Real Folks Part 13

"Children must be born simple, as they were then. There's nothing my girls would like better, even at their age, than to help at just such a party. It is a dream of theirs. Why shouldn't somebody do it, just to show how good it is?"

"You can lead a horse to water, you know, Frank, but you can't make him drink. And the colts are forty times worse. I believe you might get some of the mothers together for an ancient tea-drink, just in the name of old a.s.sociation; but the _babies_ would all turn up their new-fashioned little noses."

"O, dear!" sighed Frau Van Winkle. "I wish I knew people!"

"By the time you do, you'll know the reason why, and be like all the rest."

Hazel Ripwinkley went to Mrs. Hilman's school, with her cousin Helena. That was because the school was a thoroughly good one; the best her mother could learn of; not because it was kept in parlors in Dorset Street, and there were girls there who came from palaces west of the Common, in the grand avenues and the ABC streets; nor did Hazel wear her best gray and black velvet suit for every day, though the rich colored poplins with their over-skirts and sashes, and the gay ribbons for hair and neck made the long green baize covered tables look like gardenplots with beds of bloom, and quite extinguished with their brilliancy the quiet, one skirted brown merino that she brushed and folded every night, and put on with fresh linen cuffs and collar every morning.

"It is an idiosyncrasy of Aunt Frances," Helena explained, with the grandest phrase she could pick out of her "Synonymes," to cow down those who "wondered."

Privately, Helena held long lamentations with Hazel, going to and fro, about the party that she could not have.

"I'm actually ashamed to go to school. There isn't a girl there, who can pretend to have anything, that hasn't had some kind of a company this winter. I've been to them all, and I feel real mean,--sneaky.

What's 'next year?' Mamma puts me off with that. Poh? Next year they'll all begin again. You can't skip birthdays."

"I'll tell you what!" said Hazel, suddenly, inspired by much the same idea that had occurred to Mrs. Ripwinkley; "I mean to ask my mother to let _me_ have a party!"

"You! Down in Aspen Street! Don't, for pity's sake, Hazel!"

"I don't believe but what it could be done over again!" said Hazel, irrelevantly, intent upon her own thought.

"It couldn't be done _once_! For gracious grandmother's sake, don't think of it!" cried the little world-woman of thirteen.

"It's gracious grandmother's sake that made me think of it," said Hazel, laughing. "The way she used to do."

"Why don't you ask them to help you hunt up old Noah, and all get back into the ark, pigeons and all?"

"Well, I guess they had pretty nice times there, any how; and if another big rain comes, perhaps they'll have to!"

Hazel did not intend her full meaning; but there is many a faint, small prophecy hid under a clover-leaf.

Hazel did not let go things; her little witch-wand, once pointed, held its divining angle with the might of magic until somebody broke ground.

"It's awful!" Helena declared to her mother and sisters, with tears of consternation. "And she wants me to go round with her and carry 'compliments!' It'll never be got over,--never! I wish I could go away to boarding-school!"

For Mrs. Ripwinkley had made up her unsophisticated mind to try this thing; to put this grain of a pure, potent salt, right into the seethe and glitter of little Boston, and find out what it would decompose or precipitate. For was not she a mother, testing the world's chalice for her children? What did she care for the hiss and the bubble, if they came?

She was wider awake than Mrs. Ledwith knew; perhaps they who come down from the mountain heights of long seclusion can measure the world's paces and changes better than they who have been hurried in the midst of them, on and on, or round and round.

Worst of all, old Uncle t.i.tus took it up.

It was funny,--or it would have been funny, reader, if anybody but you and I and Rachel Froke knew exactly how,--to watch Uncle t.i.tus as he kept his quiet eye on all these things,--the things that he had set going,--and read their revelations; sheltered, disguised, under a character that the world had chosen to put upon him, like Haroun Alraschid in the merchant's cloak.

