“O Lord, look down on these eighty families, old and young and real young, that we’ve lived neighbor to all our lives, and yet we don’t know half of ’em, either by name or by face, till now. Till now!“And some of them we do know individual has showed up here to-day with a back-ground of families, wives and children they’ve got, just like anybody—Tippie that drives the dray and that’s helped moved everybody; for twelve years he’s moved my refrigerator out and my cook stove in, and vicious verses, as regular as Spring come and Autumn arrived; and there all the time he had a wife, with a cameo pin, and three little Tippies in plaid skirts and pink cheeks, asking everybody for a drink of water just like your own child, and one of ’em so nice that he might of been anybody’s instead of just Tippie’s.“And Mamie Felt, that does up lace curtains of them that can afford to have ’em done up and dries ’em on a frame so’s they hang straight and not like a waterfall with its expression blowing sideways, same as mine do—there’s Mamie with her old mother and a cripple brother that we’ve never guessed about, and that she was doing for all the whole time.“And Absalom Ricker’s old mother, that’s mourning bitter because she left her coral pin with a dog on behind on the Flats that herhusband give it to her when they was engaged ... and we knew she was married, but not one of us had thought of her as human enough ever to have been engaged. And Mis’ Haskitt with her new black dress, and Mis’ Dole with her clean-ironed clothes bars, and Mis’ Bitty Marshall with her baby and her little chickens and her lace curtain, and Bitty with his grocery store.“Lord, we thank thee for letting us see them, and all the rest of ’em,close up to.“We’re glad that now just because the Mad river flowed into the homes that we ain’t often been in or ever, if any, and drove up to us the folks that we’ve never thought so very much about, we’re glad to get the feeling that I had when I heard our grocery-boy knew how to hand-carve wood and our mail man was announced to sing a bass solo, that we never thought they had any regular lives, separate from milk and mail.“And let us keep that feeling, O Lord! Amen.”
“O Lord, look down on these eighty families, old and young and real young, that we’ve lived neighbor to all our lives, and yet we don’t know half of ’em, either by name or by face, till now. Till now!
“And some of them we do know individual has showed up here to-day with a back-ground of families, wives and children they’ve got, just like anybody—Tippie that drives the dray and that’s helped moved everybody; for twelve years he’s moved my refrigerator out and my cook stove in, and vicious verses, as regular as Spring come and Autumn arrived; and there all the time he had a wife, with a cameo pin, and three little Tippies in plaid skirts and pink cheeks, asking everybody for a drink of water just like your own child, and one of ’em so nice that he might of been anybody’s instead of just Tippie’s.
“And Mamie Felt, that does up lace curtains of them that can afford to have ’em done up and dries ’em on a frame so’s they hang straight and not like a waterfall with its expression blowing sideways, same as mine do—there’s Mamie with her old mother and a cripple brother that we’ve never guessed about, and that she was doing for all the whole time.
“And Absalom Ricker’s old mother, that’s mourning bitter because she left her coral pin with a dog on behind on the Flats that herhusband give it to her when they was engaged ... and we knew she was married, but not one of us had thought of her as human enough ever to have been engaged. And Mis’ Haskitt with her new black dress, and Mis’ Dole with her clean-ironed clothes bars, and Mis’ Bitty Marshall with her baby and her little chickens and her lace curtain, and Bitty with his grocery store.
“Lord, we thank thee for letting us see them, and all the rest of ’em,close up to.
“We’re glad that now just because the Mad river flowed into the homes that we ain’t often been in or ever, if any, and drove up to us the folks that we’ve never thought so very much about, we’re glad to get the feeling that I had when I heard our grocery-boy knew how to hand-carve wood and our mail man was announced to sing a bass solo, that we never thought they had any regular lives, separate from milk and mail.
“And let us keep that feeling, O Lord! Amen.”
And I says right out of the fullness of the lump in my throat:
“Don’t these folks seem so much more folks than they ever did before?”
Mis’ Merriman that was near me, answered up:
“Why, of course,” she says, “they’re in trouble. Ain’t you no compassion to you?”
“Some,” says I, modest, “but where’d that compassion come from? It didn’t just grow up now, did it?—like Abraham’s gourd, or whoever it was that had one?”
“Why, no,” she says irritable. “It’s in us all,of course. But it takes trouble to bring it out.”
“Why does it take trouble to bring it out?” I says and I looked ahead at us all a-streaming down Daphne Street, just like it was some nice human doings. “Why does it? Here’s us all, and it only takes a minute to get us all going, with our hands in our pockets and lumps in our throats and our sympathy just as busy as it ever was for our little family in-four-walls affairs. Now,” I says, “that love and sympathy, and them pockets and them throats are all here, just the same, day after day. What I want to know is, what are them things doing with themselves when nobody is in active trouble?”
And then I said my creed:
“O, when we get to working as hard to keep things from happening as we work when it’s happened, won’t living be fun?”
“Well, of course we couldn’t prevent floods,” says Mis’ Merriman, “and them natural things.”
“Shucks!” I says, simple. “If we knew as much about frosts and hurricanes as we do about comets—we’d show you. And do you think it’s any harder to bank in a river than it is to build a subway—ifthere was the same money in it for the company?”
Just then the noon whistles blew—all of ’em together, round-house and brick-yard, so’s you couldn’t tell ’em apart; and the sun come shining down on us all, going along on Daphne Street. And all of a sudden Mis’ Merriman looked over to me and smiled, and so I done to her, and I saw that our morning together and our feeling together had made us forget whatever there’d been between us to forget about. And I ain’t ever in my life felt so kin to folks. I felt kinner than I knew I was.
That night, tired as I was, I walked over to see Mis’ Sykes’s night-blooming cereus—I don’t see enough pretty things to miss one when I can get to it. And there, sitting on Mis’ Sykes’s front porch, with her shoes slipped off to rest her feet, was Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss.
“Mis’ Sykes is out getting in a few pieces she washed out and forgot,” says Mame, “and the Marshalls is all down town in a body sending a postal to say they’re safe. Silas went too.”
“TheMarshalls!” says I. “Are theyhere?”
Mame nodded. “Silas asked ’em,” she says. “Him and Bitty’ve been looking over grocery stock catalogues. Silas’s been advising him some.”
Mame and I smiled in concert. But whether the flood done it, or whether we done it—who cared?
“But, land,you, Mame!” I says. “I thought you—I thought Mis’ Sykes....”
“I know it,” says Mame. “I was. She did. But the first thing I knew to-day, there we was peeling potatoes together in the same pan, and we done it all afternoon. I guess we kind of forgot about our bad feeling....”
I set there, smiling in the dark.... I donno whether you know a village, along toward night, with the sky still pink, and folks watering their front lawns and calling to each other across the streets, and a little smell of bon-fire smoke coming from somewheres? It was like that. And when Mis’ Sykes come to tell us the flower was beginning to bloom, I says to myself that there was lots more in bloom in the world than any of us guessed.
Mis’ Fire Chief Merrimandone her mourning like she done her house work—thorough. She was the kind of a housekeeper that looks on the week as made up of her duties, and the days not needing other names: Washday, Ironday, Mend-day, Bakeday, Freeday, Scrubday, and Sunday—that was how they went. With them nothing interfered without it was a circus or a convention or a company or the extra work on holidays. She kept house all over her, earnest; and when the Fire Chief died, that was the way she mourned.
