Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

White Bread-3

"My land!" Mis' Tyrus Burns said, "if Jane ain't setting her white-bread sponge! Want we should shut our eyes, Jane?"

"Why else did you come to this door, if you didn't know that?" Jane countered, intent on her stirring.

"Want we should shut our eyes?" Mis' Port insisted.

"You can watch every move I make, if you want," Jane serenely offered.

"Well," said Mis' Burns, "we don't, I'm sure. We got something better to look at."

She produced the proofs of the receipt-book, and the two turned the leaves while Jane kept on at her work. She knew that her dedication would be there in type, in the women's hands.

"Leona Grace," said Mis' Tyrus Burns, "and her cottage-cheese receipt. She don't set it on the stove at all. I'll bet it ain't fit to put on bread."

"Nor Mis' Kent Carter's cream potatoes, either," Mis' Port contributed. "Sprinkles dry flour on 'em, in the skillet! The idear! Anything to make work easy for Mis' Carter. She's ashamed to fuss decent."

"I don't care what anybody says," observed Mis' Burns. "My mustard pickles is something elegant. They took me three whole forenoons, letting the sauce set and adding in gradual. No shirkin' there."

"Me, either, on my tartare sauce," Mis' Port supplied. "Three-quarters of a cupful of oil, one drop at a time, stirring constant. You can't do it right, with the chopped stuff and all, in a minute under two hours. Onless you slight somewheres."

"Same with Mis' Bold's German kisses," Mis' Burns explained. "She beats 'em, and beats 'em, and beats 'em. One hour by the clock, that woman beats 'em. I'm crazy to try that receipt."

Jane, beating steadily at her sponge, stood this as long as she could. "What do you think of the dedication, ladies?" she asked, finally.

The two women turned to her with humbly admiring faces.

"It's beautiful, Jane—just beautiful," Mis' Burns told her. "There couldn't no one have expressed it nicer."

"I said that when I read it over," Mis' Port added. "I said, 'She's done it, this time. Where anybody else would have used one word, Jane Mellish has used two.' We're all real proud, Jane."

"Hold onto your bread receipt if you want to," Mis' Burns told Jane. "You've earned the right to be stingy till the day of your death, I say."

"What do you do?" Mis' Port asked her, curiously. "Set around, and lay awake nights, and get points, and then write 'em up?"

"Something like that," Jane returned, modestly.

"Whether it's white bread or whether it's poetry," said Mis' Tyrus Burns, with a laugh, "Jane keeps it to herself."

She opened the book and displayed a page blank.

"Thirty-one pages of food and dedication and title," she observed, "besides the cover. And thirty-two pages in the book altogether. They's just one blank page for your receipt, Jane. Better use it up."

Jane beat at her sponge.

"I should think," Mis' Port put in, "you'd be ashamed to withhold so from the Lord, Jane."

Jane beat at her sponge. "The Lord wouldn't earn a cent more by my receipt being in," she answered.

"Earnin' money ain't all the Lord thinks about," Mis' Burns returned, tartly. "They is such a thing as sacrificin' for a sweet savor."

"You tend to your own sweet savors, Sarah Burns," Jane flashed, "and I'll tend to mine."

"Nat Commons has promised 'em for the Monday meeting," Mis' Port put in. "Mebbe Jane can see light by then. Some do, give 'em time."

Jane beat at her sponge.

Molly, on the side porch, felt dull wonder that any one could be so interested in the matters of which these women talked. As for her, she wanted her thought free to go to Nat and to plan the details of her simple wedding finery! Beside her own sharp sense of this muslin and that silk to buy, her mother's passionate guarding of the secret of the bread of four generations seemed to Molly as insubstantial and unallied to the realities as was the hair wreath in the parlor.

She strolled down to the gate, set between flowering currants. The women emerged, and Mis' Port went through the garden to her own house. Mis' Tyrus Burns lingered.

"I got a letter from Ellen to-day," she said to Molly, "and her picture."

"How does she look?" Molly asked, and tried not to show her slow-mounting discomfort at this mention of Ellen Burns.

"Walk along with me and I'll show it to you," Ellen's mother said.

They went on together, Mis' Burns talking of Ellen. Her illness had left her; she had been visiting in the mountains; she had taken a ten-days' motor trip. As this woman talked, Molly looked at her with attention. She was a large, pale creature, with fat cheeks and shapeless ears dragged down by old ear-rings. She wore a rough coat, too tight across the chest, and there her large-veined hand was outspread. She had on a heavy wedding-ring, which cut her thick finger. Her hat, trimmed in front with a weight of short, straight tips, bore down upon her forehead like a constant experience. Her footsteps were heavy and flat on the board side-walk. She was an ugly woman.

"Ellen's been a great comfort to me," she said many times. "As a little girl she was always a great help to me."

"It's fine to know she's well again," Molly ventured.

"Sometimes I think it's enough to know she's in the world and well, even if I never see her again," said Mis' Tyrus Burns.

She lived alone, and when she had taken the key from the saucer of a plant they went into the quiet rooms, which yielded nothing to one entering. The old furniture was crystallized in some motionless medium. The rooms paid no attention to any one.

