Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney - The Other Girls

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"That's a comfort, ain't it?" whispered mischievous, sharp,
good-natured Kate. "Look here; I'll help, if you won't talk any more
Latin, or Hottentot."

It was of no use to tell those girls not to talk over their work.
The more work they had in them, the more talk; it was a test, like a
steam-gauge. Only the poor, pale, worn-out ones, like Emma Hollen,
who coughed and breathed short, and could not spend strength even in
listening, amidst the conflicting whirr of the feeds and
wheels,--and the old, sobered-down, slow ones, like Miss Bree and
Miss Proddle, button-holing and gather-sewing for dear life, with
their spectacles over their noses, and great bald places showing on
the tops of their bent heads,--kept time with silent thoughts to the
beat of their treadles and the clip of their needles against the
thimble-ends.

Elise Mokey stretched up her back slowly, and drew her shoulders
painfully out of their steady cramp.

"There! I went round without stopping! I put a sign on it, and I've
got my wish! I'd rather sweep a room, though, than do it again."

"You _might_ sweep a room, instead," said Emma Hollen, in her low,
faint tone, moved to speak by some echo in that inward rhythm of her
thinking. "I partly wish _I_ had, before now."

"O, you goose! Be a kitchen-wolloper!"

"May be I sha'n't be anything, very long. I should like to feel as
if I _could_ stir round."

"I wouldn't care if anybody could see what it came to, or what there
was left of it at the year's end," said Elise Mokey.

"I'd sweep a room fast enough if it was my own," said Kate
Sencerbox. "But you won't catch me sweeping up other folks' dust!"

"I wonder what other folks' dust really is, when you've sifted it,
and how you'd pick out your own," said Bel.

"I'd have my own _place_, at any rate," responded Kate, "and the
dust that got into it would go for mine, I suppose."

Bel Bree tucked away. Tucked away thoughts also, as she worked. Not
one of those girls who had been talking had anything like a home.
What was there for them at the year's end, after the wearing round
and round of daily toil, but the diminishing dream of a happier
living that might never come true? The fading away out of their
health and prettiness into "old things like Miss Proddle and Aunt
Blin,"--to take their turn then, in being snubbed and shoved aside?
Bel liked her own life here, so far; it was pleasanter than that
which she had left; but she began to see how hundreds of other girls
were going on in it without reward or hope; unfitting themselves,
many of them utterly, by the very mode of their careless, rootless
existence,--all of them, more or less, by the narrow specialty of
their monotonous drudgery,--for the bright, capable, adaptive
many-sidedness of a happy woman's living in the love and use and
beauty of home.

Some of her thoughts prompted the fashion in which she recurred to
the subject during the hour's dinner-time.

They were grouped together--the same half dozen--in a little
ante-room, with a very dusty window looking down into an alley-way,
or across it rather, since unless they really leaned out from their
fifth story, the line of vision could not strike the base of the
opposite buildings, a room used for the manifold purposes of
clothes-hanging, hand-washing, brush and broom stowing, and
luncheon eating.

"Girls! What would you do most for in this world? What would you
have for your choice, if you could get it?"

"Stories to read, and theatre tickets every night," said Grace
Toppings.

"Something decent to eat, as often as I was hungry," said Matilda
Meane, speaking thick through a big mouthful of cream-cake.

"To be married to Lord Mortimer, and go and live in an Abbey," said
Mary Pinfall, who sat on a box with a cracker in one hand, and the
third volume of her old novel in the other.

The girls shouted.

"That means you'd like a real good husband,--a Tom, or a Dick, or a
Harry," said Kate Sencerbox. "Lord Mortimers don't grow in this
country. We must take the kind that do. And so we will, every one of
us, when we can get 'em. Only I hope mine will keep a store of his
own, and have a house up in Chester Park!"

"If I can ever see the time that I can have dresses made for me,
instead of working my head and feet off making them for other
people, I don't care where my house is!" said Elise Mokey.

"Or your husband either, I suppose," said Kate, sharply.

"Wouldn't I just like to walk in here some day, and order old Tonker
round?" said Elise, disregarding. "I only hope she'll hold out till
I can! Won't I have a black silk suit as thick as a board, with
fifteen yards in the kilting? And a violet-gray, with a yard of
train and Yak-flounces!"

