KITCHEN CRAMBO.
Elise Mokey and Mary Pinfall came in one evening to see Bel Bree and Kate.
There had been company to tea up-stairs, and the dishes were more than usual, and the hour was a little later.
Kate was putting up the last of the cooking utensils, and scalding down the big tin dish-pan and the sink. Bel was up-stairs.
A table with a fresh brown linen cloth upon it, two white plates and cups, and two white napkins, stood out on the kitchen floor under the gas-light. The dumb-waiter came rumbling down, with toast dish, tea and coffee pots, oyster dish and muffin plate. Several slices of cream toast were left, and there was a generous remnant of nicely browned scalloped oysters. The half muffins, buttered hot, looked tender and tempting still.
Kate removed the dishes, sent up the waiter, and producing some nice little stone-ware nappies hot from the hot closet, transferred the food from the china to these, laying it neatly together, and replaced them in the closet, to wait till Bel should come. The tea and coffee she poured into small white pitchers, also hot in readiness, and set them on the range corner. Then she washed the porcelain and silver in fresh-drawn scalding water, wiped and set them safely on the long, white sideboard. There they gleamed in the gas-light, and lent their beauty to the brightness of the room, just as much as they would have done in actual using.
"But what a lot of trouble!" said Elise Mokey.
"Half a dozen dishes?" returned Kate. "Just three minutes' work; and a warm, fresh supper to make it worth while. Besides rubbing the silver once in four weeks, instead of every Friday. A Yankee kitchen is a labor-saving institution, Mrs. Scherman says."
Down came the waiter again, and down the stairs came Bel. Kate brought two more cups and plates and napkins.
"Now, girls, come and take some tea," she said, drawing up the chairs.
Mrs. Scherman was not strict about "kitchen company." She gave the girls freely to understand that a friend or two happening in now and then to see them, were as welcome to their down-stairs table as her own happeners in were to hers. "I know it is just the cosiness and the worth-while of home and living," she said. "And I'll trust the 'now and then' of it to you."
The hint of reasonable limit, and the word of trust, were better than lock and law.
"How nice this is!" said Mary Pinfall, as Bel put a hot muffin, mellow with sweet butter, upon her plate.
"If Matilda Meane only knew which side—and where—bread was buttered! She's living on 'relief,' yet; and she buys cream-cakes for dinner, and peanuts for tea! But, Bel, what were you up-stairs for? I thought you was queen o' the kitchen!"
"Kate gives me her chance, sometimes. We change about, to make things even. The best of it is in the up-stairs work, and waiting at table is the first-best chance of all. You see, you 'take it in at the pores,' as the man says in the play."
"Tea and oysters?" said Elise, with an exclamatory interrogation.
"You know better. See here, Elise. You don't half believe in this experiment, though you appreciate the muffins. But it isn't just loaves and fishes. There's a living in the world, and a way to earn it, besides clothes, and bread and butter. If you want it, you can choose your work nearest to where the living is. And wherever else it may or mayn't be, it is in houses, and round tea-tables like this."
"Other people's living,—for you to look at and wait on," said Elise. "I like to be independent."
"They can't keep it back from us, if they wanted to," said Bel. "And you can't be independent; there's no such thing in the world. It's all give and take."
"How about 'other folks' dust,' Kate? Do you remember?"
"There's only one place, I guess, after all," said Kate, "where you can be shut up with nothing but your own dust!"
"Sharper than ever, Kate Sencerbox! I guess you do get rubbed up!"
"Mr. Stalworth is there to-night," said Bel. "He tells as good stories as he writes. And they've been talking about Tyndall's Essays, and the spectroscope. Mrs. Scherman asked questions that I don't believe she'd any particular need of answers to, herself; and she stopped me once when I was going out of the room for something. I knew by her look that she wanted me to hear."
"If they want you to hear, why don't they ask you to sit down and hear comfortably?" said Elise Mokey, who had got her social science—with a little warp in it—from Boffin's Bower.
