White Bread-4
1821 Words
"I should say not," answered the author of the dedication.
"Them aid societies is a brassy lot," the old woman volunteered. "Allus got their claws out for somebody's snuff-box."
"Do you like the dedication, grandma?" Jane asked.
"It's good enough, what there is of it," said Grandma Mellish, "and there's enough of it, such as it is."
"It's 'most like I'd wrote a book," said Jane, fingering the pages. "If I'd had a poem in here, now—"
Suddenly she sat straight and stared down at the leaves. She had come on the blank page, the thirty-second page, at the book's end. Why not? Why should she not have a poem of her own there?
Her sewing-machine stood in the kitchen. In its top drawer was an old account-book, long and narrow, which just fitted in above the spools and the button-box. It was scribbled in pencil—pages of verses. They had been written while fires were kindling, while flat-irons were heating, while the potato-water was boiling, while Jane was waiting for her bread to "come out of the oven." Only within the last few years had Jane begun to face the fact that she should never publish a book of poems.
Her thought went now to some verses which of late she had set down at the news of the death of a little child in the neighborhood. These were, she felt, the best that she had ever written. They had come in real stress of feeling, at dawn, when she and Molly had returned from that house of mourning. She found the verses, read them over by the light of the bracket-lamp:
Oh, he was born the other day,
And now he is no more.
He never lived a word to say
And still he is no more.
You might think, "Why was he let live
If he no larger grew?"
O little life, e'en you can give
More than we ever knew.
God has us roses and us buds,
And when we come to die
The heavenly manna and bright foods
Will be for you and I.
"I might call it 'Manna,' " she thought. "Then that would make it real appropriate for a receipt-book."
She hesitated, turning the leaves of the account-book. This poem she had meant to send to a magazine. It had been years since she had tried to have anything published, save in the Epitome. And this was the best that she could do. But why not give this poem to the church book—"an offering to the Ideal, a sweet savor and flavor unto the Lord"?
She stooped to twitch over her pan of bread the old red-cotton table-cover with which it was protected. And from the base of her cooking-range leaped out the grinning faces stamped in the cast iron—the leering, mocking faces which so haunted Grandma Mellish, which looked now at Jane with a world of derisive understanding in their pointed eyes.
"You're using that poem for a sop," went through Jane's mind, as sharp as words.
"No such thing!" she said, aloud, and stood erect, in some strange defiance.
"Hey?" said Grandma Mellish.
"I'm going up-stairs," Jane said, abruptly. "Where's Molly? When she comes, you tell her to come on up."
When Molly went up, she found her mother sitting in her room, without a lamp. It was a mean little room, whose china wash-bowl and pitcher were the only high lights.
Jane had meant to turn to Molly and to put upon her the burden of the final decision which now, at last, she was facing. But, instead, Molly ran to her and sat upon her knee, like a little girl.
"Mother," she said, "I'm going to give up my school to Ellen Burns."
"What on earth for?" Jane cried, sharply.
"So her mother can have her here," said Molly. "Her mother's alone—she's alone. I never thought of it that way."
"What about me being alone?" Jane demanded.
"But I'll be living right here after Nat and I are married," Molly told her, "so what if I do go away for a little while first? And maybe, if Ellen don't come home now, she'll get something somewhere else and not come at all. And her mother's alone."
"But—" Jane said, and stopped.
"Oh, mother!" Molly cried. "If you knew how light and good I feel about it! I'm going down to the Epitome office and tell Nat to get it in the paper that way, to-morrow morning."
"You going to the Epitome office? Now?" Jane asked.
Molly rose, and Jane sprang up and stood beside her.
"Mother," said Molly, "I don't know whether you'll know what I mean. But I'd rather Ellen would have the school than to have it myself. Isn't that funny?"
"Wait," said Jane; "I'm coming down."
She brushed at her hair before her dark mirror, and on an invisible cushion found a brooch. They groped down the stairway and into the kitchen. By the stove Grandma Mellish sat sleeping, sweet-flag scattered on her apron.
"I won't be long, mother," Molly said.
"I'm coming, too," said Jane.
At the Epitome office Nat Commons looked in Molly's eyes as he listened. "Just put in the paper that Ellen Burns is well again and is coming to take her school," Molly said.
It may have been that her positiveness bore its own mark of finality; it may have been that his love of her bred understanding. He said little. He glanced swiftly round the city room, and, seeing only bent, absorbed heads and green eye-shades, he kissed Molly, in the comparative shadow of the telephone-booth.
"Nat!" said Jane Mellish.
Her tone was so sharp that the city editor himself looked up.
"I want to put something more in the cook-book," said Jane. "Is they time?"
There was time. Nat took her into the composing-room. By his littered desk Jane stood erect, once more the priestess.