"That isn't _my_ sort," said Kate Sencerbox, emphatically. "It's
played out, for me. People talk about our being in the way of
temptation, always seeing what we can't have. It isn't _that_ would
ever tempt me; I'm sick of it. I know all the breadth-seams, and the
gores, and the gathers, and the travelling round and round with the
hems and trimmings and bindings and flouncings. If I could get _out_
of it, and never hear of it again, and be in a place of my own, with
my time to myself! Wouldn't I like to get up in the morning and
_choose_ what I would do?--when it wasn't Fast Day, nor Fourth of
July, nor Washington's Birthday, nor any day in particular? I think,
on the whole, I'd choose _not_ to get up. A chance to be lazy;
that's my vote, after all, Bel Bree!"

"O, dear!" cried Bel, despairingly. "Why don't some of you wish for
nice, cute little things?"

"Tell us what," said Kate. "I think we _have_ wished for all sorts,
amongst us."

"O, a real little _home_--to take care of," said Bel. "Not fine, nor
fussy; but real sweet and pleasant. Sunny windows and flowers, and a
pretty carpet, and white curtains, and one of those chromos of
little round, yellow chickens. A best china tea-set, and a real trig
little kitchen; pies to make for Sundays and Thanksgivings; just
enough work to do in the mornings, and time in the afternoons to sit
and sew, and--somebody to read to you out loud in the evenings! I
think I'd do anything--that wasn't wicked--to come to live just like
that!"

"There isn't anybody that does live so nowadays," said Kate.
"There's nothing between horrid little stivey places, and a regular
scrub and squall and slop all the week round, and silk and snow and
ordering other folks about. You've got to be top or bottom; and if
it's all the same to you, I mean to be top if I can; even if"--

Kate was a great deal better than her pretences, after all. She did
not finish the bad sentence.

"I'll tell you what I do wonder at," said Bel Bree. "So many great,
beautiful homes in this city, and so few people to live in them. All
the rest crowded up, and crowded out. When I go round through Hero
Street, and Pilgrim Street, and past all the little crammy courts
and places, out into the big avenues where all the houses stand back
from each other with such a grand politeness, I want to say, Move up
a little, can't you? There's such small room for people in there,
behind!"

"Say it, why don't you? I'll tell you who'd listen. Washington,
sitting on his big bronze horse, pawing in the air at Commonwealth
Avenue!"

"Well--Washington _would_ listen, if he wasn't bronze. And its grand
for _everybody_ to look at him there. I shouldn't really want the
houses to move up, I suppose. It's good to have grandness somewhere,
or else nobody would have any place to stretch in. But there must be
some sort of moving up that could be, to make things evener, if we
only knew!"

Poor little Bel Bree, just dropped down out of New Hampshire! What a
problem the great city was already to her!

Miss Tonker put her sub-aristocratic face in at the door. It is a
curious kind of reflected majesty that these important functionaries
get, who take at first hand the magnificent orders, and sustain
temporary relations of silk-and-velvet intimacy with Spreadsplendid
Park.

The hour was up. Mary Pinfall slid her romance into the pocket of
her waterproof; Matilda Meane swallowed her last mouthful of the
four cream-cakes which she had valorously demolished without
assistance, and hastily washed her hands at the faucet; Kate and
Elise and Grace brushed by her with a sniff of generous contempt.

In two minutes, the wheels and feeds were buzzing and clicking
again. What did they say, and emphasize, and repeat, in the ears
that bent over them? Mechanical time-beats say something, always.
They force in and in upon the soul its own pulses of thought, or
memory, or purpose; of imagination or desire. They weld and
consolidate our moods, our elements. Twenty miles of musing to the
rhythmic throbbings of a railroad train, who does not know how it
can shape and deepen and confirm whatever one has started with in
mind or heart?

CHAPTER XI.

CRISTOFERO.

A September morning on the deck of a steamer bound into New York,
two days from her port.

A fair wind; waves gleaming as they tossed landward, with the white
crests and the grand swell that told of some mid-Atlantic storm,
which had given them their impulse days since, and would send them
breaking upon the American capes and beaches, in splendid tumult of
foam, and roar, and plunge; "white horses," wearing rainbows in
their manes.

The blue heaven full of sunshine; the air full of sea-tingle; a
morning to feel the throb and spring of the vessel under one's feet,
as an answer to the throb and spring of one's own life and
eagerness; the leap of strength in the veins, and the homeward haste
in the heart.

Two gentlemen, who had talked much together in the nine days of
their ship-companionship, stood together at the taffrail.

