Gale Zona
Peace in Friendship Village
In the silence that fell when he'd finished, I sat there knowing that even now it wasn't like he thought it was – and I wished that it had been so.
He put his hand on his boy's shoulder.
"It's for his sake," he said, "that I thank you most."
Mis' Sykes was equal to that, too.
"In the name of our whole town," she says to that young soldier, "we thank you for what you've done."
He just nodded a little, and nobody said anything more. And it came to me that most everything is more so than we most always suppose it to be.
When Mis' Toplady don't know quite what to do with a minute, she always brings her hands together in a sort of spontaneous-sounding clap, and kind of bustles her shoulders. She done that now.
"I motion I'll take charge of the refreshments," she says. "Who'll volunteer? I'm crazy to see what-all we've brought."
Everybody laughed, and rustled, easy. And I slipped over to the daughter, standing by herself by the fire-place.
"You take, don't you?" I ask' her.
"'Take?'" she says, puzzled.
"Music, I mean," I told her. (We always mean music when we say "take" in Friendship Village.)
"No," she says, "but my brother plays, sometimes."
The soldier sat down to the piano, when I asked him, and he played, soft and strong, and something beautiful. His cross shone on his breast when he moved. And me, I stood by the piano, and I heard the soul of the music come gentling through his soul, just like it didn't make any difference to the music, one way or the other…
Music. Music that spoke. Music that sounded like laughing voices… No, for it was laughing voices…
I opened my eyes, and there in my dining-room, by the lounge, stood Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb, laughing at me for being asleep. Then they sat down by me, and they didn't laugh any more.
"Calliope," Mis' Toplady says, "Mis' Sykes has been round to everybody, and told them about the Oldmoxon House folks."
"And she took a vote on what to do to-night," says Mame Holcomb.
"Giving a little advice of her own, by the wayside," Mis' Toplady adds.
I sat up and looked at them. With the soldier's music still in my ears, I couldn't take it in.
"You don't mean – " I tried to ask them.
"That's it," says Mis' Toplady. "Everybody voted to have a public meeting to honor the soldiers – the colored soldier with the rest. But that's as far as it will go."
"But he don't want to be honored!" I cried. "He wants to be neighbored – the way anybody does when they're worth it."
"Mis' Sykes says," says Mis' Toplady, "that we mustn't forget what is fitting and what isn't."
And Mis' Holcomb added: "She carried it off grand. Everybody thinks just the way she does."
My reception-surprise cake stood ready on the table. After a while, we three sat down around it, and cut it for ourselves. But all the while we ate, that soldier's music was still playing for me; and what hadn't happened was more real for me than the things that were true.
THE BROTHER-MAN 9
When the New Race comes – those whom Hudson calls "that blameless, spiritualized race that is to follow" – surely they will look back with some sense of actual romance upon the faint tapers which we now light, both individual and social tapers. They will make their allowance for us, as do we for the ambiguous knights of chivalry. And while the New Race will shudder at us – at our disorganization with its war, its poverty and its other crime – yet I think that they will love us a little for our ineffectual ministries, as already we love them for exceeding our utmost dream.
Don't you love a love-story; starting right before your eyes as casual as if it was preserves getting cooked or parsley coming up? It doesn't often happen to me to see one start, but once it did. It didn't start like anything at all that was going to be anything, but just still and quiet, same as the stars come out. I guess that's the way most great things move, isn't it? Still and quiet, like stars coming out. Or similar to stars.
It was the time of the Proudfits' big what-they-called week-end parties, and it was the Saturday of the biggest of them, when a dozen city people came down to Friendship Village for the lark. And with them was to come a Piano Lady and a Violin Man – and a man I'd known about in the magazines, a Novel-and-Poem Man that writes the kind of things that gets through all the walls between you and the world, so's you can talk to everything there is. I was crazy to see the Novel-and-Poem Man – from behind somewheres, though, so's he wouldn't see me and look down on me. And when Miss Clementina Proudfit asked me to bring her out some things from the city Saturday night, chocolate peppermints and red candles and like that, and said she'd send the automobile to the train for me to fetch up the things and see the decorations, I was real pleased. But I was the most excited about maybe seeing the Poem-and-Novel Man.
