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FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
BY ZONA GALE
AUTHOR OF "THE LOVES OF PELLEAS AND ETTARRE"
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1908
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1908,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1908.
_Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
To
EDITH, HARRIET, AND MUSA
AND THE TWO FOR WHOM IT COMES TOO LATE
GEORGIA AND HELEN
THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Friendship Village is not known to me, nor are any of its people, save
in the comradeship which I offer here. But I commend for occupancy a
sweeter place. For us here the long Caledonia hills, the four rhythmic
spans of the bridge, the nearer river, the island where the first birds
build--these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the
"home town," among the "home people." To those who have such a bond to
cherish I commend the little real home towns, their kindly, brooding
companionship, their doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy
fingers. If there were shrines to these things, we would seek them. The
urgency is to recognize shrines.
Portage, Wisconsin,
September, 1908.
Certain of the following chapters have appeared in _The Outlook, The
Broadway Magazine, The Delineator, Everybody's, and Harper's Monthly
Magazine_. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous permission
to reprint these chapters.
CONTENTS
I. The Side Door
II. The Debut
III. Nobody Sick, Nobody Poor
IV. Covers for Seven
V. The Shadow of Good Things to Come
VI. Stock
VII. The Big Wind
VIII. The Grandma Ladies
IX. Not as the World Giveth
X. Lonesome--I
XI. Lonesome--II
XII. Of the Sky and Some Rosemary
XIII. Top Floor Back
XIV. An Epilogue
XV. The Tea Party
XVI. What is That in thine Hand?
XVII. Put on thy Beautiful Garments
XVIII. In the Wilderness a Cedar
XIX. Herself
XX. The Hidings of Power
Friendship Village
I
THE SIDE DOOR
It is as if Friendship Village were to say:--
"There is no help for it. A telephone line, antique oak chairs, kitchen
cabinets, a new doctor, and the like are upon us. But we shall be
mediaeval directly--we and our improvements. Really, we are so now, if
you know how to look."
And are we not so? We are one long street, rambling from sun to sun,
inheriting traits of the parent country roads which we unite. And we are
cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving
our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in
inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and
Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindles out in a slaughter-yard
and a few detached houses of milkmen. The cemetery is delicately put
behind us, under a hill. There is nothing mediaeval in all this, one
would say. But then see how we wear our rue:--
When one of us telephones, she will scrupulously ask for the number, not
the name, for it says so at the top of every page. "Give me one-one,"
she will put it, with an impersonality as fine as if she were calling
for four figures. And Central will answer:--
"Well, I just saw Mis' Holcomb go 'crost the street. I'll call you, if
you want, when she comes back."
Or, "I don't think you better ring the Helmans' just now. They were
awake 'most all night with one o' Mis' Helman's attacks."
Or, "Doctor June's invited to Mis' Sykes's for tea. Shall I give him to
you there?"
The telephone is modern enough. But in our use of it is there not a
flavour as of an Elder Time, to be caught by Them of Many Years from
Now? And already we may catch this flavour, as our Britain
great-great-lady grandmothers, and more, may have been conscious of the
old fashion of sitting in bowers. If only they were conscious like that!
To be sure of it would be to touch their hands in the margins of the
ballad books.
Or we telephone to the Livery Barn and Boarding Stable for the little
blacks, celebrated for their self-control in encounters with the
Proudfits' motor-car. The stable-boy answers that the little blacks are
at "the funeral." And after he has gone off to ask his employer what is
in then, the employer, who in his unofficial moments is our neighbour,
our church choir bass, our landlord even, comes and tells us that, after
all, we may have the little blacks, and he himself brings them round at
once,--the same little blacks that we meant all along. And when, quite
naturally, we wonder at the boy's version, we learn: "Oh, why, the
blacks was standin' just acrost the street, waitin' at the church door,
hitched to the hearse. I took 'em out an' put in the bays. I says to
myself: 'The corp won't care.'" Someway the Proudfits' car and the
stable telephone must themselves have slipped from modernity to old
fashion before that incident shall quite come into its own.
So it is with certain of our domestic ways. For example, Mis' Postmaster
Sykes--in Friendship Village every woman assumes for given name the
employment of her husband--has some fine modern china and much solid
silver in extremely good taste, so much, indeed, that she is wont to
confess to having cleaned forty, or sixty, or seventy-five
pieces--"seventy-five pieces of solid silver have I cleaned this
morning. You can say what you want to, nice things are a _rill_ care."
Yet--surely this is the proper conjunction--Mis' Sykes is currently
reported to rise in the night preceding the days of her house cleaning,
and to take her carpets out in the back yard, and there softly to sweep
and sweep them so that, at their official cleaning next day, the
neighbours may witness how little dirt is whipped out on the line. Ought
she not to have old-fashioned silver and egg-shell china and drop-leaf
mahogany to fit the practice? Instead of daisy and wild-rose patterns in
"solid," and art curtains, and mission chairs, and a white-enamelled
refrigerator, and a gas range.
