The Other Girls - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (free novels to read TXT) 📗

so really "a beautiful east window, and the morning had come in." I should like to just stay in the sunshine of it, and show what the stir of it was, and what it had come to with these two; what a brightness, day by day, they lived in. I should be glad to tell their piece of the story minutely; but I should not be able to get at it to tell. We may touch such lives, and feel the lovely pleasantness; but to enter in, and have the whole--that may only be done in one way; by going and doing likewise.

This talk of theirs gives one link; it shows you how easily and naturally they came to have to do with the Ingrahams; how they belonged in one sphere and drew to one centre; how simply things happen, after all, when they have any business to happen.

Somebody speaks of the ascent of a lofty church spire, as giving such a wonderful glimpse of the unity of a great city; showing its converging movements, its net-work of connection,--its human currents swayed and turned by intelligible drifts of purpose; all which, when one is down among them, seem but whirls of a confusing and distracting medley; a heaping and a rushing together of many things and much conflicting action; where the wonder is that it stays together at all, or that one part plays and fits in with any other to harmony of service. If we could climb high enough, and see deep enough, to read a spiritual panorama in like manner, we should look into the mystery of the intent that builds the worlds and works with "birth and death and infinite motion" to evolve the wonders of all human and angelic history. We should only marvel, then, at what we, with our little bit of wayward free will, hinder; not at what God gently and mightily forecasts and brings to pass.

To find another link, we must go away and look in elsewhere.


CHAPTER X.

FILLMER AND BYLLES.

It was a hot morning in the heart of summer. The girls, coming in to their work, after breakfasts of sour rolls, cheap, raw, bitter coffee and blue milk, with a greasy relish, perhaps, of sausage, bacon, fried potatoes, or whatever else was economical and untouchable,--with the world itself frying in the fervid blaze of a sun rampant for fifteen hours a day,--saw in the windows early peaches, cool salads, and fresh berries; yellow and red bananas in mellow, heavy clusters; morning bouquets lying daintily on wet mosses; pale, beryl-green, transparent hothouse grapes hanging their globes of sweet, refrigerant juices before toil-parched, unsatisfied, feverish lips.

Let us hope that it did them good; it is all we can do now about it.

Up in the work-room of a great dress-making establishment were heaps of delicate cambric, Victoria lawn, piques, muslins, piles of frillings, Hamburg edgings, insertions, bands. Machines were tripping and buzzing; cutters were clipping at the tables; the forewoman was moving about, directing here, hurrying there, reproving now and then for some careless tension, rough fastening, or clumsy seam. Out of it all were resulting lovely white suits; delicate, cloud-like, flounced robes of bewitching tints; graceful morning wrappers,--perfect toilets of all kinds for girls at watering-places and in elegant summer homes.

Orders kept coming down from the mountains, up from the sea-beaches, in from the country seats, where gay, friendly circles were amusing away the time, and making themselves beautiful before each others' eyes.

For it was fearfully hot again this year.

Bel Bree did not care. It all amused her. She had not got worn down yet, and she did not live in a cheap, working-girls' boarding-house. She had had radishes that morning with her bread and butter, and a little of last year's fruit out of a tin can for supper the night before. That was the way Miss Bree managed about peaches. I believe that was the way she thought the petition in the Litany was answered,--"Preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth, that in due time we may enjoy them;" after the luckier people have had their fill, and begun on the new, and the cans are cheap. There are ways of managing things, even with very little money. If you pay for the _managing_, you have to do without the things. Bel and her aunt together, with their united earnings and their nice, cosy ways, were very far from being uncomfortable. Bel said she liked the pinch,--what there was of it. She liked "a little bit brought home in a paper and made much of."

Bel had been just a fortnight in the city. She had gone right to work with her aunt at Fillmer & Bylles, she was bright and quick, knew how to run a "Wilcox & Gibbs," and had "some perception," the forewoman said, grimly; with a delicate implication that some others had not. Miss Tonker's praises always pared off on one side what they put on upon another.

It had taken Bel a fortnight to feel her ground, and to get exactly the "lay of the land." Then she went to work, unhesitatingly, to set some small things right.

This morning she had hurried herself and her aunt, come early, and put Miss Bree down, resolutely, against all her disclaimers, in a corner of the very best window in the room. To do this, she moved Matilda Meane's sewing-machine a little.

When Matilda Meane came in, she looked as though she thought the world was moved. She did not exactly dare to order Miss Bree up; but she elbowed about, she pushed her machine this way and that; she behaved like a hen hustled off her nest and not quite making up her mind whether she would go back to it or not. Miss Bree's nose grew apprehensive; it drew itself up with a little, visible, trembling gasp,--her small eyes glanced timidly from under the drawn, puckered lids, it was evidently all she could do to hold her ground. But Bel had put her there, and loyalty to Bel kept her passive. It is so much harder for some poor meek things ever to take anything, than it is forever to go without. Only for love and gratefulness can they ever be made to assume their common human rights.