They took their tea with him,--the two families,--every Sunday night. Agatha Ledwith "filled him in" a pair of slippers that very first Christmas; he sat there in the corner with his old leather ones on, when they came, and left them, for the most part, to their own mutual entertainment, until the tea was ready. It was a sort of family exchange; all the plans and topics came up, particularly on the Ledwith side, for Mrs. Ripwinkley was a good listener, and Laura a good talker; and the fun,--that you and I and Rachel Froke could guess,--yes, and a good deal of unsuspected earnest, also,--was all there behind the old gentleman's "Christian Age," as over brief mentions of sermons, or words about books, or little brevities of family inquiries and household news, broke small floods of excitement like water over pebbles, as Laura and her daughters discussed and argued volubly the matching and the flouncing of a silk, or the new flowering and higher pitching of a bonnet,--since "they are wearing everything all on the top, you know, and mine looks terribly meek;" or else descanted diffusely on the unaccountableness of the somebodies not having called, or the bother and forwardness of the some-other-bodies who had, and the eighty-three visits that were left on the list to be paid, and "never being able to take a day to sit down for anything."

"What is it all for?" Mrs. Ripwinkley would ask, over again, the same old burden of the world's weariness falling upon her from her sister's life, and making her feel as if it were her business to clear it away somehow.

"Why, to live!" Mrs. Ledwith would reply. "You've got it all to do, you see."

"But I don't really see, Laura, where the living comes in."

Laura opens her eyes.

"_Slang_?" says she. "Where did you get hold of that?"

"Is it slang? I'm sure I don't know. I mean it."

"Well, you _are_ the funniest! You don't _catch_ anything. Even a by-word must come first-hand from you, and mean something!"

"It seems to me such a hard-working, getting-ready-to-be, and then not being. There's no place left for it,--because it's all place."

"Gracious me, Frank! If you are going to sift everything so, and get back of everything! I can't live in metaphysics: I have to live in the things themselves, amongst other people."

"But isn't it scene and costume, a good deal of it, without the play? It may be that I don't understand, because I have not got into the heart of your city life; but what comes of the parties, for instance? The grand question, beforehand, is about wearing, and then there's a retrospection of what was worn, and how people looked. It seems to be all surface. I should think they might almost send in their best gowns, or perhaps a photograph,--if photographs ever were becoming,--as they do visiting cards."

"Aunt Frank," said Desire, "I don't believe the 'heart of city life'

is in the parties, or the parlors. I believe there's a great lot of us knocking round amongst the dry goods and the furniture that never get any further. People must be _living_, somewhere, _behind_ the fixings. But there are so many people, nowadays, that have never quite got fixed!"

"You might live all your days here," said Mrs. Ledwith to her sister, pa.s.sing over Desire, "and never get into the heart of it, for that matter, unless you were born into it. I don't care so much, for my part. I know plenty of nice people, and I like to have things nice about me, and to have a pleasant time, and to let my children enjoy themselves. The 'heart,' if the truth was known, is a dreadful still place. I'm satisfied."

Uncle t.i.tus's paper was folded across the middle; just then he reversed the lower half; that brought the printing upside down; but he went on reading all the same.

"_I_'m going to have a real party," said Hazel, "a real, gracious-grandmother party; just such as you and mother had, Aunt Laura, when you were little."

Her Aunt Laura laughed good-naturedly.

"I guess you'll have to go round and knock up the grandmothers to come to it, then," said she. "You'd better make it a fancy dress affair at once, and then it will be accounted for."

"No; I'm going round to invite; and they are to come at four, and take tea at six; and they're just to wear their afternoon dresses; and Miss Craydocke is coming at any rate; and she knows all the old plays, and lots of new ones; and she is going to show how."

"I'm coming, too," said Uncle t.i.tus, over his newspaper, with his eyes over his gla.s.ses.

"That's good," said Hazel, simply, least surprised of any of the conclave.

"And you'll have to play the m.u.f.fin man. 'O, don't you know,'"--she began to sing, and danced two little steps toward Mr. Oldways. "O, I forgot it was Sunday!" she said, suddenly stopping.

"Not much wonder," said Uncle t.i.tus. "And not much matter. _Your_ Sunday's good enough."

And then he turned his paper right side up; but, before he began really to read again, he swung half round toward them in his swivel-chair, and said,--

"Leave the sugar-plums to me, Hazel; I'll come early and bring 'em in my pocket."

"It's the first thing he's taken the slightest notice of, or interest in, that any one of us has been doing," said Agatha Ledwith, with a spice of momentary indignation, as they walked along Bridgeley Street to take the car.

For Uncle t.i.tus had not come to the Ledwith party. "He never went visiting, and he hadn't any best coat," he told Laura, in verbal reply to the invitation that had come written on a square satin sheet, once folded, in an envelope with a big monogram.

"It's of no consequence," said Mrs. Ledwith, "any way. Only a child's play."