When I say mourning I mean what you do besides the feeling bad part. She felt awful bad about her husband, but her mourning was somehow kind of separate from her grieving. Her grieving was done with her feelings, but her mourning was done more physical, like a diet. After the first year there was certain things she would and wouldn’t do, count of mourning, and nothing could change them.
Weddings and funerals Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman stayed true to. She would go to either.“Getting connect’ or getting buried,” she said, “them are both religious occasions, and they’s somethin’ so sad about either of ’em that they kind of fit in with weeds.”
But she wouldn’t go to a party if there was more than three or four to it, and not then if one of ’em was a stranger to her. And she wouldn’t go to it unless it was to a house—picnics, where you sat around on the ground, she said, was too informal for them in mourning. Church meetings she went to, but not club meetings, except the Cemetery Improvement Sodality ones. It was like keeping track of etiquette to know what to do with Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman.
“Seems though Aunt Hettie is more married now than she was when Uncle Eben was living,” her niece use’ to say.
It was on the little niece, Harriet Wells,—named for Mis’ Chief and come to live with her a while before the Fire Chief died,—it was on her that Mis’ Merriman’s mourning etiquette fell the heaviest. Harriet was twenty and woman-pretty and beau-interested; and Amos More, that worked in Eppleby’s feed store and didn’t hev no folks, he’d been shining round the Merriman house some, and Harriet had been shining back, modest and low-wicked, but lit.He was spending mebbe a couple of evenings a week there and taking Harriet to sociables and entertainments some. But when the Fire Chief died Mis’ Merriman set her foot down on Amos.
“I couldn’t stand it,” she says, “to hev a man comin’ here that wasn’t the Chief. I couldn’t stand it to hev sparkin’ an’ courtin’ goin’ on all around me. An’ if I should hev to hev a weddin’ got ready for in this house—the dressmakin’ an’ like that—I believe I should scream.”
So Amos he give up going there and just went flocking around by himself, and Harriet, she give all her time to her aunt, looking like a little lonesome candle that nothing answered back to. And Mis’ Merriman’s mourning flourished like a green bay tree.
It was into this state of affairs, more than a year after the Chief died, that Mis’ Merriman’s cousin’s letter come. Mis’ Merriman’s cousin had always been one of them myth folks that every town has—the relations and friends of each other that is talked about and known about and heard from and even asked after, but that none of us ever sees. This cousin, Maria Carpenter, was one of our most intimate myths. Next to the Fire Chief himself, Mis’ Merriman give the most of her time in conversationto her. She was real dressy—she used to send Mis’ Merriman samples of her clothes and their trimmings, and we all felt real well acquainted and interested; and she was rich and busy and from the city, and the kind of a relation it done Mis’ Merriman good to have connected with her, and her photograph with a real lace collar was on the parlor mantel. She had never been to Friendship Village, and we used to wonder why not.
And then she got the word that her cousin was actually flesh-an’-blood coming. I run in to Mis’ Merriman’s on my way home from town just after Harriet had brought her up the letter, and Mis’ Merriman was all of a heap in the big chair.
“Calliope,” she says, “the blow is down! Maria Carpenter is a-comin’ Tuesday to stay till Friday.”
“Well,” I says, “ain’t you glad, Mis’ Fire Chief? Company ain’t no great chore now the telephone is in,” I says to calm her.
She looked up at me, sad, over her glasses.
“What good is it to have her come?” she says. “I can’t show her off. There won’t be a livin’ place I can take her to. Nobody’ll see her nor none of her clothes.”
“It’s too bad,” I says absent, “it didn’t happen so’s you could give a company for Miss Carpenter.”
Mis’ Fire Chief burst out like her feelings overflowed themselves.
“It’s what I’ve always planned,” she says. “Many a night I’ve laid awake an’ thought about the company I’d give when Maria come. An’ Maria never could come. An’ now here is Maria all but upon me, an’ the company can’t be. I know she’ll bring a dress, expectin’ it. She knows it’s past the first year, an’ she’ll think I’ll feel free to entertain. I donno but I ought to telegraph her:Pleased to see you but don’t you expect a company.Wouldn’t that be more open an’ aboveboard? Oh, dear!” Mis’ Fire Chief says, rockin’ in her chair that wouldn’t rock, “I’m well an’ the house is all in order an’ I could afford a company if I didn’t go in deep. But I couldn’t bear to be to it. That’s it, Calliope; I couldn’t bear to be to it.”
I remember Mis’ Fire Chief kind of stopped then, like she thought of something; but I wasn’t looking at her. I was watching Harriet Wells that was standing by the window a little to one side. And I see her lift her hand and give it a little wave and lay it on the glass like a signal to somebody. And all of a sudden I knew it was half past ’leven and that AmosMore went home early to his dinner at the boarding house so’s to get back at twelve-thirty, when Eppleby went for his, and that nine to ten it was Amos that Harriet was waving at. I knew it special and sure when Harriet turned back to the room with a nice little guilty look and a pink spot up high on both her cheeks. And something sort o’ shut up in my throat. It seems so easy for folks to get married in this world, and here was these two not doing it.
All of a sudden Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman jumped up on to her feet.
“Calliope Marsh,” says she, “I’ve got a plan. I can do it, if you’ll help me. Why can’t I give a company,” she says, “an’ not come in the room? A hostess has to be in the kitchen most of the time anyway. Why can’t I just stay there, an’ leave Maria be in the parlor, an’ me not be to the company at all?”
We talked it over, and neither of us see why not. Mis’ Sykes, when she gives her series of companies, three in three days running, she often don’t set foot in the parlor till after the refreshments are served. I remember once she was so faint she had to go back to the kitchen and eat her own supper, and we didn’t say good-by to her at all, except as some of us that knewher best went and stuck our heads out the kitchen door. So with all us ladies—we done the same way when we entertained, so be we give ’em any kind of a lay-out.
“I won’t say anything about the party bein’ for Maria, one way or the other,” she says; “I won’t make a spread about it, nor much of an event. I’ll just send out invites for a quiet time. Then when they come, you can stay in the room with Maria at first an’ get her introduced. An’ after that the party can go ahead on its own legs, just as well without me as with me. I could only fly in now an’ then anyhow, an’ talk to ’em snatchy, with my mind on the supper. Why ain’t it just as good to stay right out of it altogether?”
We see it reasonable. And a couple of days before Maria Carpenter was expected, Mis’ Fire Chief, she went to work, Harriet helping her, and she got her invitations out. They was on some black bordered paper and envelopes that Mis’ Fire Chief had had for a mourning Christmas present an’ had been saving. And they was worded real delicate, like Mis’ Fire Chief done everything:
Mrs. Merriman, At Home, Thursday afternoon, Four o’clock Sharp, Thimbles. Six o’clock Supper. Walk right in past the bell.
Mrs. Merriman, At Home, Thursday afternoon, Four o’clock Sharp, Thimbles. Six o’clock Supper. Walk right in past the bell.
