Zona Gale
Neighborhood Stories

PREFACE

“When I die,” said Calliope Marsh, “don’t you get anybody that’s always treated me like a dog and put them on the front seat. Make ’em sit back.”

Then she looked at me, her rare and somewhat abashed smile on her face.

“Birds and stars and children and God in the world,” she said, “and hark at me talking like that. Honest, I don’t care where you seat ’em.”

That is like Calliope. And that is like the village. Blunt and sometimes bitter speech there is, and now and again what we gently call “words”; but the faith of my experience is that these are facile, and need never trouble one. These are born of circumscription, of little areas, of teasing tasks, of lack of exercise, of that curious mingling which we call social life; but any one who takes seriously our faint feuds or even our narrow judgments does not know and love the Middle Western villages, nor understand that seeds and buds are not the norm of bloom. Instance, if you will, this case and that to show the contrary. But the days of pioneering, when folk drew together in defense, left us a heritage which no isolated instances can nullify. On the whole, we are all friends.

There could be no better basis for the changes that are upon us. The new ideals of the great world are here, in our little world. Though there is an impression to the contrary, the Zeitgeist is not attracted exclusively to cities. From design in our County Fair fancy work to our attitude toward the home, new things are come upon us. To be sure, we do not trust our power. We cling to our “Well, you can’t change human nature” as to a recipe, though it does change before our eyes. If it were only that impossible plaques and pillows have given place to hammered brass and copper, our disregard might be warrantable. But now when one praises home life, home cooking, home training, home influence, we are beginning to say: “Whose home?” And the sentimentalities do not give place to reason without healthful cause. And when of late, from the barber’s children’s lunch basket, the young professor of our village took out the heavy, sunken biscuits of the barber’s new wife and threw them in the ash box, even the barber’s wrathful imprecations could not draw our sympathy to the side of the hearth, where once it would have stood upholding domestic unsanctities.

To be sure, in the village the old confusion between motherhood and domestic service still maintains. But both in cities and in villages perhaps it is to-morrow rather than to-day that we shall see women free from kitchen drudgery, and home economics a paid profession, such as nursing has lately become. Though when one of us said this, at a meeting of the Friendship Village Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement Sodality, one of us rejoined:

“What! Do you mean that a womanly woman wants any occupation besides housekeeping? Why, I love my dishpan!”

And the burst of merriment which followed was almost a surprise to those who laughed, and to whom this extreme statement had unwittingly revealed the whole absurdity.

Already in the village it is almost impossible to get maids, even though many have entirely ceased to say “hired girl.” Night after night we scan the Friendship Village Daily Paper (who shall read that name and not admit that we live close to the essentials?) and see the same half dozen “Wanted … for General Housework” appeals drearily repeated. And while some of us merely wonder how “Mis’ Whatever is getting along, and the weather what it is, and her baby not through the second summer,” there are those of us who feel secret thanksgiving in the fact that we, too, are painfully playing our part in forcing the recognition of domestic service as an eight-hour-a-day profession. And “But who would answer the bell evenings?” and “Why, none of us could afford to keep help then!” sound as unreasoning as they did when apprentices first changed to clerks.

Even the village theology broadens before our eyes. Few can be found who do not admit the anomaly of denominationalism, even while they cling to it. And it is no longer considered reprehensible to state openly, as well as to believe secretly, that the truth about living which Jesus taught has been told in certain forms whose ancient interpretation no thinking person holds. Something of the glory of the God-ward striving of all religions is felt, here and there, in the village, and now and then, in a village sitting-room, you come on some one who is cherishing a vision like that of John on Patmos, and saying nothing.

To be sure, one village theologian was heard to cry:

“Empty or full, I tell you them churches are all necessary, every one of ’em. And if we had more kinds of ’em, then they’d be necessary too.”

But there seemed to be something the matter with this. And on the whole there is more food for thought in another observation from among us:

“We always used to think Drug-store Curtsie was an infidel. And, land, there he is making the best State Senator we ever had. I guess we exaggerated it some, maybe.”

We are beginning to be ashamed of charity and to see that our half dozen dependent families need not have been dependent, if their own gifts had been developed and their industry had not been ill-directed or exploited. And if that is true of the Rickers and the Hennings and the Hasketts and the Bettses and the Doles, we begin to suspect that it may be true of all poverty. We are beginning to be ashamed of many another inefficiency and folly which anciently we took for granted as necessary evils. Of his own product the village brewer says openly: “The time is coming when they won’t let us make it. And I don’t care how soon it comes.” And this in the village, where we used to laugh at Keddie Bingy, drunken and singing on Daphne Street, and whose wife we censured for leaving him to shift for himself!

We are coming to applaud divorce when shame or faithlessness or disease or needless invalidism have attended marriage, and for a village woman to continue to earn her livelihood by marriage under these circumstances is now to her a disgrace hardly less evident than that of her city sister. We continue to cover up far too much, just as in the cities they cover too much. But we do mention openly things which in the old days we whispered or guessed at or whose peril we never knew at all. And when, by a visiting lecturer, more is admitted than we would ourselves admit, we are splendidly, if softly, triumphant with: “That couldn’t have been done here twenty years ago.”

To be sure, with some of the new terminology, we have had desperate battle.

”I don’t like them eugenics,” one of us said, “I know two of ’em that’s separated.”

Yet on the whole we tell one another that our new state law is “going to be” a good thing.

Inevitably, then, romance among us is becoming something else. The village girl no longer waits at the gate in a blue sash. There are no gates. She is wearing belts. And I heard one of the girls of the village say:

“A girl used to act so silly about being happy. What did she mean by that – being made love to forever by somebody forever in love with her? Well, I want something more than that in mine.”

And there, in her vague, slang speech lay the outline of the shadow that is pointing women to share in the joys of the race and the delight of a chosen occupation. And though not many of us here in the village will say as much as that, yet genetically the thing goes on: Women choose occupations, develop gifts, sail for Europe, refuse “good offers” even if these do hold out “support,” or come out with fine, open hatred of the menial tasks which their “womanliness” once forbade them to disavow. And beyond, in all relevancy, there opens the knowledge that motherhood is a thing to be trained for, as much as stenography!

Yet meadows sweet with hay, and twilights, and firelight, and the home (around the evening lamp) have not passed; but they lie close to a Romance of Life now coming fast upon us, away here in the village – a Romance of Life as much finer than sentimentality as modern romance is saner than chivalry.

In spite of our Armory and our strong young guard, we are quite simply for peace, and believe that it will come. And because we have among us a few of other races whom we understand, race prejudice is a thing which never troubles us; and I think that we could slip into the broadened race concept without realizing that anything had happened. The only thunder of change which does not echo here is the thunder of the industrial conflict. But although most of the village takes sides quite naïvely with the newspaper headlines, yet that is chiefly because the thing lies beyond our experience, and because – like the dwellers in cities – we lack imagination to visualize what is occurring. As far as our experience goes, the most of us are democratic. But when there arises an issue transcending our experience, our tendency is to uncompromising conservatism. And there is hope in the fact that politically many of us are free and think for ourselves, and smile at the abuse that is heaped upon great leaders, and understand with thanksgiving – away here in the village – how often the demagogues of to-day are the demi-gods of to-morrow.

We well know that with all this changing attitude, we are losing a certain homely flavor. Old possibilities, especially of humor, no longer have incidence. Our sophistication somehow includes our laughter. In these days, in what village could it happen, at the funeral of a well-beloved townsman, with the church filled to do him honor, that the minister should open his eyes at the close of the prayer, and absently say:

“The contribution will now be received.”

Yet that and the consequent agonized signaling of one of the elders are within my memory, and are indelibly there because they occurred at the first funeral in my experience, and I could not account for the elder’s perturbation.

Or, where among us now is the village dignitary who would take the platform to speak at the obsequies of a friend and would begin his eulogy with:

“I have always had a great respect for the deceased, for – [pointing with his thumb downward at the coffin] for that gentleman down there.”

Or, when a deacon with squeaking shoes is passing the plate, in what modern village church is to be found the clergyman who will call out:

“Brother, you’ll find my rubbers there in the lecture room. You best slip ’em on.”

Or the deacon who would instantly reply, overshoulder:

“I’ve got a pair of me own,” and so go serenely on, squeaking, to the last pew.

Yet these happened, not long ago, and we smile at the remembrance, knowing that just those things could not take place among us now. New absurdities occur. But there is a different humor, even of misadventure and the maladroit. Instead of deploring the old days, however, I think that nearly all of us say what I have heard a woman of ninety saying – not, “Things are not what they used to be in the old days,” but:

“Well, I’m thankful that I’ve lived to see so many things different.”

That is the way in which we grow old in the little towns of the Middle West. We are not afraid to know that old ways of laughter and old flavors of incident depart, with the old ills. Since disease and marching armies and the like are to leave us, humor and sentimentalism of a sort and gold lace of many sorts must likewise be foregone. We say: “The day is dead. Long be the day.” May we not boast of it? For such adaptation would not be wonderful in a city, where impressions crowd and are cut off. But it stands for a special and precious form of vitality, in little towns.

It is for this acceptance of growth that our days of pioneering together and our slow drawing together of later years form a solid basis. For we are knit, and now the fabric is beginning to be woven into a garment. Some are alarmed at the lack of seams, some anxiously question the color, some shake their heads and say that it will never fit. But there are those of us here in the village who think that we understand.

