cakes by then, and she was getting kind of flustered and crispy.
“Shucks?” says Mis’ Sykes, haughty and questioning, and all but in two
syllables.
“If that’s all the law is,” says Mis’ Toplady, beating away at her
pancake batter, “give me anar-kicky, or whatever it is they call it.”
Mis’ Sykes never said a word. She just went on making syrup,
reproachful. Mis’ Sykes is one of them that acts like life was made up
of the pattern of things, and like speaking of warf and woof wasn’t
delicate. And she never so much as lets on they is such a thing as a
knot. Yes, some folks is like that. But not me--not me.
It was ’most half-past seven o’clock when the bird-man was ready. Like a
big bug the machine looked, with spidery, bent legs and wings spread
ready and no head necessary. And when he finally run it off down the
square and headed towards the Pump pasture, my heart sunk some. My land,
I thought, it can’t be a real true one. I guess there are them, but this
right here on the market square can’t be one.
Since the world begun, there ain’t a more wonderful minute for folks
than the minute when they first see some kind of flying-machine leave
the ground--_leave the ground_! It’s like seeing the future come true
right in your face. The thing done it so gentle and so simple that you’d
of thought it was invented when legs was. It lifted itself up in the
air, like by its own boot-straps, and it went up and up and up, just
like going up was its own alphabet. It went and it kept going, its motor
buzzing and purring, softer and softer. And pretty soon the blue that it
was going up to meet seemed to come down and meet it, and the two sort
of joined, and the big, wide gold morning flowed all over them, and the
first thing I knew the bird-man’s machine and him in it looked like just
what I had said: an eagle of the Lord, soaring to meet the sun like a
friend of its.
I couldn’t bear it any more. It seemed to me as if, if I should look any
longer, I should all of a sudden have ten senses instead of five, and
they’d explode me. I looked away and down. And when I done that, all at
once there I was looking right into the face of all the folks in
Friendship Village. Heads back, a sea of little white dabs that was
faces, and hearts beating underneath where you couldn’t see ’em--all of
us was standing there breathless, feeling just alike. Feeling just alike
and being just alike, underneath that wonderful thing happening in the
sky.... And all of a sudden, while I looked at them, the faces all
blurred and wiggled, and it seemed like I was looking into only one
face, the face of Friendship Village, like a person....
I see it, like I’d never seen it before. While we watched, _we was one
person_. When we was all thinking about the same thing, there was only
one of us. And the more wonderful things that come into the world and
took hold of everybody, the more _one_ we was going to get and to stay.
And this, all vague inside of us, I knew now was what us ladies had
meant by what we’d planned. Didn’t it seem--didn’t it seem as if them
that watched had ought to stay _one_--that decent, wondering, almost
reverent one, long enough to vote decent and wondering and reverent for
their town?
Right while my heart was beating with it all, the little buzzing and
purring of the motor, away up there in the blue, stopped short off. My
eyes flew up again, and I see the bird-man coming down. He was up so
high that he was a dot, and he grew and grew like a thing being born in
the sky--right down towards us and on us he come like a shot, a
shot-down shot. Nobody breathed. I couldn’t see. But I looked and looked
and dreaded.... And not eight hundred feet from the ground he begun
coming down easy, and he come the rest of the way as gentle as a bird,
and lit where he rose from.
Oh, how they cheered him--like one man! _Like one man._ Lem Toplady and
Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and the boys that was out in the field went and
shook his hand--like the servants, I thought in the middle of my head,
of some great new order. And I was thinking so deep and so breathless
that I ’most forgot the band till it crashed right out behind us,
playing loud and fine that Marseilles French piece, like we’d told them.
And when it done that, up hopped the children that it give the cue to,
and there in the midst of us they struck in, singing loud and clear the
words they sung in school to that old tune, with its wonderful tang to
it, that slips to your heels with its music and makes you want to go
start something and to start it _then_:
“_Come, Children of To-morrow, come!_
_New glory dawns upon the world._
_The ancient banners must be furled._
_The earth becomes our common home--_
_The earth becomes our common home._
_From plain and field and town there sound_
_The stirring rumors of the day._
_Old wrongs and burdens must make way_
_For men to tread the common ground._
“_Look up! The children win to their immortal place.
