to him about the services that it was his job to do. And though I was
miserable enough--I honestly couldn’t be sorry. You know the difference
in them two?
I was to engage Lavvy Whitmore to lead our singing for the four Sundays,
and I went over to see her the next afternoon. She was cleaning the
lamps when I stepped up to the kitchen door, so I went right in and sat
down at the end of the table, and helped her with the chimneys. She was
a pretty little thing--little, but with black eyes that mentioned her
thoughts before ever any of the rest of her agreed to announce ’em. And
plenty of thoughts, too, Lavvy had. She wasn’t one of the girls that is
turned out by the thousands, that wouldn’t recognize their own minds if
they was to meet ’em unbeknownst; but one that her mind was cut out,
careful, by a pattern part of her own selecting, and not a pattern just
laid on to it, haphazard, by the folks that she lived neighbor to, and
went with when she went.
“Lavvy,” I says, “we want to speak for you to sing to our church the
four Sundays in September, when we have special services to get
everybody to go, so’s everybody’ll see everybody else going, and go too.
Can we? Will you?”
“I’ve been spoke for,” says she, “by the White Frame church for the four
September Sundays. For the same reason.”
“Go on!” I says. “Do you mean to tell me that they’re going to have a
competition revival?”
“Well,” she says, “they’re going to make an extra effort to get folks
out for the four Sundays.”
“Copied it off’n us,” I says thoughtful. “Well, I guess the four Sundays
can’t be regularly copyrighted by us, can they? But I thought their
minister didn’t like revivals?” I says.
“Oh, he don’t--Elbert Kinsman don’t,” says Lavvy. “It’s the rest of ’em
wants it. He told me he thought it was a mistake.”
“That young Elbert Kinsman,” I says, “he loves _folks_. I saw it in his
face long ago.”
Lavvy went on trimming wicks.
“And then the Red Brick church,” says she, “_they’ve_ spoke for me to
sing for them for the four Sundays in September too.”
“Land of life,” I says, “they haven’t! What on earth have they done that
for?”
“Oh,” says Lavvy, “to get everybody to go, so’s everybody’ll see
everybody else going, and----”
“Don’t, Lavvy,” I says. “That makes me feel kind of sick.”
“So it done to me,” she says. “And I’ll tell you the same as I told
them: No, I won’t sing those four Sundays. I ain’t going to be here. I
don’t know yet where I’m going, but I’ll go off somewheres--where things
are better--if I have to go blackberrying in Shepherd’s Grove.”
“My land,” I says, “I’ve a great good notion to get my pail and go along
with you.”
We talked about it quite a while that afternoon, Lavvy and me. And
though all along I’d been feeling sort of sore and sick over the whole
idea--and I might have known that I was, by the chip-shouldered way I
had talked to our minister--still, it wasn’t till there by the lamps
that I come to a realization of myself, and of some other things just as
foolish, and that I faced around and begun to ask myself, plain, what in
the world was what.
For it was as true as possible: As soon as it got out around that our
church was laying plans for a revival--not an evangelist revival, but a
home-made one--it had happened just as might have been expected. The
other two churches was afraid we’d get their folks away from them, and
they says they’d make an extra effort to get folks out, as well. They
fell into the same hope--to “fill up” the churches, and see if we
couldn’t get folks started attending regular. Somebody suggested having
a month’s union services in each of the three churches, but they voted
that three months of this would get monotonous, while the novelty of the
other way would “get folks out.”
No sooner had we all settled on that, then we slipped, by the
gradualest degrees, into the next step, that was as inevitable as two
coming after one. We begun being secret about what we meant to have, not
telling what the order of exercises was going to be, or what special
music we was getting up. And then come along the next thing, as regular
as three coming after two--we begun sort of running one another to see
who could get the most folks. At first we sent out printed invitations
addressed to likely spots; then we took to calling to houses by
committees, and delivering invitations in person. Now and then rival
visiting committees would accidentally meet to the same house and each
try to out-set the other. And from this, one or two things developed, as
things will, that made a little uppishness here and there. For out of
certain situations, uppishness does seem to arise, same as cream out of
milk, or dust out of furniture.