"What's he like, Miss Clementina?" I ask' her. "When I hear his name I feel like when I hear the President's. Or even more that way."
"I've never met him," she says. "Mother knows him – he's her lion, not mine."
"He writes lovely things," I says, "things that makes you feel like everybody's way of doing is only lukewarm, and like you could just bring yourself to a boil to do good and straighten things out in the world, no matter what the lukewarm-way folks thought."
Miss Clementina looked over to me with a wonderful way she had – beautiful face and beautiful eyes softening to Summer.
"I know – know," she says; "I dread meeting him, for fear he doesn't mean it."
I knew what she meant. You can mean a thing you write in a book, or that you say in talk, or for other folks to do. But meaning it for living it – that's different.
I came out from the city that night on the accommodation, tired to death and loaded down with bundles for everybody in Friendship Village. Folks used to send into town by me for everything but stoves and wagons, though I wouldn't buy anything there except what you can't buy in the village: lamb's-wool for comforters, and cut-glass and baby-pushers, and shrimps – that Silas won't keep in the post-office store, because they don't agree with his stomach. Well, I was all packages that night, and it was through dropping one in the seat in front of me that I first saw the little boy.
He was laying down, getting to sleep if he could and pulling his eyes open occasional to see what was going on around him. His mother had had the seat turned, and she sat there beyond him, facing me, and I noticed her – flat red cheeks, an ostrich feather broke in the middle, blue and red stone rings on three fingers, and giving a good deal of attention to studying the folks around her. She was the kind of woman you see and don't look back to, 'count of other things interesting you more.
But the little boy, he was different. He wasn't more than a year old, and he didn't look that – and his cheeks were flushed and his eyelashes and mouth made you think "My!" I remember feeling I didn't see how the woman could keep from waking him up, just to prove he was hers and she could if she wanted to.
Instead of that, all she did was continually to get up and go out of the car. Every station we stopped at – and the accommodation acts like it was made for the stations and not the stations for it – she was up and out, as if the town was something swimming up to the car-door to speak to her. She'd leave the baby asleep in the seat, and I wondered what would happen if he woke up while she was gone, and started to roll. She stayed every time up till after the train started – I didn't wonder it made her cold, and that after a bit she put on her coat before she went. And once or twice she carried out her valise with her, as if she might have expected somebody to be there to get it. "Mebbe she's got somebody's laundry," thinks I, "and mebbe a stranger has asked her to bring it out on the train and she can't remember what station it's to be put off at." They send things to stations along the way a lot on the accommodation – everybody being neighbors, so.
Well, when we got to the Junction, out she went again, cloak and valise and all. But I didn't think much about her then, because at the Junction it's always all excitement, being that's where they switch the parlor car off the train, and whoever is in it for Friendship Village has to come back in the day coach for the rest of the way, and be just folks. And among those that came back that night was the Brother-man.
I dunno if you'll know what I mean by that name for him. Some men are just men, like they thought God made them just for the pleasure of making them. And some men are flying around like they wanted to prove that the Almighty didn't make a mistake when He created them. But there are some men that just live like God hadn't made them so much as that they're a piece of Him, and they haven't forgotten it and they feel kindly toward all the other pieces. Well, this man was one of the Brother-men. I knew it the minute I saw him.
By the time he came in the car, moving leisurely and like getting a seat wasn't so interesting as most other things, there wasn't a seat left, excepting only the turned one in front of the little chap asleep. The man looked around idle for a minute and see that they wasn't cloak or valise keeping that seat, and he sat down and opened the book he'd had his finger in the place all the time, and allowed to read.
There's consid'rable switching to do at the Junction, time we get started; and the jolts and bounces did just exactly what I thought they would do – woke the little chap up. From before the train started he begun stirring and whimpering – that way a baby does when it wants nothing in the world but a hand to be laid on it. Isn't it as if its mother's hand was a kind of healing that big folks forget about needing? By the time the train was out on the road in earnest, the little chap, he was in earnest, too. And he just what-you-might-say yelled. But no mother came. They wasn't a mother's hand with big red and blue rings on three fingers to lay on the little boy's back. And there wasn't a mother of him anywhere's in sight.