March on, march on--within the ranks of all the human race._
“_Come, love of people, for the part_
_Invest our willing arms with might._
_Mother of Liberty, shed light_
_As on the land, so in the heart--_
_As on the land, so in the heart._
_Divided, we have long withstood_
_The love that is our common speech._
_The comrade cry of each to each_
_Is calling us to humanhood._”
Hum it to the tune of that Marseilles piece, and you’ll know how we was
all feeling. By the time they got down to their last two lines, my
throat was about the size of my head.
And then the bird-man got back in his little sulky seat, and he waved
his hand to us, and he left his machine run down the field, and lift,
and head straight for open country. His way lay, it seemed, right acrost
Friendship Village; and he’d no more’n started before the band started
too, playing the tune that by now was in everybody’s veins. And behind
them the children fell in, singing again, and with the people streaming
behind them they all marched off down Daphne Street--where the little
shops lay waiting to be opened, and the polls was waiting to be voted
in, and Friendship Village was waiting for us to know it was a town,
like it meant.
All us ladies went to scraping up plates like fury. Excep’ Mis’ Toplady.
She stood for a minute wiping her eyes on a paper napkin. And she says:
“Oh, ladies. I ain’t never felt so much like a human being since I was
born one.”
And me, I stood there looking across the Market Square to the
school-house. There it was, with its doors open and the new voting
machine setting in the hall,--they’d took the polls out of the barber
shop and the livery stable sole because the voting machine got in the
way of trade. They’d put it in the school-house. And it was to the
school-house that the men were going now.
“Oh,” I says to Mis’ Toplady, “would you think anybody could go in a
child’s school-house, and vote for anybody that--”
“No, no,” she says, “you wouldn’t think so, would you?”
But she didn’t look at me. She was looking over to the school-house
steps. Lem Toplady stood there, and Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and Hugh
Merriman and Mis’ Uppers’s boy--watching the last of the bird-man and
the air-wagon flying down the sky. When it had gone, the four boys
turned and went together up the steps of the school-house. And Mis’
Toplady and Mis’ Sturgis and Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman and Mis’ Uppers
stood and watched them--going in to vote now, to the place where the
four mothers had seen them go ever since they were little bits of boys,
with faces and clothes to be kept clean, and lessons to learn, and lunch
baskets to fill. Then the mothers could either do these things for
them--or anyway help along. Now they stood there doing nothing,
watching, while their boys went in to do their first vote--into the
school-house where they’d learned their A B C’s.
“Ain’t that--ain’t it just--?” I says low to Mis’ Toplady; and kind of
stopped.
“Ain’t it?” she says, fervent and low too. “Oh, ain’t it?”
“The time’ll come,” I says, “when you mothers, and me too, will go in
there with them. And when we’ll go straight from a great public
meeting--like this--to a great public business like that. And when it
comes--”
We all looked at one another--all but Mis’ Silas Sykes, that was busy
with the syrup pitchers. But the thing was over the rest of us--the lift
and the courage and the belief of that hour we’d all had together. And I
says out:
“Oh, ladies! I believe in us. I believe in us.”
So I tell you, I wasn’t surprised at what that day done. I dunno for
sure what done it. Mebbe it was just the common sense in folks that I
can_not_ get over believing in. Mebbe it was the cores of their minds
that I know is sound, no matter how many soft spots disfigures their
brains. Mebbe it was the big power and the big glory that’s near us,
waiting to be drawn-on-and-used as fast as we learn how to do it--no, I
dunno for sure. But they put Eppleby Holcomb in for mayor. Eppleby got
in, to mayor the town! And some said it was because the boys that was to
cast their first vote had got out, last minute, and done some hustling,
unbeknownst. And some thought it was because Threat and ’Lish couldn’t
wait, but done a little private celebrating together in Threat’s hotel
bar the night before election. And others said election always is some
ticklish--they give that reason.