One afternoon I looked out my window, and I see the three Sunday school
superintendents come marching up my brick walk--ain’t it funny how, when
men goes out with a proposition for raising pew-rent, or buying a new
furnace for the manse, or helping along the town, they always go two or
three strong? If you notice, they do.
“Come right in, gentlemen,” I says. “If it’s money, I can’t give you a
cent. If it’s work, I’m drove to death as it is. But if it’s advice, I
do enjoy myself giving that.”
It was our own superintendent that spoke, as being the least foreign to
me, I s’pose,--though it happened that I was better acquainted with both
the other two.
“It’s neither, Miss Marsh,” he says, “it’s some ideas we want off’n you.
We’ve got,” says he, “a plan.”
Then he unrolled it, assisted by the other two.
“We thought,” he says, “that in all this added interest in church
attendance which we are hoping to stimulate, the three churches had
ought to pull together a little.”
At that my heart jumped up. It was what I had been longing for, and
grieving because it didn’t come true.
“We thought we’d ought to have a little more community effort,” says the
White Frame superintendent, clearing his throat. I guess he knew how
that word “community” always gets me. I’d rather read that one word than
half the whole books on the market.
“Oh, yes,” I says. “Yes! I think so too.”
“We thought we’d ought to make the experience one of particular blessing
and fellowship,” says the Red Brick superintendent, fairly beaming.
And me, the simple soul, I beamed back.
“Count on me,” says I, fervent, “to do anything in the world to help on
a thing like that!”
“We were sure of it,” said our superintendent, “and that is why we have
come to you. Now,” says he, “the idea is this: We thought we’d each take
a color--give each church a color, you know.”
“A color?” says I.
“Exactly,” says he. “The White Frames white. The Red Bricks red. And us
blue. Then on each of the four Sundays the number present in the three
churches will be kept track of and totaled at the end of the month. And,
at the end of the month, the church having had the largest attendance
for the whole time shall be given a banquet by the other two. What do
you say to that?”
What did I say to that? Somehow I got them out of the house, telling
them I’d send them word later. When I feel as deep as I did then, I know
I can’t do justice, by just thoughts or just words, to what I mean
inside. So I let the men go off the best I could. And then I went back
into my sitting room, with the August sun pouring in all acrost the air
like some kind of glory that we didn’t understand; and I set down in
it, and thought. And the thing that come to me was them early days, them
first days when the first Christians were trying to plan ways that they
could meet, and hoping and longing to be together, and finding caves and
wild places where they could gather in safety and talk about their
wonderful new knowledge of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of
man, and the divine experience of the spirit, here and after. And then I
thought of this red, white and blue denominational banquet. Oh, what a
travesty it was even on the union that the three colors stand for. And I
thought of our talk about “getting people out,” and “filling up the
churches,” and I thought of the one hundred and fourteen or more social
calls that we require a month from our pastors. And I says to myself:
“Oh, Calliope Marsh, has it come to this--_has_ it? Is it like this only
in Friendship Village? Or is it like this out in the world too? And,
either way, what are we going to do about it?”
There was one thing I could do about it. I went to see our minister and
his wife, and I told ’em firm that I couldn’t have anything more to do
about the extra September services, and that they would have to get
somebody else to play the organ for all four Sundays. They was both
grieved--and I hated to hurt them. That’s the worst about being true to
something you believe--it so often hurts somebody else. But there wasn’t
any other way to do.
“But Miss Marsh,” says our minister, “don’t you see that it is going to
be a time of awakening if we all stand by each other and support the
meetings?”
“Support the meetings!” I wondered how many times, in those first days,
they had to argue that. But I didn’t say anything--I just sat still and
ached.
“But Miss Marsh,” said the minister’s wife, “we have so depended on you.
And your influence--what about that?”
“I can’t help it,” I says--and couldn’t say no more.
Mis’ Postmaster Sykes was there, and _she_ piped up:
“But it’s so _dig_nified, Calliope,” she says. “No soliciting, no
pledging people to be present, no money-begging for expenses. No
anything except giving people to understand that not attending ain’t
real respectable.”