And now we are beginning to suspect that there is more to understand than we have guessed. For there was some one “From Away” who came to us and said:

“Your little town is a piece of to-morrow. Once a village was a source of quiet and content and prettiness. Once a village was withdrawn from what is going forward in the world. But now the village is the very source of our salvation, social and artistic. It is not that we are finding humanity at its best in the villages, but that there humanity is at the point where it is most in type. And in this lie the hidings of our power.”

We listened, not all of us believing. We were used to being praised for our cedar fenceposts, our mossy roofs, our bothersome, low-hanging elm boughs, even, of late, for our irregular streets and our creamy brick. But in our hearts we had been feeling apologetic that we had not more two-storey shops, not more folk who go away in Summer, and not even one limousine. And now we were hearing that we are playing a part social, artistic, which no city can play!

It is true that from the days of those old happenings which I have been recounting, down to now, the form of our self-expression has changed somewhat, its quality, never. Always we have been ourselves, simply and unreservedly. Not boldly ourselves, for we do not know that there is anything to be bold about. But in the small things, quite simply ourselves. And once I would have called that a negative quality…

But what of this salvation, social and artistic, and how are these to be fostered by our one characteristic? And with that, the cries of the world, from art, from life, are in one’s ears: Against imitation, against artificiality, against seeing the thing as a thousand others have seen it and saying it as a thousand others have said it, against moving in a mass which has won the right to no social adhesion, but instead stupidly coheres, and does its thinking by bad proxies. And we – who do already let ourselves be ourselves – who knows what contribution we may be bringing, now that there have come upon us these new reactions to convention, these slow new freedoms of belief?

There in the cities, humanity is in the melting pot, we say; and the figure is that of countless specializations dissolved in one general mass. We revert to type individually, but we advance to type collectively. Unquestionably this collective advance is a part of experience. But it is not an ultimate of experience. Somewhere there beyond, shining, is a new individualism, whose incarnations shall flow to no melting pot, but instead shall cling together, valued for their differentiation, and like a certain precious form of life, low in the scale, shall put out a thousand filaments, and presently move away together, a unit.

Already the individual experiences this progression – that is, he does if he does! – and, through his own unique value, wins back in later life to that simplicity which is every one’s birthright. It is Nietzsche’s threefold metamorphosis of the spirit: First the camel, then the lion, last the child. What if, standing in that simplicity, at the point where humanity is most in type, the village does open the social and artistic outlook of To-morrow?

Some of us believe. Some of us say: “What if the federation of the world is to begin in the little towns? What if it is beginning there now…”

“A village is nothing but a little something broke off from a city,” says Calliope Marsh, “only it never started in hitched to the city in the first place. And that makes all the difference.”

It is Calliope Marsh who tells, in her own speech, these Neighborhood Stories. And if she were given to selecting texts, I think that she would have selected one which says that life is something other than that which we believe it to be.

Portage, Wisconsin,

August, 1914.

A GREAT TREE

I never had felt so much like Christmas, said Calliope Marsh, as I did that year.

“I wish’t,” I says, when it got ’most time, “I wish’t I knew somebody to have a Christmas tree with.”

“Well, Calliope Marsh,” says Mis’ Postmaster Sykes, looking surprised-on-purpose, the way she does, “ain’t there enough poor and neglected folks in this world to please anybody?”

“I didn’t say have a Christmas tree for,” I says back at her; “I says have one with.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that difference,” she says, “I’m sure.”

“I donno,” I says, “as I know either. But there is a difference, somewhere. I’d kind of like to have a tree with folks this year.”

“Why don’t you help on your church tree?” Mis’ Sykes ask’ me. “They’re going to spend quite a little money on theirs this year.”

“I hate to box Christmas up in a church,” I says.

“Why, Calliope Marsh!” she says, shocked.

I didn’t want to hurt her feelings – I ain’t never one of those that likes to throw their idees in folks’s faces and watch folks jump back. So I tried to talk about something else, but she went right on, trying her best to help me out.

“The ward schools is each going to have a tree this year, I hear,” she says. “Why don’t you go in on your ward, Calliope, and help out there? They’d be real glad of help, you know.”

“I hate to divide Christmas off into wards,” I says to her.

“Well, then, go in with a family,” she says; “any of us’ll be real glad to have you,” she adds, generous. “We would. Come to ours – we’re going to have a great big tree for the children. I’ve been stringing the pop-corn and cutting the paper for it whenever I got an odd minute. The Holcombs, they’re going to have one too – and Mis’ Uppers and Mis’ Merriman and even the Hubbelthwaits and Abigail Arnold, for her little nieces. I never see a year when everybody was going to celebrate so nice. Come on with one of us, why don’t you?”

“Well,” I says, “mebbe I will. I’ll see. I don’t know yet what I will do,” I told her. And I went off down the street. What I wanted to say was, “I hate to box Christmas up in a family,” but I didn’t quite dare – yet.

Friendship Village ain’t ever looked much more like Christmas, to my notion, than it did that December. Just the right snow had come – and no more; and just the right cold – and no more. The moon was getting along so’s about the night of the twenty-fifth it was going to loom up big and gold and warm over the fields on the flats, where it always comes up in winter like it had just edged around there to get sort of a wide front yard for its big show, where the whole village could have a porch seat.

You know when you live in a village you always know whether the moon is new or to the full or where it is and when it’s going to be; but when you live in a city you just look up in the sky some night and say “Oh, that’s so, there’s the moon,” and go right on thinking about something else. Here in the village that December everything was getting ready, deliberate, for a full-moon Christmas, like long ago. The moon and the cold and the snow, and all them public things, was doing their best, together, for our common Christmas. All but us. It seemed like all of us humans was working for it separate.

Tramping along there in the snow that night, I thought over what Mis’ Sykes had said, and about all the places she’d mentioned over was going to have Christmas trees. And I looked along to the houses, most of ’em lying right there on Daphne Street, where they were going to have ’em – I could see ’em all, one tree after another, lighted and streaming from house to house all up and down Daphne Street, just the way they were going to look.

And then there was the little back streets, and the houses down on the flats, where there wouldn’t be any trees nor much of any Christmas. Of course, as Mis’ Sykes had said, the poor and the neglected are always with us – yet; but I didn’t want to pounce down on any of ’em with a bag of fruit and a box of animal crackers and set and watch ’em.

That wasn’t what I meant by having a Christmas with somebody.

“There’d ought to be some place – ” I was beginning to think, when right along where I was, by the Market Square, I come on five or six children, kicking around in the snow. It was ’most dark, but I could just make ’em out: Eddie Newhaven, Arthur Mills, Lily Dorron, and two-three more.

“Hello, folks,” I says, “what you doing? Having a carnival?” Because it’s on the Market Square that carnivals and some little circuses and things that belongs to everybody is usually celebrated.

Little Arthur Mills spoke up. “No,” he says, “we was just playing we’s selling a load of Christmas trees.”

“Christmas trees,” I says. “Why, that’s so. This is where they always bring ’em to sell – big load of ’em for everybody, ain’t it?”

“They’re going to bring an awful big load here this time,” says Eddie Newhaven – “big enough for everybody in town to have one. Most of the fellows is going to have ’em – us and Ned Backus and the Cartwrights and Joe Tyrril and Lifty – all of ’em.”

“My,” I says, “what a lot of Christmas trees! Why, if they was set along by the curbstone here on Daphne Street,” I says, just to please the children and make a little talk with ’em, “why, the line of ’em would reach all up and down the town,” I says. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Little Lily claps her hands.

“Oh, yes,” she cries, “wouldn’t that be fun? With pop-corn strings all going from one to the other?”

“It would be a grand sight,” says I, looking down across the Market Square. There, hanging all gold and quiet, like it didn’t think it amounted to much, right over the big cedar-of-Lebanon-looking tree in the Square, was the moon, crooked to a horn.

“Once,” says Eddie Newhaven, “when they was selling the Christmas trees here, they kept right on selling ’em after dark. And they stood ’em around here and put a little light in each one. It was awful nice. Wouldn’t it be nice if they’d do that all over the Square some time!”

“It would be a grand sight,” says I again, “but one that the folks in this town would never have time for…”

While I spoke I was looking down across Market Square again toward the moon hanging over the cedar-of-Lebanon-looking tree.

“There’s a pretty good-looking tree there already,” I says idle. “What a grand thing it would be lit up,” says I, for not much of any reason – only to keep the talk going with the children. Then something went through me from my head to my feet. “Why not light it some time?” I says.

The children set up a little shout – part because they liked it, part because they thought such a thing could never be. I laughed with ’em, and I went on up the street – but all the time something in me kept on saying something, all hurried and as if it meant it. And little ends of ideas, and little jagged edges of other ideas, and plans part raveled out that you thought you could knit up again, and long, sharp motions, a little something like light, kept going through my head and going through it.

Down to the next corner I met Ben Cory, that keeps the livery-stable and sings bass to nearly everybody’s funeral and to other public occasions.

“Ben,” I says excited, though I hadn’t thought anything about this till that minute, “Ben – you getting up any Christmas Eve Christmas carols to sing this year?”

He had a new string of sleigh-bells over his shoulder, and he give it a shift, I recollect, so’s they all jingled.

“Well,” he says, “I did allow to do it. But I’ve spoke to one or two, and they donno’s they can do it. Some has got to sing to churches earlier in the evening and they donno’s they want to tune up all night. And the most has got to be home for family Christmas.”

“There ain’t,” I says, “no manner o’ doubt about the folks that’d be glad to listen, is there, provided you had the singers?”