It made quite a little stir in Friendship Village, because Mis’ Merriman hadn’t been anywheres yet. But everybody took it all right. And anyway, everybody was too busy getting ready, to bother much over anything else. It’s quite a problem to know what to wear to a winter company in Friendship Village. Nobody entertains much of any in the winter—its a chore to get the parlor cleaned and het, and it’s cold for ’em to lay off their things, and you can’t think up much that’s tasty for refreshments, being it’s too cold to give ’em ice cream. Mis’ Fire Chief was giving the party on the afternoon of Miss Carpenter’s three o’clock arrival, in the frank an’ public hope that somebody would dance around during her stay and give her a return invite out to tea or somewheres.
The morning of the day that was the day, there come a rap to my door while I was stirring up my breakfast, and there was Harriet Wells, bare-headed and a shawl around her, and looking summer-sweet in her little pink muslin dressing sacque that matched her cheeks and showed off her blue eyes.
“Aunt Hettie wants to know,” she says, “whether you can’t come over now so’s to get an early start. She’s afraid the train’ll get in before we’re ready for it.”
“Land!” I says, “I know how she feels. The last company I give I got up and swep’ by lamplight and had my cake all in the oven by 6A.M.Come in while I eat my breakfast and I’ll run right back with you and leave my dishes setting. How’s your aunt standing it?” I ask’ her.
“Oh, pretty well, thank you,” says Hettie, “but she’s awful nervous. She hasn’t et for two days—not since the invitations went out o’ the house—an’ last night she dreamt about the Chief. That always upsets her an’ makes her cross all next day.”
“If she wasn’t your aunt,” I says, “I’d say, ‘Deliver me from loving the dead so strong that I’m ugly to the living.’ But sheisyour aunt and a good woman—so I’m mum as you please.”
Hettie, she sighs some. “Sheisa good woman,” she says, wistful; “but, oh, Mis’ Marsh, they’s some good women that it’s terrible hard to live with,” she says—an’ then she choked up a little because shehadsaid it. But I, and all Friendship Village, knew it for the truth. And we all wanted to be delivered from people that’s so crazy to be moral and proper themselves, in life or in mourning, that they walk over everybody else’s rights and stomp down everybody’s feelin’s. My eyesfilled up when I looked at that poor, lonesome little thing, sacrificed like she was to Mis’ Fire Chief’s mourning spree.
“Hettie,” I says, “Amos More goes by here every morning about now on his way to his work. When he goes by this morning, want to know what I’m going to tell him?”
“Yes’m,” says Hettie, simple, blushing up like a pink lamp shade when you’ve lit the lamp.
“I’m a-goin’ to tell him,” says I, “that I’m going to ask Eppleby Holcomb to let him off for a couple of ours or so this morning, an’ a couple more this afternoon. I want he should come over to Mis’ Fire Chief’s an’ chop ice an help turn freezer.” (We was going to feed ’em ice cream even if it was winter.) “I’m getting too old for such fancy jobs myself, and you ain’t near strong enough, and Mis’ Chief, I know how she’ll be. She won’t reco’nize her own name by nine o’clock.”
While I was finding out what cocoanut and raisins and such they’d got in stock, along come Amos More, hands hanging loose like he’d lost his grip on something. I called to him, and pretended not to notice Harriet’s little look into the clock-door looking-glass, and when he come in I ’most forgot what I’d meant to say to him, it was so nice to see them two together.I never see two more in love with every look of each other’s.
“Why, Harriet!” says Amos, as if saying her name was his one way of breathing.
“Good mornin’, Amos,” Harriet says, rose-pink and looking at the back of her hand.
Amos just give me a little nice smile, and then he didn’t seem to know I was in the room. He went straight up to her and caught a-hold of the fringe of her shawl.
“Harriet,” he says, “how long have I got to go on livin’ on the sight of you through that dinin’-room window? Yes, livin’. It’s the only time I’m alive all day long—just when I see you there, signalin’ me—an’ when I know you ain’t forgot. But I can’t go on this way—I can’t, I can’t.”
“What can I do—what can I do, Amos?” she says, faint.
“Do? Chuck everything for me—if you love me enough,” says Amos, neat as a recipe.
“I owe Aunt Hettie too much,” says Hettie, firm; “I ain’t that kind—to turn on her ungrateful.”
“I know it. I love you for that too,” says Amos, “I love you on account of everything you do. And I tell you I can’t live like this much longer.”
“Well said!” I broke in, brisk; “I can help you over this day anyhow. You go on down-town, Amos, and get the stuff on this list I’ve made out, and then you come on up to Mis’ Fire Chief’s. We need a man and we need you. I’ll fix it with Eppleby.”
They wasn’t any need to explain to Mis’ Fire Chief. She was so excited she didn’t know whether she was a-foot or a-horseback. When Amos got back with the things I’d sent for she didn’t seem half to sense it was him I was sending out in the woodshed to chop ice. She didn’t hev her collar on nor her shoes buttoned, and she wasn’t no more use in that kitchen than a dictionary.
“Oh, Calliope,” she says, in a sort of wail, “I’m so nervous!”
“You go and set down, Mis’ Fire Chief,” says I, “and button up your shoes. I’ve got every move of the morning planned out,” says I, “so be you don’t interrupt me.”
Of course it was her party and all, but they’s some hostesses you hev to lay a firm holt of, if you’re the helper and expect the party to come off at all. And I never see any living hostess more upset than was Mis’ Fire Chief. She give all the symptoms—not of a company, but of coming down with something.
“Oh, Calliope,” says she, “everything’s against me. I donno,” she says, “but it’s a sign from the Chief in his grave that I’m actin’ against his wishes an’ opposite to what widows should. The wood is green—hear it siss an’ sizzle in that stove an’ hold back its heat from me. The cistern is dry—we’ve hed to pump water to the neighbors. Not a hen has cackled this livelong mornin’ in the coop. The milkman couldn’t only leave me three quarts instead of four, though ordered ahead. An’ I feel like death—I feel like death,” says she, “part on account of the Chief—ain’t it like he was speakin’ his disapprovin’ in all these little minor ways?—an’ part because I know I’m comin’ down with a hard cold an’ I’d ought to be in bed all lard an’ pepper this livin’ minute. Oh, dear me! An’ Maria all but upon me. I don’t know how I’ll ever get through this day.”
“Mis’ Fire Chief,” says I, “you go and lay down and try to get some rest.”
“No, Calliope,” says she, “the beds is all ready for the company to lay their hats off, an’ the lounge pillows has been beat light on the line.”
“Well,” says I, “go off an’ take a walk.”
“Not without I walk to the cemetery,” says she, “an’ that I couldn’t bear. Not to-day.”
“Well,” says I, “then you let me put a wet cloth over your head and eyes, and you set still and stop talkin’. You’ll be wore to a thread,” says I.
And that was what I done to her, expecting that if she didn’t keep still I’d bake the ice cream and freeze the cake and lose my own head entire.
Out in the shed I’d set Amos to cracking ice, and Harriet to cracking nuts, with a flatiron and a hammer. And pretty soon I stepped along to see how things was going. Land, land, it was a pretty sight! They was both working away, but Amos was looking down at her more’n to his work, and Harriet was looking up at him like he was all of it—and the whole air was pleasant with something sweeter than could be named. So I left them two alone, well knowing that I could manage a company sole by myself yet a while, no matter how much courting and mourning was going on all around me.