But me--I went and stood out on my side porch that election-day night,
a-looking down Daphne Street to the village. There it lay, with its arc
light shining blue by the Market Square, and it was being a village,
with nobody looking and all its folks in its houses, just like the
family around that one evening lamp. And their hearts was beating along
about the same things; just like they had beat that day for the
sky-wagon, and for the Marseilles French piece. Only they didn’t know
it--yet.
And I says right out loud to the village--just like Friendship Village
was a person, with its face turned toward me, listening:
“Why, you ain’t half of us--nor you ain’t some of us. You’re all of us!
And you must of known it all the time.”
THE FLOOD
_It’s “brother” now and it’s “brother” then,_
_And it’s “brother” another day,_
_And it’s “brother” whenever a loud doom sounds_
_With a terrible toll to pay...._
_But what of the silent dooms they bear_
_In an inoffensive way?_
_It’s “brother” here and it’s “brother” there,_
_And it’s “brother” once in a while,_
_And it’s “brother” whenever an hour hangs black_
_On the face of the common dial...._
_But what of the days that stretch between_
_For the march of the rank and file?_
I don’t know how well you know villages, but I hope you know anyhow one,
because if you don’t they’s things to life that you don’t know yet. Nice
things.
I was thinking of that the Monday morning that all Friendship Village
remembers still. I was walking down Daphne Street pretty early, seeing
everybody’s breakfast fire smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney and
hearing everybody’s little boy splitting wood and whistling out in the
chip pile, and smelling everybody’s fried mush and warmed-up potatoes
and griddle cakes come floating out sort of homely and old fashioned and
comfortable, from the kitchen cook-stoves.
“Look at the Family,” I says to myself, “sitting down to breakfast, all
up and down the street.”
And when the engine-house clock struck seven, and the whistle over to
the brick-yard blew little and peepy and like it wasn’t sure it was
seven but it thought so, and the big whistle up to the round-house blew
strong and hoarse and like it knew it all and could tell you more about
the time of day then you’d ever guessed if it wanted to, and the sun
come shining down like the pouring out of some new thing that we’d never
had before--I couldn’t help drawing a long breath, just because Now was
Now.
Down the walk a little ways I met Bitty Marshall. I wondered a little at
seeing him on the street way up our end o’ town. He’d lately opened a
little grocery store down on the Flats, for the Folks that lived down
there. Him and his wife lived overhead, with a lace curtain to one of
the front windows--though they was two front windows to the room. “I’ve
always hankered for a pair o’ lace curtains,” she said to me when I
went up to see her one day, “but when I’d get the money together to buy
’em, it seems like somethin’ has always come and et it up--medicine or
school books or the children’s shoes. So when we moved in here, I says I
was goin’ to have one lace curtain to one window if I board the other
up!” And she had one to one window, and a green paper shade to the
other.
“Well, Bitty,” I says, “who’s keeping store to-day? Your wife?”
But he didn’t smile gay, like he usually does. He looked just regular.
“Neither of us’ll be doing it very long,” he said. “I’ve got to close
down.”
“But I thought it was paying you nice?” I says.
“And so it was,” says Bitty, “till Silas Sykes took a hand. He didn’t
have a mind to see me run no store down there and take away his trade
from the Flats. He begun under-sellin’ me--he’s been runnin’ everything
off at cost till I can’t hold out no longer.”
“So that’s what Silas Sykes has been slashin’ down everything for, from
prunes upwards,” I says. “I might of known. I might of known.”
“My interest is comin’ due,” says Bitty, movin’ on; “I’ve come up this
mornin’ to see about going back to work in the brick-yard.”
“Good land,” I says sorrowful. “Good land. And Silas in the Council--and
on the School Board--and an elder thrown in.”
Bitty grinned a little then.
