“ ‘The Son of God goes forth to warA kingly crown to gain.His blood-red banner streams afar.Who follows in his train?’
“ ‘The Son of God goes forth to warA kingly crown to gain.His blood-red banner streams afar.Who follows in his train?’
“ ‘The Son of God goes forth to warA kingly crown to gain.His blood-red banner streams afar.Who follows in his train?’
“I call a good deal of that hymn immoral. Think of that gentle soul caring to gain a kingly crown. Think of his having a blood-red banner. Thinkof him going forthto war. It’s a wicked hymn, some of it.”
“Oh, well,” said our minister, “those things are just figurative. You mustn’t take them too literally, Miss Marsh.”
I looked over at him, across my cherries.
“We’re saying that pretty often these days,” I said. “Sometimes it’s glorious true and sometimes it’s stupid false.”
“Well,” he says, “that needn’t enter into the services for these Sundays. We might of course do well to pick out the hymns with care. What else had you thought of?”
“I thought,” I said, “of having the Sunday School come in then and march down the aisle, singing—not ‘We Are Little Soldiers,’ or anything like that, but ‘I Think When I Read That Sweet Story of Old,’ say. And then have them repeat something—well,” I says, “I found a little verse the other day. I never saw it before—mebbe you have. I’ve been meaning to ask the superintendent how it would be to have the children learn to say that.”
I said it for him:
“ ‘The year’s at the Spring,The day’s at the morn,Morning’s at seven,The hill-side’s dew-pearled.The lark’s on the wing,The snail’s on the thorn,God’s in his heaven,All’s right with the world.’
“ ‘The year’s at the Spring,The day’s at the morn,Morning’s at seven,The hill-side’s dew-pearled.The lark’s on the wing,The snail’s on the thorn,God’s in his heaven,All’s right with the world.’
“ ‘The year’s at the Spring,The day’s at the morn,Morning’s at seven,The hill-side’s dew-pearled.The lark’s on the wing,The snail’s on the thorn,God’s in his heaven,All’s right with the world.’
“And then,” I says, “have them add: ‘And oh God, help the last line to get to be true for everybody, and help me to help make it true. Amen,’ That,” I says, “might do for one day. Then you talk to ’em for five minutes. And then dismiss them.”
“Dismissthem?” he said. “Not have them remain to the service?”
“Why, no,” I says, “not unless you can interest and occupy them. Which no sermons do for little children.”
“Where would the mothers that are in churchsendtheir children to?” says he.
“We ought to have the rooms downstairs open,” I says, “and have somebody in charge, and have quiet exercises and story-telling and pictures for them.”
“My dear Miss Marsh,” he says, “that would be a revolution.”
“True,” says I, serene. “Ain’t life odd?” I adds. “One minute we’re saying, shocked: ‘But that would be a revolution.’ And the next minute we’re harping away on keeping alive the revolutionary spirit. I wonder which of the two we really mean?”
“Well, then, what else?” says he, pacific.
“Then,” I says, “I wish we could have five minutes of silent prayer. And then right off, the sermon—and no hymn after that at all, but let the sermon end with the benediction—a real cry to God to be with us and to live in us. That’s all.”
I had to go out in the kitchen then to empty a bowl of my pitted fruit, and when I come back the minister stood there, smiling.
“Ah, Miss Marsh,” he said, “you’ve forgotten a very important thing. You’ve forgotten the collection.”
“No,” says I. “No, I haven’t. Except on the days when it’s a real offering for some work for God. I’d take a collection then. The rest of the time I’d have the minister’s salary and the fuel and the kerosene paid for by checks, private.”
After he’d gone, I set there going over, miserable, the things I’d said to him about the services that it was his job to do. And though I was miserable enough—I honestly couldn’t be sorry. You know the difference in them two?
I was to engage Lavvy Whitmore to lead our singing for the four Sundays, and I went over to see her the next afternoon. She was cleaning the lamps when I stepped up to the kitchen door,so I went right in and sat down at the end of the table, and helped her with the chimneys. She was a pretty little thing—little, but with black eyes that mentioned her thoughts before ever any of the rest of her agreed to announce ’em. And plenty of thoughts, too, Lavvy had. She wasn’t one of the girls that is turned out by the thousands, that wouldn’t recognize their own minds if they was to meet ’em unbeknownst; but one that her mind was cut out, careful, by a pattern part of her own selecting, and not a pattern just laid on to it, haphazard, by the folks that she lived neighbor to, and went with when she went.
“Lavvy,” I says, “we want to speak for you to sing to our church the four Sundays in September, when we have special services to get everybody to go, so’s everybody’ll see everybody else going, and go too. Can we? Will you?”
“I’ve been spoke for,” says she, “by the White Frame church for the four September Sundays. For the same reason.”
“Go on!” I says. “Do you mean to tell me that they’re going to have a competition revival?”
“Well,” she says, “they’re going to make an extra effort to get folks out for the four Sundays.”
“Copied it off’n us,” I says thoughtful. “Well, I guess the four Sundays can’t be regularly copyrighted by us, can they? But I thought their minister didn’t like revivals?” I says.
“Oh, he don’t—Elbert Kinsman don’t,” says Lavvy. “It’s the rest of ’em wants it. He told me he thought it was a mistake.”
“That young Elbert Kinsman,” I says, “he lovesfolks. I saw it in his face long ago.”
Lavvy went on trimming wicks.
“And then the Red Brick church,” says she, “they’vespoke for me to sing for them for the four Sundays in September too.”
“Land of life,” I says, “they haven’t! What on earth have they done that for?”
“Oh,” says Lavvy, “to get everybody to go, so’s everybody’ll see everybody else going, and——”
“Don’t, Lavvy,” I says. “That makes me feel kind of sick.”
“So it done to me,” she says. “And I’ll tell you the same as I told them: No, I won’t sing those four Sundays. I ain’t going to be here. I don’t know yet where I’m going, but I’ll go off somewheres—where things are better—if I have to go blackberrying in Shepherd’s Grove.”
“My land,” I says, “I’ve a great good notion to get my pail and go along with you.”