And everything went fine, in spite of Mis’ Fire Chief’s looking like death in the rocker, with a wet rag on her brow.
But she kept lifting up one corner and giving directions.
“No pink frostin’, Calliope, you know,”she says, “only white. An’ no colored flowers—only white ones. You’ll have to write the place cards—my hand shakes so I don’t dare trust myself. But I’ll cut up the ribbin for the sandwiches—I can do that much,” says she.
The place cards was mourning ones, with broad black edges, and the ribbin to tie up the sandwiches was black too. And the centerpiece was one Mis’ Fire Chief and Hettie hed been up early that morning making—it was a set piece from the Chief’s funeral, a big goblet, turned bottom side up, done in white geraniums with “He is Near” in purple everlastings. The table was going to look real tasty, Mis’ Fire Chief thought, all in black and white so—with little sprays of willow laid around on the cloth instead of ferns.
“I’ve done the best I could,” she said, solemn, “to make the occasion do honor to Maria an’ pay reverence to the Chief.”
I had just finally persuaded her to go up-stairs and look the chambers over and then try to take a little rest somewheres around, when Amos come to the shed door to tell me the freezer wouldn’t turn no more, and was it broke or was the cream froze. And Mis’ Fire Chief, seeing him coming in the shed way, seemed to sense for the first time that he was there.
“Amos More,” says she, “what you doin’ here?”
“I ask’ him,” says I, hasty; “I had to have his help about the ice.”
She covered her eyes with one hand. “Courtin’ an’ entertainin’ goin’ on in the Chief’s house,” she said, “an’ him only just gone from us!”
“Well,” s’I, “I’ve got to havesomeman’s help out here this afternoon—why not Amos’s?”
“Oh,” says Mis’ Merriman, “you’re all against me but the Chief, an’ him helpless.”
“The Chief,” says I, “was always careful of your health. You’ll make yourself sick taking on so, Mis’ Fire Chief,” I told her. “You go and put flowers in the chambers and leave the rest to me. Put your mind,” I told her, “on the surprise you’ve got for your guests that’s comin’—Maria Carpenter here and all! Besides,” I couldn’t help sticking in, “I donno as Amos is cold poison.”
So we got her off up-stairs.
Maria Carpenter’s train was due at 3:03, so she was just a-going to have the right time to get ready when the afternoon would begin, because in Friendship Village “sharp four” means four o’clock. I had left the sandwichesto make last thing, and I come back from my dinner towards three and tiptoes through the house so’s not to disturb Mis’ Fire Chief if she was resting, and I went into the pantry and begun cutting and spreading bread. I hadn’t been there but a little while before the stair door into the kitchen opened and I heard Hettie come down, humming a little. But before I could sing out to her, the woodshed door opened too, and in come Amos that had been out putting more salt in the freezer.
“Hettie!” he says in a low voice, and I see she prob’ly hed on her white muslin and was looking like angels, and more. And—“I won’t,” says Amos, then—“I won’t—though I can hardly keep my hands off from you—dear.”
“It don’t seem right even to have you call me ‘dear,’ ” says Hettie, sad.
Amos burst right out. “It is right—it isright!” says he. “They can’t nobody make me feel ‘dear’ is wicked, not when it means as dear as you are to me. Hettie,” Amos says, “sit down here a minute.”
“Not us. Not together,” says Hettie, nervous.
“Yes!” says Amos, commanding, “I don’t know when I’ll see you again. Set down here, by me.”
And by the little stillness, I judged she done so. And I says this: “Them poor things ain’t had ten minutes with each other in over a year, and if they know I’m here, that’ll spoil this time. I’d better stay where I am, still, with my thoughts on my sandwiches.” And that was what I done. But I couldn’t—Icouldn’t—and neither could most anyone—of helped a word or two leaking through the pantry doorandthe sandwich thoughts.
“I just wanted to pretend—for a minute,” Amos said, “that this was our house. An’ our kitchen. An’ that we was settin’ here side of the stove an’ belonged.”
“Oh, Amos,” said Hettie, “it don’t seem right to pretend that way with Aunt Hettie’s stove—an’ her feelin’ the way she does.”
“Yes, it is right,” says Amos, stout. “Hettie! Don’t you see? Shedon’tfeel that way. She’s just nervous with grievin’, an’ it comes out like that. She don’t care—really. At least not anything like the way she thinks she does. Now don’t let’s think about her, Hettie—dearest! Think about now. An’ let’s just pretend for a minute it was then. You know—then!”
“Well,” says Hettie, unwilling,—and yet, oh, so willing,—“if itwasthen, what would you be sayin’?”
“I’d be sayin’ what I say now,” says Amos, “an’ what I’ll say to the end o’ time: that I love you so much that the world ain’t the world without you. But I want to hearyousay somethin’. What would you be sayin’, Hettie, if it wasthen?”
I knew how she dimpled up as she answered—Hettie’s dimples was like the wind had dented a rose leaf.
“I’d prob’ly be sayin’,” says Hettie, “Amos, you ain’t filled the water pail. An’ I’ll have to have another armful o’ kindlin’.”
“Well,” says Amos, “but then when I’d brought ’em. What would you say then?”
“I’d say, ‘What do you want for dinner?’ ” said Hettie, demure. But even this was too much for Amos.
“An’ then we’d cook it,” he says, almost reverent. “Oh, Hettie—don’t it seem like heaven to think of us seein’ to all them little things—together?”
I loved Hettie for her answer. Coquetting is all right some of the time; but—some of the time—so is real true talk.
“Yes,” she says soft, “it does. But it seems like earth too—an’ I’m glad of it.”
“Oh, Hettie,” says Amos, “marry me. Don’t let’s go on like this.”
“Dear,” says Hettie, all solemn,—and forgetting that “dear” was such a wicked word,—“dear, I’d marry you this afternoon if it wasn’t for Aunt Hettie’s feelin’s. But I can’t hurt her—I can’t,” she says.
Well, just then the door bell rung, and Hettie she flew to answer it, and Amos he lit back to the woodshed and went to chopping more ice like life lay all that way. And I was just coming out of the butt’ry with a pan of thin sandwiches ready for the black ribbins, when I heard a kind of groan and a scuffle, and down-stairs come Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman, and all but fell into the kitchen. She had something in her hand.
“Calliope—Calliope Marsh,” says she, all wailing like a bereavement, “Cousin Maria has fell an broke her wrist, an’ she ain’t comin’at all!”
I stood still, real staggered. I see what it meant to Mis’ Merriman—invites all out, Cousin Maria for surprise and hostess in one, Mis’ Merriman not figgering on appearing at all, account of the Chief, and the company right that minute on the way.
“What’ll I do—what’ll Ido?” cries Mis’ Merriman, sinking down on the bottom step in her best black with the crêpe cuffs. “Oh,”she says, “it’s a judgment upon me. I’ll hev to turn my guests from my door. I’ll be the laughing-stock,” says she, wild.
And just then, like the trump of judgment to her, we heard the front door shut, and the first folks to come went marching up the stairs. And at the same minute Amos come in from the shed with the dasher out of the second freezer, and Hettie’s eyes run to him like he was their goal and their home. And then I says:
“Mis’ Fire Chief. Leave your company come in. Serve ’em the food of your house, just like you’ve got it ready. Stay back in the kitchen and don’t go in the parlor and do it all just like you’d planned. And in place of Maria Carpenter and the surprise you’d meant,” says I, “give ’em another surprise. Leave Hettie and Amos be married in your parlor, like they want to be and like all Friendship Village wants to see ’em. Couldn’t nothing be sweeter.”