"Because it's my place to stand, at that time," said Bel, stoutly; "and I shouldn't be comfortable out of my place. I haven't earned a place like Mrs. Scherman's yet, or married a man that has earned it for me. There are proper things for everybody. It isn't always proper for Mrs. Scherman to sit down herself; or for Mr. Scherman to keep his hat on. It's the knowing what's proper that sets people really up; it never puts them down!"
"There's one thing," said Kate Sencerbox. "You might be parlor people all your days, and not get into everybody's parlor, either. There's an up-side and a down-side, all the way through, from top to bottom. The very best chance, for some people, if they only knew it, into some houses, would be up through the kitchen."
"Never mind," said Bel, putting sugar into Mary Pinfall's second cup of coffee. "I've got the notion of those lines, Kate,—I was going to tell you,—into my head at last, I do believe. Red-hot iron makes a rainbow through a prism, like any light; but iron-steam stops a stripe of the color; and every burning thing does the same way,—stops its own color when it shines through its own vapor; there! Let's hold on to that, and we'll go all over it another time. There's a piece about it in last month's Scribner."
"What are you talking about?" said Elise Mokey.
"The way they've been finding out what the sun is made of. By the black lines across the rainbow colors. It's a telegraph; they've just learned to read it."
"But what do you care?"
"I guess it's put there as much, for me as anybody," said Bel. "I don't think we should ever pick up such things, though, among the basting threads at Fillmer & Bylles'. They're lying round here, loose; in books and talk, and everything. They're going to have Crambo this evening, Kate. After these dishes are washed, I mean to try my hand at it. They were laughing about one Mrs. Scherman made last time; they couldn't quite remember it. I've got it. I picked it up among the sweepings. I shall take it in to her by and by."
Bel went to her work-basket as she spoke, and lifting up some calico pieces that lay upon it, drew from underneath two or three folded bits of paper.
"This is it," she said, selecting one, and coming back and reading.
(Do you see, let me ask in a hurried parenthesis,—how the tone of this household might easily have been a different one, and pervaded differently its auxiliary department? How, in that case, it might have been nothing better than a surreptitious scrap of silk or velvet, that would have lain in Bel Bree's work-basket, with a story about it of how, and for what gayety, it had been made; a scrap out of a life that these girls could only gossip and wonder about,—not participate, and with self-same human privilege and faculty delight in; and yet the only scrap that—"out of the sweepings"—they could have picked up? There is where, if you know it, dear parlor people, the up-side, by just living, can so graciously and generously be always helping the down.)
Bel read:—
"'What of that second great fire that was prophesied to come before Christmas?'—'Peaches.'"
"You've got to get that word into the answer, you see and it hasn't the very least thing to do with it! Now see:—
'A prophet, after the event,
No startling wisdom teaches;
A second fire would scarce be sent
To gratify the morbid bent
That for fresh horror reaches.
But, friend, do tell me why you went
And mixed it up with peaches!'
It's great fun! And sometimes it's lovely, real poetry. Kate, you've got to give me some words and questions, I'm going to take to Crambo."
"You'll have to mix it up with dish-washing," said Elise. "Dish-washing and dust,—you can't get rid of them!"
"We do, though!" said Kate, alertly, jumping up and beginning to fetch the plates and cups from the dumb-waiter. "Here, Bel!" And she tossed three or four long, soft, clean towels over to her from the shelf beside the china.
"And about that dusting," she went on, after the noise of the hot water rushing from the faucet was over, and she began dropping the things carefully down through the cloud of steam into the great pan full of suds, and fishing them up again with a fork and a little mop,—"about the dusting, I didn't finish. It's a work of art to dust Mrs. Scherman's parlor. Don't you think there's a pleasure in handling and touching up and setting out all those pretty things? Don't they get to be a part of our having, too? Don't I take as much comfort in her fernery as she does? I know every little green and woolly loop that comes up in it. It's the only sense there is in things. There's a picture there, of cows coming home, down a green lane, and the sun striking through, and lighting up the gravel, and a patch of green grass, and the red hair on the cows' necks. You think you just catch it coming, suddenly, through the trees, when you first look up at it. And you go right into a little piece of the country, and stand there. Mr. Scherman doesn't own that lane, or those cows, though he bought the picture. All he owns is what he gets by the signs; and I get that, every day, for the dusting! There are things to be earned and shared where people live, that you can't earn in the sewing-shops."
