 | CHAPTER XI.
GOING INTO SOCIETY. The silent partner |  |
11. CHAPTER XI.
GOING INTO SOCIETY.
“DELIGHTED, Perley, I am sure, and shall
be sure to come. Nothing could give
us greater pleasure than a day with you in your
lovely, Quixotic, queer venture of a home. Mamma
begs me, with her love and acceptance, to
assure you that she appreciates,” etc., etc.
“As for my friends, the Van Doozles of New
York, you know, (it is Kenna Van Doozle who is
engaged to Mr. Blodgett,) they are charmed. It
was just like you to remember them in your
kind,” etc.
“And actually to see for ourselves one of your
dear, benevolent, democratic, strong-minded réunions,
of which we have heard so much! What
could be more?” etc.
“I promise you that I will be very good and
considerate of your protégés. I will wear nothing
gayer than a walking-suit, and I will inform myself
be as charming as I know how, so that you shall
not regret having honored me by,” etc.
“And now, my dear Perley, I cannot come to
Five Falls without telling you myself what I
should break my heart if you should hear from
anybody but myself.
“I know that you must have guessed my little
secret before now. But Maverick and I thought
that we should like at least to pretend that it was
a secret for a little while.
“Ah, Perley, I see your great wise eyes smile!
Do you know, I suspect that you were too wise for
him, dear boy! He seems to think a little, foolish,
good-for-nothing girl like me would make
him happy.
“And I know he wants me to say, dear Perley,
how we have neither of us ever had any hardness
in our hearts towards you, or ever can. How
can we now? We are so very happy! And I
know how wise he thinks you still, and how
good. So very good! A great deal better than
his ridiculous little Fly, I have no doubt; but
then, you see, we don't either of us mind that,”
etc., etc., etc.
Fly's note preceded Fly by but a few hours, it
so chanced. That evening Miss Kelso's parlors
presented what Fly perhaps was justified in calling
“such a dear, delightful, uncommon appearance.”
Kenna Van Doozle called it outré. She was
sitting on a sofa by Nynee Mell when she said so.
It was a stifling July night, and closed a stifling
day. Mrs. Silver, in the cars, on the Shore Line,
and swept by sea breezes, had “suffered agonies,”
so she said. Even in the close green dark of
Miss Kelso's lofty rooms, life had ceased to be desirable,
and the grasshopper had been a burden,
until dusk and dew-fall.
“In the houses from which my guests are
coming to-night,” she had said at supper, “the
mercury has not been below 90°, day nor night,
for a week.”
Her guests seemed to appreciate the fact;
shunned the hot lawn and garden, where a pretty
show of Chinese lanterns and a Niobe at a fountain
(new upon the grounds, this year) usually
attracted them, and grouped in the preserved
coolness of the parlor.
Her guests, in those parlors, were worth a ride
from town in the glare to meet.
There were some thirty, perhaps, in all; families,
for the most part, just as they came. Mr.
Mell, for instance, in decent clothes; the “fust
gell,” with one of the children; Nynee, in light
muslin and bright ribbons; old Bijah Mudge in
a corner with little Dib Docket, — they sent Dib
to the poorhouse by especial permit to bring
him, always; Catty, closely following the crisp
rustle of the hostess's plain white dress (Sip was
delayed, nobody knew just why); and Dirk Burdock,
apart from the other young fellows, drifting
restlessly in and out of the hot, bright lawn;
little knots of young people chattering over picture-racks;
a sound of elections and the evening
news in other knots where their fathers stood with
hands behind them; the elder women easily
seated in easy-chairs; a tangle about the piano,
where a young weaver was doing a young waltz
very well.
Now there was one very remarkable thing
about these thirty people. With the exception
of a little plainness about their dress (plainness
rather than roughness, since in America we will
die of bad drainage, but we will manage to have
a “best suit” when occasion requires) and an air
all, leave a very different impression upon the
superficial spectator from that of any thirty people
whom Fly Silver might collect at a musicale.