“Oh, sure,” he says. “Folks shines up to music consider’ble, Christmas Eve. It – sort of – well, it – ”

“Yes,” I says, “I know. It does, don’t it? Well, Ben Cory, you get your Christmas-carol singers together and a-caroling, and I’ll undertake that there sha’n’t nothing much stand in the way of their being out on Christmas Eve. Is it a bargain?”

His face lit up, all jolly and hearty.

“Why, sure it’s a bargain,” he says. “I’ll get ’em. I wanted to, only I didn’t want to carol ’em any more than they wanted to be caroled. I’ll get ’em,” he says, and gives his bells a hunch that made ’em ring all up and down Daphne Street – that the moon was looking down at just as if it was public property and not all made up of little private plans with just room enough for us four and no more, or figures to that effect.

I donno if you’ve ever managed any kind of a revolution?

They’s two kinds of revolutions. One breaks off of something that’s always been. You pick up the broke piece and try to throw it away to make room for something that’s growing out of the other part. And ’most everybody will begin to tell you that the growing piece ain’t any good, but that the other part is the kind you have always bought and that you’d better save it and stick it back on. But then they’s the other kind of revolution that backs away from something that’s always been and looks at it a little farther off than it ever see it before, and says: “Let’s us move a little way around and pay attention to this thing from a new spot.” And real often, if you put it that way, they’s enough people willing to do that, because they know they can go right back afterward and stand in the same old place if they want to.

Well, this last was the kind of a revolution I took charge of that week before Christmas. I got my plans and my ideas and my notions all planned and thought and budded, and then I presented ’em around, abundant.

The very next morning after I’d seen the children I started out, while I had kind of a glow to drape around the difficulties so’s I couldn’t see ’em. I went first to the store-keepers, seeing Christmas always seems to hinge and hang on what they say and do. And I went to Eppleby Holcomb, because I knew he’d see it like I done – and I wanted the brace of being agreed with, like you do.

Eppleby’s store was all decorated up with green cut paper and tassels and turkey-red calico poinsettias, and it looked real nice and tasty. And the store was full of the country trade. The little overhead track that took the bundles had broke down just at the wrong minute, and old rich Mis’ Wiswell’s felt soles had got stuck half-way, and Eppleby himself was up on top of a counter trying to rescue ’em for her, while she made tart remarks below. When he’d fished ’em out and wrapped ’em up for her,

“Eppleby,” I says, “would you be willing to shut up shop on Christmas Eve, or wouldn’t you?”

He looked kind of startled. “It’s a pretty good night for trade, you know, Calliope?” says he – doubtful.

“Why, yes,” I says, “it is. But everybody that’s going to give presents to people’ll give presents to people. And if the stores ain’t open Christmas Eve, folks’ll buy ’em when the stores is open. Is that sense, or ain’t it?”

He knew it was. And when I told him what I’d got hold of, stray places in my head, he says if the rest would shut he’d shut, and be glad of it. Abigail Arnold done the same about her home bakery, and the Gekerjecks, and two-three more. But Silas Sykes, that keeps the post-office store, he was firm.

“If that ain’t woman-foolish,” he says, “I donno what is. You ain’t no more idee of business than so many cats. No, sir. I don’t betray the public by cutting ’em off of one evening’s shopping like that.”

It made a nice little sentence to quote, and I quoted it consider’ble. And the result was, the rest of ’em, that knew Silas, head and heart, finally says, all right, he could keep open if he wanted to, and enjoy himself, and they’d all shut up. I honestly think they kind of appreciated, in a nice, neighborly way, making Silas feel mean – when he’d ought to.

It was a little harder to make the Sunday-school superintendents see the thing that I had in my head. Of course, when a thing has been the way it has been for a good while, you can’t really blame people for feeling that it’s been the way it ought to be. Feelings seems made that way. Our superintendent has been our superintendent for ’most forty years – ever since the church was built – and of course his thoughts is kind of turned to bone in some places, naturally.

His name is Jerry Bemus, and he keeps a little harness shop next door to the Town Hall that’s across from Market Square. When I went in that day he was resting from making harnesses, and he was practising on his cornet. He can make a bugle call real nice – you can often hear it, going up and down Daphne Street in the morning, and when I’m down doing my trading I always like to hear it – it gives me kind of a nice, old-fashioned feeling, like when Abigail Arnold fries doughnuts in the back of the Home Bakery and we can all smell ’em, out in the road.

“Jerry,” I says, “how much is our Sunday-school Christmas tree going to cost us?”

Jerry’s got a wooden leg, and he can not remember not to try to cross it over the other one. He done that now, and give it up.

“We calc’late about twenty-five dollars,” says he, proud.

“What we going to do to celebrate?”

“Well,” he says, “have speaking pieces – we got a program of twenty numbers already,” says he, pleased. “And a trimmed tree, and an orange, and a bag of nuts and candy for every child,” he says.

“All the other churches is going to do the same,” I says. “Five trees and five programs and five sets of stuff all around. And all of ’em on Christmas Eve, when you’d think we’d all sort of draw together instead of setting apart, in cliques. Land,” I says out, “that first Christmas Eve wouldn’t the angels have stopped singing and wept in the sky if they could of seen what we’d do to it!”

“Hush, Calliope,” says Jerry Bemus, shocked. “They ain’t no need to be sacrilegious, is they?”

“Not a bit,” says I; “we’ve been it so long a’ready, worshiping around in sections like Hottentots. Well, now,” I says, “do you honestly think we’ve all chose the best way to go at Christmas Eve for the children, filling them up with colored stuff and getting their stummicks all upset?”

We had quite a little talk about it, back and forth, Jerry and me. And all of a sudden, while I was trying my best to make him see what I saw, I happened to notice his bugle again.

“There ain’t no thrill in none of it,” I was saying to him. “Not half so much,” I says, “as there is in your bugle. When I hear that go floating up and down the street, I always kind of feel like it was announcing something. To my notion,” I says, “it could announce Christmas to this town far better than forty-’leven little separate trimmed-up trees… Why, Jerry,” I says out sudden, “listen to what I’ve thought of…”

A little something had come in my head that minute, unexpected, that fitted itself into the rest of my plan. And it made Jerry say, pretty soon, that he was willing to go with me to see the other superintendents; and we done so that very day. Ain’t it funny how big things work out by homely means – by homely means? Sole because the choir-leader in one choir had resigned because the bass in that choir was the bass in that choir, and so they didn’t have anybody there to train their Christmas music, and sole because another congregation was hard up and was having to borrow its Christmas celebration money out of the foreign missionary fund – we got ’em to see sense. And then the other two joined in.

The schools were all right from the first, being built, like they are, on a basis of belonging to everybody, same as breathing and one-two other public utilities, and nothing dividing anybody from anybody. And I begun to feel like life and the world was just one great bud, longing to open, so be it could get enough care.

The worst ones to get weaned away from a perfectly selfish way of observing Christ’s birthday was the private families. Land, land, I kept saying to myself them days, we all of us act like we was studying kindergarten mathematics. We count up them that’s closest to us, and we can’t none of us seem to count much above ten.

Not all of ’em was that way, though. Well – if it just happens that you live in any town whatever in the civilized world, I think you’ll know about what I had said to me.

On the one hand it went about like this, from Mis’ Timothy Toplady and the Holcombs and the Hubbelthwaits and a lot more:

“Well, land knows, it’d save us lots of back-aching work – but – will the children like it?”

“Like it?” I says. “Try ’em. Trust ’em without trying ’em if you want to. I would. Remember,” I couldn’t help adding, “you like to be with the children a whole lot oftener than they like to be with you. What they like is to be together.”

And, “Well, do you honestly think it’ll work? I don’t see how it can – anything so differ’nt.”

And, “Well, they ain’t any harm trying it one year, as I can see. That can’t break up the holidays, as I know of.”

But the other side had figured it out just like the other side of everything always figures.

“Calliope,” says Mis’ Postmaster Sykes, “are you crazy-headed? What’s your idee? Ain’t things all right the way they’ve always been done?”

“Well,” says I, conservative, “not all of ’em. Not wholesale, I wouldn’t say.”

“But you can’t go changing things like this,” she told me. “What’ll become of Christmas?”

“Christmas,” I says, “don’t need you or me, Mis’ Sykes, to be its guardians. All Christmas needs is for us to get out of its way, and leave it express what it means.”

“But the home Christmas,” she says, ’most like a wail. “Would you do away with that?”

Then I sort of turned on her. I couldn’t help it.

“Whose home?” I says stern. “If it’s your home you mean, or any of the thousands of others like it where Christmas is kept, then you know, and they all know, that nothing on earth can take away the Christmas feeling and the Christmas joy as long as you want it to be there. But if it’s the homes you mean – and there’s thousands of ’em – where no Christmas ever comes, you surely ain’t arguing to keep them the way they’ve been kept?”

But she continued to shake her head.

“You can do as you like, of course,” she said, “and so can everybody else. It’s their privilege. But as for me, I shall trim my little tree here by our own fireside. And here we shall celebrate Christmas – Jeddie and Nora and father and me.”

“Why can’t you do both?” I says. “I wouldn’t have you give up your fireside end of things for anything on earth. But why can’t you do both?”

Mis’ Sykes didn’t rightly seem to know – at least she didn’t say. But she give me to understand that her mind run right along in the self-same groove it had had made for it, cozy.