Mis’ Merriman stared up to me, and set and rocked.
“A weddin’,” she says, “a weddin’ in the parlor where the very last gatherin’ was the funeral of the Chief? It’s sacrilege—sacrilege!” she says, wild.
“Mis’ Merriman,” I says, simple, “what doyou reckon this earth is about? What,” says I, “is the purpose the Lord God Most High created it for out of nothing? As near as I can make out,” I told her, “and I’ve give the matter some study, He’s got a purpose hid way deep in His heart, and way deep in the hearts of us all has got to be the same purpose, or we might just as well, and a good sight better, be dead. And a part of that purpose is to keep His world a-going, and that can’t be done, as I see it, by looking back over our shoulders to the dead that’s gone, however dear, and forgetting the living that’s all around us, yearning and thirsting and passioning for their happiness. And a part of His purpose is to put happiness into this world, so’s people can brighten up and hearten out and do the work of the world like He meant ’em to. And you, Mis’ Merriman,” says I, plain, “are a-holding back from both them purposes of God’s, and a-doing your best to set ’em to naught.”
Mis’ Merriman, she looked up kind of dazed from where she was a-sitting. “I ain’t never supposed I was livin’ counter to the Almighty,” she says, some stiff.
“Well,” says I, “none of us supposes that as much as we’d ought to. And my notion, and the notion of most of Friendship Village,it’s just what you’re doing, Mis’ Fire Chief,” says I,—“in some respec’s.”
“Oh, even if I wasn’t, I don’t want to be the laughin’-stock to-day,” says she, weak, and beginning to cry.
“Hettie and Amos,” says I, then, for form’s sake, “if Mis’ Merriman agrees to this, do you agree?”
“Yes! Oh,yes!” says Amos, like the organ and the benediction and the Amen, all rolled into one.
“Yes,” says Hettie, shy as a rose, but yet like a rose nodding on its stalk, positive.
“And you, Mis’ Fire Chief?” says I.
She nodded behind her hands that covered up her face. “I don’t know what to do,” says she, faint. “Go on ahead—all of you!”
My, if we didn’t have to fly around. They wasn’t no time for dress changing. Hettie was in white muslin and Amos in every-day, but it was all right because she was Hettie and because he looked like a king in anything. And they was so many last things to do that none of us thought of dress anyhow. It was four o’clock by then, and folks had been stomping in “past the bell” and marching up-stairs and laying off their things—being as everybody knows what’s what in Friendship Village and don’t hev to be toldwhere to go, same as some—till, judging by the sound, they had all got there and was clacking in the parlor, and Mis’ Fire Chief’s party had begun. And Mis’ Fire Chief herself revived enough to offer to tie the ribbins around the sandwiches.
“My land!” I says, “we can’t do that. We can’t have black ribbin round the wedding sandwiches.”
But Hettie, she broke in, sweet and dignified, and before her aunt could say a word. “Yes, we can,” she says, “yes, we can. I ain’t superstitious, same as some. Uncle’s centerpiece an’ his willow on the tablecloth an’ his blackribbin sandwiches,” says she, “is goin’ to stay just the way they are, weddin’ or no weddin’,” says she. “Ain’t they, Amos?” she ask’ him.
“You bet you,” says Amos, fervent, just like he would have agreed to anything under heaven that Hettie said. And Mis’ Merriman, she looked at ’em then, grateful and even resigned. And time Amos had gone and got back with the license and the minister we were all ready.
They sent me in to sort of pave the way. I slips in through the hall and stood in the door a minute wondering how I’d tell ’em. There they all was, setting sewing and rocking and gossiping, contented as if they had a hostess inevery room. And not one of ’em suspecting. Oh, I loved ’em one and all, and I loved the way they was allusedto each other, and talking natural about crochet patterns and recipes for oatmeal cookies and what’s good to keep hands from chapping—not one of ’em putting on or setting their best foot forwards or trying to act their best, same as they might with company, but just being themselves, natural and forgetting. And I was glad, deep down in my heart, that Maria Carpenter hadn’t come near. Not glad that she had broke her wrist, of course—but that she hadn’t come near. And when I stepped out to tell ’em what was going to happen, I was so glad in my throat that I couldn’t say a word only just—
“Friends—listen to me. What do yous’poseis goin’ to happen? Oh, they can’t none of you guess. So look. Look!”
Then I threw open the dining-room door and let ’em in—Hettie and Amos, with Doctor June. And patterns and recipes and lotions all just simmered down into one surprised and glad and loving buzz of wonder. And then Hettie and Amos were married, and the world begun all over again, Garden of Eden style.
There is one little thing more to tell. When the congratulations was most over, the dining-roomdoor creaked a little bit, and Amos, that was standing by it, whirled around and see Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman peeking through the crack to her guests. And Amos swung open the door wide, and he grabbed her by the arm, and though she hung back with all her strength Amos pulled her right straight into the room and kissed her, there before them all.
“AuntHettie,” he says to her, ringing, “Uncle—Hettie’s uncle an’ mine an’ your husband,—wouldn’t want you stayin’ out there in the dinin’-room to-day on account o’ him!”
And when we all crowded around her, greeting her like guests should greet a hostess and like dear friends should greet dear friends, Mis’ Fire Chief she wipes her eyes, and she left ’em shake her hands; and though she wasn’t all converted, it was her and not me that ask’ ’em please to walk out into the dining-room and eat the lunch that was part wedding and part in memory of the Chief.
I donnowhether you’ve ever lived in a town that’s having a boom? That’s being a boom town, as they call it? There ain’t any more boom to Friendship Village than there is to a robin building a nest. There ain’t any more boom to Friendship Village than there is to growth. We just go along and go along, and behave ourselves like the year does: Little spurt of Spring now and then, when two-three folks build new houses and we get a new side-walk or two or buy a new sprinkling cart. Little dead time, here and there, when the tobacco or pickle factory closes down to wait for more to grow, and when somebody gets most built and boards up the windows till something else comes in to go on with. But most of the time Friendship Village keeps on pretty even, like the year, or the potato patch, or any of them common, growing things.
But now over to Red Barns it ain’t so. Red Barns is eight miles away, and from the beginning the two towns sort of set with their backs to each other, and each give out promiscuousthat the other didn’t have a future. But, same time, the two towns looked out of the corners of their eyes enough to set quite a few things going for each other unconscious: Red Barns got a new depot, and Friendship Village instantly petitioned for one. Friendship Village set aside a little park, and Red Barns immediately appropriated for one, with a little edge more ground. Red Barns got a new post office, and Friendship Village started out for a new library. And so on. Just like a couple of boys seeing which could swim out farthest.