One was the Reverend Hilary Vireo, minister of Mavis Place Chapel,
Boston,--coming back to his work in glorious renewal from his eight
weeks' holiday in Europe. The other was Christopher Kirkbright,
younger partner of the house of Ferguson, Ramsay, and Kirkbright,
tea and silk merchants, Hong Kong. Christopher Kirkbright had gone
out to China from Glasgow, at the age of twenty-one, pledged to a
ten years' stay. For five years past, he had had a share in the
business for himself; for the two last, he had represented also the
interest of Grahame Kirkbright, his uncle, third partner; had
inherited, besides, half of his estate; the other half had come to
our friend at home, his sister, Miss Euphrasia.

"I had no right to stay out there any longer, making my tools;
multiplying them, without definite purpose. It was time to put them
to their use; and I have come home to find it. A man may take till
thirty-one to get ready, mayn't he, Mr. Vireo?"

"The man who took up the work of the world's salvation, began to be
about thirty years of age when he came forth to public ministry,"
returned Mr. Vireo.

"I never thought of that before. I wonder I never did. It has come
home to me, in many other parts of that Life, how full it is of
scarcely recognized analogy to prevailing human experience. That
'driving into the Wilderness!' What an inevitable interval it is
between the realizing of a special power and the finding out of its
special purpose! I am in the Wilderness,--or was,--Vireo; but I knew
my way lay through it. I have been pausing--thinking--striving to
know. The temptations may not have been wanting, altogether, either.
There are so many things one can do easily; considering one's self,
largely, in the plan. My whole life has waited, in some chief
respects, till the end of these ten pledged years. What was I to do
with it? Where was I to look for, and find most speedily, all that a
man begins to feel the desire to establish for himself at thirty
years old? Home, society, sphere; I can tell you it is a strange
feeling to take one's fortune in one's hand and come forth from such
a business exile, and choose where one will make the first
link,--decide the first condition, which may draw after all the
rest. Happily, I had my sister to come home to; and I had the
remembrance of the little story my mother told me--about my name. I
think she looked forward for the boy who could know so little then
of the destiny partly laid out for him already."

"About your name?" reminded Mr. Vireo. He always liked to hear the
whole of a thing; especially a thing that touched and influenced
spiritually.

"Yes. The story of Saint Cristofero. The strong man, Offero, who
would serve the strongest; who served a great king, till he learned
that the king feared Satan; who then sought Satan and served him,
till he found that Satan feared the Cross; who sought for Jesus,
then, that he might serve Him, and found a hermit who bade him fast
and pray. But he would not fast, since from his food came his
strength to serve with; nor pray, because it seemed to him idle; but
he went forth to help those who were in danger of being swept away,
as they struggled to cross the deep, wide River. He bore them
through upon his shoulders,--the weak, the little, the weary. At
last, he bore a little child who entreated him, and the child grew
heavy, and heavier, till, when they reached the other side, Offero
said,--'I feel as if I had borne the world upon my shoulders!' And
he was answered,--'Thou may'st say that; for thou hast borne Him who
made the world.' And then he knew that it was the Lord; and he was
called no more 'Offero,' but 'Cristofero.' My mother told me that
when I was a little child; and the story has grown in me. The Christ
has yet to be borne on men's shoulders."

Hilary Vireo stood and listened with gleaming eyes. Of course, he
knew the old saint-legend; of course, Christopher Kirkbright
supposed it; but these were men who understood without the saying,
that the verities are forever old and forever new. A mother's wise
and tender tale,--a child's life growing into a man's, and
sanctifying itself with a purpose,--these were the informing that
filled afresh every sentence of the story, and made its repetition a
most fair and sweet origination.

"And so,"--

"And so, I must earn my name," said Christopher Kirkbright, simply.

"Lift them up, and take them across," said Hilary Vireo, as if
thinking it over to himself. The old story had quickened him. A
grand perception came to him for his friend, who had begged him to
think for and advise him. "Lift them up and take them across!" he
repeated, looking into Mr. Kirkbright's face, and speaking the words
to him with warm energy. "They are waiting--so many of them! They
are sinking down--so many! They want to be lifted through. They
want--and they want terribly--a place of safety on the other side.
Go down into the river of temptation, and hardship, and sin, and
help them up out of it, Christopher. Take them up out of their cruel
conditions; make a place for some of them to begin over again in;
for some of them to rest in, once in a while, and take courage. Why
shouldn't there be cities of refuge, now, Kirkbright? Men are
mapping out towns for their own gain, all over the land, wherever a
water power or a railroad gives the chance for one to grow; why not
build a Hope for the hopeless? Nowhere on earth could that be done
as it could in our own land!"