It was them words that give me the strength to get up and go home
without breaking down. And all the way up Daphne Street I went saying
it over: “No anything except giving people to understand not attending
ain’t real respectable. No, not anything only just that.”
Near my own gate I come on young Elbert Kinsman, minister of the White
Frame church, going along alone.
“Oh, Mr. Kinsman,” I burst out unbeknownst, “_can_ you imagine Jesus of
Nazareth belonging to a denomination?”
All of a sudden, that young minister reached out and took my hand.
“He loved men,” he said only, “and he was very patient with them.”
And then I went into my dark house, with some other words ringing in my
ears: “Lighten mine eyes--lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of
the dead.”
* * * * *
But oh, that first September Sabbath morning. It was one of them days
that is still all deep Summer, but with just a little light mantel of
Autumn--more like a lace boa than a mantel, though--thrown round over
things. It was Summer by the leaves, by the air it was Summer, by the
gay gardens and the face of the sky; and yet somewhere, hiding inside,
was a little hint of yellow, a look of brown, a smell in the wind
maybe--that let you know it was something else besides. It wasn’t that
the time was any less Summer. It was just that it was Summer and a
little Autumn too. But I always say that you can’t think Autumn without
thinking Winter; and you can’t think Winter without thinking Spring; and
Spring and Summer are not really two, but just one. And so there you
have the whole year made one and nothing divided.... What if God were
intelligence and spirit harmonized and made one? What if all that is the
matter with us is just that we intelligences and spirits have not yet
been harmonized and made one?
I’ve got a little old piano that the keys rattle, and Sunday mornings,
for years now, I always go to that after breakfast, and sit down in my
apron, and play some anthems that I remember: “As Pants the Hart,” and
“Glory Be to God in the Highest,” and like that. I did it that first
Autumn Sunday morning, with my windows open and the muslin curtains
blowing and the sun slanting in, and a little smell of wild mint from
the bed by the gate. And I knew all over me that it was Sunday
morning--I’d have known it no matter if I hadn’t known.
For all I took as long as I could doing my dishes and brushing up the
floor and making my bed and feeding my chickens, it was only half past
nine when I was all through. Then I got my vegetables ready for dinner,
and made me a little dessert, and still it was not quite ten o’clock. So
then I give it up and went in, and sat down where I could see them go
past to church. I had wanted to keep busy till after half past ten, when
they’d all be in their pews.
Already they were going by, folks from up the street and round the
corner: some that didn’t usually go and that I couldn’t tell which of
the churches they’d be going to, and I wondered how they could tell
themselves; and then some that sat near me in church, and that I usually
walked along with.
“No,” I thought, “no such nonsense as this for me. Ever. Nor no red,
white and blue banquet, either.”
Then, all of a sudden, the first bells began to ring. All the little
churches in the village have bells and steeples--they were in debt for
them for years. But the bells ... all my life long I’d been hearing them
rung Sunday morning. All my life I had answered to them--to our special
one because, as I said, my father had been janitor there, and he had
rung the bell; but just the same, I had answered, always. The bells had
meant something to me. They meant something now. I loved to hear them.
Pretty soon they stopped, and there was just the tramp of feet on the
board walk. I sat there where I was, without moving, the quarter of an
hour until the bells began again. And when the bells began again it
seemed as if they rang right there in the room with me, but soft and
distant too,--from a long way off where I wasn’t any more. Always it had
been then, at the second bell, that mother had stood in the hall and
asked me if I was ready.... I sat there where I was, the quarter of an
hour until the bells began again, and I knew this was the last bell,
that would end in the five strokes--rung slow, and that when they
stopped, all the organs would begin together. And then I could have
cried aloud the thing that had been going in me and through me since the
first bell had begun to ring:
“Oh, God. It’s the invisible church of the living God--it’s the place
that has grown out of the relation of men to you, out of the striving of
men to find you, and out of their longing to draw together in search of
you. It is our invisible church from the old time. Why then--when men
read things into the visible church that never belonged there, when
there has crept into and clung there much that is false, why is it that
we who know this must be the ones to withdraw? It is your church and
the church of all those who try to know you. What shall we do to make it
whole?”