Somehow, the longer I live, the less sense I seem to have. There’s some things I’ve learned from twenty-five to thirty times in my life, and yet I can’t seem to remember them no more than I can remember whether it’s sulphite or sulphate of soda that I take for my quinsy. And one of these is about taking things casual.

That night, for instance, when I come round the corner on to Daphne Street at half-past seven on Christmas Eve, I thought I was going to have to waste a minute or two standing just where the bill-board makes a shadow for the arc-light, trying to get used to the idea of what we were doing – used to it in my throat. But there wasn’t much time to spend that way, being there were things to do between then and eight o’clock, when we’d told ’em all to be there. So I ran along and tried not to think about it – except the work part. ’Most always, the work part of anything’ll steady you.

The great cedar-of-Lebanon-looking tree, standing down there on the edge of the Market Square and acting as if it had been left from some long-ago forest, on purpose, had been hung round with lines and lines of strung pop-corn – the kind that no Christmas tree would be a Christmas tree without, because so many, many folks has set up stringing it nights of Christmas week, after the children was in bed, and has kept it, careful, in a box, so’s it’d do for next year. We had all that from the churches – Methodist and Presbyterian and Episcopal and Baptist and Catholic pop-corn, and you couldn’t tell ’em apart at all when you got ’em on the tree. The festoons showed ghostly-white in the dark and the folks showed ghostly-black, hurrying back and forth doing the last things.

And the folks was coming – you could hear ’em all along Daphne Street, tripping on the bad place that hadn’t been mended because it was right under the arc-light, and coming over the hollow-sounding place by Graham’s drug-store, and coming from the little side streets and the dark back streets and the streets down on the flats. Some of ’em had Christmas trees waiting at home – the load had been there on the Market Square, just like we had let it be there for years without seeing that the Market Square had any other Christmas uses – and a good many had bought trees. But a good many more had decided not to have any – only just to hang up stockings; and to let the great big common Christmas tree stand for what it stood for, gathering most of that little garland of Daphne Street trees up into its living heart.

Over by the bandstand I come on them I’d been looking for – Eddie Newhaven and Arthur Mills and Lily Dorron and Sarah and Mollie and the Cartwrights and Lifty and six-eight more.

“Hello, folks,” I says. “What you down here for? Why ain’t you home?”

They answered all together:

“For the big tree!”

“Are you, now?” I says – just to keep on a-talking to ’em. “Whose tree?”

I love to remember the way they answered. It was Eddie Newhaven that said it.

“Why, all of us’s!” he said.

All of us’s! I like to say it over when they get to saying “mine” and “theirs” too hard where I am.

When it was eight o’clock and there was enough gathered on the Square, they done the thing that was going to be done, only nobody had known how well they were going to do it. They touched the button, and from the bottom branch to the tip-top little cone, the big old tree came alight, just like it knew what it was all about and like it had come out of the ground long ago for this reason – only we’d never known. Two hundred little electric lights there were, colored, and paid for private, though I done my best to get the town to pay for ’em, like it ought to for its own tree; but they was paid for private – yet.

It made a little oh! come in the crowd and run round, it was so big and beautiful, standing there against the stars like it knew well enough that it was one of ’em, whether we knew it or not. And coming up across the flats, big and gold and low, was the moon, most full, like it belonged, too.

“And glory shone around,” I says to myself – and I stood there feeling the glory, outside and in. Not my little celebration, and your little celebration, and their little celebration, private, that was costing each of us more than it ought to – but our celebration, paying attention to the message that Christ paid attention to.

I was so full of it that I didn’t half see Ben Cory and his carolers come racing out of the dark. They was all fixed up in funny pointed hoods and in cloaks and carrying long staves with everybody’s barn-yard lanterns tied on the end of ’em, and they run out in a line down to the tree, and they took hold of hands and danced around it, singing to their voices’ top a funny old tune, one of them tunes that, whether you’ve ever heard it before or not, kind of makes things in you that’s older than you are yourself wake up and remember, real plain.

And Jerry Bemus shouted out at ’em: “Sing it again – sing it again!” and pounded his wooden leg with his cane. “Sing it again, I tell you. I ain’t heard anybody sing that for goin’ on forty years.” And everybody laughed, and they sung it again for him, and some more songs that had come out of the old country that a little bit of it was living inside everybody that was there. And while they were singing, it came to me all of a sudden about another night, ’most three hundred years before, when on American soil that lonesome English heart, up there in Boston, had dreamed ahead to a time when Christmas would come here…

“But faith unrolls the future scrolls;
Christmas shall not die,
Nor men of English blood and speech
Forget their ancestry – ”

or any other blood, or any other speech that has in it the spirit of what Christ come to teach. And that’s all of us. And it felt to me as if now we were only just beginning to take out our little single, lonely tapers and carry them to light a great tree.

Then, just after the carols died down, the thing happened that we’d planned to happen: Over on one side the choirs of all the churches, that I guess had never sung together in their lives before, though they’d been singing steadily about the self-same things since they was born choirs, begun to sing —

Silent night, holy night.

Think of it – down there on the Market Square that had never had anything sung on it before except carnival tunes and circus tunes. All up and down Daphne Street it must of sounded, only there was hardly anybody far off to hear it, the most of ’em being right there with all of us. They sung it without anybody playing it for ’em and they sung it from first to last.

And then they slipped into another song that isn’t a Christmas carol exactly, nor not any song that comes in the book under “Christmas,” but something that comes in just as natural as if it was another name for what Christmas was – “Nearer, my God, to thee,” and “Lead, Kindly Light,” and some more. And after a bar or two of the first one, the voices all around begun kind of mumbling and humming and carrying the tunes along in their throats without anybody in particular starting ’em there, and then they all just naturally burst out and sung too.

And so I donno who done it – whether the choirs had planned it that way, or whether they just thought of it then, or whether somebody in the crowd struck it up unbeknownst to himself, or whether the song begun to sing itself; but it come from somewhere, strong and clear and real – a song that the children has been learning in school and has been teaching the town for a year or two now, sung to the tune of “Wacht am Rhein”:

The crest and crowning of all good —
Life’s common goal – is brotherhood.

And then everybody sung. Because that’s a piece you can’t sing alone. You can not sing it alone. All over the Market Square they took it up, and folks that couldn’t sing, and me that can’t sing a note except when there’s nobody around that would recognize me if they ever saw me again – we all sung together, there in the dark, with the tree in the midst.

And we seemed long and long away from the time when the leader in one of them singing choirs had left the other choir because the bass in the other choir was the bass in the other choir. And it was like the Way Things Are had suddenly spoke for a minute, there in the singing choirs come out of their separate lofts, and in all the singing folks. And in all of us – all of us.

Then up hopped Eppleby Holcomb on to a box in front of the tree, and he calls out:

“Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas – on the first annual outdoor Christmas-tree celebration of Friendship Village!”

When he said that I felt – well, it don’t make any difference to anybody how I felt; but what I done was to turn and make for the edge of the crowd just as fast as I could. And just then there come what Eppleby’s words was the signal for. And out on the little flagstaff balcony of the Town Hall Jerry Bemus stepped with his bugle, and he blew it shrill and clear, so that it sounded all over the town, once, twice, three times, a bugle-call to say it was Christmas. We couldn’t wait till twelve o’clock – we are all in bed long before that time in Friendship Village, holiday or not.

But the bugle-call said it was Christmas just the same. Think of it … the bugle that used to say it was war. And the same minute the big tree went out, all still and quiet, but to be lit again next year and to stay a living thing in between.

When I stepped on to Daphne Street, who should I come face to face with but Mis’ Postmaster Sykes. I was feeling so glorified over, that I never thought of its being strange that she was there. But she spoke up, just the same as if I’d said: “Why, I thought you wasn’t coming near.”

“The children was bound to come,” she says, “so I had to bring ’em.”

“Yes,” I thought to myself, “the children know. They know.”

And I even couldn’t feel bad when I passed the post-office store and see Silas sitting in there all sole alone – the only lit store in the street. I knew he’d be on the Market Square the next year.

They went singing through all the streets that night, Ben Cory and his carolers. “Silent night, holy night” come from my front gate when I was ’most asleep. It was like the whole town was being sung to by something that didn’t show. And when the time comes that this something speaks clear all the time, – well, it ain’t a very far-off time, you know.

EXIT CHARITY

“Yes, sir,” said Silas Sykes, “we got to get some charity goin’ in this town.”

“Charity,” I says over, meditative. “How do you mean, Silas?”

“How do I mean?” says Silas, snappy. “Don’t you know your Bible, woman?”

“I ain’t so sure I do as I use’ to be,” I told him. “I use’ to think charity was givin’ things away. Then I had a spell I use’ to think it was coverin’ up their faults. Now I dunno as I’m clear what it is.”

Silas bridled some and snorted soft.

“Charity,” says he, “charity, Calliope Marsh, is doin’ nice things for folks.”

“Doin’ nice things for folks,” I says over – and I wanted to remember them words of Silas and I longed to feed ’em to him some time. But I just took up my pound of prunes and went out the post-office store, thoughtful.

Outside on the walk, I come on Absalom. He stood kicking his heels on the hydrant and looking up and down the street like he was waiting, for something that there wasn’t any such thing, and he knew it. Absalom Ricker he was, that has work in the canning factory, when any. I’d been wantin’ to see him.

“Evenin’, Ab,” says I. “How’s Gertie?”

“She ain’t on her feet yet,” says he, rueful.

“How’s your mother’s rheumatism?”

“It ain’t in her fingers yet,” says he, bright.