“It ain’t new,” he says, over his shoulder. And he went on up the
street, holding his hands heavy, and kind of letting his feet fall
instead of setting them down, like men walk that don’t care, any more.
I understood what he meant when he said it wasn’t new. There was Joe
Betts that worked three years getting his strawberry bed going, and when
he begun selling from the wagon instead of taking to Silas Sykes at the
Post-Office store, Silas got the Council that he’s in to put up
licenses, clear over Joe’s head. And Ben Dole, he’d got a little machine
and begun making cement blocks for folks’s barns, and Timothy Toplady,
that’s interested in the cement works over to Red Barns, got Zachariah
Roper, that’s to the head of the Red Barns plant, to come over and buy
Ben Dole’s house and come up on his rent--two different times he done
that. It wasn’t new. But it all kind of baffled me. It seemed so legal
that I couldn’t put down my finger on what was the matter. Of course
when a thing’s legal, and you’re anyways patriotic, you are some put to
it to find a real good term to blame it with. I walked along, thinking
about it, and feeling all baffled up as to what to do. But I hadn’t gone
ten steps when I thought of one thing I could do, to clear up my own
i-dees if for nothing else. I turned around and called out after Bitty.
“Oh, Bitty,” I says, “would you mind me letting Silas know I know?”
He threw out his hands a little, and let ’em kind of set down side of
him.
“Why sure not,” he said, “but if you’re thinkin’ of saying anything to
him--best spare the breath.”
“We’ll see about that,” I thought, and I went on down Daphne Street with
a Determination sitting up in the air just ahead of me, beginning to
crook its finger at me to come along.
In a minute I come past Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman’s house. The Chief has
been dead several years, but we always keep calling her by his title,
same as we call the vacant lot by the depot the Ellsworth House, though
the Ellsworth House has been burned six years and it’s real kind of
confusing to strangers that we try to direct. I remember one traveling
man that headed right out towards the marsh and missed his train because
some of us had told him to keep straight on till he turned the corner
by the Ellsworth House, and he kept hunting for it and trusting in it
till he struck the swamp. But you know how it is--you get to saying one
thing, and you keep on uttering it after the thing is dead and gone and
another has come in its place, and when somebody takes you up on it,
like as not you’ll tell him he ain’t patriotic. It was the same with the
Fire Chief. Dead though he was, we always give her his official title,
because we’d got headed calling her that and hated to stop. She was out
in her garden that morning, and I stood still when I caught sight of her
tulips. They looked like the earth had broke open and let out a leak of
what’s inside it, never intending to show so much at once.
“Mis’ Merriman,” I says, “what tulips! Or,” says I, flattering, “is it a
bon-fire, with lumps in the flame?”
Mis’ Merriman was bending over, setting out her peony bulbs, with her
back to me. When I first spoke, she looked over her shoulder, and then
she went right on setting them out, hard as she could dig. “Glad you
like _something_ that belongs to me,” says she, her words kind of
punched out in places by the way she dug.
Then I remembered. Land, I’d forgot all about it. But at the last
meeting of the Friendship Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement
Sodality--we don’t work for just Cemetery any more, but we got started
calling it that twenty years back, and on we go under that name, serene
as a straight line--at that last meeting I’d appointed Mis’ Timothy
Toplady a committee of one to go to the engine-house to get them to
leave us sell garbage pails at cost in the front part; and it seems Mis’
Merriman had give out that she’d ought to be the one to do it, along of
her husband having been Fire Chief for eleven years and more, and she
might have influence with ’em. I’d of known that too, if I’d thought of
it--but you know how it is when they pitch on to you to appoint a
committee from the chair? All your i-dees and your tact and your memory
and your sense takes hold of hands and exits out of you, and you’re left
up there on the platform, unoccupied by any of ’em--and ten to one
you’ll appoint the woman with the thing in her hat that first attracts
your attention. Mebbe it ain’t that way with some, but I’ve noticed how
it is with me, and that day I’d appointed Mis’ Toplady to that committee
sole because she passed her cough-drops just at that second and my eye
was drawed acrost to them and to her. I’d never meant to slight Mis’
Fire Chief and I felt nothing on this earth but kindness to her, and
yet when I heard her speak so, all crispy and chilly and uppish, about
being glad I liked _something_ about her, all to once my veins sort of
run starch, and my bones lay along in me like they was meant for extra
pokers, and I flashed out back at her:
“Oh, yes, Mis’ Merriman--your _tulips_ is all right----” bringing my
full heft down on the word “tulips.”