Before I knew what I was doing, I was slipping my long cloak on over my
work-dress, and then I was out on the street. And I remember that as I
went, the thing that kept pouring through my mind was that I wasn’t the
only one. But that all over, in other towns at that very hour, there
were those whose hearts were aching as mine had ached, and who had
nowhere to go. I don’t know yet what I meant to do; but over and over in
my head the words kept going:
“What shall we _do_ to make it whole?”
The last bell had stopped when I came to the little grassy triangle
where the three churches faced. And usually, on Sunday mornings, by the
time the last bell has rung, the triangle is still except for a few
hurrying late-comers. But now, when I turned the corner and faced it, I
saw people everywhere. Before each little church the steps, the
side-walk, and out in the street, were thronged with people, and people
were flowing out into the open spaces. And in a minute I sensed it:
There wasn’t room. There wasn’t room--for there were fifteen hundred
people living in Friendship Village, and all the little churches of the
town together wouldn’t hold that many, nor even as many of them as were
assembled there that day. But instead of thinking what to do, and how
not to waste the time when so many had got together, all that kept going
through my head was those same words that I had been saying:
“What shall we _do_ to make it whole?”
And yet those words were what made me think what to do. On the steps of
our church I saw our superintendent, looking wild and worried, and I ran
right up to him, and I said two words. And in a minute those two words
went round, and they spoke them in the crowd, and they announced them
inside our church, and somebody went with those words to the other
churches. And then we were all moving out and along together to where
the two words pointed us: Shepherd’s Grove.
There’s a rough old bandstand in Shepherd’s Grove where once, long ago,
the German band used to give evening concerts. The bandstand had nearly
fallen to pieces, but it was large enough. The three ministers went up
there together, and round the base of the bandstand came gathering the
three choirs, and in a minute or two there we all were under the trees
of the Grove, the common trees, that made a home for us all, on the
common earth, under the common sky.
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow” came first, because it said
the thing that was in the hearts of us all. And then we wondered what
would be, because of the three separate sermons up there before us, all
prepared, careful, by three separate ministers, in three separate
manses, for three separate congregations. But the thing seemed to settle
itself. For it was young Elbert Kinsman who rose, and he didn’t have any
prepared sermon in his hands. His hands were empty when he stretched
them out toward us. And he said:
“My friends and fellow-lovers of God, and seekers for his law in our
common life, this is for me an end and a beginning. As I live, it is for
me the end of the thing that long has irked me, that irks us all, that
we are clinging to nobody can tell why, or of whose will. I mean the
division of unreason in the household of love. For me the folly and the
waste and the loss of efficiency of denominationalism have forever
ceased. In this hour begins for me a new day: The day when I stand with
all men who strive to know God, and call myself by no name save the name
which we all bear: Children of the Father, and brothers to Man.”
I don’t know what else he said--I heard, but I heard it in something
that wasn’t words, but that was nearer, and closer up to, and clearer
in my ears than any words. And I knew that what he was saying had been
sounding in my heart for long; and that I had heard it trying to speak
from the hearts of others; and that it wasn’t only in Friendship
Village, but it was all over the world that people are ready and waiting
for the coming of the way that had been shown to us that day. Who knows
how it will come at last,--or what form it will take? But we do know
that the breaking down of the meaningless barriers must come first.
When the young minister had finished, we stood for a moment in silent
prayer. You can _not_ stand still in the woods and empty out your own
will, without prayer being there instead, quiet, like love.
Then all together, and as if a good many of us had thought of it first,
we began to sing:
“There’s a wideness in God’s loving
Like the wideness of the sea....”
No sooner had we begun than deep in the wood, clear and sweet above the
other singing, there came a voice that we all knew. It was Lavvy--I
stood where I could see her coming. She was in a cotton dress, and she
had done as she had said--gone into the wood--“where better things
are.” And there we had come to find them too. She came down the green
aisles, singing; and we were all singing--I wish I might have been where
I could hear that singing mount. But I was, and we all were, where we
could look into one another’s hearts and read there the common longing
to draw near unto God. And the great common God was in our midst.