We talked about it quite a while that afternoon, Lavvy and me. And though all along I’d been feeling sort of sore and sick over the whole idea—and I might have known that I was, by the chip-shouldered way I had talked to our minister—still, it wasn’t till there by the lamps that I come to a realization of myself, and of some other things just as foolish, and that I faced around and begun to ask myself, plain, what in the world was what.
For it was as true as possible: As soon as it got out around that our church was laying plans for a revival—not an evangelist revival, but a home-made one—it had happened just as might have been expected. The other two churches was afraid we’d get their folks away from them, and they says they’d make an extra effort to get folks out, as well. They fell into the same hope—to “fill up” the churches, and see if we couldn’t get folks started attending regular. Somebody suggested having a month’s union services in each of the three churches, but they voted that three months of this would get monotonous, while the novelty of the other way would “get folks out.”
No sooner had we all settled on that, then weslipped, by the gradualest degrees, into the next step, that was as inevitable as two coming after one. We begun being secret about what we meant to have, not telling what the order of exercises was going to be, or what special music we was getting up. And then come along the next thing, as regular as three coming after two—we begun sort of running one another to see who could get the most folks. At first we sent out printed invitations addressed to likely spots; then we took to calling to houses by committees, and delivering invitations in person. Now and then rival visiting committees would accidentally meet to the same house and each try to out-set the other. And from this, one or two things developed, as things will, that made a little uppishness here and there. For out of certain situations, uppishness does seem to arise, same as cream out of milk, or dust out of furniture.
One afternoon I looked out my window, and I see the three Sunday school superintendents come marching up my brick walk—ain’t it funny how, when men goes out with a proposition for raising pew-rent, or buying a new furnace for the manse, or helping along the town, they always go two or three strong? If you notice, they do.
“Come right in, gentlemen,” I says. “If it’s money, I can’t give you a cent. If it’s work, I’m drove to death as it is. But if it’s advice, I do enjoy myself giving that.”
It was our own superintendent that spoke, as being the least foreign to me, I s’pose,—though it happened that I was better acquainted with both the other two.
“It’s neither, Miss Marsh,” he says, “it’s some ideas we want off’n you. We’ve got,” says he, “a plan.”
Then he unrolled it, assisted by the other two.
“We thought,” he says, “that in all this added interest in church attendance which we are hoping to stimulate, the three churches had ought to pull together a little.”
At that my heart jumped up. It was what I had been longing for, and grieving because it didn’t come true.
“We thought we’d ought to have a little more community effort,” says the White Frame superintendent, clearing his throat. I guess he knew how that word “community” always gets me. I’d rather read that one word than half the whole books on the market.
“Oh, yes,” I says. “Yes! I think so too.”
“We thought we’d ought to make the experience one of particular blessing and fellowship,”says the Red Brick superintendent, fairly beaming.
And me, the simple soul, I beamed back.
“Count on me,” says I, fervent, “to do anything in the world to help on a thing like that!”
“We were sure of it,” said our superintendent, “and that is why we have come to you. Now,” says he, “the idea is this: We thought we’d each take a color—give each church a color, you know.”
“A color?” says I.
“Exactly,” says he. “The White Frames white. The Red Bricks red. And us blue. Then on each of the four Sundays the number present in the three churches will be kept track of and totaled at the end of the month. And, at the end of the month, the church having had the largest attendance for the whole time shall be given a banquet by the other two. What do you say to that?”
What did I say to that? Somehow I got them out of the house, telling them I’d send them word later. When I feel as deep as I did then, I know I can’t do justice, by just thoughts or just words, to what I mean inside. So I let the men go off the best I could. And then I went back into my sitting room, with the August sun pouring in all acrost the air like some kindof glory that we didn’t understand; and I set down in it, and thought. And the thing that come to me was them early days, them first days when the first Christians were trying to plan ways that they could meet, and hoping and longing to be together, and finding caves and wild places where they could gather in safety and talk about their wonderful new knowledge of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and the divine experience of the spirit, here and after. And then I thought of this red, white and blue denominational banquet. Oh, what a travesty it was even on the union that the three colors stand for. And I thought of our talk about “getting people out,” and “filling up the churches,” and I thought of the one hundred and fourteen or more social calls that we require a month from our pastors. And I says to myself:
“Oh, Calliope Marsh, has it come to this—hasit? Is it like this only in Friendship Village? Or is it like this out in the world too? And, either way, what are we going to do about it?”
There was one thing I could do about it. I went to see our minister and his wife, and I told ’em firm that I couldn’t have anything more to do about the extra September services, and that they would have to get somebody else to playthe organ for all four Sundays. They was both grieved—and I hated to hurt them. That’s the worst about being true to something you believe—it so often hurts somebody else. But there wasn’t any other way to do.
“But Miss Marsh,” says our minister, “don’t you see that it is going to be a time of awakening if we all stand by each other and support the meetings?”
“Support the meetings!” I wondered how many times, in those first days, they had to argue that. But I didn’t say anything—I just sat still and ached.
“But Miss Marsh,” said the minister’s wife, “we have so depended on you. And your influence—what about that?”
“I can’t help it,” I says—and couldn’t say no more.
Mis’ Postmaster Sykes was there, andshepiped up:
“But it’s sodignified, Calliope,” she says. “No soliciting, no pledging people to be present, no money-begging for expenses. No anything except giving people to understand that not attending ain’t real respectable.”
It was them words that give me the strength to get up and go home without breaking down. And all the way up Daphne Street I went sayingit over: “No anything except giving people to understand not attending ain’t real respectable. No, not anything only just that.”
Near my own gate I come on young Elbert Kinsman, minister of the White Frame church, going along alone.
“Oh, Mr. Kinsman,” I burst out unbeknownst, “canyou imagine Jesus of Nazareth belonging to a denomination?”
All of a sudden, that young minister reached out and took my hand.
“He loved men,” he said only, “and he was very patient with them.”
And then I went into my dark house, with some other words ringing in my ears: “Lighten mine eyes—lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of the dead.”