We have the latest funeral equipment,--black broadcloth-covered
supports, a coffin carriage for up-and-down the aisles, natural palms to
order, and the pulleys to "let them down slow"; and yet our individual
funeral capacity has been such that we can tell what every woman who has
died in Friendship for years has "done without": Mis' Grocer Stew, her
of all folks, had done without new-style flat-irons; Mis' Worth had used
the bread pan to wash dishes in; Mis' Jeweller Sprague--the _first_ Mis'
Sprague--had had only six bread and butter knives, her that could get
wholesale too.... And we have little maid-servants who answer our bells
in caps and trays, so to say; but this savour of jestership is
authentic, for any one of them is likely to do as of late did Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss's maid,--answer, at dinner-with-guests, that
there were no more mashed potatoes, "_or else_, there won't be any left
to warm up for your breakfasts." ... And though we have our daily
newspaper, receiving Associated Press service, yet, as Mis' Amanda
Toplady observed, it is "only _very_ lately that they have mentioned in
the _Daily_ the birth of a child, or anything that had anything of a
_tang_ to it."
We put new wine in old bottles, but also we use new bottles to hold our
old wine. For, consider the name of our main street: is this Main or
Clark or Cook or Grand Street, according to the register of the main
streets of towns? Instead, for its half-mile of village life, the Plank
Road, macadamized and arc-lighted, is called Daphne Street. Daphne
Street! I love to wonder why. Did our dear Doctor June's father name it
when he set the five hundred elms and oaks which glorify us? Or did
Daphne herself take this way on the day of her flight, so that when they
came to draught the town, they recognized that it _was_ Daphne Street,
and so were spared the trouble of naming it? Or did the Future
anonymously toss us back the suggestion, thrifty of some day of her own
when she might remember us and say, "_Daphne Street!_" Already some of
us smile with a secret nod at something when we direct a stranger, "You
will find the Telegraph and Cable Office two blocks down, on Daphne
Street." "The Commercial Travellers' House, the Abigail Arnold Home
Bakery, the Post-office and Armoury are in the same block on Daphne
Street." Or, "The Electric Light Office is at the corner of Dunn and
Daphne." It is not wonderful that Daphne herself, foreseeing these
things, did not stay, but lifted her laurels somewhat nearer
Tempe,--although there are those of us who like to fancy that she is
here all the time in our Daphne-street magic: the fire bell, the tulip
beds, and the twilight bonfires. For how else, in all reason, has the
name persisted?
Of late a new doctor has appeared--one may say, has abounded: a surgeon
who, such is his zeal, will almost perform an operation over the
telephone and, we have come somewhat cynically to believe, would prefer
doing so to not operating at all. As Calliope Marsh puts it:--
"He is great on operations, that little doctor. Let him go into any
house, an' some o' the family, seems though, has to be operated on,
usually inside o' twelve hours. It'll get so that as soon as he strikes
the front porch, they'll commence sterilizin' water. I donno but some'll
go an' put on the tea-kettle if they even see him drive past."
_Why_ within twelve hours, we wonder when we hear the edict? Why never
fourteen hours, or six? How does it happen that no matter at what stage
of the malady the new doctor is called, the patient always has to be
operated on within twelve hours? Is it that everybody has a bunch and
goes about not knowing it until he appears? Or is he a kind of basanite
for bunches, and do they come out on us at the sight of him? There are
those of us who almost hesitate to take his hand, fearing that he will
fix us with his eye, point somewhere about, and tell us, "Within twelve
hours, _if_ you want your life your own." But in spite of his skill and
his modernity, in our midst there persist those who, in a scientific
night, would die rather than risk our advantages.
Thus the New shoulders the Old, and our transition is still swift enough
to be a spectacle, as was its earlier phase which gave over our Middle
West to cabins and plough horses, with a tendency away from wigwams and
bob-whites. And in this local warfare between Old and New a chief figure
is Calliope Marsh--who just said that about the new doctor. She is a
little rosy wrinkled creature officially--though no other than
officially--pertaining to sixty years; mender of lace, seller of
extracts, and music teacher, but of the three she thinks of the last as
her true vocation. ("I come honestly by that," she says. "You know my
father before me was rill musical. I was babtized Calliope because a
circus with one come through the town the day't I was born.") And with
her, too, the grafting of to-morrow upon yesterday is unconscious; or
only momentarily conscious, as when she phrased it:--
"Land, land, I like New as well as anybody. But I want it should be put
in the Old kind o' gentle, like an _i_-dee in your mind, an' not sudden,
like a bullet in your brain."
In her acceptance of innovations Calliope symbolizes the fine Friendship
tendency to scientific procedure, to the penetration of the unknown
through the known, the explication of mystery by natural law. And when
to the bright-figured paper and pictures of her little sitting room she
had added a print of the Mona Lisa, she observed:--
"She sort o' lifts me up, like somethin' I've thought of, myself. But I
don't see any sense in raisin' a question about what her smile means. I
told the agent so. 'Whenever I set for my photograph,' I says to him, 'I
always have that same silly smile on my face.'"
With us all the Friendship idea prevails: we accept what Progress sends,
but we regard it in our own fashion. Our improvements, like our
entertainments, our funerals, our holidays, and our very loves, are but
Friendship Village exponents of the modern spirit. Perhaps, in a
tenderer significance than she meant, Calliope characterized us when she
said:--
"This town is more like a back door than a front--or, givin' it full
credit, _anyhow_, it's no more'n a side door, with no vines."
For indeed, we are a kind of middle door to experience, minus the fuss
of official arriving and, too, without the old odours of the kitchen
savoury beds; but having, instead, a serene side-door existence,
partaking of both electric bells and of neighbours with shawls pinned
over their heads.
Only at one point Calliope was wrong. There are vines, with tendrils and
flowers and many birds.
