"'Miss Marsh,' says Christopher.
"Mis' Emmons's living-room was like a cup of something cool, and I set
there in the after-supper light having such a nice rested time drinking
it in that at first I didn't hear him.
"'Miss Marsh,' he says again, and pulled at my dress. I put out my hand
to him and he took it. Sometimes I donno but hands are a race of beings
by themselves that talk and answer and do all the work and act like
slaves and yet really rule the world.
"'Is it me telling my feet where to go or do they tell me where I go?'
asked Christopher.
"'You can have it either way you want,' I told him. 'Some does one way
and some does the other. Which way do you like?'
"He thought for a minute, twisting on one foot with the other up in his
hand.
"'I'd like 'em to know how without our sayin' so,' he announces finally.
"'Well,' I says, 'I left out that way. That's really the best way of
all.'
"He looked at me eager.
"'Is it a game?' he says.
"'Yes,' I told him.
"'What's its name?' he ask' me.
"'Game of Life,' I told him again.
"He thought about it, still twisting. Then he done one of his littlest
laughs, with his head turned away.
"'My feet heard you,' he says. 'Now they know how to play.'
"'I hope so, Christopher,' says I, and kissed him on the back of his
neck. That made him mad, like it usually done.
"'My neck is my neck,' says he, 'and it's shut in my collar. It ain't
home to-day.'
"'Is your mouth home?' I ask' him.
"And it was.
"I could of set there talking with him all evening, but not on the night
of Sodality's Annual. I'd stopped by for Mis' Emmons. She was getting
ready, and while I waited I could hear folks passing on their way to the
schoolhouse where the meeting was. For the town was all het up about
what the meeting was going to do.
"I'd seen half-dozen or so of us that afternoon when we was putting
plants on the hall platform, and we'd all spoke our minds.
"'I'm gaspin',' observed Mis' Sturgis, 'to take a straw vote of us on
this amendin' business. Near as I can make out, it's going through.'
"'Near as I can make out,' says Marne Holcomb, 'a good deal more than
amending is going on here to-night. It looks to me as if Sodality was
just going to get into its own Cemetery and be forgot, and as if
something else was coming to meet us--something big!'
"Mis' Toplady spoke up, comfortable, down on her knees putting green
paper on the pots.
"'Well, my land!' she says, 'I've noticed two-three things in my
lifetime. And one is, that do what whoever will, things do change. And
so whenever a new change pops up, I always think: "Oh, I guess you're
comin' along anyway. I donno's I need to help." An' yet somethin' in me
always prances to pitch in, too.'
"Timothy was there, occupying himself with the high places us ladies
couldn't get up to.
"'Well,' says he, 'if folks stop dying, like Sodality evidently intends
they shall if it goes out of business, maybe you'll stay home some,
Amandy, and not always be off laying folks out.'
"'I know it,' Mis' Toplady returns, 'I've laid out most everybody I
know, and of course I'm real glad to do it. But the last dead's hair I
done up, I caught myself thinking how much more interesting it'd be if
they was alive an' could find fault. Doin' for the dead gets kind of
monotonous, _I_ think.'
"'_I_ don't,' says Timothy, decided. 'The minute you work for the
living, you get all upset with being criticised. I s'pose the dead would
find fault, if they could, over the way you cut the grass for 'em. But
they can't an' so there's an end to it, an' we get along, peaceful. If
they was living folks layin' there, you can bet they'd do some back
talk.'
"'Well,' says I, 'I've been sick of Sodality for years. But it was about
the most what-you-might-call society I had, and I hated to give it up.'
"'Me, either,' says Mame Holcomb.
"'Me, either,' says Mis' Uppers. 'I declare I've often said I wouldn't
know what _to_ do if folks stopped dyin' so's Sodality would have to
close out.'
"Mis' Sykes was setting watching the rest of us.
"'Well,' she observes, cold, 'if I was usin' the dead to keep in
society, I donno's I'd own it up.'
"Silas Sykes had just come over from the store to see if there was
anything he could meddle in.
"'Heh!' says he, showing his teeth. 'Not many of Sodality, as I can
see, _deserves_ to die and be done for, civilized.'
"'Don't you worry yourself, Silas Sykes,' says I, 'we're going to be
done things for before we die hereafter, and more civilized than ever
you dreamed of, all up and down your ledger. That's where you do dream,
ain't it, Silas?' I says. And though I said it gay, I meant it frank.