Then all of a sudden the Interurban come through Red Barns and left Friendship Village setting quiet out in the meadows eight miles from the track. And of course after that Red Barns shot ahead—Eppleby Holcomb said that on a still night you could hear Red Barns chuckle. Pretty soon a little knitting factory started up there, and then a big tobacco factory. And being as they had three motion-picture houses to our one, and band concerts all Summer instead of just through July, the folks in Silas Sykes’s Friendship Village Corn Canning Industry and in Timothy Toplady’s Enterprise Pickle Manufactory began to want to go over to Red Barns to work. Two left from Eppleby Holcomb’s Dry Goods Emporium.Even the kitchens of the few sparse ones that kept hired help begun to suffer. And the men begun to see that what was what had got to be helped to be something else—same as often happens in commercial circles.
Things was about to this degree when Spring come on. I donno how it is with other people, but with me Spring used to be the signal to run as far as I could from the place I was in, in the hopes, I guess, of getting close up to all outdoors. I used to want to run along country paths all squshy with water, and hang over a fence to try to tell whether it’s a little quail or a big meadowlark in the sedge; I wanted to smell the sweet, soft-water smell that Spring rain has. I wanted to watch the crust of the earth move because May was coming up through the mold. I wanted to climb a tree and be a bud. And one morning I got up early bent on doing all these things, and ended by poking round my garden with a stick to see what was coming up—like you do. It was real early in the morning—not much after six—and Outdoors looked surprised—you know that surprised look of early morning, as if the day had never thought of being born again till it up and happened to it? And I had got to the stage of hanging over the alley fence, doing nothing, when little DavidBeach come by. He was eating a piece of bread, and hurrying.
“Morning, David,” I sings out. “Where’s your fish-pole?”
He stopped running and stopped biting and looked up at me. And then he laughed, sharp and high up.
“Fish-pole!” says he.
“Is it swimming, then?” I says. And then I felt sick all over. For I remembered that David had gone to work in Silas Sykes’s canning factory.
“Oh, David,” I patched it up. “I forgot. You’re a man now.”
At that he put back his thin little shoulders, and stuck out his thin little chest, and held up his sharp little chin. And he said:
“Yup. I’m a man now. I get $2.50 a week,now.”
“Whew!” says I. “When do you bank your first million?”
He grinned and broke into a run again. “I’m docked if I’m late,” he shouts back.
I looked after him. It didn’t seem ten days since he was born. And here he was, of the general contour of a clay pipe, going to work. His father had been crippled in the factory, his mother was half sick, and there were three younger than David, and one older.
“Kind of nice of Silas to give David a job,” I thought. “I don’t suppose he’s worth much to him, he’s so little.”
And that was all I thought, being that most of us uses our heads far more frequent to put hats on than for any other purpose.
Right after breakfast that morning I took a walk down town to pick out my vegetables before the flies done ’em too much violence in Silas Sykes’s store window. And out in front of the store, I come on Silas himself, sprinkling his wilted lettuce.
The minute I see Silas, I knew that something had happened to make him pleased with himself. Not that Silas ain’t always pleased with himself. But that day he looked extra-special self-pleased.
“Hello, Calliope,” he says, “you’re the very one I want to help me.”
That surprised me, but, thinks I, I’ve asked Silas to do so many things he ain’t done that I’ve kind of wore grooves in the atmosphere all around him; and I guess he’s took to asking me first when he sees me, for fear I’ll come down on to him with another request. So I followed him into the post-office store where he motioned me with his chin, and this was what he says:
“Calliope,” says he, “how’d you like to help me do a little work for this town?”
I must just of stared at Silas. I can keep from looking surprised, same as the best, when a neighbor comes down on to me, with her eyebrows up over a piece of news—and I always do, for I do hate to be expected to play up to other folks’s startled eyebrows. But with these words of Silas’s I give in and stared. For of some eight, nine, ten plans that I’d approached him with to the same end, he had turned down all them, and all me.
“With who?” says I.
“For who?” says he. “Woman, do you realize that taking ’em all together, store and canning factory combined, I’ve got forty-two folks a-working for me?”
“Well!” says I. “Quite a family.”
“Timothy Toplady’s got twelve employees,” he goes on, “and Eppleby’s got seven in the store. That’s sixty-one girls and women and then ... er....”
“Children,” says I, simple.
“Young folks,” Silas says, smooth. “Sixty-one of ’em. Ain’t that pretty near a club, I’d like to know?”
“Oh,” I says, “a club. A club! And do them sixty-one want tobea club, Silas?”
Silas scowled. “What you talking?” he says. “Of course they want all you’ll do for ’em. Well, now: Us men has been facing this thing, and it’s so plain that even a woman must see it: Friendship Village is going to empty itself out into Red Barns, same as a skin, if this town don’t get up and do something.”
“True,” says I, attentive. “Even a woman can take in that much, Silas, if you put it right before her, and lead her up to it, and point it out to her and,” says I, warming up to it, “put blinders on her so’s not to distract her attention from the real fact in hand.”
“What you talking?” says Silas. “I never saw a woman yet that could keep on any one subject no more than a balloon. Well, now, what I thought was this: I thought I’d up and go around with a paper, and see how much everybody’d give, and we’d open an Evening Club somewheres, for the employees—folks’s old furniture and magazines and books and some games—and give ’em a nice time. Here,” says Silas, producing a paper from behind the cheese, “I’ve gone into this thing to the tune of Fifty Dollars. Fifty Dollars. And I thought,” says he direct, “that you that’s always so interested in doing things for folks, might put your own name down, andmight see some of the other ladies too. And I could report it to our Commercial club meeting next Friday night.Afterthe business session.”
I looked at him, meditative.
“If it’s all the same to you, Silas,” I says, “I’ll take this paper and go round and see some of these sixty-one women and girls, instead.”
Silas kind of raised up his whole face and left his chin hanging, idle.
“See them women and girls?” says he, some resembling a shout. “What have they got to do with it, I’d like to know?”
“Oh,” says I, “ain’t it some their club too, Silas? I thought the whole thing was on their account.”
Silas used his face like he’d run a draw string down it.
“Women,” he says, “dum women. Their minds ain’t any more logical than—than floor-sweepings with the door open. Didn’t I just tell you that the thing was going to be done for the benefit of Friendship Village and to keep them folks interested in it?”
“Well, but,” I says, “ain’t them folks some Friendship Village too?”
“What’s that got to do with it?” shouts Silas. “Of course they are. Of course we want to help ’em. Buttheyain’t got anythingto do with it. All they got to do with it is to be helped!”
“Is it!” I says. “Is that all, Silas?” And while he was a-gathering himself up to reply, I picked up the subscription paper. “It can’t do ’em no harm,” I says, “to tell ’em about this. Then if any of ’em is thinking of leaving, it may hold on to ’em till we get a start. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just run around and see ’em to-day. Mebbe they might help—who knows?”
“You’ll bawl the whole thing up,” says Silas. “I wish’t I’d kep’ my mouth shut.”
“Well,” I says, “you’d ought to know by this time that I ain’t any great hand to do thingsforfolks, Silas. I like to do ’emwith’em.”
Silas was starting in to wave both arms when somebody come in for black molasses. And he says to me:
“Well, go on ahead. You’ll roon my whole idea—but go on ahead and see how little hurt you can do. I’ve got to have some lady-help from somewheres,” says he, frank.
“Lady-help,” thinks I, a-proceeding down the street. “Lady-help. That’s me. Kind of auxiliarating around. A member of the General Ladies’ Aid Society. Lady-help. Ain’t it a grand feeling?”