II
THE DEBUT
Mrs. Ricker, "washens, scrubben, work by the day or Our," as the sign of
her own lettering announced, had come into a little fortune by the death
of her first husband, Al Kitton, early divorced and late repentant. Just
before my arrival in Friendship she had bought a respectable frame house
in the heart of the village,--for a village will have a heart instead of
having a boulevard,--and with her daughter Emerel she had set up a
modest establishment with Ingrain carpets and parlour pieces, and a bit
of grass in front. Thus Emerel Kitton--we, in our simple, penultimate
way, called it Kitten--became a kind of heiress. She had been christened
Emma Ella, but her mother, of her love of order, had tidied the name to
Emerel, and Friendship had adopted the form, perhaps as having about it
something pleasing and jewel-like. Though Emerel was in the thirties at
the time of her inheritance, she was still pretty, shy, conformable; and
yet there was no disguising that she was nearly a spinster when, as soon
as the white house was settled, Mrs. Ricker issued invitations to her
daughter's coming-out party.
You aRe Invite
to A
Comen Out Recep
Next wenesday Night at eigt
At Her Home
Emma Ella Kitton
Mrs. Ricker and Kitton
Pa
the invitations said, and the "Pa" was divined to imply "Please answer."
"It's Kitton's money an' it's his daughter. I hed to hev him in it
somehow," Mrs. Ricker explained her double signature. "You see," she
added, "up till now I ain't never been situate' so's Emerel _could_ come
out. I've always wanted to give her things, too, but 't seems like when
I've tried, everything's shook its fist at me. It ain't too late. Emerel
looks just like she did fifteen years ago, don't she?"
It was at once observed that if Emerel shared her mother's enthusiasm
for the project, she did not betray it. But then no one knew much about
Emerel save that she was engaged, and had been so for some years, to big
Abe Daniel, the Methodist tenor, a circumstance wholly unconsidered in
the scheme of her debut.
Quite simply and with happy pride, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton issued her
invitations to every one in the village who had ever employed her. And
the village was divided against itself.
"How can we?" Mis' Postmaster Sykes demanded, "I ask you. There's things
to omit an' there's things to observe. We should be The Laughing Stock."
"The Laughing Stock," variously echoed her followers.
On the other hand:--
"Land, o' course we'll all go," Mis' Amanda Toplady comfortably settled
it, "an' take Emerel a deboo present, civilized. The dear child."
And to that many of us gladly assented, Timothy, big Amanda's little
husband, going so far as to add:
"I do vum, the Sykeses feels the post-office like it was that much
oats."
A day later Timothy's opinion seemed, he thought, to be verified. Mis'
Postmaster Sykes issued "written invites to an evening party, hot supper
and like that," as Friendship communicated it, to be given on the very
night of Emerel's debut.
Friendship was shaken. Never in the history of the village had two
social affairs been set for the same hour. Indeed, more than one hostess
had postponed an impending tea-party or thimble party or "afternoon
coffee" or "five o'clock supper" on hearing that another was planned for
the same day. And now, when there were those of us anxious to "do
something nice" for hard-working little Mrs. Ricker, the Sykeses had
deliberately sought the forbidden ground. And Society dare not deny Mis'
Sykes, for besides "being who she was" ("She's the leader in Friendship
if they _is_ a leader," we said, emphatically implying that there was
none), she kept two maids,--little young thing and a _rill_ hired
girl,--entertained "above the most," put out her sewing and wore, we
kept in the back of our minds, a bar pin, solid, with "four solitaires"
in it. And, "Oh, you know," Calliope Marsh admitted to me later, "Mis'
Sykes is rilly a great society woman. They isn't anybody's funeral that
she don't get to ride to the cemet'ry."
Mrs. Ricker and Kitton accepted the situation with fine philosophy.
"Of course," she said, "the whole town can dance to the Sykeses'
fiddlin' if they want. But it's a pretty pass if they do let anybody
step in before me that's washed for 'em an' cleaned their houses years
on end."
My own course was pleasantly simple. Mrs. Ricker and Kitton had included
me on her list, accredited, no doubt, because a few weeks earlier she
had helped me to settle my belongings in Oldmoxon house, and since then
had twice swept for me, and was to come in a day or two to do so again.
As I had instantly accepted her invitation, I had no choice when Mis'
Sykes's "written invite" came, even though when it arrived Mis' Sykes
herself was calling on me.
"Well said," she observed, when she saw a neighbour's little girl, her
temporary servitor, coming up my walk with the invitations in a paper
bag to be kept clean, "I meant to get my call made on you before your
invite got here. I hope you'll overlook taking us both together. I've
meant to call on you before, but I declare it looked like a mountain to
me to get started out. Don't you find your calls a rill chore?"
But Mis' Sykes's visit was, she confessed, "Errand as well as Call."
"The Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality," she told
me, as she rose to go, "is to our wits' end to get up a new
entertainment. We want to give something, and we want it should be rill
new and spicey, but of course it has to be pretty quiet, owing to the
Cause--the Dead, so. It bars us from home-talent evenings or festivals
or like that. And the minute I saw the inside o' your house it come to
me: of course you know your house is differ'nt from Friendship. If I'd
been shot out of a gun into it, I wouldn't 'a' sensed I was in
Friendship at all. You've got nice things, all carved an' hard to dust.
The Oldmoxons use' to do a lot o' entertainin', an' everybody remembers
it, an' the house has been shut quite some time. Well, now, you've been
ask' to join the Sodality. An' if you was to announce an Evening Benefit
for it, here in your home, the whole town'd come out to it hot-foot.
We're owin' Zittelhof on Eph Cadoza's coffin yet, an' I shouldn't wonder
an' that one evening would pay him all off _and_, same time, get you
rill well acquainted. Don't you think it's a nice _i_-dea?"