THE FACE OF FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
The day that they denominated Threat Hubbelthwait for mayor of
Friendship Village was band-concert night. It’s real back-aching work to
go to our band concerts, because we ain’t no seats--nothing but a
bandstand in the middle of the market square; but yet we all of us do
go, because it’s something to do. And you die--you _die_ for some place
to go to see folks and to move around among them, elbow near.
I was resting on the bottom step of the bandstand between tunes, when
Mis’ Timothy Toplady come by.
“Hold up your head,” says she. “You’re going to be mayored over in a
minute by a man that ain’t been drunk for six months. I dunno but they
used that in the campaign. This town ain’t got a politic to its name.”
“Do they know yet,” I ask’ her, “who’s going to run against him?”
“I heard ’Lish Warren,” says Mis’ Toplady. “They want Eppleby to run
interdependent, but he won’t leave himself down to run against Threat
and ’Lish, I don’t believe. I wish’t,” Mis’ Toplady says, “I was men.”
But all of a sudden she sort of straightened up there to the foot of the
bandstand.
“No, I don’t,” she says. “I wish’t I was a human being. A human being
like the Lord meant me to be, with a finger in His big pie as well as in
Timothy Toplady’s everlasting apple-pie. I wish’t--oh, I wish’t I was a
real human being, with my brains in my head instead of baked into pies
and stitched into clothes and used to clean up floors with.”
I’ve often wished that, too, and every woman had ought to. But Mis’
Toplady had ought to wish it special. She’s big and strong of limb, and
she can lift and carry and put through, capable and swift. She’s like a
woman left from some time of the world when women was some human-beinger
than they are now, and she’s like looking ahead a thousand years.
“But just _half_ a human,” she says now, dreamy, “would know that
election day ought to be differn’t from the run o’ days. Some men
votes,” she says, “like they used the same muscles for votin’ that they
use for bettin’ and buyin’ and sellin’. I wonder if they do.”
When the band started to play, we moved over towards the sidewalk. And
there we come on Timothy Toplady and Silas and Mis’ Sykes and Eppleby
Holcomb and Mame, and two-three more. We stood there together, listening
to the nice, fast tune. They must have been above six-seven hundred
folks around the square, all standing quiet in the rings of the arc
lights or in the swinging shadows, listening too.
The market square is a wonderful, big open place to have in the middle
of a town. It had got set aside years ago to be a park some day, and
while it was a-waiting for parkhood, the town used the edge of it for a
market and wood-yard. It stretched away ’most to the track and the Pump
pasture, and on three sides of it Friendship Village lay--that night
with stores shut up and most of the houses shut up while folks took
their ease--though it _was_ a back-aching ease--hearing the nice, fast,
late tunes.
Right while we was keeping still, up slouched Threat Hubbelthwait, the
new mayor nominee.
“Evenin’,” says he, with no reverence for the tune. “Ain’t this here my
dance?”
“I heard you was up to lead us one,” says Mis’ Toplady, dry.
Threat took it for congratulations. “Thank you kindly,” says he, easy.
“It’s a great trust you folks are talkin’ of placin’ in me.”
“Oh, ’most everybody in town has been trustin’ you for years, ain’t
they, Threat?” says Mis’ Toplady, sweet.
That scairt Timothy, her lawful lord, and he talked fast to cover up,
but Threat pretended not to hear anyway, and pretty soon he slouched on.
And when the piece was over, and the clapping:
“Mercy,” says Mame Holcomb, “the disgrace it’ll be to have that man for
mayor! How’d he get himself picked out?”
Silas Sykes explained it. “Threat Hubbelthwait,” says he, “is the only
man in this town that can keep the party in at this election. If Threat
don’t run, the party’s out.”
“Why not leave the party _go_ out, then?” says Mis’ Toplady, innocent.
“Listen at that!” says Silas. “Leave the party go out! What do we belong
to the party for if we’re willing to leave it go out?”
“What,” says Mis’ Toplady, troubled, “do you belong to it for if you’re
willing to leave it stay in along with a bad man?”
“We stand by the party to keep the party from being disrupted, woman,”
says Silas.
Mis’ Toplady looks at him, puzzled.
“Well,” she says, “I _have_ made an apple-pie to keep the apples from
spoiling, but yet that wasn’t the real, true purpose of the pie.”