“How’re you?”

“Oh, me!” he says. “I’m rosy.”

“Your arm,” says I; “will it let you go to work yet?”

“Not yet,” he says, “the thermometer actin’ up zero, so. But still, I’m rosy – rosy.”

“Well,” says I, “bein’ you’re more rosy than busy, I wonder if you couldn’t do something for us ladies. You know,” I says, “that nice, new, galvanized iron garbage tank us ladies bought and run one season, collectin’ up garbage? Well, I dunno but what we’ve got to sell it, the Council refusin’ to run it, ’count of economy. And I wondered if you’d go and hev a look at it, and tell us what we’d ought to get for it, and where.”

“Why, sure I will,” says Absalom. “I’d be glad,” says he, kind of pleasant and important, “to accommodate.”

He went off down the street, walking sidewise, like he does, his coat and beard blowing out the same side, his pockets sagging till they looked like mouths smiling, and his hat trained up to a peak. Everybody liked Absalom – he had such a nice, one-sided smile and he seemed to be so afraid he was going to hurt your feelings. He’d broke his right arm in Silas’s canning factory that fall, and he’d been laying off ever since. His wife done washings, and his mother finished vests from the city, and the children stuffed up cracks in the walls and thought it was a game.

They was others in the town, come lately, and mostly in the factory, that was the same way: the Bettses and the Doles and the Haskitts and the Hennings. They lived in little shacks around, and the men worked in the canning factory and the gas-works and on the tracks, and the women helped out. And one or two of ’em had took down ill; and so it was Silas, that likes to think of things first, that up and said “do something.” And it was him put the notice in the papers a few nights later to all citizens – and women – that’s interested in forming a Charity Society to meet in Post-Office Hall, that he has the renting of.

I was turning in the stairway to the hall that night when I heard somebody singing. And coming down the walk, with her hat on crooked and its feather broke, was old Bess Bones. Bess has lived in Friendship Village for years – and I always thought it was real good for the town that she done so. For she is the only woman I ever knew of that ain’t respectable, and ain’t rich or famous either, and yet that goes to everybody’s house.

She does cleaning and scrubbing, and we all like to get her to do it, she does it so thoroughly conscientious. She brings us in little remedies she knows about, and vegetables from her own garden, and eggs. Sometimes some of us asks her to set down to a meal. Once she brought me a picked chicken of hers. And it’s good for Friendship Village because we all see she’s human, and mostly with women like that we build a thick wall and don’t give ’em a chance to even knock out a brick ever after.

“I was just goin’ to see you, Miss Marsh,” she says. “I got kind o’ lonesome and I thought I’d bring you over a begonia slip and set a while.”

“I’m sorry, Bess,” I says. “I’m going to a meeting.”

“What kind of meetin’?” she says. “P’litical?”

“Yes,” I says, “something like that.” And that was true, of course, being politics is so often carried on by private charity from the candidates.

“I’d kind of like to go to a meeting again,” she says, wistful. “I sung to revival meetings for a month once, when I was a girl.”

“I guess you wouldn’t like this one,” I says. “Come to see me to-morrow and I’ll tell you about it.”

And then I went up-stairs and left her standing there on the sidewalk, and I felt kind of ashamed and sneaking. I didn’t know why. But I says to myself, comforting, that she’d probably of broke out and sung in the middle of the meeting, if she had come. Her head ain’t right, like the most of ours; but hers takes noisy forms, so you notice more.

Eleven of us turned out to the meeting, which was a pretty good proportion, there being only fifteen hundred living in Friendship Village all together. Silas was in the chair, formal as a funeral.

“The idear, as I understand it,” says Silas, when the meeting was open, “is to get some Charity going. We’d ought to organize.”

“And then what?” asks Mis’ Toplady.

“Why, commence distributin’ duds and victuals,” says Silas.

“Well-a,” says Mis’ Toplady, “and keep on distributing them all our lives?”

“Sure,” says Silas, “unless you’re goin’ to be weary in well-doing. Them folks’ll keep right on being hungry and nekked as long as they live.”

“Why will they?” says Mis’ Toplady, puzzled.

“Well, they’re poor folks, ain’t they?” says Silas, scowling.

“Why, yes,” says Mis’ Toplady; “but that ain’t all they is to ’em, is it?”

“What do you mean?” says Silas.

“Why, I mean,” says Mis’ Toplady, “can’t they be got goin’ so’s they sha’n’t be poor folks?”

Silas used his face like he smelled something. “Don’t you know no more about folks than that?” says he. “Facts is facts. You’ve got to take folks as they are.”

“But you ain’t taking folks nowheres. You’re leavin’ ’em as they are, Silas,” says Mis’ Toplady, troubled.

Mis’ Silas Sykes spoke up with her way of measuring off just enough for everybody.

“It’s this way Silas means,” she says. “Folks are rich, or medium, or poor. We’ve got to face that. It’s always been so.”

Mis’ Toplady kind of bit at her lower lip a few times in a way she has, that wrinkles up her nose meditative. “It don’t follow out,” she says, firm. “My back yard used to be all chickweed. Now it’s pure potatoes.”

“Folks,” says Mis’ Sykes, real witherin’, “folks ain’t dirt.”

“That’s what I thought,” says Mis’ Toplady, dry.

Silas went right over their heads, like he does.

“We’ve all been doin’ what we could for these folks,” he says, “but we ain’t been doin’ it real wise. It’s come to my notice that the Haskitts had four different chickens give to ’em last Christmas. What we want to do is to fix up some sort of a organization so’s our chickens won’t lap.”

“Well,” says Timothy Toplady, “then let’s organize. That ain’t hard. I move it be done.”

It was done, and Silas was made president, like he ever loves to be, and Timothy treasurer, and me secretary, because they could get me to take it.

“Now,” says Silas, “let’s get down to work and talk over cases.”

“Cases!” says Mis’ Toplady, distasteful. “They ain’t got the smallpox, have they? Say folks.”

“I guess you ain’t very used to Charity societies,” says Silas, tolerant. “Take the Haskitts. They ain’t got a pane o’ glass in their house.”

“Nor no wood, much,” says Timothy. “When I went to get the rent the cat was asleep on the cook-stove.”

“What rent do they give you, Timothy?” says Silas.

“Five dollars,” he says, pursin’ his lips.

“That’s only three per cent. on the money. I don’t see how you can afford it.”

“I am indulgin’ myself a little,” Timothy admits. “But I been thinkin’ o’ raisin’ it to six. One thing, though; I ain’t give ’em any repairs. If I’d had a six-dollar family in there I’d had to fixed the window-glass and cleaned out the cistern and mended the roof. It about evens itself up.”

“Yes,” says Silas, agreeful, “I guess it does. Well, they can have some boxes to burn, out of the store. I’ll take ’em on my list. You can’t go givin’ ’em truck, Timothy. If you do, they’ll come down on to you for repairs. Now the Ricker’s…”

Abigail Arnold spoke up. “They’re awful,” she says. “Mis’ Ricker ain’t fit to wash, and the children just show through. Ab’s arm won’t let him work all winter.”

“You take him, Silas,” says Timothy. “He’s your own employee.”

Silas shakes his head. “He’s been chasin’ me for damages ever since he got hurt,” he says.

“Ain’t he goin’ to get any, Silas?” says Mis’ Toplady, pitiful.

“Get any?” says Silas. “It was his own fault. He told me a week before about them belts bein’ wore. I told him to lay off till I could fix ’em. But no – he kep’ right on. Said his wife was sick and his bills was eatin’ him up. He ain’t nobody to blame but his own carelessness. I told him to lay off.”

I looked over to Mis’ Toplady, and she looked over to me. And I looked at Abigail and at Mis’ Holcomb, and we all looked at each other. Only Mis’ Sykes – she set there listening and looking like her life was just elegant.

“Can’t you take that case, Mis’ Toplady?” says Silas.

“I’ll go and see them folks,” she says, troubled. And I guess us ladies felt troubled, one and all. And so on during all the while we was discussing the Doles and the Hennings and the Bettses and the rest. And when the meeting was over we four hung around the stove, and Mis’ Sykes too.

“I s’pose it’s all right,” Mis’ Toplady says. “I s’pose it is. But I feel like we’d made a nice, new apron to tie on to Friendship Village, and hadn’t done a thing about its underclothes.”

“I’m sure,” says Mis’ Sykes, looking hurt for Silas that had cut out the apron, “I’m sure I don’t see what you mean. Faith, Hope, and Charity, and the greatest of these is Charity. Does that mean what it says, or don’t it?”

“Oh, I s’pose it does,” says Mis’ Toplady. “But what I think is this: Ain’t there things that’s greater than the whole three as most folks mean ’em?”

Mis’ Sykes, she sort of gasped, in three hitches. “Will you tell me what?” she says, as mad as if she’d been faith, hope, and charity personally.

“I dunno …” says Mis’ Toplady, dreamy, “I dunno the name of it. But ladies, it’s something. And I can feel it, just as plain as plain.”

It was three-four weeks before the new Charity Association got really to running, and had collected in enough clothes and groceries so’s we could start distributing. On the day before the next monthly meeting, that was to be in Post-Office Hall again, we started out with the things, so’s to make our report to the meeting. Mis’ Toplady and I was together, and the first place we went to was Absalom Ricker’s. Gertie, Absalom’s wife, was washing, and he was turning the wringer with his well hand, and his mother was finishing vests by the stove, and singing a tune that was all on a straight line and quite loud. And the children, one and all, was crying, in their leisure from fighting each other.