"I remember I looked off down the room, and all of a sudden I see it as
it would be that night, packed with folks. Somehow, we'd got to saying
less about the Sodality part of the meeting, and more about the _open_
part. Most of the town would be there. We'd got the School Board to
leave us announce the second party for that night, following the
meeting, and music was coming, and us ladies had froze the ice-cream,
and the whole time reminded me of a big bud, flowered slow and bursting
sudden.
"'Land, land,' I says, fervent, 'I feel like Friendship Village was a
person that I was going to meet to-night for the first time.'
"'You express yourself so odd sometimes, Calliope,' says Mis' Sykes,
distant--but Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, they
both looked up and nodded, and they knew.
"I set holding Christopher in Mis' Emmons's living-room, and thinking
about this and most everything else, when I looked out and see Insley
going along. He hadn't been back in town since Christopher's father's
funeral, two days before, and I'd been wanting to talk over with him a
thing or two that was likely to come up at the meeting, that of course
he was going to be at, and that had to be handled with thimbles on every
finger, or somebody'd get pricked. So I rapped smart on the upper sash
and called to him through the screen, but not before I had seen the look
on his face. I've caught that special look only once or twice in my
life--the look of somebody passing the house that is different to them
from all other houses in the world. The look that wants to be a look and
won't let itself be, that tries to turn the other way and can't start,
that thinks it's unconscious and knows it isn't, and that finally, with
Insley, give it up and looked Mis' Emmons's house straight in the face
for a minute, as if he might anyhow let himself have that much intimacy.
"I had a little list of things I wanted to see go through that night.
Enough of us was ready to have Sodality perform its last cemetery rite
and bury itself so that that was pretty sure to go through, but I wanted
more than that, and several of us ladies did; and it looked to me like
the schoolhouse and the young folks and the milk and the meat of this
town could be done nice things to, so be we managed the meeting right. I
even had a wild dream that the whole new society might adopt
Christopher. Well, I donno why that's funny. It ain't funny when a club
makes a building or a play or a bazaar or a dinner. Why shouldn't it
make a man?
"I told some of this to Insley, and he caught fire and lit up into a
torch and had it all thought out beforehand, better than I could of
dreamed it. But he made me feel bad. Haunted folks--folks haunted by
something that was and that isn't--always makes me feel bad. How is it
possible, I see he was asking himself the old, wore-out question, to
drive out of the world something that is the world?
"While we talked, Christopher went off to sleep in my arms, and even
while I was so interested, I was enjoying the change that comes--the
head growing heavier and heavier on my arm, as if sleep weighed
something.
"'Poor little kiddie,' I says, stupid.
"'Rich little kiddie,' Insley says, wistful.
"'Dear little kiddie,' says somebody else.
"In the dining room doorway Robin stood--in a doorway as we had first
seen her.
"'Put him over here on the couch, do,' she says. 'It's much too hot to
hold him, Calliope.'
"She'd called me that at Mr. Bartlett's funeral, and I recollect how my
throat went all over me when she done so. Ain't it funny about your own
first name? It seems so _you_ when somebody nice says it for the first
time--more you than you ever knew you were.
"Insley lifted Chris in his arms to do as she said, and then stood
staring at her across the child.
"'I've been thinking,' he said, blunt--it's like watching the sign of
folks to watch the different kind of things that makes them blunt. 'It's
not my affair, but do you think you ought to let Chris get so--so used
to you? What will he do when you're--when you go away?'
"At this she said nothing for a moment, then she smiled up at him.
"'I meant what I told him that night his father died,' she answered.
'I'm going to keep Chris with me, always.'
"'Always?' He stared at her, saw her face mean what she said. 'How fine
of you! How fine of Mr. Proudfit!' said Insley.
"She waited just a breath, then she met his eyes, brave.
"'Not fine of me,' she says--'only fine for me. And not--Mr. Proudfit
at all. I ought to take back what I told you--since I did tell you. That
is not going to be.'
"I don't think Insley meant for a minute to show any lack of formal
respect for Christopher's sleep. But what Insley did was simply to turn
and sit him down, bolt upright, on my lap. Then he wheeled round, trying
to read her face.
"'Do you mean you aren't going to marry him?' he demanded, rough--it's
like watching another sign of folks to watch for the one thing that will
make one or another rough.
"'We are not going to be married,' she said. 'I mean that.'
"I suppose likely the room went away altogether then, Christopher and me
included, and left Insley there in some place a long ways from
everywhere, with Robin's face looking at him. And he just naturally took
that face between his hands.
"'Robin,' he said, 'don't make me wait to know.'
"Insley was the suddenest thing. And land, what it done to her name to
have him say it. Just for a minute it sounded as if her name was the
population of the world,--but with room for everybody else, too.