In a minute or two the Brother-man looked up. He hadn't seemed to see the baby before or to sense that he was a baby. And he looked at him crying and he laid his book down and he looked all around him, perplexish, and then he looked over to me that was looking at him perplexish, too. And being he was a man and I wasn't, I got right up and went round there and picked the little chap up in my arms and sat down with him.
"His ma went out of the car somewheres," I explained it.
He had lifted his hat and jumped up, polite as if he was the one I'd picked up. And he stood looking down at me.
"I wonder if I couldn't fetch her," he says – and his voice was one of the voices that most says an idea all alone. I mean you'd most have known what he meant if he'd just spoke along without using any words – oh, well, I dunno if that sounds like anything, but I guess you know the kind I mean. The Novel-and-Poem Man's stories are the same kind, being they say so much that never does get set up in type.
The baby didn't stop crying at all – seems as though your hands don't have the right healing unless – unless – well, it didn't stop nor even halt. And so I says, hesitating, I says: "You wouldn't know her," I says. "I been watching her. I could find her better – if so be you wouldn't mind taking the baby."
The Brother-man put out his arms. I remember I looked up in his face then, and he was smiling – and his smile talked the same as his voice. And his face was all full of what he meant. He had one of those Summer faces like Miss Clementina's – just a general liking of the minute and a special liking for all the world. And what he said made me think of Summer, too:
"Mind?" says he. "Why it's like putting your cap over a butterfly."
He took the little fellow in his arms, and it was then that I first sensed how beautiful the Brother-man was – strong and fine and quiet, like he done whatever he done, and said whatever he said, all over him, soul and all, and didn't just speak with his muscles, same as some. And the baby, he was beautiful, too, big and fine and healthy and a boy, only not still a minute nor didn't know what quiet meant. But he stopped crying the instant the man took him, and they both looked at each other like – oh, like they were more alike than the years between them wanted to let them think. Isn't it pitiful and isn't it wonderful – when two folks meet? Big or little, nice or horrid, pleasant or cross, famous or ragged or talking or scairt – it don't make any differ'nce. They're just brother-pieces, broke off the same way. That was how the Brother-man looked down at the little chap, and I dunno but that was how the little chap looked up at him. Because the little thing threw out his arms toward him, and we both see the letter under his blanket pinned to his chest.
All of a sudden, I understood what had happened – almost without the use of my brain, as you do sometimes.
"Sit down a minute," I said to the Brother-man. "I guess mebbe this letter tells where she is."
And so it did. It was written in pencil, spelled irregular and addressed uphill, and the direction told the story even before the letter did. "To Anybody," the direction was. And the inside of the letter said:
"Take care of my Baby. I ain't fit and never was and now don't think to be anywheres long. Don't look for me. The baby would be best off with anybody but me, and don't think to be anywheres long and so would be orphant quite soon sure. He ain't no name so best not put mine except.
Mother.
P. S. If he puts out his hand he means you should kiss his hand then he won't cry. Don't forget, then he won't cry.
P. S. When he can't get to sleep he can get to sleep if you rub the back of his neck."
I remember how the Brother-man looked at me when we'd got it spelled out.
"Oh," he said – and then he said a name that sounded like somebody calling to its Father from inside the dark.
I hate to think of what I said. I said it kind of mechanical and wooden, the way we get to be from shifting the burdens off our own backs where they belong, onto somebody else's back – and doing it second-nature, and as if we were constructed slanting so that burdens could slip off. What I said was:
"I suppose we'd better tell the conductor."
"Tell the conductor!" said he, wondering. "What on earth for?"
"I dunno," says I, some taken back. I suppose I'd had some far notion of telling him because he wore a uniform.
"What do we want to tell him for?" this Brother-man repeated. "We know."
Oh, but that's come back to me, time and time again, when I've thought I needed help in taking care of somebody, or settling something, or doing the best way for folks. "What do we want to tell the conductor or anybody else for? We know." And ten to one we are the one who can do the thing ourselves.
"But what are we going to do?" I said. I think that his eyes were the kind of eyes that just make you say "What are we going to do?" and not "What are you going to do?" or "What are they going to do?" – same as most folks start to say, same as I had started.