But oh, that first September Sabbath morning. It was one of them days that is still all deep Summer, but with just a little light mantel of Autumn—more like a lace boa than a mantel, though—thrown round over things. It was Summer by the leaves, by the air it was Summer, by the gay gardens and the face of the sky; and yet somewhere, hiding inside, was a little hint of yellow, a look of brown, a smell in the wind maybe—that let you know it was somethingelse besides. It wasn’t that the time was any less Summer. It was just that it was Summer and a little Autumn too. But I always say that you can’t think Autumn without thinking Winter; and you can’t think Winter without thinking Spring; and Spring and Summer are not really two, but just one. And so there you have the whole year made one and nothing divided.... What if God were intelligence and spirit harmonized and made one? What if all that is the matter with us is just that we intelligences and spirits have not yet been harmonized and made one?
I’ve got a little old piano that the keys rattle, and Sunday mornings, for years now, I always go to that after breakfast, and sit down in my apron, and play some anthems that I remember: “As Pants the Hart,” and “Glory Be to God in the Highest,” and like that. I did it that first Autumn Sunday morning, with my windows open and the muslin curtains blowing and the sun slanting in, and a little smell of wild mint from the bed by the gate. And I knew all over me that it was Sunday morning—I’d have known it no matter if I hadn’t known.
For all I took as long as I could doing my dishes and brushing up the floor and making my bed and feeding my chickens, it was only halfpast nine when I was all through. Then I got my vegetables ready for dinner, and made me a little dessert, and still it was not quite ten o’clock. So then I give it up and went in, and sat down where I could see them go past to church. I had wanted to keep busy till after half past ten, when they’d all be in their pews.
Already they were going by, folks from up the street and round the corner: some that didn’t usually go and that I couldn’t tell which of the churches they’d be going to, and I wondered how they could tell themselves; and then some that sat near me in church, and that I usually walked along with.
“No,” I thought, “no such nonsense as this for me. Ever. Nor no red, white and blue banquet, either.”
Then, all of a sudden, the first bells began to ring. All the little churches in the village have bells and steeples—they were in debt for them for years. But the bells ... all my life long I’d been hearing them rung Sunday morning. All my life I had answered to them—to our special one because, as I said, my father had been janitor there, and he had rung the bell; but just the same, I had answered, always. The bells had meant something to me. They meant something now. I loved to hear them.Pretty soon they stopped, and there was just the tramp of feet on the board walk. I sat there where I was, without moving, the quarter of an hour until the bells began again. And when the bells began again it seemed as if they rang right there in the room with me, but soft and distant too,—from a long way off where I wasn’t any more. Always it had been then, at the second bell, that mother had stood in the hall and asked me if I was ready.... I sat there where I was, the quarter of an hour until the bells began again, and I knew this was the last bell, that would end in the five strokes—rung slow, and that when they stopped, all the organs would begin together. And then I could have cried aloud the thing that had been going in me and through me since the first bell had begun to ring:
“Oh, God. It’s the invisible church of the living God—it’s the place that has grown out of the relation of men to you, out of the striving of men to find you, and out of their longing to draw together in search of you. It is our invisible church from the old time. Why then—when men read things into the visible church that never belonged there, when there has crept into and clung there much that is false, why is it that we who know this must be theones to withdraw? It is your church and the church of all those who try to know you. What shall we do to make it whole?”
Before I knew what I was doing, I was slipping my long cloak on over my work-dress, and then I was out on the street. And I remember that as I went, the thing that kept pouring through my mind was that I wasn’t the only one. But that all over, in other towns at that very hour, there were those whose hearts were aching as mine had ached, and who had nowhere to go. I don’t know yet what I meant to do; but over and over in my head the words kept going:
“What shall wedoto make it whole?”
The last bell had stopped when I came to the little grassy triangle where the three churches faced. And usually, on Sunday mornings, by the time the last bell has rung, the triangle is still except for a few hurrying late-comers. But now, when I turned the corner and faced it, I saw people everywhere. Before each little church the steps, the side-walk, and out in the street, were thronged with people, and people were flowing out into the open spaces. And in a minute I sensed it: There wasn’t room. There wasn’t room—for there were fifteen hundred people living in Friendship Village, and all the little churches of the town togetherwouldn’t hold that many, nor even as many of them as were assembled there that day. But instead of thinking what to do, and how not to waste the time when so many had got together, all that kept going through my head was those same words that I had been saying:
“What shall wedoto make it whole?”
And yet those words were what made me think what to do. On the steps of our church I saw our superintendent, looking wild and worried, and I ran right up to him, and I said two words. And in a minute those two words went round, and they spoke them in the crowd, and they announced them inside our church, and somebody went with those words to the other churches. And then we were all moving out and along together to where the two words pointed us: Shepherd’s Grove.
There’s a rough old bandstand in Shepherd’s Grove where once, long ago, the German band used to give evening concerts. The bandstand had nearly fallen to pieces, but it was large enough. The three ministers went up there together, and round the base of the bandstand came gathering the three choirs, and in a minute or two there we all were under the trees of the Grove, the common trees, that made a home for us all, on the common earth, under the common sky.
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow” came first, because it said the thing that was in the hearts of us all. And then we wondered what would be, because of the three separate sermons up there before us, all prepared, careful, by three separate ministers, in three separate manses, for three separate congregations. But the thing seemed to settle itself. For it was young Elbert Kinsman who rose, and he didn’t have any prepared sermon in his hands. His hands were empty when he stretched them out toward us. And he said:
“My friends and fellow-lovers of God, and seekers for his law in our common life, this is for me an end and a beginning. As I live, it is for me the end of the thing that long has irked me, that irks us all, that we are clinging to nobody can tell why, or of whose will. I mean the division of unreason in the household of love. For me the folly and the waste and the loss of efficiency of denominationalism have forever ceased. In this hour begins for me a new day: The day when I stand with all men who strive to know God, and call myself by no name save the name which we all bear: Children of the Father, and brothers to Man.”
I don’t know what else he said—I heard, but I heard it in something that wasn’t words,but that was nearer, and closer up to, and clearer in my ears than any words. And I knew that what he was saying had been sounding in my heart for long; and that I had heard it trying to speak from the hearts of others; and that it wasn’t only in Friendship Village, but it was all over the world that people are ready and waiting for the coming of the way that had been shown to us that day. Who knows how it will come at last,—or what form it will take? But we do know that the breaking down of the meaningless barriers must come first.