"A City of Refuge'" Kirkbright repeated the words gravely,
earnestly; like those of some message of an angel of the Lord, that
sounded with self-attested authority in his ears.

After a pause, in which his thought followed out the word of
suggestion into a swift dream of possible fulfillment, he said to
his companion,--

"I believe there was nothing in that old Jewish economy, Vireo, that
was not given as a 'pattern of things' that should be. That whole
Old Testament is a type and prophecy of the kingdom coming. Only it
was but the first Adam. It was given right into the very conditions
that illustrated its need. It would have meant nothing, given into a
society of angels. Yet because men were not angels, but very mortal
and sinful men, we of to-day must fling contempt upon the Myth of
the Salvation of God! It will stand, for all that,--that history of
God's intimacy with men. It was _lived_, not told as a vision, that
it _might_ stand! It was lived, to show how near, in spite of sin,
God came, and stayed. The second coming shall be without sin unto
salvation."

"I'm not sure, Kirkbright, but you ought to be a minister."

"Not to stand in a pulpit. God helping me, I mean to be a minister.
Wouldn't a preacher be satisfied to have studied a week upon a
sermon, if he knew that on Sunday, preaching it, he had sent it,
live, into one living soul? Fifty-two souls a year, to reach and
save,--would not that be enough? Well, then, every day a man might
be giving the Lord's word out somewhere, in some fashion, I think.
He needn't wait for the Sundays. Everybody has a congregation in the
course of the week. I don't doubt the week-day service is often you
preachers' best."

"I _know_ it is," Hilary Vireo replied.

"Come down into the cabin with me," said Mr. Kirkbright. "I want to
look up that old pattern. It will tell me something."

Down in the cabin they seated themselves together where they had
had many a talk before, at a corner table near Mr. Kirkbright's
state-room door. Out of the state-room he had brought his Bible.

He got hold of one word in that old ordination,--"unawares."

"'He that doeth it _unawares_," he repeated, holding the Bible with
his finger between the half-shut leaves, at that thirty-fifth
chapter of Numbers. "How that reminds of, and connects with, the
Atoning Prayer,--'Forgive them, for they know not what they do!'
'Sins, negligences, ignorances;' how they shade and change into each
other! If all the mistakes could be forgiven and set right, how much
evil, virulent and unmixed, would there be left in the world, do you
suppose?"

"Not more than there was before the mistakes began," replied Vireo.
"Like the Arabian genie, the monster would be drawn down from its
horrible expansion to a point again,--the point of a possibility;
the serpent suggestion of evil choice. When God has done his work of
forgiving, there is where it will be, I think; and the Son of the
woman shall set his heel upon its head."

"I wish I could see what lies behind this," said Mr. Kirkbright.
"'He shall abide in it unto the death of the high-priest,' and after
that, 'the slayer shall return into the land of his possession.'
That might almost seem to point to the old sacrificial idea; the
atonement by death. I cannot rest in that. I wish I could see its
whole meaning,--for meaning it must have, and a meaning of _life_."

"A temporary ministry; a limited exile; the one the measure of the
other," sail Hilary Vireo, slowly thinking it out, and taking the
book from the hand of his friend, to look over the words themselves,
as he did so.

"The glory is in the promise: 'he shall return into the land of his
possession.' His life shall be given back to him,--all that it was
meant to be. It shall be kept open for him, till the time of his
banishment is over. Meanwhile, over even this period is a holy
providing, an anointed commission of grace."

"But hear this," he continued, turning to the Epistle to the
Hebrews, "and put the suggestions alongside. All but God's final and
eternal _best_ is transitional. 'They truly were many priests,
because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death. But
this man, because He continueth ever, hath an unchangeable
priesthood. Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost,
that come to God by Him.' Did it ever occur to you to think about
that saving to the uttermost? Not a scrap of blessed possibility
forfeited, lost? All gathered up, restored, put into our hands
again, from the redeeming hands of Christ? Backward and forward,
through all that was irretrievable to us; sought, and traced, and
found, and brought back with rejoicing; the whole house swept, until
not one silver piece is missing. That is the return into the land of
our possession. _That_ is God's salvation, and his gospel! That is
what shall come to pass. Not yet; not while we are only under the
lesser ministry; but when that priesthood over the time of our
waiting ends, and we have believed unto the full appearing of the
Lord!"