The same faces at their looms to-morrow you
could not identify.
“I suppose they 're on their best behavior,”
suggested Fly, in an opportunity.
“What have you and I been on all our lives?”
asked Perley, smiling. “One does not behave
till one has a chance.”
“And not in the least afraid of us,” observed
Fly, with some surprise. “I was afraid we should
make it awkward for them.”
“But how,” asked Miss Van Doozle, with
her pale eyes full of a pale perplexity, — “you
are exceedingly original, I know, — but how, for
instance, have you ever brought this about? I
had some such people once, in a mission class; I
could do nothing with them; they pulled the fur
out of my muff, and got up and left in the middle
of the second prayer.”
“I have brought nothing about,” said Perley,
“They have brought themselves about. All that
you, Miss Van Doozle.”
“Ah?” blankly from Miss Van Doozle.
“For instance,” said the hostess in moving
away, “I get up thirty or so of those every fortnight.
I don't know how this came here. Put it
in your pocket, please.”
She tossed from the card-basket a delicate
French envelope, of the latest mode of monogram
and tint, enclosing a defective invitation in her
own generous hand, running: —
“Miss Kelso requests the pleasure of Mr. Mell's
company at half past seven o'clock on Friday evening
next.
“July 15.”
“Perley,” observed Mrs. Silver, pensively,
“ought to have been a literary character. I have
always said so; have n't I, Fly?”
“Why, mamma?” asked Fly.
“That excuses so much always, my dear,” softly
said Mrs. Silver.
There seemed to be some stir and stop in Miss
Kelso's “evening,” that hot Friday. Dirk Burdock,
restlessly diving in and out of the lawn,
finally found his hat, and, apparently at the hostess's
The young weaver played the young waltz out,
and politics in corners lulled.
“It is a Victor Hugo evening,” explained Miss
Kelso to her friends from town, “and our reader
has not come. We always manage to accomplish
something. I wish you could have heard an
essay on Burns from a Scotchman out of the
printing-rooms, a fortnight ago. Or some of our
Dickens readings. Something of that or this
kind takes better with the men than a musical
night; though we have some fine voices, I assure
you. I wish, Fly, you would play to us a little,
while we are waiting.”
Fly, not quite knowing what else to do, but feeling
surprisingly ill at ease, accomplished a sweet
little thin thing, and was prettily thanked by
somebody somewhere; but still the reader had
not come.
It has been said, upon authority, that the
next thing which happened was the Andante from
the Seventh Symphony, Miss Kelso herself at
the keys.
Mrs. Silver looked at Miss Van Doozle. Miss
Van Doozle looked at Mrs. Silver.
“She has made a mistake,” said Mrs. Silver's
look.
“The people cannot appreciate Beethoven,”
was Miss Van Doozle's look.
Now, in truth, Beethoven could not have asked
a stiller hearing than he and Miss Kelso commanded
out of those thirty work-worn factory
faces.
The blind-mute Catty stood beside Miss Kelso
while she played. She passed the tips of her
fingers like feathers over the motion of Perley's
hands. It was a privilege she had. She bent
her head forward, with her lip dropped and dull.
“When she plays,” she often said to Sip,
“there 's wings of things goes by.”
“What, wings?” asked Sip.
“I don't know — wings. When I catch, they
fly.”
Miss Kelso's elegant white, without flaw or
pucker of trimming, presented a broad and shining
background to the poor creature's puzzled
figure. Catty seemed to borrow a glory from it,
as a lean Byzantine Madonna will, from her
gilded sky. Mrs. Silver fairly wiped her eyes.
After Beethoven there was Nynee Mell, with a
and stir. The reader, they said, was coming.
Fly Silver, in the pauses, had done very well.