As I had come to Friendship chiefly to get away from everywhere, I
thought that I had never heard such a bad plan. But inasmuch as I was
obliged to refuse outright one invitation of my visitor's, about the
other I weakly temporized and promised to let her know. And she went
away, deploring my hasty acceptance of Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, although,
"How could you tell?" she strove to excuse me. "A person coming to a
strange town so, _of course_ they accept all their invitations good
faith. And then her signing her name that way might mislead you. It
gives a rill sensation of a hyphen. But still, the spelling--after all
you'd ought--"
She looked at me with tardy suspicion.
"Some geniuses can't spell very well, you know," I defended my
discrimination.
"That's so," she admitted brightly; "I see you're literary."
The next morning the other principal, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, arrived to
keep her engagement with me. She was a little woman, suggesting wire,
which gave and sprang when she moved, and paper, which crackled when she
laughed. Her speech was all independence, confidence, self-possession;
but in her silences I have seldom seen so wistful a face as hers.
In response to my question:--
"Oh," Mrs. Ricker and Kitton said brightly, "everything's goin' fine. I
s'pose the town's still decidin' between us, but up to now I ain't had
but one regrets that can't come--that's Mis' Stew. She wrote it was on
account o' domestic affliction, an' I hadn't heard what, so I went right
down. 'Seems nobody had died--she ain't much of any family, anyway. But
she'd wrote her letter out of a letter book, an' the only one she could
find regrettin' an invite give domestic affliction for the reason. She
said she didn't know a letter like that hed to be true, an' I don't know
as it does, either."
She stood silent for a moment, searching my face.
"Look-a-here," she said; "they's somethin' I thought of. Mebbe you've
heard of it bein' done in the City somewheres. Do you s'pose folks'd be
willin' to send Emerel's an' my funeral flowers to the comin' out party
_instead_?"
"Funeral...?" I doubted.
"Grave flowers," she explained. "You know, they're a perfect waste so
far's the General Dead is concerned. An' land knows, the fam'ly don't
sense 'em much more. Anyway, Emerel an' I ain't got any fam'ly. An' if
folks'd be willin' to send us what flowers they would send us if we died
_now_, then they'd do us some good. We'll never want 'em more'n we do
now, dead or alive. 'Least, I won't. Emerel, she don't seem to care. But
do you think it'd be all right if I was to mention it out around?"
My desire to have this happen I did my best not to confuse with a
disinterested opinion. But indeed Mrs. Ricker and Kitton was seldom in
need of an opinion, as was proved that night by the appearance of this
notice in the Friendship _Daily_:--
All that would give flowers when dead please send same anyhow and
not expected to send same if we do die afterwards.
MRS. RICKER AND KITTON.
All of Friendship society which intended to accept Mis' Sykes's
invitation hastened with relieved eagerness to follow with flowers its
regrets to the "comen out recep." For every one was genuinely attached
to the little laundress and interested in her welfare--up to the point
of sacrificing social interests in the eyes of the Sykeses. Friendship
gardens were rich with Autumn, cosmos and salvia and opulent asters, and
on the morning of the two parties this store of sweetness was rifled for
the debutante. By noon Mrs. Ricker and Kitton was saying in awe, "Nobody
in Friendship ever had this many flowers, dead, or alive, or rich." And
although some of us grieved that Mis' Postmaster Sykes had shown what
she named her good-will by ordering from the town a pillow of white
carnations (but with no "wording"), Mrs. Ricker and Kitton received even
this suggestive token with simple-hearted delight.
"It'll look lovely on the lamp shelf," she observed. "I've often planned
how nice my parlour'd trim up for a funeral."
In the preparation for the two events, the one unconcerned and
unconsulted appeared to be the debutante herself. We never said
"Emerel's party"; we all said "Mis' Ricker's party." We knew that Mrs.
Ricker and Kitton was putting painstaking care on Emerel's coming-out
dress, which was to be a surprise, but otherwise Emerel was seldom even
mentioned in connection with her debut. And whenever we saw her, it was
as Friendship had seen her for two years,--walking quietly with Abe
Daniel, her betrothed.
"It's doin' things kind o' backwards," Calliope Marsh said, "engaged
first an' comin' out in society afterwards. But I donno as it's any more
backwards than ridin' to the cemet'ry feet first. What's what all
depends on what you agree on for What. If it ain't your soul you mean
about," she added cryptically.
The Topladys and others of us who united to uphold Emerel, and
especially to uphold Emerel's mother, could not but realize that the
majority of Friendship society had regretted to decline the debut party,
and had been pleased to accept the hospitality of the Postmaster
Sykeses. I dare say that this may have been partly why, in the usual
self-indulgence of challenge, I put on my prettiest frock for the party
and prepared to set out somewhat early, hoping for the amusement of
sharing in the finishing touches. But as I was leaving my house Calliope
Marsh arrived, buttoned tightly in her best gray henrietta, her cheeks
hot with some intense excitement.
"Well," she said without preface, "they've done it. Emerel Kitton's
married. She's just married Abe at the parsonage to get out o' bein'
debooed. They've gone to take the train now."
No one could fail to see what this would mean to Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
and, rather than the newly married Emerel, it was she who absorbed our
speculation.