For the first time the Brother-man looked helpless – but he spoke real firm.
"Keep him," he says, simple.
"Keep him!" I said over – since I had lived quite a while in a world where those words are not common.
He looked down thoughtful at the little chap who was lying there, contented, going here and there with his fists, and looking up at the lights as if he was reflecting over the matter some himself.
"The conductor," said the Brother-man, "would telegraph, and most likely find the mother. If he was efficient enough, he might even get her arrested. And what earthly good would that do to the child? Our concern is with this little old man here, with his life hanging on his shoulders waiting to be lived. Isn't it?" he asked, simple. And in a minute, he added: "I always hoped that this would never happen to me – because when it does happen, there's only one thing to do: Keep them." And he added in another minute: "I don't know – I ought to look at it that I've been saved the trouble of going out and finding a way to help – " only you understand, his words came all glossy and real different from mine.
I tell you, anybody like that makes all the soul in you get up and recognize itself as being you; and your body and what it wants and what it is afraid of is no more able to run you then than a pinch of dirt would be, sprinkled on your wings. Before I knew it, my body was keeping quiet, like a child that's been brought up well. And my soul was saying whatever it pleased.
"I'm a woman," I said, "and alone in the world. I'm the one to take him."
"I'm alone in the world too," he said, "and I'm a man. So I'm just as able to care for him as you are. I'll keep him."
Then he looked down the car, kind of startled, and began smiling, slow and nice.
"On my word," he said, "I'd forgotten that besides being a man I'm about to be a guest. And this little old chap wasn't included in the invitation."
I looked out the window to see where we were getting, and there we were drawing over the Flats outside Friendship Village, and the brakeman came to the door and shouted the name. When I hear the name that way, and when I see the Fair ground and the Catholic church steeple and the canal bridge and the old fort and the gas house, it's always as sweet as something new, and as something old, and it's something sweeter than either. It makes me feel happy and good and like two folks instead of one.
"Look here," I said, brisk, "this is where I get off. This is home. And I'm going to take this baby with me. You go on to your visiting place – so be you'll help me off," I says, "with my baby and my bundles that's for half of Friendship Village."
"Friendship Village!" he said over, as if he hadn't heard the man call. "Is this Friendship Village? Why, then this," he said, "is where I'm going too. This is where the Proudfits live, isn't it?" he said – and he said some more, meditative, about towns acting so important over having one name and not another, when nobody can remember either name. But I hardly heard him. He was going to the Proudfits'. And without knowing how I knew it, I knew all over me, all of a sudden, who he was: That he was the Novel-and-Poem man himself.
"You can't be him!" I said aloud. I don't know what I was looking for – a man with wings or what. But it wasn't for somebody like this – all simple and still and every day – like stars coming out. "You can't be him," says I, mentioning his name. "He was to get here this afternoon on the Through."
"That alone would prove I'm I," he said, merry. "I always miss the Throughs."
Think of that… There I'd been riding all that way beside him, talking to him as familiar as if he had been just folks.
It seems a dream when I think of it now. The Proudfits' automobile was there for him too – because he had telegraphed that he would take the next train – as well as for me and the chocolate peppermints and the red candles. And so, before I could think about me being me sure enough, there I was in the Proudfits' car, glassed in and lit up, and a stranger-baby in my arms; and beside me the Novel-and-Poem man that was the Brother-man too, – the man that had made me talk through walls with everything there is. Oh, and how I wanted to tell him! And when I tried to tell him what he had meant to me, how do you guess it came out of my brain?
"I've read your book," says I, like a goose.
But he seemed real sort of pleased. "I've been honored," he said, gentle.
I looked up at him; and I knew how he knew already that I didn't know all the hard parts in the book, and all the big words, and some of the little nice things he had tried to work out to suit him. And it seemed as if any praise of mine would only make him hurt with not being appreciated. Still, I wanted my best to say something out of the gratitude in me.
"It – helped," I said; and couldn't say more to save me.
But he turned and looked down at me almost as he had looked at the little chap.
"That is the only compliment I ever try to get," he said to me, as grave as grave.
And at that I saw plain what it was that had made him seem so much like a friend, and what had made me think to call him the Brother-man. Why, he was folks, like me. He wasn't only somebody big and distinguished and name-in-the-paper. He was like those that you meet all the time, going round the streets, talking to you casual, coming out of their houses quiet as stars coming out. He was folks and a brother to folks; and he knew it, and he seemed to want to keep letting folks know that he knew it. He wasn't the kind that goes around thinking "Me, me, me," nor even "You and me." It was "You and me and all of us" with the Brother-man.
"Isn't it strange," he says once, while we rode along, "that what all these streets and lights and houses are for, and what the whole world is for is helped along by taking just one little chap and bringing him up – bringing him up?" And he looked down at the baby, that was drowsing off in my arms, as if little chaps in general were to him windows into somewhere else.
The Proudfit house was lamps from top to bottom, but I could see from the glass vestibule that the big rooms were all empty, and I thought mebbe they hadn't had dinner yet, being they have it all unholy hours when most folks's is digested and ready to let them sleep. But when we stepped in the hall I heard a little tip-tap of strings from up above, and it was from the music-room that opens off the first stair-landing, and dinner was over and they were all up there; and the Piano Lady and the Violin Man were gettin' ready to play. Madame Proudfit had heard the car, and came down the stairs, saying a little pleased word when she saw the Brother-man. She looked lovely in black lace, and jewels I didn't know the name of, and she was gracious and glad and made him one of the welcomes that stay alive afterwards and are almost people to you to think about. The Brother-man kissed her hand, and he says to her, some rueful and some wanting to laugh:
"I'm most awfully sorry about the train, Madame Proudfit. But – I've brought two of us to make up for being so late. Will – will that not do?" he says.
Madame Proudfit looked over at me with a smile that was like people too – only her smile was like nice company and his was like dear friends; and then she saw the baby.
"Calliope!" she said, "what on earth have you been doing now?"
"She hasn't done it. I did it," says the Brother-man. "Look at him! You rub the back of his neck when he won't sleep."
Madame Proudfit looked from him to me.
"How utterly, extravagantly like both of you!" Madame Proudfit said. "Come in the library and tell me about it."
We went in the big, brown library, where nothing looked as if it would understand about this, except, mebbe, some of the books – and not all of them – and the fire, that was living on the hearth, understanding all about everything. I sat by the fire and pulled back the little chap's blanket and undid his coat and took his bonnet off; his hair was all mussed up at the back and the cheek he'd slept on was warm-red. Madame Proudfit and the Brother-man stood on the hearth-rug, looking down. Only she was looking from one star to another, and the Brother-man and I, we were on the same star, looking round.
We told her what had happened, some of his telling and some of mine. It came over me, while we were doing it, that what had sounded so sensible and sure in the train and in the automobile and in our two hearts sounded different here in the Proudfits' big, brown library, with Madame Proudfit in black lace and jewels I didn't know the name of, listening. But then I looked up in the Brother-man's face and I got right back, like he was a kind of perpetual telegraph, the feeling of its being sensible and the only sensible thing to do. Sensible in the sense of your soul being sensible, and not just your being sensible like your neighbors.
"But, my dear, dear children," Madame Proudfit says, and stopped. "My dear children," she says on, "what, exactly, are you going to do with him?"
"Keep him!" says the Brother-man prompt, and beamed on her as if he had said the one possible answer.
"But – keep him!" says Madame Proudfit. "How 'keep him'? Be practical. What are you going to do?"
It makes you feel real helpless when folks in black lace tell you to be practical, as if that came before everything else – especially when their "practical" and your "practical" might as well be in two different languages. And yet Madame Proudfit is kind and good too, and she understands that you've got to help or you might as well not be alive; and she gives and gives and gives. But this– well, she saw the need and all that, but her way that night would have been to give money and send the little chap away. You know how some are. They can understand everything good and kind – up to a certain point. And that point is, keep him. They can't seem to get past that.
"Keep him!" she says. "Make your bachelor apartment into a nursery? Or you, Calliope, leave him to mind the house while you are canvassing? Be practical. What, exactly, are you going to do?"
Then the Brother-man frowned a little – I hadn't known he could, but I was glad he knew how.
"Really," he said, "I haven't decided yet on the cut of his knickerbockers, or on what college he shall attend, or whether he shall spend his vacations at home or abroad. The details will get themselves done. I only know I mean to keep him."
She shook her head as if she was talking to a foreign language; then we heard somebody coming – a little rustle and swish and afterwards a voice. These three things by themselves would have made somebody more attractive than some women know how to be. I'll never forget how she seemed when she came to the door – Miss Clementina, waiting to speak with her mother and not knowing anybody else was with her.
Honest, I couldn't tell what her dress was – and me a woman that has turned her hand to dressmaking. It was all thin, like light, and it had all little ways of hanging that made you know you never could make one like it, so's you might as well enjoy yourself looking and not fuss with trying to remember how it was put together. But her dress wasn't so much like light as her face. Miss Clementina's face – oh, it was like the face of a beautiful woman that somebody tells you about, and that you never do get to see, and if you did, like enough she might not be so beautiful after all – but you always think of her as being the way you mean when you say "beautiful." Miss Clementina looked like that. And when I saw her that night I could hardly wait to have her face and eyes soften all to Summer, that wonderful way she had.
"Oh, Miss Clementina," I says, "I've got a baby. At least, he's only half mine. I mean – "
Then, while she was coming toward us along the lamp-light, as if it was made to bring her, the little chap began waking up. He stirred, and budded up his lips, and said little baby-things in his throat, and begun to cry, soft and lonesome, as if he didn't understand. Oh, isn't it true? A baby's waking-up minute, when it cries a little and don't know where it is, ain't that like us, sometimes crying out sort of blind to be took care of? And when the little thing opened his eyes, first thing he saw was Miss Clementina, standing beside him. And what did that little chap do instead of stopping crying but just hold out one hand toward her, and kind of bend across, same as if he meant something.
With that the Brother-man, that Madame Proudfit hadn't had a chance yet to present to Miss Clementina, he says to her all excited:
"He wants you to kiss his hand! Kiss his hand and he'll stop crying!"
Miss Clementina looked up at him like a little question, then she stooped and kissed the baby's hand, and we three watched him perfectly breathless to see what he would do. And he done exactly what that up-hill note had said he would – he stopped crying, and he done more than it said he would – he smiled sweet and bright, and as if he knew something else about it. And we three looked at each other and at him, and we smiled, too. And it made a nice minute.
"Clementina," said Madame Proudfit, like another minute that wasn't so very well acquainted with the one that was being, and then she presented the Brother-man. But instead of a regular society, say-what-you-ought-to-say answer to her greeting, the Brother-man says to her:
"Miss Proudfit, you shall arbitrate! Somebody left him to this lady and me – or to anybody like, or unlike us – on the train. Shall we find his own mother that has run away from him? Or shall we send him to an institution? Or shall we keep him? Which way," he says, smiling, "is the way that is the way?"
She looked up at him as if she knew, clear inside his words, what he was talking about.
"Are you," she ask' him, half merry, but all in earnest too, "are you going to decide with your heart or your head?"
"Why, with my soul, I hope," says the Brother-man, simple.
Miss Clementina nodded a little, and I saw her face all Summer-soft as she answered him.
"Then," she said, "almost nobody will tell you so, but – there's only one way."
"I know it," says he, gentle.
"I know it," says I, solemn.
We three stood looking at each other from close on the same star, knowing all over us that if you decide a thing with your head you'll probably shift a burden off; if you decide with your heart you'll probably give, give, give, like Madame Proudfit does, to pay somebody else liberal to take the burden; but if you decide it with your soul, you give your own self to whatever is going on. And you know that's the way that is the way.
All of a sudden, as if words that were not being said had got loose and were saying themselves anyway, the music – that had been tip-tapping along all the while since we came – started in, sudden and beautiful, with the Piano Lady and the Violin Man playing up there in the landing room. I don't know whether it was a lullaby – though I shouldn't be surprised if it was, because I think sometimes in this world things happen just like they were being stage-managed by somebody that knows. But anyway – oh, it had a lullaby sound, a kind-of rocking, tender, just-you-and-me meaning; that ain't so very far from the you-and-me-and-all-of-us meaning when they're both said right and deep down.
