Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

White Bread-1

White Bread––––––––

Every one in the room had promised something. Mis' Tyrus Burns offered her receipt for filled cookies. "My filled cookie receipt," she said, "is something that very, very few have ever got out of me. I give it to Mis' Bradford—when she moved away. I've give it to one or two of my kin—by word of mouth and not wrote down. And Carol Beck had it from me when she was married—wrote out on note-paper, formal—but understood to be a personal receipt and not general at all. This 'll be the first time I've ever give in to make it public, and nothing on earth but the church carpet would make me now."

"Me either, with my Christmas cakes," said Mis' Arthur Port. "I've made 'em for fairs and bazaars and suppers, and give the material when needed it for the children's shoes, but I feel like the time had come for the real supreme sacrifice. I'll put 'em in the book with the rest of you."

Mis' Older's salad-dressing, Mis' Eldred's fruit cordial, Mis' Regg's mince-meat, Mis' Emmons's pie-crust—these were all offered up. The basement dining-room of the church was filled with women that spring afternoon, and a spirit was moving among them like a little flame, kindling each one to giving. The place in which they were gathered, its furnace in the corner, its reed melodeon for the Sunday-school, its black-boards, and its locked cupboards filled with dishes which the women had earned when a like flame quickened—this place might have been an austere height where they were face to face with the ultimate purpose of giving, of being. For abruptly children's shoes, parlor curtains, the little hoard accumulating "over back" on a cupboard shelf became as nothing, and the need to be of use was on them all, like a cry involuntarily answered to a cry. That exquisite reflection of each in each was there, obeying strange laws of repetition and contagion—a gentle, positive power, infinitely stronger than the negative infection of mob violence. It was as if the very church carpet which the receipt-book's sale must buy was but the homely means for the exercise of the mysterious force which moved them.

Save only one. Mis' Jane Mellish sat by the serving-pantry door, no more self-forgetful than when she was in her own kitchen.

"What's the book going to be called?" she had asked when they had voted to prepare it.

"The Katy Town First Church Ladies' Choice Receipt Book," they had finally decided.

"How can you call it that if it ain't all the ladies?" Jane had inquired further. "Some o' the ladies 'ain't got a choice receipt to their names nor their brains."

"Such as 'ain't can see to the printing," Mis' Tyrus Burns suggested. "Would you druther do that, Jane?" she added, tartly.

Jane's lips moved before she spoke—a little helpless way that they had, as if they were not equal to what they must do. "Who's going to write the dedication?" she asked.

No one had thought of a dedication, but it occurred to no one to question it. And the answer was inevitable.

"You'd ought to do that," they said to Jane: For who else of their number had ever published poems in the Katy Town Epitome, and whom else had its editor asked to "do special funeral and wedding write-ups"?

Jane nodded and hid her relief, and presently faced the question which all along she had been dreading:

"Now, bread. We'd ought to have some real special breads," they said. "Who's going to do them?"

Mis' Holmes's salt-rising bread, Mis' Jacobs's potato-bread, Mis' Grace's half-graham-and-half-rye—these were all offered. It was Mis' Tyrus Burns who said that which they were all thinking. She turned to Jane Mellish.

"Land! Jane," she said, "what it 'd be to have your white-bread receipt for our volume!"

At this a hush fell, and they looked at Jane. For years her white-bread receipt had baffled them all. Nobody made white bread like Jane, and no one could find out how she made it—whether by flour or mixing, or, as some suspected, a home-made lard, or an unknown baking-powder, or a secret yeast packed in occasional boxes from Jane's relatives oversea. Whatever the process or the component, she kept it. After a few rebuffs, Katy Town understood that the bread was Jane's prerogative. So they praised it to her, and experimented privately, and owned to one another their defeat. No one ever asked Jane any more. When Mis' Tyrus Burns did so, the silence was as if some one had spoken impertinently, or had made an historical reference too little known to be in good taste, or had quoted poetry.

"I'm going to compose an original dedication," Jane said, stiffly. "I guess, ladies, that's my share."

Mis' Tyrus Burns sighed. " 'Most any of us," she said, "could stodge up a dedication to a book. Or we could even go without one, if we just had to. But that white-bread receipt of yours had ought to be in this book by rights, Jane Mellish, with a page all to itself."

Jane was silent. And when little Miss Cold, of her heart's goodness, relieved the moment with, "None of you offered to give my cream cake a page all by itself, I notice," every one laughed gratefully, and spoke no more of Jane's bread.

Jane walked down the street with the others, and she knew of what they were thinking. When she turned alone into her own stint under the new buds, she went with a sick defiance, which her elaborate chatter about house-cleaning had only scotched. She left her door open to the friendly evening. The rooms were pleasant and commonplace in the westering light; her dress was to be changed, there was supper to get, her "clothes" had come home and were waiting to be sprinkled; but all these were become secondary to the disturbing thing.

"Mis' Tyrus Burns always did make things disagreeable for everybody," she thought. "Why should she say what bread should go into that book and what bread should stay out of it?"