"Mis' Ricker just slimpsed," Calliope told me. "I says to her: 'Look
here, Mis' Ricker, don't you go givin' in. Your kitchen's a sight with
the good things o' your hand--think o' that,' I told her; 'think how you
mortgaged your very funeral for to-night, an' brace yourself up,' An'
she says, awful pitiful: 'I _can't_, Calliope,' she says. ''T seems like
this slips the pins right out. They ain't nothin' to deboo with now,
anyway,' she told me. 'How can I?'"
"Oh, poor Mrs. Ricker!" I exclaimed.
Calliope looked at me intently.
"Well," she said, "that's what I run in about. You're a stranger just
fresh come here. You ain't met folks much yet. An' Mis' Sykes, she's
just crazy to get a-hold o' you an' your house for the Sodality. An' the
only thing I could think of for Mis' Ricker--well, would you stand up
with Mis' Ricker to-night an' shake all their hands? An' sort o' leave
her deboo for _you_, you might say?"
I think that I loved Calliope for this even before she understood my
assent. But she added something which puzzled me.
"If I was you," she observed, "I'd do somethin' else to-night, too. You
could do it--or I could do it for you. You don't expect to let Mis'
Sykes hev the Sodality here, do you?"
"I might have had it here," I said impulsively, "if she had not done
this to poor little Mrs. Ricker."
"Would--would you give me the lief to say that?" Calliope asked
demurely.
I had no objection in the world to any one knowing my opinion of Mis'
Postmaster Sykes's proceeding,--"one of her preposterousnesses,"
Calliope called it,--and I said so, and set off for Mrs. Ricker's, while
Calliope herself flew somewhere else on some last mission. And, "Mis'
Sykes'd ought to be showed," she called to me over-shoulder. "That
woman's got a sinful pride. She'd wear fur in August to prove she could
afford to hev moths!"
The Ricker parlour was a garden which sloped gently, as a garden should,
for the house was old and the parlour floor sagged toward the entrance
so that the front of the organ was propped on wooden blocks. The room
was bedizened with flowers, in dishes, tins, and gallon jars, so that it
seemed some way an alien thing, like a prune horse. On the lamp shelf
was the huge white carnation pillow, across which the hostess had
inscribed "welcom," in stems.
Within ten minutes of the appointed hour all those who had been pleased
to accept were in the rooms, and Mrs. Ricker and Kitton and I, standing
among the funeral flowers, received the guests while Calliope, hovering
at the door, gave the key with: "Ain't you heard? Emerel's a bride
instead of a debbytant. Ain't it a rill joke? Married to-night an' we're
here to celebrate. Throw off your things." Then she hopelessly involved
them in a presentation to me, and between us we contrived to elide Mrs.
Ricker and Kitton from all save her perfunctory office, until her voice
and lips ceased their trembling. Poor little hostess, in her starched
lawn which had seemed to her adequate for her unpretentious role of
mother! All her humour and independence and self-possession had left
her, and in their stead, on what was to have been her great night, had
settled only the immemorial wistfulness.
Although I did not then foresee it, the guests that evening were
destined to point me to many meanings, like sketches in the note-book of
a patient Pen. I am fond of remembering them as I saw them first: the
Topladys, that great Mis' Amanda, ponderous, majestic, and suggesting
black grosgrain, her beaming way of whole-hearted approval not quite
masking the critical, house-wife glances which she continually cast; and
little Timothy, her husband, who, in company, went quite out of his head
and could think of nothing to say save "Blisterin' Benson, what I think
is this: ain't everything movin' off nice?" Dear Doctor June, pastor
emeritus of Friendship, since he was so identified with all the village
interests that not many could tell from what church he had retired. (At
each of the three Friendship churches he rented a pew, and contributed
impartially to their beneficences; and, "seems to me the Lord would of,"
he sometimes apologized for this.) Photographer Jimmy Sturgis, who stood
about with one eye shut, and who drove the 'bus, took charge of the
mail-bags, conducted a photograph gallery, and painted portraits. ("The
Dead From Photos a specialty," was tacked on the risers of the stairs
leading to his studio.) And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, who was an
invalid and "very, very seldom got out." (Not, I was to learn, an
invalid because of ill health, but by nature. She was an invalid as
other people are blond or brunette, and no more to be said about it.)
Miss Liddy Ember, the village seamstress, and her beautiful sister
Ellen, who was "not quite right," and whom Miss Liddy took about and
treated like a child until the times when Ellen "come herself again,"
and then she quite overshadowed in personality little busy Miss Liddy.
Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Eppleby Holcomb, and the "Other"
Holcombs; Mis' Doctor Helman, the Gekerjecks, who "kept the drug store,"
and scented the world with musk and essences. ("Musk on one handkerchief
and some kind o' flower scent on your other one," Mis' Gekerjeck was
wont to say, "then you can suit everybody, say who who will.")--These
and the others Mrs. Ricker and Kitton and I received, standing before
the white carnation pillow. And I, who had come to Friendship to get
away from everywhere, found myself the one to whom they did honour, as
they were to have honoured Emerel.
When the hour for supper came, Mrs. Ricker and Kitton excused herself
because she must "see to gettin' it on to the plates," and Mis' Toplady,
Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, Calliope, and I "handed." We had all
lent silver and dishes--indeed, save at Mis' Sykes's (and of course at
the Proudfits' of Proudfit estate), there is rarely a Friendship party
at which the pantries of the guests are not represented, an arrangement
seeming almost to hold in anticipation certain social and political
ideals. (If the telephone yields us an invitation from those whom we
know best, we always answer: "Thank you. I will. What do you want me to
send over?" Is there such a matter-of-course federation on any
boulevard?) And after the guests had been served and the talk had been
resumed, we four who had "handed" sat down, with Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
at meat, at a corner of the kitchen table.