"It's to go on that blank page. Put it down word for word, just exactly like I say it," said Jane. "It's a receipt for bread."
Every one in Katy Town remembers the hours which followed. It was on this night that Mis' Arthur Port's youngest son was hurt in the quarry and brought home to her house to die.
On her return from the office Jane Mellish was confronted with the news. Mis' Port being their nearest neighbor, the duties of the night automatically devolved upon Jane and Molly. Molly ran across the garden to Mis' Port's house, and Jane, about to follow, suddenly stood in stupefaction and looked down at her bread. She thought for a moment, and went close to Grandma Mellish.
"Grandma," she said, "you don't sleep good. Would you just as soon lay here on the settle to-night?"
"Hey?" said Grandma Mellish.
"I want you should mix the bread, the Communion bread," Jane said. Her face had turned white, and she bent over the old woman, and had her by the arm. "Now listen: You'll keep wakin' up like you always do. And it has to be mixed every two hours. Mix it at ten, and again at twelve, and again at two, and again at four. Can you do that? I'll be home to get it into loaves at six. Can you do that?"
"Tarnation nonsense," said Grandma Mellish.
Jane stooped nearer. In the light of the high bracket-lamp she was again the priestess, beside some withered sibyl, before an altar-fire.
"Hush!" said Jane. "Grandma! That's the secret. That's what makes it better than anybody's else's bread. Can you do that?"
"Humph!" said Grandma Mellish. "Yes, I can. I can do that. More fool me!"
Jane said it over to her patiently. Then, hearing on the board walk the tramp of the bearers, she ran through the garden to Mis' Port's house. A sense of fear and solemnity was on her. Twice in an hour she had said aloud the secret of the four generations; and Mis' Arthur Port's son was being brought home on a stretcher.
Communion day in the Katy Town First Church was a day of deep religious and social import. On that day there seemed some return of all the rich reticence of the more formal church interiors, now long lost in democratizations. For the white-cloth-covered table, the tall necks of the decanters, the silver goblets, and the heaped flowers in themselves gave to the time a sense of the ceremonial. Moreover, the service was held an hour earlier, when the slanting sun fell on the ingrain carpet in unwonted ways.
In the congregation, gathering in silence, came Jane Mellish and Molly. They were both pale from a long vigil. The boy had died toward dawn, and, having done all that was required of them, they had breakfasted and dressed, and had come-down early with the Communion bread.
Broken in square bits, the two loaves were piled on silver plates. White, firm, light, its delicate crust delicately browned, Jane saw her bread borne down the aisle with the formal sweep of an elder's arm. She tasted anxiously, and bowed her head on the folded handkerchief in her gloved hand; and her consecration was all compact of thankfulness. Never had her bread been more delectable.
Mis' Tyrus Burns, whose pew was behind Jane's, leaned forward as the hymnals rustled. "I declare, Jane Mellish," she whispered, "that bread is sacrilegious, it's so near without a fault. It's a wicked crime it ain't in the book."
The receipt-book was announced in the church "notices"—"a volume of the choicest receipts of all the ladies of the congregation," the minister said, and Mis' Tyrus Burns poked Jane slyly.
"Ain't you shamed to death and ashes?" Mis' Burns whispered.
Jane smiled, and found the hymn number, and sang. At the close of the service they all came forward, as they always did, to welcome the new members with the hand of fellowship and to praise Jane for her bread. She listened, only half hearing. And when this was done, she walked home with a strange, sweet singing in all her being. She had done it—she had done it! Something right had come into the world through her. There was no dim prescience of the time when the birth of a right should be in itself a thanksgiving. Jane's joy was innocently bound up with her own personal triumph.
"It was a grand Communion," she said, fervently, to Molly.
"Oh, mother," Molly said, "Mis' Tyrus Burns kissed me!"
In the kitchen, Grandma Mellish sat, trim in her white apron for the Sabbath.
"Many out?" she demanded.
"Yes. A big congregation," Jane answered.
"How'd Communion go?" asked Grandma Mellish.
"Same as usual, I guess," Jane told her.
"Many confess?" the old lady wished to know.
"One," Jane told her, complacently, "and two letters."
Grandma Mellish hesitated. "How was the bread?" she inquired, at last.
"Some said it was the best I ever made," Jane answered, proudly. "You deserve the praise of that, grandma."
"Do—do I?" the old woman said. "The best bread you ever made, eh? The brass o' that—the brass! Listen here."
She came over to Jane, and she was laughing soundlessly in a way that moved her shoulders and head.
"Listen here!" said Grandma Mellish. "I mixed that bread at ten o'clock last night, and then it was never touched again till you come home at daylight. I told you it was all tarnation nonsense. I only mixed it up once the whole night long."
- Writer