When the young minister had finished, we stood for a moment in silent prayer. You cannotstand still in the woods and empty out your own will, without prayer being there instead, quiet, like love.
Then all together, and as if a good many of us had thought of it first, we began to sing:
“There’s a wideness in God’s lovingLike the wideness of the sea....”
“There’s a wideness in God’s lovingLike the wideness of the sea....”
“There’s a wideness in God’s lovingLike the wideness of the sea....”
No sooner had we begun than deep in the wood, clear and sweet above the other singing, there came a voice that we all knew. It was Lavvy—I stood where I could see her coming. She was in a cotton dress, and she had done as she had said—gone into the wood—“where better things are.” And there we had come to find them too. She came down the green aisles, singing; and we were all singing—I wish I might have been where I could hear that singing mount. But I was, and we all were, where we could look into one another’s hearts and read there the common longing to draw near unto God. And the great common God was in our midst.
Theday that they denominated Threat Hubbelthwait for mayor of Friendship Village was band-concert night. It’s real back-aching work to go to our band concerts, because we ain’t no seats—nothing but a bandstand in the middle of the market square; but yet we all of us do go, because it’s something to do. And you die—youdiefor some place to go to see folks and to move around among them, elbow near.
I was resting on the bottom step of the bandstand between tunes, when Mis’ Timothy Toplady come by.
“Hold up your head,” says she. “You’re going to be mayored over in a minute by a man that ain’t been drunk for six months. I dunno but they used that in the campaign. This town ain’t got a politic to its name.”
“Do they know yet,” I ask’ her, “who’s going to run against him?”
“I heard ’Lish Warren,” says Mis’ Toplady. “They want Eppleby to run interdependent, but he won’t leave himself down to run againstThreat and ’Lish, I don’t believe. I wish’t,” Mis’ Toplady says, “I was men.”
But all of a sudden she sort of straightened up there to the foot of the bandstand.
“No, I don’t,” she says. “I wish’t I was a human being. A human being like the Lord meant me to be, with a finger in His big pie as well as in Timothy Toplady’s everlasting apple-pie. I wish’t—oh, I wish’t I was a real human being, with my brains in my head instead of baked into pies and stitched into clothes and used to clean up floors with.”
I’ve often wished that, too, and every woman had ought to. But Mis’ Toplady had ought to wish it special. She’s big and strong of limb, and she can lift and carry and put through, capable and swift. She’s like a woman left from some time of the world when women was some human-beinger than they are now, and she’s like looking ahead a thousand years.
“But justhalfa human,” she says now, dreamy, “would know that election day ought to be differn’t from the run o’ days. Some men votes,” she says, “like they used the same muscles for votin’ that they use for bettin’ and buyin’ and sellin’. I wonder if they do.”
When the band started to play, we moved over towards the sidewalk. And there we comeon Timothy Toplady and Silas and Mis’ Sykes and Eppleby Holcomb and Mame, and two-three more. We stood there together, listening to the nice, fast tune. They must have been above six-seven hundred folks around the square, all standing quiet in the rings of the arc lights or in the swinging shadows, listening too.
The market square is a wonderful, big open place to have in the middle of a town. It had got set aside years ago to be a park some day, and while it was a-waiting for parkhood, the town used the edge of it for a market and wood-yard. It stretched away ’most to the track and the Pump pasture, and on three sides of it Friendship Village lay—that night with stores shut up and most of the houses shut up while folks took their ease—though itwasa back-aching ease—hearing the nice, fast, late tunes.
Right while we was keeping still, up slouched Threat Hubbelthwait, the new mayor nominee.
“Evenin’,” says he, with no reverence for the tune. “Ain’t this here my dance?”
“I heard you was up to lead us one,” says Mis’ Toplady, dry.
Threat took it for congratulations. “Thank you kindly,” says he, easy. “It’s a great trust you folks are talkin’ of placin’ in me.”
“Oh, ’most everybody in town has been trustin’you for years, ain’t they, Threat?” says Mis’ Toplady, sweet.
That scairt Timothy, her lawful lord, and he talked fast to cover up, but Threat pretended not to hear anyway, and pretty soon he slouched on. And when the piece was over, and the clapping:
“Mercy,” says Mame Holcomb, “the disgrace it’ll be to have that man for mayor! How’d he get himself picked out?”
Silas Sykes explained it. “Threat Hubbelthwait,” says he, “is the only man in this town that can keep the party in at this election. If Threat don’t run, the party’s out.”
“Why not leave the partygoout, then?” says Mis’ Toplady, innocent.
“Listen at that!” says Silas. “Leave the party go out! What do we belong to the party for if we’re willing to leave it go out?”
“What,” says Mis’ Toplady, troubled, “do you belong to it for if you’re willing to leave it stay in along with a bad man?”
“We stand by the party to keep the party from being disrupted, woman,” says Silas.
Mis’ Toplady looks at him, puzzled.
“Well,” she says, “Ihavemade an apple-pie to keep the apples from spoiling, but yet that wasn’t the real, true purpose of the pie.”
Eppleby Holcomb kind of chuckled, and justthen we all got jostled for a minute with a lot passing us. Lem Toplady come by, his girl on his arm, and a nice, sheepish grin for his mother. Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and Hugh Merriman and Mis’ Uppers’s boy and two-three more of that crowd, with boys’ eyes in brown faces, and nice, manly ways to their shoulders. Everybody was walking round between tunes. And everywhere, in and out, under foot, went the children, eight, ten, twelve years apiece to ’em, and couldn’t be left home because they wasn’t anybody to leave ’em with. And there they was, waiting to be Friendship Village when the rest of us should get out of the market square for good; and there was Friendship Village, over beyond the arc light, waiting to be their town.
“Eppleby,” I says, “why don’t you run against Threat, and mayor this town like it ought to be?”
“Because,” Silas spoke up for him, “Eppleby belongs to the party.”