She was a good-hearted little lady, and nobody
succeeded in being afraid of her. She had catechised
Dib Docket a little, and effected a timid
acquaintance with Bijah Mudge. The old man
was in a wise dotage peculiarly his own. He
came, however, regularly to Miss Kelso's “evenings”;
enjoyed his saucer of ice-cream as much
as any other child there; and yet always managed
to gather about him a little audience of men with
frowns in their foreheads, who listened to his
wild ravings with a kind of instinctive respect,
which pleased the old fellow amazingly.
He had a paper in his hand which he showed
to Fly. He always had a paper in his hand. It
was a petition to the Legislature of the State of
Massachusetts, with illustrated margins of etchings
in pen and ink. The designs ran all to foliage,
— indiscriminate underbrush at first glance;
upon examination, forests came out in rows; upon
study, hands came out from the forests, hundreds
of them, from bough, from twig, from stem, from
leaf. The forest on the left margin wrung its
clapped them smartly.
“What for?” asked Fly, politely.
“Is it not written,” said the old man, solemnly,
“that in that day all the trees of the field shall
clap their hands?”
“But what about?” persisted Fly.
“The voice said, `Cry!”' said Bijah, shrilly;
“and I said, `What shall I cry?”' He lifted
his petition to the Legislature of the State of
Massachusetts in his shaking hand, and fixed his
bleared eyes over it upon Fly's pretty, frightened
face. “What shall I cry? `And thou
saidst in thine heart, I shall be a lady forever; so
that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart,
neither didst remember the latter end of it!”'
“O dear!” said Fly, and rippled away.
“A Hebrew prophet and a canary-bird,”
thought Perley, when she heard of it.
Fly rippled out into the hall, where the stir
and stop seemed to have centred. The hostess
was there, talking to Sip Garth in a low tone.
Dirk Burdock was there, having found Sip, he
said, half - way over; and a young Irish girl
whom Sip had with her, a fine-featured little
and mouth.
She was sorry to be so late, Sip was saying,
“But Maggie 'd set her heart so on coming, you
see; and there she lay and fainted, and I have
n't been able to bring her round enough to get
over here till this minute. Her folks was all
away, and I could n't seem to leave her; and
she did so set her heart on coming! She has
been carried in a faint out of the mill four times
to-day — out into the air, and a dash of water —
and back again; and down again. The thermometer
has stood at 115° in our room to-day.
It has n't been below 110° not since last Saturday.
It 's 125° in the dressing-room. There 's
men in the dressing-room with the blood all
gathered black about their faces, just from heat;
they look like men in a fit; they 're all purple.
You 'd ought to see the clothes we wear! —
drenched like fine folks' bathing-clothes. I could
wring mine out. We call it the lake of fire, — our
room. That 's all I could think of since Sunday:
the Last Day and the lake with all the folks in it.
I have n't been in such a coolness not since I
was here last time, Miss Kelso. It 's most as bad
as hell to be mill-folks in July!”
“A blowzy, red-faced girl,” Miss Van Doozle
thought, when the reader came in.
“My Lords!” began the red-faced reader, “I
impart to you a novelty. The human race exists”....
“We have nothing so popular,” whispered
Miss Kelso, “as that girl's readings and recitations.
They ring well.”
“An unappreciated Siddons, perhaps?” The
pale Van Doozle eyes assumed the homœopathic
trituration of a sarcasm. The Van Doozle eyes
were not used to Sip exactly.
“I have thought that there might be greater
than Siddons in Sip,” replied Miss Kelso, musingly;
“but not altogether of the Siddons sort, I
admit.”
Sip followed Miss Kelso, in the breaking up of
the evening, after the books and the ices were
out of the way. They had some plan about the
little Irish girl already; a week's rest at least.
There was that family on the Shore Line; and
the hush of the sea; where they took such care of
poor Bert Bush. If Catty were well, Sip would
take her down.
“I know the girl. She must be got away till
is out of her, but she 'll work; has a brother in
an insane asylum, and likes to pay his board.
Maggie 's obstinate as death about such things.
You 'd ought to see her pushing back her hair
and laughing out, when she come out of those
faints to-day, and at it again, for all anybody
could say. You would n't think that she 'd ever
take to Jim, would you? But got over it, I guess.