"Everything tastes like so much chips to me when I hev company, anyhow,"
the hostess said sadly, "but to-night it's got the regular salt-pork
taste. When I'm nervous or got delegates or comin' down with anything, I
always taste salt pork."
"Well, everything's all of a whirl to me," Calliope confessed, "an' I
should think your brains, Mis' Ricker, 'd be fair rarin' 'round in your
head."
"Who didn't eat what?" Mrs. Ricker and Kitton asked listlessly. "I meant
to keep track when the plates come out, but I didn't. Did they all take
a-hold rill good?"
"They wa'n't any mincin' 't _I_ see," Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss
assured her. "Everything you had was lovely, an' everybody made 'way
with all they got."
We might have kept indefinitely on at these fascinating comparisons, but
some unaccountable stir and bustle and rise of talk in the other rooms
persuaded our attention. ("Can they be goin' _home_?" cried that great
Mis' Amanda Toplady. "If they are, I'll go bail Timothy Toplady started
it." And, "I bet they've broke the finger bowl," Mrs. Ricker and Kitton
prophesied darkly.) And then we all went in to see what had happened,
but it was what none of us could possibly have forecast: Crowding in the
parlour, overflowing into the sitting room, still entering from the
porch, were Postmaster and Mis' Postmaster Sykes and _all_ their guests.
It was quite as if Wishes had gathered head and spirited them there. I
remember the white little face of Mrs. Ricker and Kitton, luminously
gratified to the point of triumph; and Mis' Sykes's brisk and cordial
"No reason why we shouldn't go to two receptions in an evening, like
they do in the City, Mis' Ricker, is they?" And the aplomb of the
hostess's self-respecting, corrective "_An'_ Kitton. 'Count of Al bein'
so thoughtful in death." And then to my amazement Mis' Postmaster Sykes
turned to me and held out both hands.
"I _am_ so _glad_," she said, almost in the rhythm of certain exhausts,
"that you've decided to hev Sodality at your house. You must just let me
take a-hold of it for you and _run_ it. And I'm going to propose your
name the very next meeting we hev, can't I?"
* * * * *
I walked home with Calliope when we had left Mrs. Ricker and Kitton,
tired but triumphant. ("Land," the hostess said, "now it's turned out so
nice, I donno but I'm rill pleased Emerel's married. I'd hate to think
o' borrowin' all them things over again for a weddin'.") And in the dark
street Calliope said to me:--
"You see what I done, I guess. I told you Mis' Sykes was reg'lar
up-in-arms about usin' your house--though I think the rill reason is she
wants to get upstairs in it. You know how some are. So I marched myself
up there before the party, an' I told her you wasn't goin' to hev
Sodality sole because you thought she'd been so mean to Mis' Ricker. An'
I give her to understand sharp off 't she'd better do what she did do if
she wanted you in the Sodality at all. 'An',' s'I, 'I donno what she'll
think o' you anyway, not knowin' enough to go to two companies in one
evenin', like the City, even if one is your own.' She see reason. You
know, Mis' Sykes an' I are kind o' connections, but you can make even
your relations see sense if you go at 'em right. I donno," Calliope
ended doubtfully, "but I done wrong. An' yet I feel good friends with my
backbone too, like I'd done right!"
And it was so that having come to Friendship Village to get away from
everywhere, I yet found myself abruptly launched in its society,
committed to its Sodality, and, best of all, friends with Calliope
Marsh.
III
NOBODY SICK, NOBODY POOR
Two days before Thanksgiving the air was already filled with white
turkey feathers, and I stood at a window and watched until the
loneliness of my still house seemed like something pointing a mocking
finger at me. When I could bear it no longer I went out in the snow, and
through the soft drifts I fought my way up the Plank Road toward the
village.
I had almost passed the little bundled figure before I recognized
Calliope. She was walking in the middle of the road, as in Friendship we
all walk in winter; and neither of us had umbrellas. I think that I
distrust people who put up umbrellas on a country road in a fall of
friendly flakes.
Instead of inquiring perfunctorily how I did, she greeted me with a
fragment of what she had been thinking--which is always as if one were
to open a door of his mind to you instead of signing you greeting from a
closed window.
"I just been tellin' myself," she looked up to say without preface,
"that if I could see one more good old-fashion' Thanksgivin', life'd
sort o' smooth out. An' land knows, it needs some smoothin' out for me."
With this I remember that it was as if my own loneliness spoke for me.
At my reply Calliope looked at me quickly--as if I, too, had opened a
door.
"Sometimes Thanksgivin' _is_ some like seein' the sun shine when you're
feelin' rill rainy yourself," she said thoughtfully.
She held out her blue-mittened hand and let the flakes fall on it in
stars and coronets.
"I wonder," she asked evenly, "if you'd help me get up a Thanksgivin'
dinner for a few poor sick folks here in Friendship?"
In order to keep my self-respect, I recall that I was as ungracious as
possible. I think I said that the day meant so little to me that I was
willing to do anything to avoid spending it alone. A statement which
seems to me now not to bristle with logic.
"That's nice of you," Calliope replied genially. Then she hesitated,
looking down Daphne Street, which the Plank Road had become, toward
certain white houses. There were the homes of Mis' Mayor Uppers, Mis'
Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and the Liberty sisters,--all substantial
dignified houses, typical of the simple prosperity of the countryside.