“Youdo?” says I to Eppleby. “Well, if Threat, that would like to see the world run backwards, and you, that’s a-pushing some on the west side like the Lord meant—if you two belongs to the same party, I bet the party’s about ready to come in two pieces anyhow. Why don’t you leave it go, and get denominated on your own hook, Eppleby?” I ask’ him.
“I’m going to if ’Lish gets put up,” he says low, to me. But out loud he says, careless: “I couldn’t beat the saloon folks. They’re solid for Threat.”
“But ain’t we more folks to this town than them?” Mame asks.
“Yes,” says Eppleby, “but they don’t vote. Half the best men won’t touch the city hall with a clothes prop. The business men can’t vote much—they’ve got too mixed a trade, both sides eatin’ groceries and wearin’ clothes. And election time comes when them out towards the city limits is doing Spring plowin’ and won’t bother to come in town. (We’d took in most of the surrounding country in our efforts to beat out Red Barns in population.) And theEvening Dailywas give to understand six months ago that the brewery ad. would come out if Threat wa’n’t their ticket. Anybody that runs against him is beat before the polls open.”
“Among ’em all, what about the town?” says I.
Mis’ Sykes spoke up, majestic. “The town,” says she, “is as good as any town. I’m sure we’ve got as many nice residences and well-kep’ yards, and as many modern improvements as most towns our size.Mypart, I’m too patriotic to be all the time askin’ for more.”
“I wonder, Mis’ Sykes,” I couldn’t help saying, “you ain’t too religious ever to pray about yourself.”
The band always plays “America” to go home on, not so much out of patriotism, I guess, as to let folks know it’s time to go home. And just as they was tuning up, Mis’ Toplady leaned over to me, brooding.
“I wouldn’t care so much,” she says, “if it wasn’t Lem’s first vote. Lem was twenty-one in the spring, and it’s his first vote. I just can’t bear to think of his voting for Threat or ’Lish, to cut his voting teeth on.”
“I know,” I says. “So it is Hugh Merriman’s first vote—and Mis’ Uppers’s boy and Jimmy Sturgis’s, Jr. Don’t it seem too bad?”
Mis’ Toplady looked at the men. “Couldn’t you do something to your election day that you own so personal?” she snaps. “Couldn’t you make it a day that is a day? A day that would make folks want to vote decent, and be some kitterin’-minded about votin’ bad?”
“Like what?” says Timothy, blank.
“Oh—I dunno,” says Mis’ Toplady, restless. “Somethin’ that’ll roust folks up and give ’em to see their town like a wagon to be pulled and not one to be rode in. Exercises, mebbe——”
“Exercises!” says Silas Sykes, explosive.“You’ll be wantin’ the stores closed election day, next thing.”
“I mean that now,” says Mis’ Toplady. “Exercises,” she went on, “that’ll show ’em what’s being done for ’em in the world—and the universe—and I dunno but other places. Exercises that’ll make ’em think ahead and out, and up and in the air instead of just down into their pocketbooks. I dunno. Exercises that’ll make ’em see the state like a state,theirstate——”
“My dum, woman,” says Silas, “election day ain’t no Fourth of July proceedings.”
“Ain’t it?” says Mis’ Toplady. “That’s what I dunno. It kind of seems to me as if it was.”
Then the band jabbed into “America” abundant, and the men took off their hats, patriotic as pictures. And I stood there, kind of looking at us all while we listened. I see all them hundreds of us out of the stores and houses of Friendship Village that was laying over behind us there in the dark, waiting for us to keep on a-making it; and I see Lem Toplady and the rest of ’em going to do their first move public towards the making. And while the band was playing and everybody humming their country’s air, negligent in their throats, I started to slip off—Icouldn’t help it—and to go home by the back street, like I didn’t want to meet the village face to face.
But I hadn’t got very far when the band done a thing it’s been doing lately—ever since the new leader come that’s some kind of a foreigner up to the round-house. It run off into some kind of a French piece with a wonderful tang to it. The children have been singing it in school, with some different words to it, and when the band begun it now, they all kind of hummed it, all over the square. The Marseilles, I think they call it—like a kind of cloth. When I hear it, it always makes me want to go and start something. It done that now. And I says to myself:
“What you slinkin’ off home for, actin’ like the ‘best’ people that can’t look their town in the face at election time? Go on down Daphne Street like a citizen, that you are one.”
And I did, and walked along the little watching streets with all the rest of us, and that march music in my heels. And listening to it, and seeing us all streaming to our homes, I could ’most have felt like we was real folks living in a real town, like towns was meant to be.
But I lost the feeling two days after, when ’Lish got the other denomination, and begun swaggering around similar to Threat, peddlingpromises. When ’Lish done that, though, Eppleby done like he said and come out to run interdependent; only he done it real halfhearted, and them that signed his petition was mostly out of business or retired or working for the Government or ministers or like that, and everybody thought they was about the only ones that would be to the polls for him. Because the rest was already engaged in uttering the same old fear that voting for Eppleby now would be throwing their vote away. And they allowed that Threat was a little better than ’Lish, or that ’Lish was a little nobler than Threat, and they laid to vote according.
“If only the town could get rousted up somehow,” Mis’ Toplady kep’ saying, grieving. “It seems as if, if there was something to roust folks, they’d do something. And if they’d only do something, they’d get rousted. It’s like a snake with its tail in its mouth. It seems as if, if we could have some doin’s on election day—oh, I wish’t we was a real human being,” she says, again and again, “I wish’t we was. I bet we’d wind this town up, and we wouldn’t set it by Threat’s watch nor by ’Lish’s, either. We’d set it by the sun.”
But we see we couldn’t take no part. And the town settled down on its oars restful, waitingfor election day that looked like it wasn’t going to do nothing but shake up the town feather-bed and lay it back on springs that sagged in the same old place.
Three days before election it happened I was up early to mix my bread. The clock showed half-past six just as I got through with my breakfast, and the sun come in so nice and slanting acrost my kitchen floor that I stepped to the open door to get the smell of it. All outside lay sweet and surprised, like the first notes of something being played. Before I knew it, I went out and down the path, between the things that hadn’t come up yet—ain’t it like all outdoors was friendly and elbow near, the way it keeps pulling at you to be out there with it? Before I knew it I was out my back gate and acrost the vacant lot and off down the old trail road, my hands wrapped up in my apron and me being just selfish glad I was alive.
