NEIGHBORHOOD STORIES
[Illustration: colophon]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: “NOW, THIS ONE--WHO’LL BID ON THIS ONE?”]
NEIGHBORHOOD
STORIES
BY
ZONA GALE
AUTHOR OF “FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE,” “THE LOVES
OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE,” ETC.
_WITH FRONTISPIECE_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1914
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1912, by The Ridgway Company, and by The Butterick
Publishing Company.
Copyright, 1913, by The Ridgway Company.
Copyright, 1914, by The Ridgway Company, by the Crowell Publishing
Company, and by the McClure Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT, 1914,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1914.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To
THE LITTLE TOWNS
OF
THE TIME TO COME
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.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A GREAT TREE 1
II. EXIT CHARITY 27
III. THE TIME HAS COME 56
IV. THE FACE OF FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE 90
V. THE FLOOD 124
VI. THE PARTY 157
VII. THE BIGGEST BUSINESS 183
VIII. THE PRODIGAL GUEST 216
IX. MR. DOMBLEDON 226
X. HUMAN 258
XI. THE HOMECOMING 275
NEIGHBORHOOD STORIES
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.