"The only trouble," she added simply, "is that in Friendship I don't
know of a soul rill sick, nor a soul what you might call poor."
At this I laughed, unwillingly enough. Dear Calliope! Here indeed was a
drawback to her project.
"Honestly," she said reflectively, "Friendship can't seem to do anything
like any other town. When the new minister come here, he give out he was
goin' to do settlement work. An' his second week in the place he come to
me with a reg'lar hang-dog look. 'What kind of a town is this?' he says
to me, disgusted. 'They ain't nobody sick in it an' they ain't nobody
poor!' I guess he could 'a' got along without the poor--most of us can.
But we mostly like to hev a few sick to carry the flowers off our house
plants to, an' now an' then a tumbler o' jell. An' yet I've known weeks
at a time when they wasn't a soul rill flat down sick in Friendship.
It's so now. An' that's hard, when you're young an' enthusiastic, like
the minister."
"But where are you going to find your guests then, Calliope?" I asked
curiously.
"Well," she said brightly, "I was just plannin' as you come up with me.
An' I says to myself: 'God give me to live in a little bit of a place
where we've all got enough to get along on, an' Thanksgivin' finds us
all in health. It looks like He'd afflicted us by lettin' us hev nobody
to do for.' An' then it come to me that if we was to get up the
dinner,--with all the misery an' hunger they is in the world,--God in
His goodness would let some of it come our way to be fed. 'In the
wilderness a cedar,' you know--as Liddy Ember an' I was always tellin'
each other when we kep' shop together. An' so to-day I said to myself
I'd go to work an' get up the dinner an' trust there'd be eaters for
it."
"Why, Calliope," I said, "Calliope!"
"I ain't got much to do with, myself," she added apologetically;
"the most I've got in my sullar, I guess, is a gallon jar o'
watermelon pickles. I could give that. You don't think it sounds
irreverent--connectin' God with a big dinner, so?" she asked anxiously.
And, at my reply:--
"Well, then," she said briskly, "let's step in an' see a few folks that
might be able to tell us of somebody to do for. Let's ask Mis' Mayor
Uppers an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, an' the Liberty girls."
Because I was lonely and idle, and because I dreaded inexpressibly going
back to my still house, I went with her. Her ways were a kind of
entertainment, and I remember that I believed my leisure to be infinite.
We turned first toward the big shuttered house of Mis' Mayor Uppers, to
whom, although her husband had been a year ago removed from office,
discredited, and had not since been seen in Friendship, we yet gave her
old proud title, as if she had been Former Lady Mayoress. For the
present mayor, Authority Hubblethwaite, was, as Calliope said,
"unconnect'."
I watched Mis' Uppers in some curiosity while Calliope explained that
she was planning a dinner for the poor and sick,--"the lame and the sick
that's comfortable enough off to eat,"--and could she suggest some poor
and sick to ask? Mis' Uppers was like a vinegar cruet of mine, slim and
tall, with a little grotesquely puckered face for a stopper, as if the
whole known world were sour.
"I'm sure," she said humbly, "it's a nice i-dea. But I declare, I'm put
to it to suggest. We ain't got nobody sick nor nobody poor in
Friendship, you know."
"Don't you know of anybody kind o' hard up? Or somebody that, if they
ain't down sick, feels sort o' spindlin'?" Calliope asked anxiously.
Mis' Uppers thought, rocking a little and running a pin in and out of a
fold of her skirt.
"No," she said at length, "I don't know a soul. I think the church'd
give a good deal if a real poor family'd come here to do for. Since the
Cadozas went, we ain't known which way to look for poor. Mis' Ricker
gettin' her fortune so puts her beyond the wolf. An' Peleg Bemus, you
can't _get_ him to take anything. No, I don't know of anybody real
decently poor."
"An' nobody sick?" Calliope pressed her wistfully.
"Well, there's Mis' Crawford," admitted Mis' Uppers; "she had a spell o'
lumbago two weeks ago, but I see her pass the house to-day. Mis' Brady
was laid up with toothache, too, but the _Daily_ last night said she'd
had it out. An' Mis' Doctor Helman did have one o' her stomach attacks
this week, an' Elzabella got out her dyin' dishes an' her dyin' linen
from the still-room--you know how Mis' Doctor always brings out her nice
things when she's sick, so't if she should die an' the neighbours come
in, it'd all be shipshape. But she got better this time an' helped put
'em back. I declare it's hard to get up anything in the charity line
here."
Calliope sat smiling a little, and I knew that it was because of her
secret certainty that "some o' the hunger" would come her way, to be
fed.
"I can't help thinkin'," she said quietly, "that we'll find somebody.
An' I tell you what: if we do, can I count on you to help some?"
Mis' Mayor Uppers flushed with quick pleasure.
"Me, Calliope?" she said. And I remembered that they had told me how the
Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality had been unable
to tempt Mis' Uppers to a single meeting since the mayor ran away. "Oh,
but I couldn't though," she said wistfully.
"No need to go to the table if you don't want," Calliope told her. "Just
bake up somethin' for us an' bring it over. Make a couple o' your cherry
pies--did you get hold of any cherries to put up this year? Well, a
couple o' your cherry pies an' a batch o' your nice drop sponge cakes,"
she directed. "Could you?"
Mis' Mayor Uppers looked up with a kind of light in her eyes.
"Why, yes," she said, "I could, I guess. I'll bake 'em Thanksgivin'
mornin'. I--I was wonderin' how I'd put in the day."
When we stepped out in the snow again, Calliope's face was shining.