I went straight to Abigail Arnold that keeps the Home Bakery. Abigail lives in the Bakery, and I donno a nicer, homier place in town. She didn’t make the mistake of putting up lace curtains in the store, to catch the dust.... I always wonder when the time’ll come that we’ll be content not to have any curtains to any windows in the living rooms of this earth, but just to let the boughs and the sun and the day smile in on us, like loving faces. Fade things? Fade ’em? I wonder they didn’t think of that when they made the sun, and temper it down to keep the carpets good.... Sometimes I dream of a house on a hill, with meadows of grass and the line of the sky and the all-day sun for neighbors, and not a thing to say to ’em: “Keep out. You’ll fade me.” But, “Come in. You’ll feed me.”
Well, Abigail Arnold was making her home-made doughnuts that morning, and the whole place smelled like when you was twelve years old, and struck the back stoop, running, about the time the colander was set on the wing of the stove, heaped up with brown, sizzling, doughnut-smelling doughnuts.
“Set right down,” she says, “and have one.” And so I done. And for a few minutes Silas and Red Barns and Friendship Village and theindustrial and social relations of the entire country slipped away and was sunk in that nice-tasting, crumpy cake. Ain’t it wonderful—well, we’d ought not to bother to go off into that; but sometimes I could draw near to the whole human race just thinking how every one of us loves a fresh doughnut, et in somebody’s kitchen. It’s a sign and symbol of how alike we are—and I donno but it means something, something big.
But with the last crumb I come back to commerce.
“Abigail,” I says, “Silas wants to start a club for his and Timothy’s and Eppleby’s employees.”
“Huh!” says Abigail, sticking her fork down in the kettle. “What’s the profit? Ain’t I getting nasty in my old age?” she adds solemn. “I meant, Go on. Tell me about it.”
I done so, winding up about the meeting to be held the coming Friday in Post-Office Hall, at which Silas was to report on the progress of the club, after the business session. And she see it like I see it: That a club laid on to them sixty-one people had got to be managed awful wise—or what was to result would be considerable more like the stuff put into milk to preserve it than like the good, rich, thick cream that milk knows how togive, so be you treat it right.
Abigail said she’d help—she’s one of themnewwomen—oh, I ain’t afraid of the word—she’s one of them new women that catches fire at a big thing to be done in the world just as sure as another kind of woman flares up when her poor little pride is hurt. I’ve seen ’em both in action, and so have you. And we made out a list—in between doughnuts—of them sixty-one women and girls and children that was working in Friendship Village, and we divided up the list according to which of us was best friends with which of ’em—you know that’s a sort of thing you can’t leave out in the sort of commercial enterprise we was embarking on—and we agreed to start out separate, right after supper, and see what turned out to be what.
I went first to see Mary Beach, little David Beach’s sister. They lived about half a mile from the village on a little triangle of land that had been sold off from both sides and left because it was boggy. They had a little drab house, with thick lips. David’s mother set outside the door with a big clothes-basketful of leggings beside her. She was a strong, straight creature with a mass of gray hair, and a way of putting her hands on her knees when she talked, and eyes that said: “I know and I think,” and not “I’m sure I can’t tell,” like so many eyes are builtto represent. Mary that I’d come to see might have been a person in a portrait—she was that kind of girl. And little David was there, laying sprawled out on the floor taking a clock to pieces and putting the items in a pie-tin.
“You won’t care,” says Mis’ Beach, “if I keep on with the leggings?”
“Leggings?” says I.
She nodded to the basket. “It’s bad pairs,” she said. “They leave me catch up the dropped stitches.”
“How much do they give you?” says I, brutal. If it had been Silas Sykes I’d never have dreamt of asking him how much anybody give him for anything. But—well, sometimes we hound folks and hang folks and ask folks questions, merely because they’re poor.
“Six cents a dozen,” she says.
I remember they had a fly-paper on the window sill, and the caught flies and the uncaught ones whirred and buzzed. I can see the room: The floor that sagged, the walls that cracked, the hot, nameless smell of it. And in it a woman with the strength and the figure of a race that hasn’t got here yet, and three children—one of them beautiful, and David, taking a clock to pieces and putting it together again, without ever having been taught. You know all aboutit—and so did I. And while I set there talking with her, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else but that hole of a home, and the three splendid beings chained there, like folks in a bad dream. Someway I never get used to it, and I know I never shall. It makes me feel as if I was looking on the inside of a table spoon and seeing things twisted, and saying: “Already such things can’t be. Already they sound old and false—like thumbscrews!”
And the worst of it was, David’s mother was so used to it. She was so bitter used to it. And oh—don’t things turn round in the world? A few years before if somebody like me had gone to see her, I’d of been telling her to be resigned, and to make the best of her lot, and trying to give her to understand that the Lord had meant it personal. And instead, when she said she was doing nice, I longed to say to her:
“No, no, Mis’ Beach! Don’t you make that mistake. You ain’t doing nice. As long as you think you are, this world is being held back. It’s you that’s got to help folks to know that youaren’tdoing nice. And to make folks wonder why.”
But I didn’t say it to her. I s’pose I haven’t got that far—yet.
She said she’d like to come to the club thatSilas proposed, and Mary, she said she’d come. They didn’t question much about it—they merely accepted it and said they’d come. And I went out into the April after-supper light, with a bird or two twittering sleepy, and an orange and lemon and water-melon sunset doing its best to attract my attention, and I says out loud to April in general:
“A club. A club. So we’re going to help that house with a club.”
Then I stopped to Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house. Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house faces the railroad tracks, and I never went by there without seeing her milk bottles all set out on her porch, indelicate, like some of the kitchen lining showing. Bettie Forkaw and Libbie Collins and Rose Miller and Lizzie Lane, pickle factory girls, lived there. They were all home, out on the smoky porch, among the milk bottles, laughing and talking and having a grand time. They had sleeves above their elbows and waists turned in at the throat with ruffles of cheap lace, and hair braided in bunches over their ears and dragged low on their foreheads, and they had long, shiney beads round their necks, and square, shiney buckles on their low shoes. Betty was pretty and laughed loud and had uncovered-looking eyes. Libbie was big and strong andstill. Rose was thin, and she had less blood and more bones than anybody I ever see. And Lizzie—Lizzie might have been a freshman in any college you might name. She’d have done just as good work in figures as she did in pickles—only cucumbers come her way and class-rooms didn’t.
“Hello, girls,” I says, “how are you to-night? Do you want to be a club?”
“To do what?” says they.
“Have a good time,” says I. “Have music—eat a little something—dance—read a little, maybe. And ask your friends there. Aclub, you know.”
After we’d talked it over, all four of ’em said yes, they wished they had some place to go evenings and wouldn’t it be fine to have some place give to ’em where they could go. I didn’t discuss it over with ’em at all—but I done the same thing I’d done before, and that I cannot believe anybody has the right to ask, no matter how rich the questioner or how poor the questionee.
“Girls,” I says, “you all work for Silas Sykes, don’t you? How much do you get a week?”
They told me ready enough: Five and Six Dollars apiece, it was.