With outdoors all around you, just waiting to be paid attention to; with friends set here and there in the world, near like planets, high and single like stars, or grouped like constellations; and with a spirit inside us—the same spirit—trying to say something—and trying to say the same thing—ain’t life rich? Ain’t it rich?
Sometimes I try to think what could make it richer. And I can never get any farther than the growing of those three foundation things: Outdoors and friends and the spirit. For life will be richer when the outdoors gets done—the floods tamed, the roads built, the forests tended, the deserts risen from the dead and the cities and towns and villages tamed and built and trained and tended and risen from the dead of dirt and ugliness to be real bodies for the souls stirring and beating in them now—and trying to speak. And life will be richer when friends come true—not just this planet, and that star, and these constellations,—but when the whole great company of friends, in homes, in churches, in mines, in prisons, in factories, in brothels, shall be known to us, and set free to be real bodies for the souls stirring and beating in them now—and trying to speak. And not till then will that spirit in outdoors and in cities and in us—the same spirit, trying to say the same thing—not till then can that spirit ever get it said.
“Oh,” I thought, “on a morning like this, if somebody could only think of the right word, maybe the whole thing might come true.”
And almost I knew what that word was—like you do.
I remember I wasn’t thinking of anything but wonder, when away acrost the Pump pasture I see a thing. It wasn’t a tent or it wasn’t a wagon or it wasn’t a farm machine of any kind. I looked at it a minute and I couldn’t formulate nothing. And as you could drive through the Pump pasture fence ’most anywheres, I went through and started right over to whatever was there.
’Most anybody can tell you how it looked, for by nine o’clock the whole village was out to it. But I’ll never be able to tell much about the feel of the minute when I see the two great silk wings and the airy wire, and knew I was coming close up to a flying-machine, setting there on the ground, like a god that had stopped on a knoll to tie his shoe.
A man was down on his hands and knees, doing something to an underneath part of it, but I guess at first I hardly see him. The machine was the thing, the machine that could go up in the air, the machine thathad done it at last!
“Good morning,” says the man, all of a sudden. “Am I trespassing?”
He stood there with his cap in his hand, clean-muscled, youngish, easy-acting, and as casual as if he’d just come out of a doorway instead of out of the sky.
I says, “Ain’t it wonderful? Ain’t it wonderful?” Which is just exactly what I’d said about Mis’ Toplady’s crocheted bed-spread. It’s terrible to try to talk with nothing but the dictionary back of you.
“Yes,” he says, “it is. Then I’m not trespassing?”
“No more’n the eagles of the Lord,” I says to him. “Are you broke down?”
“There’s a little something wrong with the balance,” he says. “I’m going to lie over here a day or so, providing the eagle of the Lord figure holds for the town. What place will this be?” he asks.
“Friendship Village,” I says.
“Friendship Village,” he says it after me, and looked off at it. And I stood for a minute looking at it, too.
Beyond the trees north of the pasture it lay, with little lifts of smoke curling up from folks’s cook-stoves. There was a look to it of breakfasts a-getting and stores being opened and the day rousting up. Right while we looked, the big, bass seven o’clock whistle blew over to the round-house, and the little peepy one chimed in up at the brick-yard, and I could hear the town clock in the engine-house striking, kind of old-fashioned and sweet-toned. And allaround the country lay quiet-seeming, down to the flats and out acrost the tracks and clear to the city limits that we couldn’t see, where the life of the little fields was going on. And in that nice, cozy, seven-o’clock minute I see it all as I do sometimes, almost like a person sitting there, with its face turned towards me, expectant, waiting to see what I’m going to do for it.
“Jove,” says the man, “look at it! Look at it. It looks like the family sitting down to breakfast.”
I glanced up at him quick. Not many sees villages that way. The most sees them like cats asleep in the sun. But I always like to think of ’em like a room—a little room in the house, full of its family, real busy getting the room-work done up in time.
“From here,” I says, “it does most look like a real town.”
“More folks live in the little towns of the United States than in the big cities of it,” he said, absent.
“Theydo?” I says.
“By count,” he answers, nodding, and stood a minute looking over at the roofs and the water tower. “You feel that,” he says, “when you see them the way I do. From up high. I keepseeing them skimming under me, little places whose names don’t show. And it always seems that way—like the family at breakfast—or working—or sitting around the arc lamp. You’re splendid—you little towns. What you do is what the world does.”
A kind of shiver took me in the back of my head.
“It looks as if such nice things were going on over there—in Friendship Village,” he says, his voice sort of wrapping about the name.
“Election day is going on,” I says, “day after to-morrow. But it won’t be so very nice.”
“No,” he says, “they aren’t very nice—yet.”
That made me think of something. “Have you been in many cities and dropped down into many towns?” I ask’ him.
“Several,” says he,—sort of rueful.
“On election day?” I says.
“Sometimes,” he answered.
“Well, then,” I says, “maybe you can tell me what they do on election day in cities. Don’t they ever have exercises?”
“Exercises?” he says over, blank.
“Why, yes,” I says, “though I dunno just how I mean that. But don’t they ever openup the city hall and have singing and speeches—not political speeches, but ones about folks and about living? I should think they must do that somewheres—‘most anybody would of thought of that. And have the young folks there, and have them that’s going to vote sort of—well,commenced, like college. Don’t they do that, places?”
When he shook his head I was worried for fear he’d think I was crazy.
“No,” he says, “I never heard of their doing that anywhere—yet.”
But when he says that “yet” I wasn’t worried any more. And I burst right out and told him about our trouble in Friendship Village, and about the “best” people never voting, and the city limits folks not coming in for it, and about our two candidates, and about Eppleby, that hadn’t a ghost of a show.
“Us ladies,” I wound up, “wanted to have a kind of an all-together campaign—with mass meetings of folks to kind of talk over the town, mutual. And we wanted to get up some exercises to make election day a real true day, and to roust folks up to being not so very far from the way things was meant to be. But the men folks said it wasn’t never done so. They give us that reason.”