Sometimes now, when my faith is weak in any good thing, I remember her
look that November morning. But all that I thought then was how I was
being entertained that lonely day.
The dear Liberty sisters were next, Lucy and Viny and Libbie Liberty. We
went to the side door,--there were houses in Friendship whose front
doors we tacitly understood that we were never expected to use,--and we
found the sisters down cellar, with shawls over their heads, feeding
their hens through the cellar window, opening on the glassed-in coop
under the porch.
In Friendship it is a point of etiquette for a morning caller never to
interrupt the employment of a hostess. So we obeyed the summons of the
Liberty sisters to "come right down"; and we sat on a firkin and an
inverted tub while Calliope told her plan and the hens fought for
delectable morsels.
"My grief!" said Libbie Liberty, tartly, "where you goin' to _get_ your
sick an' poor?"
Mis' Viny, balancing on the window ledge to reach for eggs, looked back
at us.
"Friendship's so comfortable that way," she said, "I don't see how you
can get up much of anything."
And little Miss Lucy, kneeling on the floor of the cellar to measure
more feed, said without looking up:--
"You know, since mother died we ain't never done anything for holidays.
No--we can't seem to want to think about Thanksgiving or Christmas or
like that."
They all turned their grave lined faces toward us.
"We want to let the holidays just slip by without noticin'," Miss Viny
told us. "Seems like it hurts less that way."
Libbie Liberty smiled wanly.
"Don't you know," she said, "when you hold your hand still in hot water,
you don't feel how hot the water really is? But when you move around in
it some, it begins to burn you. Well, when we let Thanksgiving an'
Christmas alone, it ain't so bad. But when we start to move around in
'em--"
Her voice faltered and stopped.
"We miss mother terrible," Miss Lucy said simply.
Calliope put her blue mitten to her mouth, but her eyes she might not
hide, and they were soft with sympathy.
"I know--I know," she said. "I remember the first Christmas after my
mother died--I ached like the toothache all over me, an' I couldn't bear
to open my presents. Nor the next year I couldn't either--I couldn't
open my presents with any heart. But--" Calliope hesitated, "that second
year," she said, "I found somethin' I could do. I saw I could fix up
little things for other folks an' take some comfort in it. Like mother
would of."
She was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully at the three lonely
figures in the dark cellar of their house.
"Your mother," she said abruptly, "stuffed the turkey for a year ago the
last harvest home."
"Yes," they said.
"Look here," said Calliope; "if I can get some poor folks together,--or
even _one_ poor folk, or hungry,--will you three come over to my house
an' stuff the turkey? The way--I can't help thinkin' the way your mother
would of, if she'd been here. An' then," Calliope went on briskly,
"could you bring some fresh eggs an' make a pan o' custard over to my
house? An' mebbe one o' you'd stir up a sunshine cake. You must know how
to make your mother's sunshine cake?"
There was another silence in the cellar when Calliope had done, and for
a minute I wondered if, after all, she had not failed, and if the
bleeding of the three hearts might be so stanched. It was not
self-reliant Libbie Liberty who spoke first; it was gentle Miss Lucy.
"I guess," she said, "I could, if we all do it. I know mother would of."
"Yes," Miss Viny nodded, "mother would of."
Libbie Liberty stood for a moment with compressed lips.
"It seems like not payin' respect to mother," she began; and then shook
her head. "It ain't that," she said; "it's only missin' her when we
begin to step around the kitchen, bakin' up for a holiday."
"I know--I know," Calliope said again. "That's why I said for you to
come over in my kitchen. You come over there an' stir up the sunshine
cake, too, an' bake it in my oven, so's we can hev it et hot. Will you
do that?"
And after a little time they consented. If Calliope found any sick or
poor, they would do that.
"We ain't gettin' many i-dees for guests," Calliope said, as we reached
the street, "but we're gettin' helpers, anyway. An' some dinner, too."
Then we went to the house of Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss--called
so, of course, to distinguish her from the "Other" Holcombs.
"Don't you be shocked at her," Calliope warned me, as we closed Mis'
Holcomb's gate behind us; "she's dreadful diff'r'nt an' bitter since
Abigail was married last month. She's got hold o' some kind of a Persian
book, in a decorated cover, from the City; an' now she says your soul is
like when you look in a lookin'-glass--that there ain't really nothin'
there. An' that the world's some wind an' the rest water, an' they ain't
no God only your own breath--oh, poor Mis' Holcomb!" said Calliope. "I
guess she ain't rill balanced. But we ought to go to see her. We always
consult Mis' Holcomb about everything."
Poor Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss! I can see her now in her
comfortable dining room, where she sat cleaning her old silver, her
thin, veined hands as fragile as her grandmother's spoons.
"Of course, you don't know," she said, when Calliope had unfolded her
plans, "how useless it all seems to me. What's the use--I keep sayin' to
myself now'-days; what's the use? You put so much pains on somethin',
an' then it goes off an' leaves you. Mebbe it dies, an' everything's all
wasted. There ain't anything to tie to. It's like lookin' in a glass all
the while. It's seemin', it ain't bein'. We ain't certain o' nothin' but
our breath, an' when that goes, what hev you got? What's the use o'
plannin' Thanksgivin' for anybody?"
"Well, if you're hungry, it's kind o' nice to get fed up," said
Calliope, crisply. "Don't you know a soul that's hungry, Mame Bliss?"
She shook her head.
"No," she said, "I don't. Nor nobody sick in body."
"Nobody sick in body," Calliope repeated absently.