The speaker's face flushed and glowed; Hilary Vireo, always glad and
strong in look and bearing, was grandly joyful when the power of the
gospel he had to preach came upon him; the gospel of a full,
perfect, and unstinted hope.

"Is that what you tell your simple people?" asked Christopher
Kirkbright, fixing deeply eager eyes upon him.

"Yes; just that. In simplest words, changed and repeated often. It
is the whole burden of my message. What other message is there, to
men's souls? 'Repent, and receive the remission of your sins!' Build
your city of refuge, Mr. Kirkbright, and show them a beginning of
the fulfillment."

Whist and euchre tables not far off were breaking up, just before
lunch, with laughter and raised voices. Ladies were coming down from
the deck. In the stir, Mr. Vireo rose and went away. Christopher
Kirkbright carried his Bible back into his state-room, and shut the
door.

CHAPTER XII.

LETTERS AND LINKS.

That same September morning, Miss Euphrasia, sitting in her pretty
corner room at Mrs. Georgeson's,--just returned to her city life
from the rest and sweetness of a country summer,--had letters
brought to her door.

The first was in a thin, strong, blue envelope, with London and
Liverpool postmarks, and "per Steamer Calabria," written up in the
corner, business-wise, with the date, and a dash underneath. This
she opened first, for the English postmarks, associated with that
handwriting, gave her a sudden thrill of bewildered surprise:--

"MY DEAR SISTER,--Within a very few days after this
will reach you, I hope myself to land in America, and to see
if, after all these years, you and I can do something about a
home together. We learn one good of long separations, by what
we get of them in this world. We can't help beginning again,
if not actually where we left off, at least with the thought
we left off at, 'live and fresh in our hearts. The thought, I
mean, as regards each other; we have both got some thoughts
uppermost by this time, doubtless, that we had not lived to
then. At any rate, I have, who had ten years ago only the
notions and dreams of twenty-one. I come straight to you with
them, just as I went from you, dear elder sister, with your
love and blessing upon me, into the great, working world.

"Send a line to meet me in New York at Frazer and
Doubleday's, and let me know your exact whereabouts. I found
Sherrett here, and had a run to Manchester with him to see
Amy. That's the sort of thing I can't believe when I do see
it,--Mary's baby married and housekeeping! I'm glad you are my
elder, Effie; I shall not see much difference in you.
Thirty-one and forty-three will only have come nearer
together. And you are sure to be what only such fresh-souled
women as you _can_ be at forty-three."

With this little touch of loving compliment the letter ended.

Miss Euphrasia got up and walked over to her toilet-glass. Do you
think, with all her outgoing goodness, she had not enough in her
for this, of that sweet woman-feeling that desires a true
beauty-blossoming for each good season of life as it comes? A pure,
gentle showing, in face and voice and movement, of all that is
lovely for a woman to show, and that she tells one of God's own
words by showing, if only it be true, and not a putting on of
falseness?

If Miss Euphrasia had not cared what she would seem like in the eyes
as well as to the heart of this brother coming home, there would
have been something wanting to her of genuine womanhood. Yet she had
gone daily about her Lord's business, thinking of that first; not
stopping to watch the graying or thinning of hairs, or the gathering
of life-lines about eyes and mouth, or studying how to replace or
smooth or disguise anything. She let her life write itself; she only
made all fair, according to the sense of true grace that was in her;
fair as she could with that which remained. She had neither
neglected, nor feverishly contrived and worried; and so at forty
three she was just what Christopher, with his Scotch second-sight,
beheld her; what she beheld herself now as she went to look at her
face in the glass, and to guess what he would think of it.

She saw a picture like this:--

Soft, large eyes, with no world-harass in them; little curves
imprinted at the corners that may be as beautiful in later age as
lip-dimples are in girlhood; a fair, broad forehead, that had never
learned to frown; lines about mouth and chin, in sweet, honest
harmony with the record of the eyes; no strain, no distortion of
consciousness grown into haggard wornness; a fine, open, contented
play of feature had wrought over all like a charm of sunshine, to
soften and brighten continually. Her hair had been golden-brown;
there was plenty of it still; it had kept so much of the gold that
it was now like a tender mist through which the light flashes and
smiles. Of all color-changes, this is the rarest.

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