The bird-man looked at me, and nodded. “I fancy it isn’t,” he says, “—yet.”
But he didn’t say anything else, and I thought he thought I was woman-foolish; so to cover up, I says, hasty:
“Couldyou leave me hear you talk a little about it? I mean about flying. It’s old to you, but it’s after-I-die to me. I never shall do it. So far I’ve never seen it. But oh, I like to hear about it. It seems the freest-feeling thing we’ve ever done.”
“To do,” he says, “it’s coldish. And it’s largely acrobatics—yet. But to see—yes, I fancy it is about the freest-feeling thing we’ve ever done. A thing,” he says my words over, smiling a little, “that makes you think you’re a step nearer to the way things were meant to be.” Then he stood still a minute, looking down at me meditative. “Has there ever been a flying-machine in Friendship Village?” he ask’ me.
“Never,” I says—and my heart stood still at what it thought of.
“And day after to-morrow is your election day?” he says over.
“Yes,” I says—and my head begun to beat like my heart wasn’t.
“The machine will be in shape by then,”he said. “Would—would you care to have me make a flight on election-day morning? Free, you know. It wouldn’t be much; but it might,” he says, with his little smile, “it might pull in a few votes from the edge of town.”
“Oh, my land—oh, my land a-living!” I says—and couldn’t say another word.
But I knew he knew what I meant. It was a dream like I hadn’t ever dreamed of dreaming. It seems it was his own machine—he was on his own hook, a-pleasuring. And it seemed as if he just had come like an eagle of the Lord, same as I said.
We settled where I was to let him know, and then I headed for Mis’ Toplady’s, walking some on the ground and some in the air. For I sensed the thing, whole and clear, so be we could get enough to pitch in. And Mis’ Toplady left her breakfast dishes setting, like I had mine, and away we went. And I see Mis’ Toplady’s ideas was occupying her whole face.
We went straight to the mothers—Mis’ Uppers and Mis’ Merriman and Mis’ Sturgis and the others that had sons that was going to vote, this year or in ten years or in twenty years. I dunno whether it was the mother in them, or just the straight human being in them—but they see, the most of’em, what it was we meant. Of course some of them just see the lark, and some of them just didn’t want to refuse us, and some of them just joined in because they’re the joining-in kind. But oh, some of them see what we see—and it was something shining and real and far off, and it made us willing to go ahead like wild, and I dunno but like mad. Ain’t it wonderful how when a plan is born into the world, it grows on air? On air—and a little pitching in to work?
All but Mis’ Silas Sykes. When we went to see her, Mis’ Sykes was like that much adamant.
“Pshaw,” says Mis’ Sykes, “you ladies don’t understand politics. In politics you can’t fly up this way and imagine out vain things. You got to do ’em like they’ve been done. As I understand it, they’s two parties. One is for the good of the country and one ain’t. And anything you dicker up outside them two gets the public all upset and steps on the Constitution. And Silas says you’ve got to handle the Constitution like so many eggs, or else where does the United States come in?”
“It don’t seem to me that all makes real good sense,” says Mis’ Toplady, troubled.
“No,” says Mis’ Sykes, serene, “the peopleas a whole never do see sense. It’s always a few that has to do the seeing.”
“I know,” says Mis’ Toplady, “I know. But what I think is this:Which few?”
“Why, them that best supports the party measures,” says Mis’ Sykes, superior.
But Mis’ Toplady, she shook her head.
“It don’t follow out,” she says, firm. “Legs ain’t the only things they is to a chair.”
Nor, as us ladies saw it, the polls ain’t all there is to election day. And we done what we could, steadfast and quick and together, up to the very night before the day that was the day.
On election-day morning, I woke up before daylight and tried to tell if the sun was going to shine. The sky wasn’t up there yet—nothing was but the airful of dark. But acrost the street I see a light in a kitchen—it was at the station agent’s that had come home to the hot breakfast his wife had been up getting for him. One of ’em come out to the well for a bucket of water, and the pulleys squeaked, and somebody’s dog woke up and barked. Back on the trail road somebody’s baby was crying. Down acrost the draw the way-freight whistled and come rumbling in. And there was Friendship Village, laying still, being a town in the dark withnobody looking, just like it was being one all day long, with people looking on but never sensing what they saw.
It seemed, though, as if they must get it through their heads that day that the town was being a town right before their face and eyes—having a kind of a performance to do, like digestion, or thinking, or working; and having something anxious and fluttered inside of it, waiting to know what was going to become of it. I could almost sense this at six o’clock, when Mis’ Toplady and I hurried down to the market square. Yes, sir, six o’clock in the morning it was. We had engineered it that the flight of the flying-machine should be at seven o’clock, so’s everybody could have a chance to see it on their way to work, and so’s they should be at the market-square doings before they went to the polls.
The sunwasshining like mad, and the place looked all expectant and with that ready-to-nod look that anything got ready beforehand will always put on. Only this seemed sort of a special nod. We’d had a few board seats put up, and a platform that ’most everybody had the idea the airship was going up from. The machine itself was over in the corner of the square near the wood-yard under a wagon-shedthey’d made over for it. And to a stand near the platform the Friendship Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement Sodality had advertised to serve hot coffee and hot griddle-cakes and sausages. And we begun on the coffee and the sausages long enough ahead so’s by the time folks was in the high midst of arriving, the place smelled like a kitchen with savory things a-doing on the cook-stove.
And I tell you, folks done some arriving. Us ladies had seen to it to have the flight advertised big them two nights. The paper done it willing enough, being the bird-man was so generous and all. Then everybody’s little boy had been posted off as far as the city limits with hand-bills and posters, advertising the flight, and the breakfast on election day. And it seemed to me that outside the place we’d roped off, and in wagons in the streets, was ’most everybody in Friendship Village that I ever knew or saw. The folks from the little city-limit farms, the folks that ordinarily didn’t have time to vote nor to take a holiday, even folks from the country and from other towns, “best” people and all—they was all there to see the sky-wagon.