“Well,” says Mis’ Toplady, “how you getting on now? Got many washings to do?”

Gertie Ricker, she set down on the wood-box all of a sudden and begun to cry. She was a pretty little woman, but sickly, and with one of them folding spines that don’t hold their folks up very good.

“I’ve got three a week,” she says. “I can earn the rent all right.”

“I tell her,” says Absalom, “if she didn’t have no washings, then there’d be something to cry for.”

But he said it sort of lack-luster, and like it come a word at a time.

“Do you get out any?” says Mis’ Toplady, to improve the topic.

“Out where?” says Gertie. “We ain’t no place to go. I went down for the yeast last night.”

It kind of come over me: Washing all day and her half sick; Absalom by the stove tending fire and turning wringer; his old mother humming on one note; the children yelling when they wasn’t shouting. I thought of their cupboard and I could see what it must hold – cold boiled potatoes and beans, I bet. I thought of their supper-table … of early mornings before the fire was built. And I see the kind of a life they had.

And then I looked over to the two loaves of bread and the can of fruit and the dozen eggs and the old coat of Timothy’s that we’d brought, and it seemed to me these touched the spot of what was the trouble in that house about as much as the smoke that oozed into the room from the chimney. And I glanced over to Mis’ Toplady and there she set, with ideas filterin’ back of her eyes.

“We’ve brought you a few things, being you’re sick – ” she begun, sort of embarrassed; but Absalom, he cut in short, shorter than I ever knew him to speak.

“Who’s we?” he says.

“Why-a,” says Mis’ Toplady, stumbling some over her words, “the new society.”

Absalom flushed up to the roots of his hair. “What society?” says he, sharp.

Mis’ Toplady showed scairt for just a minute, and then she met his eyes brave. “Why,” she says, “us – and you. You belong to it. We had it in the paper, and met to the Post-Office Hall the other night. It’s for everybody to come to.”

“To do what?” says Absalom.

“Why-a,” says Mis’ Toplady, some put to it, “to – to do nice things for – for each other.”

“The town?” says Absalom.

“The town,” agrees Mis’ Toplady – and pressed ahead almost like she was finding something to explain with. “We meet again to-morrow night,” says she. “Couldn’t you come – you and Gertie? Come – and mebbe belong?”

Absalom’s mad cooled down some. First he looked sheepish and then he showed pleased. “Why, I dunno – could we, Gertie?” he says.

“Is it dress-up?” says Gertie.

“Mercy, no,” says Mis’ Toplady, “it’s every-day. Or not so much so. You’ll come, won’t you?”

“Mebbe,” says Gertie.

When we got outside, I looked at Mis’ Toplady, kind of took aback; and it was so that she looked at me.

“Silas’ll talk charity his way to that meeting, you know,” I says. “I’m afraid he’ll hurt Absalom and Gertie. I’m afraid…”

Mis’ Toplady looked kind of scairt herself. “I done that before I meant to do it no more’n nothing in this world,” she says, “but I dunno – when I begun handin’ ’em out stuff I was ashamed to do it without putting it like I done.”

“I know,” I says, “I know.” And know I did. I’ve give things to poor folks lots of times and glowed up my spine with a virtuous feeling – but something big was always setting somewhere inside me making me feel ashamed of the glow and ashamed of the giving. Who am I that I should be the giver, and somebody else the givee?

We went to the Bettses’ and caught Mis’ Betts washing up two days’ of dishes at four o’clock in the afternoon, and we heard about Joe’s losing his job, and we talked to the canary. “We’d ought not to afford him,” Mis’ Betts says, apologetic. “I always hate to take the money to get him another package of seed – and we ain’t much of any crumbs.”

And we went to the Haskitts’ and found her head tied up with the toothache. Folks looks sick enough with their heads tied up around; but when it comes to up and down, with the ends sticking up, they always look like they was going to die. And we went to the Doles’ and the Hennings’ and carried in the stuff; and one and all them places, leaving things there was like laying a ten-cent piece down on a leper, and bowing to him to help on his recovery. And every single place, as soon as ever we’d laid down the old clothes we’d brought, we invited ’em to join the organization and to come to the meeting next night.

“What’s the name of this here club?” Joe Betts asks us.

By that time neither Mis’ Toplady nor me would have tied the word “Charity” to that club for anything on earth. We told him we was going to pick the name next night, and told him he must come and help.

“Do come,” Mis’ Toplady says, and when Mis’ Betts hung off: “We’re goin’ to have a little visiting time – and coffee and sandwiches afterwards,” Mis’ Toplady adds, calm as her hat. And when we got outside: “I dunno what made me stick on the coffee and the sandwiches,” she says, sort of dazed, “but it was so kind of bleak and dead in there, I felt like I just had to say something cheerful and human – like coffee.”

“Well,” I says, “us ladies can do the refreshments ourselves, so be the rest of the Board stands on its head at the idee of doing ’em itself. As I presume likely it will stand.”

And this we both of us presumed alike. So on the way home we stopped in to the post-office store and told Silas that we’d been giving out a good many invitations to folks to come to the meeting next night, and mebbe join.

“That’s good,” says Silas, genial; “that’s good. We need the dues.”

“We kind of thought coffee and sandwiches to-morrow night, Silas,” says Mis’ Toplady, experimental, “and a little social time.”

“Don’t you go to makin’ no white-kid-glove doin’s out o’ this thing,” says Silas. “You can’t mix up charity and society too free. Charity’s religion and society’s earthy. And that’s two different things.”

“Earthy,” I says over. “Earthy! So’m I. Ain’t it a wonderful word, Silas? Well, us two is going to do the coffee and sandwiches for to-morrow night,” I added on, deliberate, determined and serene.

When Silas had done his objecting, and see he couldn’t help himself with us willing to solicit the whole refreshments, and when we’d left the store, Mis’ Toplady thought of something else: “I dunno,” she says, “as we’d ought to leave folks out just because they ain’t poor. That,” she says, troubled, “don’t seem real right. Let’s us telephone to them we can think of that didn’t come to the last meeting.”

So we invited in the telephone population, just the same as them that didn’t have one.

The next night us ladies got down to the hall early to do the finishing touches. And on Daphne Street, on my way down, I met Bess Bones again, kind of creeping along. She’d stopped to pat the nose of a horse standing patient, hitched outside the barber-shop saloon – I’ve seen Bess go down Daphne Street on market-days patting the nose of every horse one after another.

“Hello, Mis’ Marsh,” Bess says. “Are you comin’ down with another meeting?”

“Yes, sir, Bess,” I says, “I am.” And then a thought struck me. “Bess,” I says – able now to hold up my head like my skull intended, because I felt I could ask her – “you come on up, too – you’re invited to-night. Everybody is.”

Her face lit up, like putting the curtain up.

“Honest, can I?” she says. “I’d love to go to a meeting again – I’ve looked in the window at ’em a dozen times. I’ll get my bread and be right up.”

I tell you, Post-Office Hall looked nice. We’d got in a few rugs and plants, and the refreshment table stood acrost one corner, with a screen around the gas-plate, and the cups all piled shiny and the sandwiches covered with white fringed napkins. And about seven o’clock in come three pieces of the Friendship Village Stonehenge Band we’d got to give their services, and they begun tuning up, festive. And us ladies stood around with our hands under our white aprons; and you’d have thought it was some nice, human doings instead of just duty.

Before much of anybody else had got there, in come them we’d invited first: Absalom Ricker and Gertie, her looking real nice with a new-ironed bow to her neck, and him brushed up in Timothy’s old coat and his hair trained to a high peak. And the Bettses – Joe with his beard expected to cover up where there wasn’t a necktie and her pretending the hall was chilly so’s to keep her cloak on over whatever wasn’t underneath. And the Haskitts, him snapping and snarling at her, and her trying to hush him up by agreeing with him promiscuous. And Mis’ Henning that her husband didn’t show up. We heard afterwards he was down in the barber-shop saloon, dressed up to come but backed out after. And most everybody else come – not only the original ’leven, but some of the telephone folks, and some that the refreshment-bait always catches.

Silas come in late – he’d had to wait and distribute the mail – and when he see the Rickers and the rest of them, he come tearing over to us women in the refreshment corner.

“My dum!” he says, “look at them folks setting down there – Rickerses and Henningses and Bettses and them – how we goin’ to manage with them here? The idear of their coming to the meeting!”

“Ain’t it some their meeting, Silas?” I says. “The whole society was formed on their account. Seems to me they’ve got a right – just like in real United States Congress doings.”

“But, my dum, woman,” says Silas, “how we going to take up their cases and talk ’em over with them setting there, taking it all in? Ain’t you got no delicacy to you?” he ends up, ready to burst.

And of course, when you come to think of it, Congress always does do its real business in committees, private and delicate.

Mis’ Toplady was ready for Silas.

“You’re right about it,” she says. “We can’t do that, can we? Suppose we don’t do so very much business to-night? Let’s set some other talk goin’. We thought mebbe – do you s’pose your niece would sing for us, Silas?”

“Mebbe,” says Silas, some mollified, through being proud to sinning of his visiting niece; “but I don’t like this here – ” he was going on.

“Ask her,” says Mis’ Toplady. “She’ll do it for you, Silas.”

And Silas done so, ignorant as the dead that he’d been right down managed. Then he went up stage and rapped to begin.