"That's what Bel said. Well, I'm glad you like it. Sha'n't I wipe up some of those cups?"
"They're all done now," said Bel, piling them together.
In fifteen minutes after their own tea was ended, the kitchen was in order again; the dumb-waiter, with its freight, sent up to the china closet; the brown linen cloth and the napkins folded away in the drawer, and the white-topped table ready for evening use. Bel Bree had not been brought up in a New England farm-house, and seen her capable stepmother "whew round," to be hard put to it, now, over half a dozen cups and tumblers more or less.
"We must go," said Elise Mokey. "I've got the buttons to sew on to those last night-gowns of Miss Ledwith's. I want to carry them back to-morrow."
"You're lucky to sew for her," said Bel. "But you see we all have to do for somebody, and I'd as lief it would be teacups, for my part, as buttons."
Bel Bree's old tricks of rhyming were running in her head. This game of Crambo—a favorite one with the Schermans and their bright little intimate circle—stirred up her wits with a challenge. And under the wits,—under the quick mechanic action of the serving brain,—thoughts had been daily crowding and growing, for which these mere mental facilities were waiting, the ready instruments.
I have said that Bel Bree was a born reformer and a born poet; and that the two things go together. To see freshly and clearly,—to discern new meaning in old living,—living as old as the world is; to find by instinct new and better ways of doing, the finding of which is often only returning to the heart and simplicity of the old living before it was old with social circumventions and needed to be fresh interpreted; these are the very heavenly gift and office of illumination and leadership. Just as she had been made, and just where she had been put,—a girl with the questions of woman-life before her in these days of restless asking and uncertain reply,—with her lot cast here, in this very crowding, fermenting, aspiring, great New England metropolis, in the hour of its most changeful and involved experience,—she brought the divine talisman of her nature to bear upon the nearest, most practical point of the wide tangle with which it came in contact. And around her in this right place that she had found and taken, gathered and wrought already, by effluence and influence, forces and results that gather and work about any nucleus of life, however deep hidden it may be in a surrounding deadness. All things,—creation itself,—as Asenath had said, must begin in spots; and she and Bel Bree had begun a fair new spot, in which was a vitality that tends to organic completeness, to full establishment, and triumphant growth.
Upon Bel herself reflected quickly and surely the beneficent action of this life. She was taking in truly, at every pore. How long would it have been before, out of the hard coarse limits in which her one line of labor and association had first placed her, she would have come up into such an atmosphere as was here, ready made for her to breathe and abide in? To help make also; to stand at its practical mainspring, and keep it possible that it should move on.
The talk, the ideas of the day, were in her ears; the books, the periodicals of the day were at hand, and free for her to avail herself of. The very fun at Mrs, Scherman's tea-table was the sort of fun that can only sparkle out of culture. There was a grace that her aptness caught, and that was making a lady of her.
"I'll give in," said Elise Mokey, "that you're getting style; though I can't tell how it is either. It ain't in your calico dresses, nor the doing up of your hair."
Perhaps it was a good deal in the very simplifying of these from the exaggerated imitations of the shop and street, as well as in the tone of all the rest with which these inevitably fell into harmony.
But I want to tell you about Bel's kitchen Crambo. I want to show you how what is in a woman, in heart and mind, springs up and shows itself, and may grow to whatever is meant for it, out of the quietest background of homely use.
She brought out pencil and paper, and made Kate write question slips and detached words.
"I feel just tingling to try," she said. "There's a kind of dancing in my head, of things that have been there ever so long. I believe I shall make a poem to-night. It's catching, when you're predisposed; and it's partly the spring weather, and the sap coming up. 'Put a name to it,' Katie! Almost anything will set me off."
Kate wrote, on half a dozen scraps; then tossed them up, and pushed them over for Bel to draw.
"How do you like the city in the spring?" was the question; and the word, suggested by Kate's work at the moment, was,—"Hem."