Had a hard time, though. Look here! I found
a piece in a newspaper yesterday, and cut it out
to show to you.”
Sip handed to Miss Kelso, with a smile, a slip
from one of the leading city dailies, reading
thus: —
“What is generally written about Lorenzo factory-girls
is sensational and pure nonsense. They
are described as an overworked class, rung up,
rung out, rung in; as going to their labors worn,
dispirited, and jaded; as dreading to meet their
task-masters in those stifling rooms, where they
have cultivated breathing as a fine art; as coming
home from their thraldom happy but for
thoughts of the resumption of their toil on the
morrow. The fact is, sympathy has been offered
and the girls themselves will tell you the tasks
are not exhaustive. No one gets so tired that
she cannot enjoy the evening, every thought
of work dismissed. Her employment is such that
constant attention is not demanded. She may
frequently sit thinking of the past or planning
for the future. She earns nearly four dollars per
week, beside her board. The pleasantest relations
subsist between her and her overseer, who
is frequently the depositary of her funds, who
perhaps goes with her to buy her wedding or
household outfit, who is her counsellor and protector.
Her step is not inelastic, but firm.....
The mills are high studded, well ventilated, and
scrupulously clean. The girls are healthy and well
looking, and men and women, who have worked
daily for twenty or thirty years, are still in undiminished
enjoyment of sound lungs and limbs.”
“I never was in Lorenzo,” said Sip, drily, as
Perley folded the slip, “but mills are mills. I 'd
like to see the fellow that wrote that.”
Fly and her friends had sifted into the library,
while Miss Kelso's guests were thinning.
“This, I suppose,” Mrs. Silver was sadly saying,
life.”
“You speak as if she were dead and buried,
mamma,” said Fly, making a dazzling little heap
of herself upon a cricketful of pansies.
“So she is,” affirmed Mrs. Silver, plaintively,
— “so she is, my dear, as far as Society is concerned.
I have been struck this evening by the
thought, what a loss to Society! Why, Miss
Kenna, I am told that this superb house has
been more like a hospital or a set of public soup-rooms
for six months past, than it has like the
retiring and secluded home of a young lady.
Those people overrun it. They are made welcome
to it at all hours and under all circumstances.
She invites them to tea, my dear!
They sit down at her very table with her. I
have known her to bring out Mirabeau from town
to furnish their music for them. Would you
credit it? Mirabeau! In the spring she bought
a Bierstadt. I was with her at the time. `I
have friends in Five Falls who have never seen
a Bierstadt,' she said. Now what do you call
that? I call it morbid,” nodded the lady, making
soft gestures with her soft hands, — “morbid!”
“I don't suppose anybody knows the money
that she has put into her libraries, and her model
tenements, and all that, either,” mused Fly, from
her cricket.
“It does well enough in that Mr. Garrick,”
proceeded Mrs. Silver, in a gentle bubble of despair;
“I don't object to fanatical benevolence in
a man like him. It is natural, of course. He is
self-made entirely; twenty years ago might have
come to Miss Kelso's evenings himself, you
know. It is excusable in him, though awkward
in the firm, as I had reason to know, when he
started to build that chapel. Now there is
another of poor Perley's freaks. What does
she do but leave Dr. Dremaine's, where she
had at least the dearest of rectors and the best
pew-list in Five Falls, on the ground that the
mill-people do not frequent Dr. Dremaine's, and
take a pew in the chapel herself! They have a
young preacher there fresh from a seminary,
and Perley and the mill-girls will sit in a row
together and hear him! Now that may be
Christianity,” adds Mrs. Silver, in a burst of
heroism, “but I call it morbidness, sheer morbidness!”
“But these people are very fond of Perley,
mamma,” urged Fly, lifting some honest trouble
in her face out of the pretty shine that she made
in the dim library.
“They ought to be!” said Mrs. Silver, with
unwonted sharpness.