Grandma Mellish was in the kitchen. She had an airy room of her own, and the "other" room was warm enough for comfort, but she sat in the kitchen. Sometimes she spent wakeful nights there.

"The other furniture bunts out at me," the old lady had said. "I see it's there. In the kitchen I can think things without truck having to be looked at all the time— Can't I sit where I want?" she would querulously demand of them.

Of late she had been querulous, too, about certain grinning faces on the cook-stove.

"They're makin' fun of what they think you be," she said once. "You can stand there fryin' things, as moral as the minister, but you can't fool them faces. Dum 'em."

She sat in the kitchen now, patching a roller-towel. "Be they done clackin'?" she inquired, as Jane entered.

With the table-cloth in her hand, Jane stooped to her, told her about the book and the new church carpet. "They want I should put my white-bread receipt in," she said.

"The brass!" said Grandma Mellish, shrilly. "The brass!"

"Ain't it?" Jane said, softening to the sympathy, and stopped in her journey from cupboard to table to tell more of the meeting. The old woman listened; she was very bent, and to listen she looked over her stooped shoulder, her lips parted and moving in her effort to follow.

"The brass!" she said again. "That receipt's yours. I don't know how you make it, and I live in the same house with you. They'll want the hair off your head, next. What you goin' to do for their book?"

"It's my book, too," Jane said. "It's our book, I s'pose—it ain't all theirs. I'm going to write the dedication—giving it away on the front page, you know."

"Eh," said Grandma Mellish. "Well, just you make it flowery enough, and put in enough love and heaven, and that had ought to satisfy 'em. They'll want the clothes off your back, next." She broke off and shook her fist at the grinning faces on the cooking-stove. "What you smirkin' at, drat ye?" she inquired.

When supper was ready Jane went out on the porch, and there, in order to be away from the droning voice, she waited for Molly. Molly was late, but Jane was not hungry. The feeling of sick distaste had persisted, so that it was almost physical nausea; and this the old woman's words, which had at first soothed her, now someway intensified.

What was she caring so much about? she asked herself, indignantly. The bread receipt was hers, and that was all there was to it. It had been brought from the old country by her great-grandmother Osthelder, and had been handed down from mother to daughter. She remembered how jealously it had been guarded by her own mother, who had brought the receipt West with her when she married; and straightway in her home town her bread had become an amazement. Her mother had always made the bread for the Communion services, and so had Jane. In a fortnight more Jane would be making bread for the spring Communion of the First Church.

"I do enough for them—I guess I do enough for them with my receipt," she thought. "Besides, it's Molly's. I 'ain't the right to give away what's Molly's."

Molly, coming from her school, seemed not at all disturbed about her rights. She had been teaching for two years, but she looked like a school-girl herself as she came round the house. She came bareheaded, save for a flutter of white veil on her hair; and she was always like one who is met at a day's beginning, and not at an ending. Only to-night there was a cloud on her face, no larger than the white space between her brows. But her mother saw.

"What is it, Molly?" she asked, but the girl laughed and ran up-stairs and managed to keep off the question until supper was done. She had eaten nothing, however; and Jane had eaten nothing, because that sick sense of something wrong possessed her; only Grandma Mellish ate steadily. "What is it, Molly?" her mother asked again, when the old woman had finished.

"Well, mother darling," Molly said, "Ellen Burns has come back. At least she's sent word she's ready to take the school. They've offered it to me if I want to stay, but—"

"But what?" Jane said, sharply.

"I can't keep it," Molly answered. "It was her school. I was just a supply while she was sick. Now she's well, and she wants it back."

"What's that?" said Grandma Mellish. "Mis' Tyrus Burns's girl's got well? She wants back, after you doin' her work the best o' two years? What's the Board say to that?"

"They haven't met yet," Molly said. "But Nat says he knows I can stay if I like. Only—"

"Well, I should think so," said Grandma Mellish. "It's a good school. You stay. Wants back, does she? The brass!"

Molly looked at her mother, but Jane did not meet her eyes. It would be serious, this loss of the school. There were the three of them, and Molly was the breadwinner. If she were to get no other school next year. ...

"You've got the good of the school to think of," Jane said. "You must be the best teacher, or Nat wouldn't be so sure of the Board. The good of the school's the main thing."

Molly shook her head. "I don't know about my being a better teacher," she said. "I think if they let me stay it 'll be because Nat Commons is president of the Board."

"Nonsense!" her mother said, with vigor. "Just because he's taken you to drive once or twice. Anyway, what if it is so? You like him, don't you? You don't want you should hurt his feelings? If you go he'll think you're running away from him. You've got to think of everything."

Grandma Mellish was wiping her spectacles on her petticoat. "You better keep your cap set for Rufus Commons's son," she said. "He's got his pa's pocket and his grandad's jaw. Don't you leave him slip through your fingers."

Molly rose swiftly and went out on the porch. Her mother's eyes followed her, but she said nothing. As Jane turned back to her work, she was aware that her own dull sense of physical ill-being had been multiplied, and she felt a weight within, bearing down her chest, changing her breath.

"I've got to get a-hold of myself," she thought. "I guess I'll take a dose of something and get into the bed."