Bel put her elbows on the table, and her hands up against her ears. Her eyes shone, as they rested intent upon the two penciled bits. The link between them suggested itself quickly and faintly; she was grasping at an elusive something with all the fine little quivering brain-tentacles that lay hold of spiritual apprehension.
Just at that moment the parlor bell rang.
"I'll go," she said. "You keep to your sewing. It's for the nursery, I guess, and I'll do my poem up there."
She caught up pencil and paper, and the other fragment also,—Mrs. Scherman's own rhyme about the "peaches."
Mrs. Scherman met her at the parlor door.
"I'm sorry to interrupt you," she said; "but the baby is stirring. Could you, or Kate, go up and try to hush her off again? If I go, she'll keep me."
"I will," said Bel. "Here is that 'Crambo' you were talking of at tea, Mrs. Scherman. I kept it. Kate picked it up with the scraps."
"O, thank you! Why, Bel, how your face shines!"
Bel hurried off, for Baby Karen "stirred" more emphatically at this moment. Asenath went back into the parlor.
"Here is that rhyme of mine, Frank, that you were asking for. Bel found it in the dust-pan. I believe she's writing rhymes herself. She tries out every idea she picks up among us. She had a pencil in her hand, and her face was brimful of something. Mr. Stalworth, if I find anything in the dust-pan, I shall turn it over to you. 'First and Last' is bound to act up to its title, and transpose itself freely, according to Scripture."
"'First and Last' will receive, under either head, whatever you will indorse, Mrs. Scherman,—and the last not least,"—returned the benign and brilliant editor.
Bel had a knack with a baby. She knew enough to understand that small human beings have a good many feelings and experiences precisely like those of large ones. She knew that if she woke up in the night, she should not be likely to fall asleep again if pulled up out of her bed into the cold; nor if she were very much patted and talked to. So she just took gently hold of the upper edge of the small, fine blanket in which Baby Karen was wrapped, and by it drew her quietly over upon her other side. The little limbs fell into a new place and sensation of rest, as larger limbs do; little Karen put off waking up and crying for one delicious instant, as anybody would; and in that instant sleep laid hold of her again. She was safe, now, for another hour or two, at least.
Mrs. Scherman said she had really never had so little trouble with a baby as with this one, who had nobody especially appointed to make out her own necessity by constant "tending."
Bel did not go down-stairs again. She could do better here than with Kate sitting opposite, aware of all her scratches and poetical predicaments.
An hour went by. Bel was hardly equal yet to five-minute Crambo; and besides, she was doing her best; trying to put something clearly into syllables that said itself, unsyllabled, to her.
She did not hear Mrs. Scherman when she came up the stairs. She had just read over to herself the five completed stanzas of her poem.
It had really come. It was as if a violet had been born to actual bloom from the thought, the intangible vision of one. She wondered at the phrasing, marveling how those particular words had come and ranged themselves at her call. She did not know how she had done it, or whether she herself had done it at all. She began almost to think she must have read it before somewhere. Had she just picked it up out of her memory? Was it a borrowing, a mimicry, a patchwork?
But it was very pretty, very sweet! It told her own feelings over to her, with more that she had not known she had felt or perceived. She read it again from beginning to end in a whisper. Her mouth was bright with a smile and her eyes with tears when she had ended.
Asenath Scherman with her light step came in and stood beside her.
"Won't you tell me?" the sweet, gracious voice demanded.
Bel Bree looked up.
"I thought I'd try, in fun," she said, "and it came in real earnest."
Asenath forgot that the face turned up to hers, with the smile and the tears and the color in it, was the face of her hired servant. A lovely soul, all alight with thought and gladness, met her through it.
She bent down and touched Bel's forehead with her lady-lips.
Bel put the little scribbled paper in her hand, and ran away, up-stairs.
"Will you give it to me, Bel, and let me do what I please with it?"—Mrs. Scherman went to Bel and asked next day.
Bel blushed. She had been a little frightened in the morning to think of what had happened over night. She could not quite recollect all the words of her verses, and she wondered if they were really as pretty as she had fancied in the moment of making them.
All she could answer was that Mrs. Scherman was "very kind."
"Then you'll trust me?"
And Bel, wondering very much, but too shy to question, said she would.