The bird-man had to dicker away quite a little at his machine. A man had run out fromthe city to help him, and out there with them was Lem Toplady and Jimmy Sturgis and Hugh Merriman, and two-three more of those boys, that had got acquainted with the bird-man. And while they was getting ready, the band was playing gay over in the bandstand, and we was serving breakfasts as fast as we could hand them out. Mis’ Sturgis was doing the coffee, I was sizzling sausages that the smell floated up and down Daphne Street delicious, and Mis’ Toplady was frying the pancakes because she’s had such a big family to fry for she’s lightning in the right wrist.
Everybody was talking and laughing and waiting their turn, and acting as if they liked it. Them that was up around the breakfast stand didn’t seem to be saying much about politics. Us ladies mentioned to one another that Threat nor ’Lish didn’t seem to be anywhere around. But we was mostly all thinking just about the flying-machine, and how nice it was to be having it, and about the socialness of it all—like the family was having breakfast....
Just as the big, bass seven-o’clock whistle trailed out from the round-house—the brick-yard one didn’t blow because the men was all at the market square—the thing happenedthat we’d arranged for. Down Daphne Street, hurrying some because they was late, with irregular marching and a good deal of laughing, come the public-school teachers with the school children. We’d give out that they’d be easier managed so, and not so much under foot; but what we really wanted was that they should come in just like this, together, and set together, because we wanted something of them after a while.
They sat down on the place we’d left for ’em, on the seats and the grass in front of everybody, and them that could sing we put on the platform, lots of rows deep, so’s they all covered it. They was big boys and little, and little girls and big, good-dressed and poor-dressed; with honest fathers, and with them that didn’t know honest when they see it nor miss it when they didn’t—and all of them was the Friendship Village that’s going to be some time, when the market square is emptied of us others, for good and all.
“Where’s Threat and ’Lish?” I says to Eppleby, that was helping keep the children in order.
“Dustin’ the mayor’s office out ready, I s’pose,” he says, wrinkling his eyes at the corners.
“Mebbe they’ve abducted each other,” Mis’ Toplady suggests, soothing.
Mis’ Sykes looked over from filling the syrup pitchers—she’d boiled the brown sugar down for that, and it added its thick, golden smell unto the general inviting mixture.
“I don’t think,” she says serious, “that you’d ought to speak disrespectful ofanybody that’s going to be your mayor. Public officials,” said she, “had ought to be paid respect to, or else the law won’t be carried out.”
“Shucks,” says Mis’ Toplady, short. She’d made upwards of ninety griddle cakes by then, and she was getting kind of flustered and crispy.
“Shucks?” says Mis’ Sykes, haughty and questioning, and all but in two syllables.
“If that’s all the law is,” says Mis’ Toplady, beating away at her pancake batter, “give me anar-kicky, or whatever it is they call it.”
Mis’ Sykes never said a word. She just went on making syrup, reproachful. Mis’ Sykes is one of them that acts like life was made up of the pattern of things, and like speaking of warf and woof wasn’t delicate. And she never so much as lets on they is such a thing as a knot. Yes, some folks is like that. But not me—not me.
It was ’most half-past seven o’clock when the bird-man was ready. Like a big bug the machine looked, with spidery, bent legs and wings spread ready and no head necessary. And when he finally run it off down the square and headed towards the Pump pasture, my heart sunk some. My land, I thought, it can’t be a real true one. I guess there are them, but this right here on the market square can’t be one.
Since the world begun, there ain’t a more wonderful minute for folks than the minute when they first see some kind of flying-machine leave the ground—leave the ground! It’s like seeing the future come true right in your face. The thing done it so gentle and so simple that you’d of thought it was invented when legs was. It lifted itself up in the air, like by its own boot-straps, and it went up and up and up, just like going up was its own alphabet. It went and it kept going, its motor buzzing and purring, softer and softer. And pretty soon the blue that it was going up to meet seemed to come down and meet it, and the two sort of joined, and the big, wide gold morning flowed all over them, and the first thing I knew the bird-man’s machine and him in it looked like just what I had said: an eagle of the Lord, soaring to meet the sun like a friend of its.
I couldn’t bear it any more. It seemed to me as if, if I should look any longer, I should all of a sudden have ten senses instead of five, and they’d explode me. I looked away and down. And when I done that, all at once there I was looking right into the face of all the folks in Friendship Village. Heads back, a sea of little white dabs that was faces, and hearts beating underneath where you couldn’t see ’em—all of us was standing there breathless, feeling just alike. Feeling just alike and being just alike, underneath that wonderful thing happening in the sky.... And all of a sudden, while I looked at them, the faces all blurred and wiggled, and it seemed like I was looking into only one face, the face of Friendship Village, like a person....
I see it, like I’d never seen it before. While we watched,we was one person. When we was all thinking about the same thing, there was only one of us. And the more wonderful things that come into the world and took hold of everybody, the moreonewe was going to get and to stay. And this, all vague inside of us, I knew now was what us ladies had meant by what we’d planned. Didn’t it seem—didn’t it seem as if them that watched had ought to stayone—that decent, wondering, almost reverent one,long enough to vote decent and wondering and reverent for their town?
Right while my heart was beating with it all, the little buzzing and purring of the motor, away up there in the blue, stopped short off. My eyes flew up again, and I see the bird-man coming down. He was up so high that he was a dot, and he grew and grew like a thing being born in the sky—right down towards us and on us he come like a shot, a shot-down shot. Nobody breathed. I couldn’t see. But I looked and looked and dreaded.... And not eight hundred feet from the ground he begun coming down easy, and he come the rest of the way as gentle as a bird, and lit where he rose from.
Oh, how they cheered him—like one man!Like one man.Lem Toplady and Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and the boys that was out in the field went and shook his hand—like the servants, I thought in the middle of my head, of some great new order. And I was thinking so deep and so breathless that I ’most forgot the band till it crashed right out behind us, playing loud and fine that Marseilles French piece, like we’d told them. And when it done that, up hopped the children that it give the cue to, and there in the midst of us they struck in, singing loudand clear the words they sung in school to that old tune, with its wonderful tang to it, that slips to your heels with its music and makes you want to go start something and to start itthen: