Gale Zona
Peace in Friendship Village
I looked up at Miss Clementina and the Brother-man – as you do look up when some nice little thing has happened that you think whoever you're with will understand. But they didn't look back at me. They looked over to each other. They looked over to each other, swift at the first, but lasting long, and with the faces of both of them softening to Summer. And the music went heavenly-ing on, into the room, and into living, and into everything, and it was as if the whole minute was turned into its own spirit and then was said out in a sound.
Miss Clementina and the Brother-man looked away and down at the little chap that Miss Clementina was holding his hand. It was as if there was a pulse in the room – the Great Pulse that we all beat to, and that now and then we hear. But those two didn't see me at all; and all of a sudden I understood, how there was still another star that I didn't know anything about, and that they two were standing there together, they two and the little chap – but not me. Oh, it was wonderful – starting the way great things start, still and quiet like stars coming out. So still that they didn't either of them know it. And I felt as if everything was some better and some holier than I had ever known.
Then Madame Proudfit, she leans out from her star, gracious and benign, and certain sure that her star was the only one that had eternal truth inside it; and she spoke with a manner of waving her hand good natured to all the other little stars, including ours:
"You mad, mad, children!" she said. "You are mad. But you are very picturesque in your decisions, there's no denying that. He would probably be better cared for, more scientifically fed, and all that, in a good, hired, private family. But that's as you see it. Be mad, if you like – I'm here to watch over you!"
She had quite a nice tidy high point of view about it – but oh, it wasn't ours. It wasn't ours. We three – the Brother-man and Miss Clementina and me – we sort of hugged our own way. And the little chap he kept smiling, like he sort of hugged it too.
So that was the way it was. Miss Clementina and the Brother-man – that she'd been afraid to meet, 'count of thinking mebbe he didn't mean his writings for living – were in love from before they knew it. And I think it was part because they both meant life strong enough for living and not just for thinking, like the lukewarm folks do.
I kept the little chap with me the three months or so that went by before the wedding – and I could hardly bear to let him go then.
"Why don't you keep him for them the first year or so?" Friendship Village ask' me. But there's some things even your own town doesn't always understand. "It's so unromantic for them to take him now," some of them even said.
But I says to them what I say now: "There's things that's bigger than romantic and there's things that's bigger than practical, so be some of both is mixed in right proportion. And the biggest thing I know in this world is when folks say over, 'You and me and all of us,' like voices, speaking to everybody's Father from inside the dark."
THE CABLE 10
I says to myself: "What shall I do? What shall I do?"
I crushed the magazine down on my knee, and sat there rocking with it between my hands.
It was just a story about a little fellow with a brick. They met him, a little boy six years old, somewhere in Europe, going along up toward one of the milk stations, at sunrise. They wondered why he carried a brick, and they asked him: "Why do you have the brick?" "You see," he says, "it's so wet. I can get up on this." And he stood on his brick in the mud before the milk station for five hours, waiting for his supplies that was a pint of milk to take home to his mother.
Mebbe it was queer that this struck me all of a heap, when the big war I'd got used to. But you can't get used to the things that hurt a child.
And then I kept thinking about Bennie. Supposing it had been Bennie, with the brick? Bennie was the little boy that his young father had gone back to the old country, and Bennie hadn't any mother. So I had him.
Because I had to do something, I went out on the porch and called him. He came running from his swing – his coat was too big for him and his ears stuck out, but he was an awful sweet little boy. The kind you want to have around.
"Bennie," I says, "I know little boys hate it. But could you leave me hug you?"
He kind of saw I was feeling bad – like a child can – and he came right up to me and he says:
"I got one hug left. Here it is!"
And he hugged me grand.
Then he ran back down the path, throwing his legs out sideways, kind of like a little calf, the way he does. And I set down on the side stoop, and I cried.
"Oh, blessed God," I says, "supposing Bennie was running round Europe with a brick, waiting five hours in the mud for milk for his ma, that he ain't got none?"
When I feel like that, I can't sit still. I have to walk. So I opened the side gate and left Bennie run through into Mis' Holcomb's yard, that was ironing on her back porch, and I says to her to please keep an eye on him. And then I headed down the street, towards nothing; and my heart just filled out ready to blow up.
As I went, I heard a bell strike. It was a strange bell, and I wondered. Then I remembered.
"The new Town Hall's new bell," I thought. "It's come and it's up. They're trying it."
And it seemed like the voice of the town, saying something.
In the door of the newspaper office sat the editor, Luke Norris, his red face and black hair buried behind a tore newspaper.
"Hello, Luke," I says, sheer out of wanting human looks and words from somebody.
He laid down his newspaper, and he took his breath quick and he says: "I wish't Europe wasn't so far off. I'd like to go over there – with a basket."
I overtook little Nuzie Cook, going along home, – little thin thing she was, with such high eye-brows that her face looked like its windows were up.
"Nuzie," I says, "how's your ma?" And that was a brighter subject, because Mis' Cook has only got the rheumatism and the shingles.
"Ma's in bed," says Nuzie. "She's worried about her folks in the old country – she ain't heard and she can't sleep."
I went to a house where I knew there was a baby, and I played with that. Then I went to call on Mis' Perkins, that ain't got sense enough to talk about anything that is anything, so she kind of rested me. But into Mis' Hunter's was a little young rabbit, that her husband had plowed into its ma's nest, and he'd brought it in with its leg cut by the plow, and they was trying to decide what best to do. And I begun hurting inside again, and thinking:
"Nothing but a rabbit – a baby rabbit – and over there…"
I didn't say anything. Pretty soon I turned back home. And then I ran into the McVicars – three of them.
The McVicars – three of them – had Spring hats trimmed with cherries and I guess raisins and other edibles; the McVicars – mother and two offspring, sprung quite a while back – are new-come to the village, and stylish. They hadn't been in town in two months when they'd been invited twice to drive to the cemetery in the closed carriages, though they hadn't known either corpse, personally. They impressed people.
"Oh, Mis' Marsh," says Mis' McVicar, "we wanted to see you. We're getting up a relief fund…"
I went down in my pocket for a quarter, automatic. I heard their thanks, and I went on. And it came to me how, all over the country, the whole 100,000,000 of us, more or less, had been met up with to contribute something to relief, and we'd all done it. And it had gone over there to this country and to that. But our hearts had ached, individual and silent, the way mine was aching that day – and there wasn't any means of cabling that ache over to Europe. If there was, if that great ache that was in all of us for the folks over there, could just be gathered up and got over to them in one mass, I thought it would do as much as food and clothes and money to help them.
I stood still by a picket fence I happened to be passing, and I looked down the little street. It had a brick sidewalk and a dirt road and little houses, and the fences hadn't been taken down yet. And all the places looked still and kind of dear.
"They all feel bad," I thought, "just as bad as I do, for folks that's starved. But they can't say so – they can't say so. Only in little dabs of money, sent off separate."
Bennie was swinging on Mis' Holcomb's gate, looking for me. He came running to meet me.
"I found a blue beetle," he says to me. "And that lady's kitty's home, with a bell on. And I got a new nail. An – an – an – "
And I thought: "He ain't no different from them – over there. The little tikes, with no pas and no suppers and nothing to play with, only mebbe a brick to lug."
And there I was, right back to where I started from. And I went out to get supper, with my heart hanging around my neck like a pail of rock.
II
Next day was Memorial Day. And Memorial Day in Friendship Village is something grand.
First the G. A. R. conducts the service in the Court House yard, with benches put up special, and a speech from out of town and paid for.
Right away afterward everybody marches or drives, according to the state of their pocket-book, out to the Cemetery, to lay flowers on the soldiers' graves; and it's quite an event, because everybody that's got anybody buried out there and that is still alive themselves, they all whisk out the day before and decorate up their graves, so's everybody can see for themselves how intimate their dead is held in remembrance. And everybody walks around to see if so-and-so has thought to send anything from Seattle, or wherenot, this year. And if they didn't, it's something to tell about.
Then all the Ladies' Aid Societies serve dinners in the empty store buildings down town, and make what they can. And in the afternoon everybody lounges round and cuts the grass and tinkers with the screens and buys ice cream off the donkey-cart man.
I dressed Bennie up, clean and miserable, in the morning, and went down to the exercises. I couldn't see much, because the woman in front of me couldn't either, and she stood up; and I couldn't hear much, because the paid-for speaker addressed only one-half of his audience, and as usual I wasn't in the right half. But the point is that neither of them limitations mattered. I didn't have to see and I didn't have to hear. All that I had to do was to feel. And I felt. For I was alive at the time of the Civil War, and all you have to do to me is to touch that spring in me, and I'm back there: Getting the first news, reading about Sumter, sensing the call for 75,000 volunteers, hearing that this one and this one and this one had enlisted, peeking through the fence at Camp Randall where my two brothers were waiting to go; and then living the long four years through, when every morning meant news, and no news meant news, and every night meant more to hear. For years I couldn't open a newspaper without feeling I must look first for the list of the dead…
I set there on the bench in the spring sunshine, without anything to lean against, seeing the back breadths of Mis' Curtsey's gray flowered delaine, and living it all over again, with Bennie hanging on my knee. And it made it a thousand times worse, now that these Memorial Days were passing, with what was going on in Europe still going on.
And I thought: "Oh, I dunno how we can keep up feeling memorial for just our own soldiers, when the whole world's soldiers are lying dead, new every night…"
And getting a little more used to the paid speaker's voice, I could hear some of what he was saying. I could get the names, – Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Shenandoah, Missionary Ridge, all these, over and over. And my heart ached with every one. But it had a new ache, for names that the whole world will echo with for years to come. And sitting there, with nobody knowing, I says to myself:
"And, O Lord, I memorial all the rest of them – the soldiers of fifty years ago no more than the soldiers of now – the soldiers of Here no more than the soldiers of Over There. O Lord, I memorial them all, and I pray for them that survive over there – put all Your strength on them, Lord, as far as I am concerned, for us survivors here, we don't need You as much as they do – them that's new bereaved and new desolated. For Christ's sake. Amen."
On my way home, I saw Luke Norris sitting out by the door of his office again. He never went to any exercises because his wind-pipe was liable to shut up on him, and it broke up the program some, getting his breath through to him.
"Calliope," he says, "we want you should go on to the Committee for opening the new Town Hall, in about two months from now. We want the jim-dandiest, swell-upest celebration this town has ever had. Twenty years of unexampled prosperity – "
I stood still and stared down on him.
"Honest," I says, "do you want me to help in a prosperity celebration this Summer?"
"Sure," he says, "women are in on it."
"Luke," I says. "I dunno how you'll feel about that when you come to think it over. But I feel – "
Bennie, fussing round on the side-walk, came over, tugging a chunk of wood. I thought at first he was carrying a brick.
I sat down in a handy chair, just inside Luke's door.
"Luke," I says, "Luke! That ain't the kind of a celebration this town had ought to have. You listen here to me…"
III
Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think about the next two Summer months. I lie awake and think how it all went, that planning, from first to last. I think about the idea, and about how it started, and kindled, and spread, and flamed. And I think about what finally came of it.
For one thing, it was the first living, human thing that Friendship Village ever got up that there wasn't a soul that kicked about. You can't name another thing that any of the town ever went in for, that the rest didn't get up and howl. Pavement – some of us said we couldn't afford it, "not now." New bridge – half of us says we was bonded to the limit as it was. Sewerage – three-fourths of us says for our town it was a engineering impossibility. Buying the electric light plant, that would be pure socialism. Central school building – a vast per cent of us allows it would make it too far for the children to walk, though out of school hours they run all over the town, scot-free and foot loose, skate, sled and hoop. As a town none of us would unite on nothing. Never, not till this time.
But this time it was different. And even if not anything had come of it, I'd be glad to remember the kind of flash I got from different folks, when we came to tell them about it.
I went first to the Business Men's Association, because it was them that was talking the Town Hall celebration the hardest. I'd been to them before, about playgrounds, about band concerts, about taking care of the park; and some of them were down on us ladies.
"You're always putting up propositions to give money out," says one of them once. "Why don't you propose us taking in some? What do you think we are? Charity?"
"No," says I to him, "I don't. Nor yet love. You're dollar marks and ciphers, a few of you," I told him, candid, "and those don't make a number."
So when I stood up before them that night, I knew some of them were prepared to vote, automatic, against whatever we wanted. Some of them didn't even have to hear what us ladies suggested in order to be against it. And then I began to talk.
I told them the story of the little fellow with the brick. That stayed in my mind. I never see my milk-man go along, leaving big, clean bottles in everybody's doors that I didn't image up that little boy standing in the mud on his brick, waiting. And then I mentioned Bennie to them too, that they all knew about. We hadn't heard from his father in two months now, and of course there didn't any of us know…
"I don't need to remind you," I says to them, "how we feel about Europe. Every one of us knows. We try not to talk about it, because there's some of it we can't talk about without letting go. But it's on us all the time. The other day I was trying to think how the world use' to feel, and how I'd felt, before this came on us. I couldn't do it. There can't any of us do it. It's on us, like thick dark, whatever we do. Giving money don't express it. Talking don't express it… Oh, let's do something in this town! Instead of our new Town Hall Prosperity celebration, let's us do something on August 4 to let Europe see how bad we feel. Let's us."
We talked a little more, and then I told them our plan, and we talked over that. I'll never forget them, in the little Town Room with the two gas jets and the chairman's squeaky swivel chair and the tobacco smoke. But there wasn't one voice that dissented, not one. They all sat still, as if they were taking off some spiritual hats that didn't show. It was as if their little idea of a Prosperity celebration sort of gave up its light to some big sun, blazing there on us, in the room.
The rest was easy. It kind of done itself. In a way it was already done. Something was in people's hearts, and we were just making a way for it to get out. And the air was full of something that was ready to get into people's hearts, and we made a way for it to get in. I don't know but these are our only job on this earth.
August 4 – that's the Europe date that none of America can forget, because it's part our date too.
"What we going to do?" says Bennie, when I was dressing him. It was four months since we had had a letter from his father…
"We're going to do something," I says to him, "that you'll remember, Bennie, when you're an old man." And I gave his shoulders a little shake. "You tell them about it when you're old. Because they'll understand it better then than we do now. You tell them!"
"Yes, ma'am," says Bennie, obedient – and I kind of think he'll do it.
We were to meet in the Court House yard, that's central, and march to the Market Square, that's big. I was to march in the last detachment, and so it came that I could watch them start. And I could see down Daphne Street, with all the closed business houses with the flags hung out at half mast, some of them with a bow of black cloth tied on. And it was a strange gathering, for everybody was thinking, and everybody knew everybody else was thinking.
We've got a nice band in Friendship Village, that they often send for to play to the City. And when it started off ahead, beating soft with the Beethoven funeral march, I held my breath and shut my eyes. They were playing for Europe, four thousand miles away.
Then came the women. That seemed the way to do, we thought – because war means what war means to women. They were wearing white – or at least everybody was that had a white dress, but blue or green or brown marched just the same as if it was white; and they all wore black streamers – just cloth, because we none of us had very much to do with. Every woman in town marched – not one stayed home. And one of the women had thought of something.
"We'd ought not to carry just our flag," she said. "That don't seem real right. Let's us get out our dictionaries and copy off the other nations' flags over there; and make 'em up out of cheese-cloth, and carry 'em."
And that was what we done. And all the women carried the different ones, just as they happened to pick them up, and at half mast.
I don't know as I know who came next, or what order we arranged them. We didn't have many ex-foreigners living in Friendship Village, but them we had marched, in their own groups. They all came, dressed in their best, and we had cheese-cloth flags of their own nation, made for each group; and they marched carrying them, all together.
There was everybody that worked in the town, marching for Labor. Then come the churches, not divided off into denominations, but just walking, hit or miss, as they came; and though this was due to a superintendent or two getting rattled at the last minute and not falling in line right, it seemed good to see it, for the sorrow of one church for Europe isn't any whit different from the sorrow of every one of the rest. When your heart aches, it aches without a creed.
Last came the children, that I was going to march with; and someway they were kind of the heart of the whole. And just in front of them was the Mothers' Club – twenty or so of them, hard-worked, hopeful women, all wanting life to be nice for their children, and trying, the best they knew, to read up about it at their meetings. And they were marching that day for the motherhood of the nations, and there wasn't one of them that didn't feel it so. And the children … when we turned the corner where I could look back on them, I had all I could do – I had all I could do. Three-four hundred of them, bobbing along, carrying any nation's flag that came handy. And they meant so much more than they knew they meant, like children always do.
"You're going to march for the little boys and girls in Europe that have lost their folks," was all we said to them.
And when I see them coming along, looking round so sweet, dressed up in what they had, and their hair combed up nice by somebody, somehow, there came over me the picture of that little fellow with his brick, waiting there for that pint of milk; and I squeezed up so on Bennie's hand that I was walking with, that he looked up at me.
"You're lovin' me too hard in my fingers," he told me, candid.
"Oh, Bennie," I says, "you excuse me. I guess I was squeezing the hand of every little last one of them, over there."
We all came into the Market Square, in the afternoon sunshine, with our little still, peaceful street – laying and listening, and never knowing it was like heaven at all. Every soul in town was there, I don't know of one that didn't go. Even Luke Norris was there, his wind-pipe forgot. We didn't have much exercises. Just being there was exercise enough. We sung – no national airs, and above all, not our own; but just a hymn or two that had in it all we could find of sympathy and love. There wasn't anything else to say, only just those two things. Then Dr. June prayed, brief:
"Lord God of Love, our hearts are full of love this day for all those in Europe who are bereaved. We cannot speak about it very well – we cannot show it very much. But Thou art love to them. Oh, draw us near in spirit to those sorrowing over there, even as Thou are near to them all. Amen."
Then the band played the Chopin funeral march, while we all stood still. When it was done, up in the belfry of the new Town Hall, the new bell that we were so proud of began to toll. And it seemed like the voice of the town, saying something. We all went home to that bell, with the children leading us. And nobody's store was opened again that day. For the spirit of the time, and of Over There, was on the village like a garment, and I suppose none of us spoke of anything else at supper, or when the lamps were lit.
Quite a little while after supper I was sitting on my porch in the dark, when Luke Norris and some of them came in my gate.
"Calliope," said one of the women, "we've been thinking. Don't it seem awful pitiful that Europe can't know how we feel here to-day?"
"I thought of that," I said.
And Luke says: "Well, we've been looking up the cable charges. And we thought we might manage it, to cable something like this:
"Friendship Village memorial exercises held to-day for Europe's dead. Love and sympathy from our village."
"It'll cost a lot," says Luke. "The McVicars want us to add the money to their relief fund instead. But I say no!" he struck the porch post with his palm. "Leave us send it, cost or no cost, no matter what."
"I say so too," I says. "But tell me: Where'll you send it to?"
And Luke says simple:
"None of the newspaper dispatch folks'll take it – it ain't news enough for them. So I'm a-going to cable it myself, prepaid, to six Europe newspapers."
Pretty soon they went away, and I took Bennie and walked down to the gate. I thought about that message, going on the wire to Europe… There wasn't any moon, or any sound. The town lay still, as if it was thinking. The world lay still, as if it was feeling.