A few days after that, Asenath called her up-stairs. The postman had rung five minutes before, and Kate had carried up a note.
"We were just in time with our little spring song," she said. "Bluebirds have to sing early; at least a month beforehand. See here! Is this all right?" and she put into Bel's hand a little roughish slip of paper, upon which was printed:—
"THE CITY IN SPRING.
"It is not much that makes me glad:
I hold more than I ever had.
The empty hand may farther reach,
And small, sweet signs all beauty teach.
"I like the city in the spring,
It has a hint of everything.
Down in the yard I like to see
The budding of that single tree.
"The little sparrows on the shed;
The scrap of soft sky overhead;
The cat upon the sunny wall;
There's so much meant among them all.
"The dandelion in the cleft
A broken pavement may have left,
Is like the star that, still and sweet,
Shines where the house-tops almost meet.
"I like a little; all the rest
Is somewhere; and our Lord knows best
How the whole robe hath grace for them
Who only touch the garment's hem."
At the bottom, in small capitals, was the signature,—Bel Bree.
"I don't understand," said Bel, bewildered. "What is it? Who did it?"
"It is a proof," said Mrs. Scherman. "A proof-sheet. And here is another kind of proof that came with it. Your spring song is going into the May number of 'First and Last.'"
Mrs. Scherman reached out a slip of paper, printed and filled in.
It was a publisher's check for fifteen dollars.
"You see I'm very unselfish, Bel," she said. "I'm going to work the very way to lose you."
Bel's eyes flashed up wide at her.
The way to lose her! Why, nobody had ever got such a hold upon her before! The printed verses and the money were wonderful surprises, but they were not the surprise that had gone straight into her heart, and dropped a grapple there. Mrs. Scherman had believed in her; and she had kissed her. Bel Bree would never forget that, though she should live to sing songs of all the years.
"When you can earn money like this, of course I cannot expect to keep you in my kitchen," said Mrs. Scherman, answering her look.
"I might never do it again in all my life," sensible Bel replied. "And I hope you'll keep me somewhere. It wouldn't be any reason, I think, because one little green leaf has budded out, for a plant to say that it would not be kept growing in the ground any longer. I couldn't go and set up a poem-factory, without a home and a living for the poems to grow up out of. I'm pleased I can write!" she exclaimed, brimming up suddenly with the pleasure she had but half stopped to realize. "I thought I could. But I know very well that the best and brightest things I've ever thought have come into my head over the ironing-board or the bread-making. Even at home. And here,—why, Mrs. Scherman, it's living in a poem here! And if you can be in the very foundation part of such living, you're in the realest place of all, I think. I don't believe poetry can be skimmed off the top, till it has risen up from the bottom!"
"But you ought to come into my parlor, among my friends! People would be glad to get you into their parlors, by and by, when you have made the name you can make. I've no business to keep you down. And you don't know yourself. You won't stay."
"Just please wait and see," said Bel. "I haven't a great deal of experience in going about in parlors; but I don't think I should much like it,—that way. I'd rather keep on being the woman that made the name, than to run round airing it. I guess it would keep better."
"I see I can't advise you. I shouldn't dare to meddle with inspirations. But I'm proud, and glad, Bel; and you're my friend! The rest will all work out right, somehow."
"Thank you, dear Mrs. Scherman," said Bel, her voice full of feeling. "And—if you please—will you have the grouse broiled to-day, or roasted with bread-sauce?"
At that, the two young women laughed out, in each other's faces.
Bel stopped first.
"It isn't half so funny as it sounds," she said. "It's part of the poetry; the rhyme's inside; it is to everything. We're human people: that's the way we get it."
And Bel went away, and stuffed the grouse, and grated her bread-crumbs, and sang over her work,—not out loud with her lips, but over and over to a merry measure in her mind,—
"Everything comes to its luck some day:
I've got chickens! What will folks say?"
"I'm solving more than I set out to do," Sin Scherman said to her husband. "Westover was nothing to it. I know one thing, though, that I'll do next."
"One thing is reasonable," said Frank. "What is it?"