Presently it had to come out.

Bel was singing away, as she gathered her work together in an opposite quarter of the room, keeping a glance out at her right eye-corner, expectantly.

"Who moved this machine?" asked Matilda Meane, stopping short in her endeavors to make it take up the middle of the window without absolutely rolling it over Aunt Blin's toes.

"I did, a little," answered Bel, promptly. "There was plenty of room for two; and if there hadn't been, Aunt Blin must have a good light, and have it over her left shoulder, at that. She's the oldest person in the room, Miss Meane!"

"She was spoken to yesterday about her buttonholes," she added, in a lower tone, to Eliza Mokey, as she settled herself in her own seat next that young lady. "And it was all because she could hardly see."

"Buttonholes or not," answered Eliza, who preferred to be called "Elise," "I'm glad somebody has taken Mat Meane down at last. She needed it. I wish you could take her in hand everywhere. If _you_ boarded at our house"--

"I shouldn't," interrupted Bel, decisively. "Not under any circumstances, from what you tell of it."

"That's all very well to say now; you're in clover, comparatively. 'Chaters' and real tea,--_and_ a three-ply carpet!"

Miss Mokey had gone home with Bel and Aunt Blin, one evening lately, when there had been work to finish and they had made a "bee" of it.

"See if you could help yourself if you hadn't Aunt Blin."

"Why couldn't I help myself as well as she? She had a nice place all alone, before I came."

"She must have half starved herself to keep it, then. Stands to reason. Dollar and a quarter a day, and five dollars a week for your room. Where's your muffins, and your Oolong? Or else, where's your shoes?--Where's that Hamburg edging?"

"We don't have any Hamburg edging," said Bel, laughing.

"Nonsense. You know what I mean. O, here it is, under all that pique! For mercy's sake, won't Miss Tonker blow?--Now I get my nine dollars a week, and out of it I pay six for my share of that miserable sky-parlor, and my ends of the crusts and the cheese-parings. No place to myself for a minute. Why, I feel mixed up sometimes to that degree that I'd almost like to die, and begin again, to find out who I am!"

"Well, I wouldn't live so. And Aunt Blin wouldn't. I'm afraid she _didn't_ have other things quite so--corresponding--when she was by herself; but she had the home comfort. And, truly, now, I shouldn't wonder if there was real nourishment in just looking round,--at a red carpet and things,--when you've got 'em all just to your own mind. You can piece out with--peace!"

For two or three minutes, there was nothing heard after that in Bel and Elise's corner, but the regular busy click of the machines, as the tucks ran evenly through. Miss Tonker was hovering in the neighborhood. But presently, as she moved off, and Elise had a spool to change, Bel began again.

"Why don't you get up something different? Why couldn't a dozen, or twenty, take a flat, or a whole house, and have a housekeeper, and live nice? I believe I could contrive."

Bel was a born contriver. She was a born reformer, as all poets are; only she did not know yet that she was either. That had been the real trouble up in New Hampshire. She had her ideals, and she could not carry them out; so she sat and dreamed of what she would do if she could. If she might in any way have moulded her home to her own more delicate instincts, it may be that her step-mother need not have had to complain that "there was no spunk or snap to her about anything." It was not in her to "whew round" among tubs and whey,--to go slap-dash into soapmaking, or the coarse Monday's washing, when all nicer cares were evaded or forbidden, when chairs were shoved back against each other into corners, table-cloths left crooked, and dragging and crumby, drawing the flies,--mantel ornaments of uncouth odds and ends pushed all awry and one side during a dusting, and left so,--carpets rough and untidy at the corners; no touch of prettiness or pleasantness, nothing but clear, necessary _work_ anywhere. She would have made home _home_; then she would have worked for it.

Aunt Blin was like her. She would rather sit behind her blinds in her neat, quiet room of a Sunday, too tired to go to church, but with a kind of sacred rest about her, and a possible hushed thought of a presence in a place that God had let her make that He might abide with her in it,--than to live as these girls did,--even to have been young like them; to have put on fine, gay things, bought with the small surplus of her weekly earnings after the wretched board was paid, and parade the streets, or sit in a pew, with a Sunday-consciousness of gloves and new bonnet upon her.

"O, faugh!" said Elise Mokey, impatiently, to Bel's "I could contrive." "I should like to see you, with girls like Matilda Meane. You've got to _get_ your dozen or twenty, first, and make them agree."

Miss