“Gracious,” I says, “how can you use up so much?” And they laughed and thought it wasa joke. And I went along to the next place—and my thoughts come slowly gathering in from the edges of my head and formed here and there in kind of clots, that got acted on by things I begun to see was happening in my town, just as casual as meat bills and grocery bills—just as casual as school bells and church bells.
For the next two days I went to see them on my list. And then nights I’d go back and sit on my porch and look over to Red Barns that was posting itself as a nice, hustling, up-to-date little town, with plenty of business opportunities. And then I’d look up and down Friendship Village that was getting ready for its Business meeting in Post-Office Hall on Friday night, and trying its best to keep up with its “business reputation.” And then I’d go on to some more homes of the workers that was keeping up their share in the commercial life of Friendship Village. And then my thoughts would bring up at Silas’s club house, with the necessary old furniture and magazines and games laid out somewheres, tasty. And the little clots of thought in my brain somehow stuck there. And I couldn’t think through them, on to what was what.
Then something happened that put a little window in the side of what was the matter with Silas’s plan. And I begun to see light.
The second night I was sitting on my porch when I heard my back gate slam. My back gate has a chain for a spring, weighted with a pail of stones, and when it slams the earth trembles, and I have time to get my hands out of the suds or dough or whatever; and it’s real handy and practical. This time there come trotting round my house David Beach. My, my but he was a nice little soul. He had bright eyes, that looked up quick as a rabbit’s. And a smile that slipped on and off, swift as a frisking squirrel. And he had little darting movements, like a chipmunk’s. There was something wild about him, like the wind. Silas’s pickle factory did seem a queer place for us to have put him.
“Look, Miss Marsh!” he says. And he was holding out his clock. “I got it all together,” he says, “and it’ll go. And it’ll go right.”
“Did you now?” I says. And it was true. He had. It did. That little alarm clock was ticking away like a jeweller-done job.... Yes, Silas’s pickle factory did seem a queer place for us to have put him.
When the little lad had gone off through the dusk, with his clock under his arm, I looked down the street after him. And I thought of this skill of his. And then I thought of the $2.50 a week Silas was giving him for shellingcorn. And then I thought of this club that was to keep him and the rest of ’em contented. And I begun to see, dim, just the particular kinds of fools we was making of ourselves.
There was yet one thing more happened that wasn’t so much a window as a door. The next night was to be the Business Men’s meeting, and just before supper I went to pay my last visit on my list. It was out to the County House to see the superintendent’s niece that had just resigned from Eppleby’s store, and that they were afraid was going to Red Barns to work.
The County House. Ain’t that a magnificent name? Don’t we love to drape over our bones and our corpses some flying banner of a word like sarcophagus? The County House sets on a hill. A hill is a grand place for a County House. “Look at me,” the County House can say, “I’m what a beneficent and merciful people can do for its unfit.” And I never go by one that I don’t want to shout back at it: “Yes. Look at you. You’re our biggest confession of our biggest sham. What right have we, in Nineteen Hundred Anything, to have any unfit left?”
Right in front of the County House is a cannon. I never figured out the fitness of having a cannon there—in fact, I never can figure out the fitnessof having a cannon anywhere. But one thing I’ve always noticed: When public buildings and such do have cannon out in front of them, they’re always pointingawayfrom the house. Never toward the house. Always going to shoot somebody else. That don’t seem to me etiquette. If we must keep cannon for ornament, aren’t we almost civilized enough to turn ’em around?
Seems the superintendent’s niece wasn’t going to Red Barns at all—she’d merely resigned to be married and had gone to town to buy things—a part of being married which competes with the ceremony, neck and neck, for importance. In the passageway, the matron called me in the office. She was a tall, thick woman with a way of putting her hand on your back to marshal you, as mothers do little children in getting them down an aisle. Yes, she was a marshaling woman.
“Look here,” says the matron, proud.
They’d put a glass case up in the office and it was all hung with work—crocheted things, knit and embroidered things, fringed things. “Did by the inmates,” says she, proud. That word “inmates” is to the word “people” what the word “support” is to the word “share.” It’s a word we could spare.
I looked at the things in the case—hours and hours and hours the fingers of the women upstairs had worked on ’em—intricate counting, difficult stitches, pretty patterns. And each of them was marked with a price tag. The County House inmates had got ’em hung out there in the hope of earning a little money. One was a bed-spread—a whole crocheted bed-spread. And one—one was a dress crocheted from collar to hem, and hung on with all sorts of crazy crocheted ends and tassels so—I knew—to make the job last a little longer. And when I saw that, I grabbed the tall, thick matron by the arm and I shook her a little.
“What was we doing,” I says, “that these folks wasn’t taught to do some kind of work so’s they could have kept out of the poor house?”
She looked at me odd and cool.
“Why,” she said, “my dear Miss Marsh, it’s being in here that gives ’em the leisure to make the things at all!”
What was the use of talking to her? And besides being unreasonable, she was one of them that you’re awful put to it to keep from being able not to right down dislike. And I went along the passage thinking: “She acts like the way things are is the way things ought to be.But it always seems to me that the way things ought to be is the best way things could be. For the earth ain’t so full of the fulness thereof but that we could all do something to make it a little more so.”
And then the thing happened that opened the door to all I’d been thinking about, and let me slip through inside.
Being I was there, I dropped in a minute to see old Grandma Stuart. She was one of the eighty “inmates.” Up in the ward where she was sitting, there were twenty beds. And between each two beds was a shelf and a washbasin, and over it a hook. And old Grandma Stuart sat there by her bed and her shelf and her hook. She was old and white, and she had fine wrinkles, like a dead flower. She drew me down to her, with her cold hands.
“Miss Marsh,” she said, “I got two-three things.”
“Yes,” I says, “well, that’s nice,” I says. And wondered if that was the right thing to say to her.
“But I ain’t got any box,” she says. “They keep the things and bring ’em to us clean every time. And I ain’t got any box.”
“That’s so, you ain’t,” says I, looking at her shelf.
“I put my things in my dress,” she says, “but they always fall out. And I’ve got to stop to pick ’em up. Andshedon’t like it.”
No. The matron wouldn’t like it. I knew that. She was one of them that the thing was the thing even if it was something else.
“And so I thought,” says Grandma Stuart, “that if I had a pocket, I could put my things in that. I thought they wouldn’t fall out if I had a pocket.Shesays she can’t be making pockets for every one. But I keep thinking if I had a pocket.... It’s these things I’ve got,” she says.
She took from her dress three things: A man’s knife, a child’s ring, and a door-key.
“It was the extry key to my house,” she said. “I—brought it along. And I thought if I had a pocket....”
...I sat there with her till the lights come out. I promised to come next day and bring her a little calico pocket. And then I set and let her talk to me—about how things use’ to be. When at last the matron come to take ’em away to be fed, I went out, and I ran down the road in the dark. And it was one of the times when the world of life is right close up, and you can all but touch it, and you can almost hear what it says, and you know that it can hearyou—yes, and you almost know that it’s waiting, eager, to hear whatyouare going to say to it. For one force breathes through things, trying to let us know it’s there. It was speaking to me through that wrecked home of Grandma Stuart’s—through the man’s knife, the child’s ring, the door-key; and through the pitiful, clever, crocheted stuff in the glass case in the County House; and through David, and through all them that we were trying to fix up a club for—like a pleasant plaster for something that couldn’t be touched by the remedy.