"Take her to York with us, this summer. Row out on the river with her. Sit on the rocks, and read and sew, and play with the children. Show her the ocean. She never saw it in all her life."
"How wonderful is 'one thing' in the mind of a woman! It is a germ-cell, that holds all things."
"Thank you, my dear. If I weren't helping you to soup, I'd get up and make you a courtesy. But what a grand privilege it is for a man to live with a woman, after he has found that out! And how cosmical a woman feels herself when her capacity is recognized!"
Mrs. Scherman has told her plan to Bel. Kate also has a plan for the two summer months in which the household must be broken up.
"I mean to see the mountains myself," she said, boldly. "I don't see why I shouldn't go to the country. There are homes there that want help, as well as here. I can get my living where the living goes. That's just where it fays in, different from other work. Bel knows places where I could get two dollars a week just for a little helping round; or I could even afford to pay board, and buy a little time for resting. I shall have clothes to make, and fix over. It always took all I could earn, before, to keep me from hand to mouth. I never saw six months' wages all together, in my life. I feel real rich."
"I will pay you half wages for the two months," said Mrs. Scherman, "if you will come back to me in September. And next year, if we all keep together, it will be your turn, if you like, to go with me."
Kate feels the spring in her heart, knowing that she is to have a piece of the summer. The horse-chestnut tree in the yard is not a mockery to her. She has a property in every promise that its great brown buds are making.
"The pleasant weather used to be like the spring-suits," she said. "Something making up for other people. Nothing to me, except more work, with a little difference. Now, somewhere, the hills are getting green for me! I'm one of the meek, that inherit the earth!"
"You are earning a whole living," Bel said, reverting to her favorite and comprehensive conclusion.
"And yet,—somebody has got to run machines," said Kate.
"But all the bodies haven't. That is the mistake we have been making. That keeps the pay low, and makes it horrid. There's a little more room now, where you and I were. Anyhow, we Yankee girls have a right to our turn at the home-wheels. If we had been as cute as we thought we were, we should have found it out before."
Bel Bree has written half a dozen little poems at odd times, since the rhyme that began her fortune. Mr. Stalworth says they are stamped with her own name, every one; breezy, and freshly delicious. For that very reason, of course, people will not believe, when they see the name in print, that it is a real name. It is so much easier to believe in little tricks of invention, than in things that simply come to pass by a wonderful, beautiful determination, because they belong so. They think the poem is a trick of invention, too. They think that of almost everything that they see in print. Their incredulity is marvelously credulous! There is no end to that which mortals may contrive; but the limit is such a measurable one to that which can really be! We slip our human leash so easily, and get outside of all creation, and the "Divinity that shapes our ends," to shape and to create, ourselves!
For my part, the more stories I write out, the more I learn how, even in fiction, things happen and take relation according to some hidden reality; that we have only to stand by, and see the shiftings and combinings, and with what care and honesty we may, to put them down.
If there is anything in this story that you cannot credit,—if you cannot believe in such a relation, and such a friendship, and such a mutual service, as Asenath Scherman's and Bel Bree's,—if you cannot believe that Bel Bree may at this moment be ironing Mrs. Scherman's damask table-cloths, and as the ivy leaf or morning-glory pattern comes out under the polish, some beautiful thought in her takes line and shade under the very rub of labor, and shows itself as it would have done no other way, and that by and by it will shine on a printed page, made substantive in words,—then, perhaps, you have only not lived quite long—or deep—enough. There is a more real and perfect architecture than any that has ever got worked out in stone, or even sketched on paper.
Neither Boston, nor the world, is "finished" yet. There may be many a burning and rebuilding, first. Meanwhile, we will tell what we can see.
And that word sends me back to Bel herself, of whom this present seeing and telling can read and recite no further.
Are you dissatisfied to leave her here? Is it a pity, you think, that the little glimmer of romance in Leicester Place meant nothing, after all? There are blind turns in the labyrinth of life. Would you have our Bel lost in a blind turn?
The right and the wrong settled it, as they settle all things. The right and the wrong are the reins with which we are guided into the very best, sooner or later; yes,—sooner and later. If we will go God's way, we shall have manifold more in this present world, and in the world to come life everlasting.