Ellen's picture was in the parlor. There the hush was more prominent than the furnishings. All had been as it was for a very long time. Old reasons for arrangement had disappeared, but the arrangements stayed. The clock was wrong. The crayon portraits were almost certainly of those no longer living. There was an odor, not of padded carpeting, not of damp wall-paper paste, not of chimney-soot, but an odor unallied to rooms where folks go and come.

"Have a seat," said Mis' Tyrus Burns. "I think you'll find this the most comfortable chair. It's the one my husband was always partial to."

She brought Ellen's photograph. The picture showed a pretty, open face, with the touch of settled sadness which ill-health gives.

"She's an awful good girl," said Mis' Tyrus Burns, "and she was always a good baby. She was never much of any trouble to me. When she was a little thing I use' to take her with me to Ladies' Aid meetings. She knew how to set still. She never teased for anything. She was always a child you could easy give to understand things. She never took advantage. ... When she got through the high school I wanted she should stay home here with us. But no, her pa wanted her to have something. I guess he never did know what. And after that she taught till she got sick. I feel she's been give back to me from the dead. For a long time I just about knew what happiness was every time I said over, 'She ain't dead.' Yes, it's a good photograph. Her waist draws a little mite at the shoulder-seam, though, don't you think so?"

Molly listened. All her life she had known Mis' Tyrus Burns. She might have known that Mis' Tyrus Burns felt all this for Ellen, but to hear it said was like uncovering a new relationship.

Mis' Burns set the picture in its place before the ebony horse which forever stood with one uplifted foot.

"Molly," she said, without preface, "I want you to know I 'ain't mite of feeling about you not giving up the school to Ellen—after two years so."

"Who said I wasn't going to give it up?" Molly asked,

"Why," said Mis' Burns, "I took it for granted. Nobody in their senses would. You want your school—and it's yours to keep a-hold of. Ellen 'ain't no claim."

"But she won't come back here without a position?" Molly asked.

"No," her mother said; "she'll somewheres else."

"But you want her to come back!" Molly cried.

"That ain't it," said Mis' Burns.

She took down the photograph again, and wiped a dust speck from the face. Then she moved about the parlor, touching this or that to rights—picking up a red berry fallen from the asparagus in the fireplace, finding a raveling on the rug. Her hands had done much hard work, and they were shiny, and dark between the cords. Her hair was somewhat fallen, and the throat of her dress was badly fastened. In the midst of her plain and paltry belongings this woman moved, as instinct with wistfulness, with hope, with resignation, as if she had been any beautiful being.

And abruptly, as she looked, Molly Mellish seemed to pass over into the woman, and to become identical with her. And then it was something more. For, with no harbinger of the miracle within, the girl suddenly knew all the wonder of wanting a blessing for the woman more than for herself just as if Mis' Tyrus Burns had been someone whom she very much loved. Molly had wanted things in this way for her mother. As a matter of course, she would rather that a heritage should come to her mother than to herself. And now this process of preference was simply extended, and, quite surprisingly, it embraced Mis' Tyrus Burns.

Molly rose "I haven't told anybody yet what I'll do," she said.

She never forgot the leap of hope which flamed for a moment in the mother's eyes.

"Why, I never dreamed but what you'd keep the place!" Mis' Tyrus Burns said, "Anybody would."

Molly walked home in no agitation, no debate. Her mother was not in the kitchen. Gandma Mellish sat there, shaving sweet flag.

"Your ma's up-stairs," she said. "She wants you should go on up."

When her bread-pan was covered beside the stove, Jane, sitting in the kitchen to pore over the receipt-book, turned straight to t+he dedication. There it was, in a border of pine cones and quill pens and unicorns.

Some one has said that we are what we eat, It is well known that food makes people what we are. The idea that getting up a meal is a moral responsibility is in every one's head, more or less. As the poet Pope has said, "Who can live without cooks!"

God commanded the first pair to eat of the fruit of the fields, They probably did so for some time. Did they cook it? We can only surmise, The likelihood is that they did not. Who can tell but what if Eve had been able to cook right she wouldn't have been reduced to raw apples, and so her and Adam had not been driven from the garden with a flaming sword?

Mother! What sacred feelings pack that name! Who can remember their mother without remembering some of what she could cook? It is part of the divine something which hems mothers round.

In making up this little book, therefore, we have a purpose much wider than mere palatableness. Our roots go deeper. We make this Receipt Book an offering to the

ideal, a sweet savor and flavor unto the Lord. Jane Mellish.

Jane touched the hook lovingly. The time had been when she had dreamed of seeing her name between the covers of a book. Up-stairs, in an old trunk, lay the pile of thin paper, just as it had come back to her from a publisher, years ago. But now here was her name, almost on the title page of the book, and quite as it would have looked at the end of that book's dedication.

"See, grandma!" she cried, as the old woman came into the kitchen.

"I can't see," said Grandma Mellish; "but if you've stuck it full of love and God they'll think they like it. Did you?"

"I'll read it to you," Jane said, and did so, though she knew that the old woman could not hear. Jane loved to read it through.

" '—an offering to the Ideal, a sweet savor and flavor unto the Lord,' " she ended.

"Set around here where them dum faces can't see me," Grandma Mellish said only. "You didn't give 'em your white-bread receipt, did you?" she demanded, shrilly.