Well, of course I had to read the minutes, being secretary so, and I was ready, having set up half the night before to make them out. And of course, the job was some delicate; but I’d fixed them up what I thought was real nice and impersonal. Like this:

“A meeting of citizens of Friendship Village was held, – , in Post-Office Hall, for the purpose of organizing a society to do nice things for folks. (Then I give the names of the officers.) Several plans was thought over for making presents to others and for distributing the same. Several families was thought of for membership. It was voted to have two kinds of members, honorary and active. The active pay all the dues and provide the presents, but everybody contributes what they can and will, whether work or similar. A number of ways was thought of for going to work. Things that had ought to be done was talked over. It was decided to hold monthly meetings. Meeting adjourned.”

That seemed to me to cover everything real neat, nobody ever paying much attention to the minutes anyway. I suppose that’s why they give ’em such a small, stingy name. And when Silas got to reports of committees, Mis’ Toplady was no less ready for him. She hopped right up to say that the work that had been put in her hands was all finished, the same as was ordered, and no more to be said about it. And when it come to Unfinished Business, there was me on my feet again to say that the work that had been put in my hands wasn’t finished and there’d be more to be said about it later.

Then Silas asked for New Business, and there was a pause. And all of a sudden Absalom Ricker got on to his feet with his arm still in its sling.

“Mr. President,” he says, so nice and dignified. And when Silas had done his nod, Absalom went on in his soft, unstarched voice: “It’s a real nice idear,” he says, “to get up this here club. I for one feel real glad it’s going. You ain’t got up any line around it. Nobody has to be any one thing in order to get in on it. I’ve thought for a long time there’d ought to be some place where folks could go that didn’t believe alike, nor vote alike, nor get paid alike. I’m glad I come out – I guess we all are. Now the purpose of this here club, as I understand it, is to do nice things for folks. Well, I’ve got a nice thing to propose for us to do. I’ll pitch in and help, and I guess some of the rest of us will. Soon as it comes warm weather, we could get a-hold of that elegant galvanized iron swill-wagon that ain’t in use and drive it around the town to do what it’s for. Us that don’t have work so awful steady could do it, nice as a mice. I dunno whether that comes inside what the club was intended for, but it would be doing a kind of a nice thing for folks, my way of thinking.”

Up hopped Eppleby Holcomb – Eppleby being one of those prophet men that can see faint signs sticking up their heads where there ain’t much of anything showing.

“That’s the ticket, Mr. President,” says he. “Us that don’t have horses or chickens can sense that all right. If Absalom moves it, I second it.”

“Will you help drive it around, Betts?” says Absalom. “Hank Haskitt? Ben Dole? We’re all of us home a good deal of the time – we could keep it goin’, amongst us. All right,” says he, when the men had nodded matter-of-course nods, “sure I make it a motion.”

Silas put the motion, looking some dazed. And when it carried, hearty, us ladies sitting over by the refreshment table, and that had bought the wagon, we all burst out and spatted our hands. We couldn’t help it. And everybody kind of turned around and passed some remark – and it made a real nice minute.

Then Silas spoke up from the chair kind of sour – being in the Council so, that wouldn’t run the wagon.

“The thing’s in the city tool-house now,” says he, “and it’s a good deal in the way where it is. It had ought to be put somewheres.”

Up pipes Ben Dole, kind of important and eager, and forgot to address the chair till he was half through, and then done so and ducked and flushed and went on anyhow. And the purport of his remarks was, that he could set that tank in the barn of his lot, that he didn’t have no horse for and no use of, and keep it there till spring. And I seconded what he meant, and it got itself carried, and Ben set down like he’d done a thing, same as he had done.

Then, when Silas said what was the next pleasure of the meeting, Mis’ Toplady mentioned that they needed carpet rags to make up some rugs for two-three places, and who could give some and help sew them? Mis’ Sykes said she could, and Mame and Abigail and me and some more offered up, and Mis’ Toplady wrote our names down, and, “How about you, Gertie?” says she to Gertie Ricker.

Gertie looked scairt for a minute, and then my heart jumped pleasant in its socket, for I see Absalom nudge her. Yes, sir, he nudged her to say she would, and all of a sudden I knew that he wanted his wife to be taking some part like the rest was; and she says, faint, “I guess so.” And when Mis’ Sykes asked round, Mis’ Haskitt and Mis’ Henning said they didn’t have much of any rags, but they could come and help sew the rags of them that did have.

“So do,” says Mis’ Toplady, hearty, “and we’ll meet to my house next Tuesday at two o’clock, sha’n’t we? And have a cup o’ tea.”

“What else is the pleasure of the meeting?” says Silas, balancing on his toes as chairman-like as he knew how.

Then on the second row from the back, who should we see getting up but Bess Bones. I hadn’t seen her come in and I’d forgot all about her. Her hat was on one side, and the plume that was broke in the middle was hanging idle, not doing any decorating; and I could see the other ladies thinking with one brain that ten to one she’d been drinking, and would break out singing in our very midst. But she hadn’t nor she didn’t. Only what she said went over the room shrill, as her singing voice was.

“For the land’s sakes,” says Bess, “if you’re goin’ to hold protracted meetin’s in this hall, why don’t you clean up the floor? I never see such a hole. I motion I come in an’ scrub it up. I ain’t no thousand dollars to subscribe, but a cake o’ soap’ll keep you from stickin’ to the boards.”

“Second the motion!” says I, all over me.

And even Silas broke down and smiled like he don’t think no president had ought to do. And everybody else kind of laughed and looked at each other and felt the kind of a feeling that don’t run around among folks any too often. And when Silas put the motion, kind of grudging, we all voted for it abundant. And Bess set there showing pleased, like an empty room that has had a piece of furniture got for it.

I dunno what it was that minute done to us all. I’ve often wondered since, what it was. But somehow everybody kind of felt that they all knew something each other knew, only they couldn’t rightly name it. Ab and Joe Betts, Mame Holcomb and Eppleby, Gertie and Mis’ Toplady and me – we all felt it. Everybody did, unless it was Silas and Mis’ Sykes. Silas didn’t sense nothing much but that he hoped the meeting was going to run smooth, and Mis’ Sykes – well, right in the middle of that glowing minute I see her catch sight of Mame Holcomb’s new red waist and she set there thinking of nothing but waist either with eyes or with mind.

But the rest of us was sharing a big minute. And I liked us all to be feeling that way – I ain’t never liked anything better, without it’s the Christmas feeling or the Thanksgiving feeling. And this feeling was sort of like all two. And I betted if only we could make it last – Absalom wouldn’t be getting done out of his arm’s money-value by Silas, nor the Bettses out of their decent roof by Timothy, nor they wouldn’t be no club formed to dole out charity stuff, but we would all know a better way. And things would be different. Different.

I leaned clear past three chairs and nudged Mis’ Toplady. She looked round, and I see she was just wiping her eyes on her apron-string – Mis’ Toplady never can find her handkerchief when she most wants to cry. And I never said a word – I didn’t need to – but we nodded and we both knew what we both knew: that there was a bigger thing in the room that minute than ever Silas knew or guessed when he planned out his plan. And it was what Mis’ Toplady had meant when she told him there was something “greater than these” – as most folks mean ’em.

I didn’t lose the feeling through the piece by the band that come next, nor through the selection by Silas’s niece. The music really made the feeling more so – the music, and our all setting there hearing it together, and everybody in the room being givers, and nobody givees. But when the music stopped, and while I was still feeling all glorified up, what did Mis’ Sykes do but break in, something like throwing a stone through a window.

“I should think we might as well get the club name settled to-night,” she says with her little formal pucker. “Ain’t the Charity Club that we spoke of real nice and dignified for our title?”

It was Mis’ Toplady that exploded. It just bare happened it wasn’t me, but it turned out to be her.

“Land, land,” she says, “no! Not one person in fifteen hundred knows what charity means anyhow, and everybody’d get the wrong idee. Let’s call it just its plain natural name: The Friendship Village Club. Or, The Whole World Club. Or I dunno but The Universe Club!”

I knew I wouldn’t have the sense to keep still right through things. I never do have.

“No, sir!” I says out, “oh, no sir! Universe Club ain’t big enough. For if they is any other universe anywhere maybe that might feel left out.”

Long before we had settled on any one name, I remember Mis’ Toplady come out from behind the refreshments screen and says: “Mr. President, the coffee and sandwiches has come to a boil. Can’t you peter off the meeting and adjourn it for one week?”

Which wasn’t just exactly how she meant to say it. But it seemed to come in so pat that everybody rustled, spontaneous, in spite of themselves. And us ladies begun passing the plates.

After they’d all gone, we was picking up the dishes when Silas come in to see to the stoves.

“Oh, Silas,” I says, “wasn’t it a splendid meeting? Wasn’t it?”

Silas was pinching, gingerish, at the hot stove-door handle, rather than take his coat-tail for a holder.

“I s’pose you’re satisfied,” he says. “You fed ’em, even if we didn’t get much done.”

“Not get much done!” I says – “not get much done! Oh, Silas, what more did you want to do than we see done here to-night?”

“Well, what kind of a charity meeting was that?” says he, sour and bitter rolled into one.

I went up to him with all of Mis’ Toplady’s fringed tea-napkins in my hands that it was going to take her most of the next day to do up.

“Why, Silas,” I says, “I dunno if it was any kind of a charity meeting. But it was a town meeting. It was a folks’ meeting. It was a human meeting. Can’t you sense it? Can’t you sense it, Silas?” I put it to him: “We got something else besides charity going here to-night – as sure as the living sun.”