Now Fly, in her own mind, had meant to find
out something about that; she went after the
Hugo reader, it just occurring to her, and took
her into a corner before everybody was gone.
She made a great glitter of herself here too;
she could not help it, in her shirred lace and
garnets. Sip looked her over, smiling as she
would at a pretty kitten. Sip was more gentle
in her judgments of “that kind of folks” than
she used to be.
“What do we think of her?” Sip's fitful face
flushed. “How can I tell you what we think of
her? There 's those of us here, young girls of us,”
Nynee Mell's blue ribbons, just before them, were
fluttering through the door, “that she has saved
from being what you would n't see in here to-night.
There 's little children here that would be little
devils, unless it was for her. There 's men of us
with rum to fight, and boys in prison, and debts to
this world or the other but her. There 's others
of us, that — that — God bless her!” broke off
Sip, bringing her clenched little hands together,
— “God bless her, and the ground she treads on,
and the air she breathes, and the sky that is over
her, and the friends that love her, and the walls
of her grand house, and every dollar of her
money, and every wish she wishes, and all the
prayers she prays — but I cannot tell you, young
lady, what we think of her!”
“But Society,” sighed Mrs. Silver, — “Society
has rights which every lady is bound to respect;
poor Perley forgets her duties to Society. Where
we used to meet her in our circle three times, we
meet her once now.”
“Once of Perley is equal to three times of
most people,” considered Fly, appearing with
Maverick (who had slipped in as the “evening”
slipped out) from some lovers' corner. “And she
does n't rust, you must own, mamma; and seems
to enjoy herself so, besides.”
“I have understood,” observed the elder Miss
Van Doozle, “that she has been heard to say
ordinary drawing-room party happily again.”
This, in fact, was a report very common about
Miss Kelso at one time. Those well acquainted
with her and with her movements in Five Falls
will remember it.
“Poor Perley” herself came in just in time to
hear it then.
“I always forgave the falsity of that, for the
suggestiveness of it,” she said, laughing.
“A thoughtful set of guests you have here,”
said Fly. “We have been finding fault with you
all the evening.”
“That is what I expected.”
“So we supposed. Perley!”
“Well, my dear?”
“Are you happy?”
“Quite happy, Fly.”
“I should be so miserable!” said Fly, with a
shade of the honest trouble still on her pretty
face.
“I have been saying,” began Mrs. Silver, “that
Society is a great loser by your philanthropy,
Perley.”
Perley lighted there.
“Society!” she said, “I feel as if I had but
just begun to go into society!”
“But, on your theories,” said Kenna Van
Doozle, with a clumsy smile of hers, “we shall
have our cooks up stairs playing whist with us,
by and by.”
“And if we did?” quietly. “But Miss Van
Doozle, I am not a reformer; I have n't come to
the cooks yet; I am only a feeler. The world
gets into the dark once in a while, you know;
throws out a few of us for groping purposes.”
“Kenna and I, for instance, being spots on the
wings?” asked Fly.
“Naturalists insist that the butterfly will pause
and study its own wings, wrapt in —”
“O Maverick!”
“Admiration,” finished Maverick.
“But one must feel by something,” persisted
Fly, “guess or measure. It is all very beautiful
in you, Perley. But it seems to me such a
venture. I should be frightened out of it a dozen
times over.”
Perley took a little book out of a rack upon one
of the tables, where Mr. Mell's ice-cream saucer yet
lay unremoved, — Isaac Taylor in bevelled board.
“Here,” she said, “is enough to feel by, even
if I feel my way to your cook, Miss Kenna.”
“`To insure, therefore, its large purpose of good-will
to man, the law of Christ spreads out its
claims very far beyond the circle of mere pity or
natural kindness, and in absolute and peremptory
terms demands for the use of the poor, the ignorant,
the wretched, and demands from every one
who names the name of Christ, the whole residue
of talent, wealth, time, that may remain after
primary claims have been satisfied.”'
| CHAPTER XI.
GOING INTO SOCIETY. The silent partner | |