Part 20 (2/2)

”Yes. The least little thing that comes next is better than a world full of wisdom away off beyond. There is too much in 'general housework' for one ignorant, inexperienced brain to take in. What should we think of a government that gave out its 'general field-work'

so?”

”There won't be any Lucys long,” said Madam Pennington, with a sigh.

”What are homes coming to?”

”Back to _homes_, I hope, from _houses_ divided against themselves into parlors and kitchens,” said mother, earnestly. ”If I should tell you all I think about it, you would say it was visionary, I am afraid.

But I believe we have got to go back to first principles; and then the Lucys will grow again.”

”Modern establishments are not homes truly,” said Madam Pennington.

”We shall call them by their names, as the French do, if we go on,”

said mother,--”hotels.”

”And how are we to stop, or help it? The enemy has got possession.

Irishocracy is a despotism in the land.”

”Only,” said mother, in her sweetest, most heartfelt way, ”by learning how true it is that one must be chief to really serve; that it takes the highest to do perfect ministering; that the brightest grace and the most beautiful culture must come to bear upon this little, every-day living, which is all that the world works for after all. The whole heaven is made that just the daily bread for human souls may come down out of it. Only the Lord G.o.d can pour this room full of little waves of suns.h.i.+ne, and make a still, sweet morning in the earth.”

Mother and Madam Pennington looked at each other with soulful eyes.

”'We girls,'” began mother again, smiling,--”for that is the way the children count me in,--said to each other, when we first tried this new plan, that we would make an art-kitchen. We meant we would have things nice and pretty for our common work; but there is something behind that,--the something that 'makes the meanest task divine,'--the spiritual correspondence of it. When we are educated up to that I think life and society will be somewhat different. I think we shall not always stop short at the drawing-room, and pretend at each other on the surface of things. I think the time may come when young girls and single women will be as willing, and think it as honorable, to go into homes which they need, and which need them, and give the best that they have grown to into the commonwealth of them, as they are willing now to educate and try for public places. And it will seem to them as great and beautiful a thing to do. They won't be buried, either. When they take the work up, and glorify it, it will glorify them. We don't know yet what households might be, if now we have got the wheels so perfected, we would put the living spirit into the wheels. They are the motive power; homes are the primary meetings.

They would be little kingdoms, of great might! I _wish_ women would be content with their mainspring work, and not want to go out and point the time upon the dial!”

Mother never would have made so long a speech, but that beautiful old Mrs. Pennington was answering her back all the time out of her eyes.

There was such a magnetism between them for the moment, that she scarcely knew she was saying it all. The color came up in their cheeks, and they were young and splendid, both of them. We thought it was as good a Woman's Convention as if there had been two thousand of them instead of two. And when some of the things out of the closets get up on the house-tops, maybe it will prove so.

Madam Pennington leaned over and kissed mother when she took her hand at going away. And then Miss Elizabeth spoke out suddenly,--

”I have not done my errand yet, Mrs. Holabird. Mother has taken up all the time. I want to have some _nexts_. Your girls know what I mean; and I want them to take hold and help. They are going to be 'next Thursdays,' and to begin this very coming Thursday of all. I shall give primary invitations only,--and my primaries are to find secondaries. No household is to represent merely itself; one or two, or more, from one family are to bring always one or two, or more, from somewhere else. I am going to try if one little bit of social life cannot be exogenous; and if it can, what the branching-out will come to. I think we want sapwood as well as heartwood to keep us green. If anybody doesn't quite understand, refer to 'How Plants Grow--Gray.'”

She went off, leaving us that to think of.

Two days after she looked in again, and said more. ”Besides that, every primary or season invitation imposes a condition. Each member is to provide one practical answer to 'What next?' 'Next Thursday' is always to be in charge of somebody. You may do what you like, or can, with it. I'll manage the first myself. After that I wash my hands.”

Out of it grew fourteen incomparable Thursday evenings. Pretty much all we can do about them is to tell that they were; we should want fourteen new numbers to write their full history. It was like Mr.

Hale's lovely ”Ten Times One is Ten.” They all came from that one blessed little Halloween party of ours. It means something that there _is_ such a thing as the multiplication-table; doesn't it? You can't help yourself if you start a unit, good or bad. The Garden of Eden, and the Ark, and the Loaves and Fishes, and the Hundred and Forty-four Thousand sealed in their foreheads, tell of it, all through the Bible, from first to last. ”Multiply!” was the very next, inevitable commandment, after the ”Let there be!”

It was such a thing as had never rolled up, or branched out, though, in Westover before. The Marchbankses did not know what to make of it.

People got in who had never belonged. There they were, though, in the stately old Pennington house, that was never thrown open for nothing; and when they were once there you really could not tell the difference; unless, indeed, it were that the old, middle wood was the deadest, just as it is in the trees; and that the life was in the new sap and the green rind.

Lucilla Waters invented charades; and Helen Josselyn acted them, as charades had never been acted on West Hill until now. When it came to the Hobarts' ”Next Thursday” they gave us ”Dissolving Views,”--every successive queer fas.h.i.+on that had come up resplendent and gone down grotesque in these last thirty years. Mrs. Hobart had no end of old relics,--bandbaskets packed full of venerable bonnets, that in their close gradation of change seemed like one individual Indur pa.s.sing through a metempsychosis of millinery; nests of old hats that were odder than the bonnets; swallow-tailed coats; broad-skirted blue ones with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons; baby waists and basquines; leg-of-mutton sleeves, balloons, and military; collars inch-wide and collars ell-wide with ruffles _rayonnantes_; gathers and gores, tunnel-skirts, and barrel-skirts and paniers. She made monstrous paper d.i.c.keys, and high black stocks, and great bundling neckcloths; the very pocket-handkerchiefs were as ridiculous as anything, from the waiter-napkin size of good stout cambric to a quarter-dollar bit of a middle with a cataract of ”chandelier” lace about it. She could tell everybody how to do their hair, from ”flat curls” and ”scallops” down or up to frizzes and chignons; and after we had all filed in slowly, one by one, and filled up the room, I don't think there ever could have been a funnier evening!

We had musical nights, and readings. We had a ”Mutual Friend”

Thursday; that was Mrs. Ingleside's. Rosamond was the Boofer Lady; Barbara was Lavvy the Irrepressible; and Miss Pennington herself was Mrs. Wilfer; Mr. and Mrs. Hobart were the Boffins; and Doctor Ingleside, with a wooden leg strapped on, dropped into poetry in the light of a friend; Maria Hendee came in twisting up her back hair, as Pleasant Riderhood,--Maria Hendee's back hair was splendid; Leslie looked very sweet and quiet as Lizzie Hexam, and she brought with her for her secondary that night the very, real little doll's dressmaker herself,--Maddy Freeman, who has carved brackets, and painted lovely book-racks and easels and vases and portfolios for almost everybody's parlors, and yet never gets into them herself.

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