“I like to know what?” he snaps back, and slammed the stove door.

Mis’ Toplady, she looked at him tranquil over the tops of her two pairs of spectacles.

“Something that’s in folks,” says she – and went on hunting up her spoons.

THE TIME HAS COME

When the minister’s wife sent for me that day, it was a real bad time, because I’d been doing up my tomato preserves and I’d stood on my feet till they was ready to come off. But as soon as I got the last crock filled, I changed my dress and pushed my hair up under my hat and thought I’d remember to keep my old shoes underneath my skirt.

The minister’s parlor is real cool and shady – she keeps it shut up all day, and it kind of smells of its rose jar and its silk cushions and the dried grasses in the grate; and I sank down in the horse-hair patent rocker, and was glad of the rest. But I kept wondering what on earth the minister’s wife could want of me. It wasn’t the season for missionary barrels or lumberman’s literature – the season for them is house-cleaning time when we don’t know what all to do with the truck, and we take that way of getting rid of it and, same time, providing a nice little self-indulgence for our consciences. But this was the dead of Summer, and everybody sunk deep in preserves and vacations and getting their social indebtedness paid off and there wasn’t anything going around to be dutiful about for, say, a month or six weeks yet, when the Fall woke up, and the town begun to get out the children’s school-clothes and hunt ’em for moths.

“Well, Calliope,” says the minister’s wife, “I s’pose you wonder what I’ve got important to say to you.”

“True,” says I, “I do. But my feet ache so,” I says graceful, “I’m perfectly contented to set and listen to it, no matter what it is.”

She scraped her chair a little nearer – she was a dear, fat woman, that her breathing showed through her abundance. She had on a clean, starched wrapper, too short for anything but home wear, and long-sleeved cotton under-wear that was always coming down over her hands, in July or August, and making you feel what a grand thing it is to be shed of them – I don’t know of anything whatever that makes anybody seem older than to see long, cotton undersleeves on them and the thermometer 90° at the City Bank corner.

“Well,” says she, “Calliope, the Reverend and I – ” she always called her husband the Reverend – “has been visiting in the City, as you know. And while there we had the privilege of attending the Church of the Divine Life.”

“Yes,” says I, wondering what was coming.

“Never,” says she, impressive, “never have I seen religion at so high an ebb. It was magnificent. From gallery to the back seat the pews were filled with attentive, intelligent people. Outside, the two sides of the street were lined with their automobiles. And this not one Sunday, but every Sunday. It was the most positive proof of the interest of the human heart in – in divine things. It was grand.”

“Well, well,” says I, following her.

“Now,” she says, “the sermon wasn’t much. Good, but not much. And the singing – well, Lavvy Whitmore can do just as good when she sets about it. Then what made folks go? The Reverend and I talked it over. And we’ve decided it isn’t because they’re any better than the village folks. No, they’ve simply got in the habit of it, they see everybody else going, and they go. And it give us an idea.”

“What was that?” says I, encouraging, for I never see where she was driving on at.

“The same situation can be brought about in Friendship Village,” says she. “If only everybody sees everybody going to church, everybody else will go!”

I sat trying to figger that out. “Do you think so?” says I, meantime.

“I am sure so,” she replies, firm. “The question is, How shall we get everybody to go, till the example becomes fixed?”

“How, indeed?” says I, helpless, wondering which of the three everybodys she was thinking of starting in on.

“Now,” she continues, “we have talked it over, the Reverend and I, and we have decided that you’re the one to help us. We want you to help us think up ways to get this whole village into church for, say, four Sundays or so, hand-running.”

I was trying to see which end to take hold of.

“Well-a,” I says, “into which church?”

The minister’s wife stared at me.

“Why, ours!” says she.

“Why into ours?” I ask’ her, thoughtful.

“My goodness,” says she, “what do you s’pose we’re in our church for, anyway?”

“I’m sure,” says I, “I don’t know. I often wonder. I’m in our particular one because my father was janitor of it when I was a little girl. Why are you in it?”

She looked at me perfectly withering.

“I,” she says cold, “was brought up in it. There was never any question what one I should be in.”

“Exactly,” says I, nodding. “And your husband – why is he in our special church?”

“My dear Calliope,” says she, regal, “he was born in it. His father was minister of it – ”

“Exactly,” I says again. “Then there’s Mame Holcomb, her mother sung in our choir, so she joined ours. And Mis’ Toplady, they lived within half a mile of ours out in the country, and the other churches were on the other side of the hill. So they joined ours. And the Sykeses, they joined ours when they lived in Kingsford, because there wasn’t any other denomination there. But the rest of the congregation, I don’t happen to know what their reasons was. I suppose they was equally spiritual.”

The minister’s wife bent over toward me.

“Calliope Marsh,” says she, “you talk like an atheist.”

“Never mind me,” I says. “Go on about the plan. Everybody is to be got into our church for a few Sundays, as I understand it. What you going to give them when you get them there?”

She looked at me kind of horror-struck.

“Calliope,” says she, “what has come over you? The Reverend is going to preach, of course.”

“About what?” says I, grim. “Describin’ the temple, and telling how many courts it had? Or giving us a little something exegitical – whatever that means?”

For a minute I thought she was going to cry, and I melted myself. If I hadn’t been preserving all the morning, I wouldn’t never have spoke so frank.

“Honest,” I says, “I don’t know what exegitical does mean, but I didn’t intend it insulting. But tell me this – just as truthful as if you wasn’t a minister’s wife: Do you see any living, human thing in our church service here in the village that would make a living, human young folk really want to go to it?”

“They’d ought to want to go to it,” says she.

“Never mind what they’d ought to want,” says I, “though I ain’t so clear they’d ought to want it, myself. Just as truthful as if you wasn’t a minister’s wife – do you?”

“No,” says she, “but – ”

“Now,” I says, “you’ve said it. And what is true for young is often true for old. If you want to meet that, I’m ready to help you. But if you just want to fill our church up full of folks, I don’t care whether it’s full or not – not that way.”

“Well,” she says, “I’m sure I only meant what was for the best in my husband’s work – ”

I put out my hand to her. All of a sudden, I saw her as she was, doing her level best inside the four walls of her – and I says to myself that I’d been a brute and, though I was glad of it, I’d make up for it by getting after the thing laying there underneath all the words.

For Friendship Village, in this particular, wasn’t any different from any other village or any other town or city of now. We had fifteen hundred folks and we had three churches, three ministers at Eight Hundred Dollars apiece annually, three cottage organs, three choirs, three Sunday School picnics in Summer, three Sunday School entertainments in Winter, three sets of repairs, carpets, conventions and delegates, and six stoves with the wood to buy to run ’em. And out of the fifteen hundred folks, from forty to sixty went to each church each Sunday. We were like that.

In one respect, though, we differed from every other town. We had Lavvy Whitmore. Lavvy was the town soprano. She sung like a bird incarnate, and we all got her for Sunday School concerts and visiting ministers and special occasions in general. Lavvy didn’t belong to any church. She sort of boarded round, and we couldn’t pin her down to any one choir.

“For one reason,” she said, “I haven’t got enough clothes to belong to any one choir. I’ve been driven distracted too many times looking at the same plaid waist and the same red bird and the same cameo pin in choirs to do it for anybody else. By kind of boarding round the way I do, I can give them all a change.”

The young minister over to the White Frame church – young Elbert Kinsman – he took it harder than the rest.

“How are your convictions, Miss Lavvy?” he had once been heard to say.

“My convictions?” she answered him. “They are that there isn’t enough difference in the three to be so solemn and so expensive over. Especially the expensive,” she added. “Is there now?”

“No,” young Elbert Kinsman had unexpectedly replied, “I myself don’t think there is. But – ”

“The only thing is,” Lavvy had put in irreverent, “you can’t get rid of that ‘but,’ and I have!”

“You send for Lavvy,” I says now to our minister’s wife. “She’ll think of something.”

So there we were, with a kind of revival on our hands to plan before we knew it, because our minister’s wife was like that, much more like that than he was. He had a great deal of emphasis, but she had a great deal of force.

Going home that morning, I went a little out of my way and come round by Shepherd’s Grove. Shepherd’s Grove lays just on the edge of the village, not far from the little grassy triangle in the residence part – and it always rests me to go there. Walking through it that morning I remember I thought:

“Yes, I s’pose this kind of extry effort must be all right – even Nature enters into it real extensive. Every Summer is an extry effort – a real revival, I guess. But oh,” I says to myself, wishful, “that’s so spontaneous and unanimous! I wish’t folks was more like that…”

I was filling in for organist while ours was away on a vacation to her husband’s relatives. That sounds so grand and I’d ought to explain that I can only play pieces that are written in the natural. But by picking out judicious, I can get along through the morning and evening services very nice. I don’t dare ever attempt prayer-meeting, because then somebody is likely to pipe up and give out a hymn that’s in sharps or flats, without thinking. I remember one night, though, when I just had to play for prayer-meeting being the only one present that knew white notes from black. There was a visiting minister. And when he give out his first hymn, I see it was “There is a Calm for Those That Weep” in three flats, and I turned around on the stool, and I says, “Wouldn’t you just as lief play the piece on the opposite page? That’s wrote natural.” He done so, looking some puzzled, and well he might, for the one I mentioned happened to be, “Master, the Tempest is Raging.” I was a kind of a limited organist but then I filled in, vacations and such, anyhow. And it was so I was doing that Summer.

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