"I think she put up her hands to take down his hands, but when she
touched them, I think hers must have closed over his, next door to on
purpose.
"'Dear,' she says, 'tell me afterward.'
"In that minute of stillness in which any new heaven is let down on a
suitable new earth, a little voice piped up:--
"'Tell it now,' says the voice. 'Is it a story? Tell it now.'
"And there was Christopher, wide awake where he had been set down rude
on my knee, and looking up at them, patient.
"'I was dreamin' my dream,' he explained, polite. 'It was about all the
nice things there is: You and you and you and hot ice-cream and the
house's party.... Is they any more?' he asked, anxious.
"Robin put out her arms for him, and she and Insley and I smiled at one
another over his head.
"'Ever so many more,' we told him.
"I slipped out then and found Mis' Emmons, and I guess I come as near
shining as anything that's like me can.
"'What's the matter?' she says to me. 'You look as if you'd turned up
the wick.'
"'I did. They have. I won't tell,' I says. 'Oh, Mis' Emmons, I guess
the meeting to-night won't need to adopt Christopher.'
"She looked up at me quick, and then she started shining, too.
"'What a universe it is,' she says, '--what a universe it is.'
"Then we went off down to the meeting together. And the village was
wonderful to go through, like a home some of us had hollowed out of the
hills and was living in, common. As we went walking to the schoolhouse,
the sidewalks seemed to me no more than ways dickered up to fasten us
together, and to fasten us to them whose feet had wore the road before
us, and to lead us to them that was coming, coming after: Christopher
and Eph and Spudge Cadoza and Otie Daniel, or them like these. Otie
Daniel had died the night before. Dr. Barrows had said Eph would not be
lame, but we see he wan't sure of the value of the boy's physical life.
But even so, even so we had a chance with Chris, and we had a chance
with Spudge, and we had millions more. My feet wanted to run along them
roads to meet the millions and my fingers tingled to get things ready.
And as we went down Daphne Street to that meeting, I see how we all
_was_ getting things ready, and I could of sung out for what I saw:--
"For Mame Holcomb, sprinkling clothes on the back porch and hurrying to
get to the hall.
"For Mis' Uppers, picking her currants before she went, so's to get an
early start on her jam in the morning.
"For Viny Liberty, setting sponge for her bread loud enough so we heard
her clear out in the street, and for Libby, shutting up her chicken coop
that they earned their own living with.
"For Mis' Toplady, driving by with Timothy, and her in the brown silk
she'd made herself, like she's made all she's got.
"For Abagail Arnold, wiping out her window to be filled to-morrow with
the pies of her hand.
"For little Mis' Sparks, rocking her baby on the front stoop and
couldn't come to the meeting at all, 'count of having nobody to leave
him with.
"For them that had left cloth bleaching in their side yards and was
saving the price of buying bleached. For them that had done their day's
work, from parlour to wood-shed, and had hurried up the supper dishes
and changed their dress and was on their way to the schoolhouse. For
them that had lived lives like this and had died at it. For all the
little dog-eared, wore-out account books where every one of them women
figured out careful what they couldn't spend. And I looked down the
street till I couldn't see no farther, and yet Daphne Street was going
on, round and round the world, and acrost and acrost it, full of women
doing the same identical way. And I could see away off to the places
that Daphne Street led past, where women has all these things done for
them and where the factories is setting them free, like us here in the
village ain't free just yet, and I felt a wicked envy for them that can
set their hands to the New Work, that us here in Friendship Village is
trying so hard to get in between whiles. And I could see away ahead to
times when sponge and currants and clothes and coops and similar won't
have to be mothered by women 'most as much as children are; but when
women, Away Off Then, will be mothers and workers and general human
beings such as yet we only know how to think about being, scrappy and
wishful. But all the time, in their arms and in ours and nowheres else,
lays all the rest of the world that is ever going to be. And something
in me kind of climbed out of me and run along ahead and looked back at
me over its shoulder and says: 'Keep up, keep up, Calliope.' And before
I knew it, right out loud, I says: 'I will. I will.'
"An hour later, up in the schoolhouse, Silas Sykes stood arguing, to
the top of his tone, that the first work of the reorganized
society--that was to take in the whole town--had ought to be to buy a
bargain Cupid-and-fish fountain he knew of, for the market square.
"'It's going to take years and years to do--everything,' says Mis'
Emmons to me, low.
"But that didn't seem like much of anything to either of us. 'What if it
is,' I says. And she nodded."