And then I went on up the street with something--something--something
inside me, or outside me, or mebbe just _with_ me, looking at me, simple
and grave and direct and patient and--wounded again. And I felt kind of
sick, along up and down my chest. And the back of my head begun to hurt.
And I breathed fast and without no pleasure in taking air. And I says to
myself and the world and the Something Else:
“Oh, God, creator of heaven and earth that’s still creatin’ ’em as fast
as we’ll get our meannesses out of the way and let you go on--_what_
made me do that?”
And nothing told me what--not then.
Just then I see Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss come out on their side
porch and hang out the canary. I waved my hand acrost to her, and she
whips off her big apron and shakes it at me, and I see she was feeling
the sun shine clear through her, just like I’d been.
“Come on down with me while I do an errant,” I calls to her.
“My table ain’t cleared off yet,” says she, decisive.
“Mine either,” I says back. “But ain’t you just as fond of the sun in
heaven as you are of your own breakfast dishes? Come on.”
So she took off her apron and run in and put on a breastpin and come
down the walk, rolling down her sleeves, and dabbing at her hair to make
sure, and we went down the street together. And the first thing I done
was to burst out with my thoughts all over her, and I told her about
Silas and about Bitty Marshall, and about how his little store on the
Flats was going to shut down.
“Well,” she says, “if that ain’t Silas all over. If it ain’t Silas. I
could understand his dried fruit sales, ’long toward Spring so--it’s
easy to be reasonable about dried peaches when its most strawberry time.
I could even understand his sales on canned stuff he’s had in the store
till the labels is all fly-specked. But when he begun to cut on new
potatoes and bananas and Bermuda onions and them necessities, I says to
myself that he was goin’ to get it back from somewheres. So it’s out o’
Bitty Marshall’s pocket, is it?”
“And it’s so legal, Mis’ Holcomb,” I says, “it’s so bitterly legal.
Silas ain’t corporationed himself in with nobody. It ain’t as if the
courts could get after him and some more and make them be fair to their
little competitors, same as courts is fallin’ over themselves to get the
chance to do. This is nothin’ but Silas--our leadin’ citizen.”
Mis’ Holcomb, she made her lips both thin and tight.
“Let’s us go see Silas,” says she, and I see my Determination was
crooking its finger to her, same as to me.
Silas had gone down to the store, we found, but Mis’ Sykes was just
coming out their gate with a plate of hot Johnny cake to take up to Miss
Merriman.
“Oh, Mis’ Sykes,” I says, “is your night bloomin’ cereus goin’ to be out
to-night, do you know? I heard it was.” The whole town always watches
for Mis’ Sykes’s night-blooming cereus to bloom, and the night it comes
out we always drop in and set till quite late.
Mis’ Sykes never looked at Mis’ Holcomb.
“Good morning, Calliope,” says she. “Yes, I think it will, Calliope.
Won’t you come in to-night, Calliope, and see it?” says she.
I says I would; and when we went on,
“What struck her,” I says, puzzled, “to spread my name on to what she
said like that, I wonder? I feel like I’d been planted in that sentence
of hers in three hills.”
Then I see Mis’ Holcomb’s eyes was full of tears.
“Mis’ Sykes was trying to slight me,” she says. “She done that so’s to
kind of try to seem to leave me out.”
“Well,” I says, “I must say, she sort of succeeded. But what for?”
“I give her potato bread receipt away,” she says miserable, “and it
seems she didn’t expect it of me.”
“Is _that_ it?” I says. “Well, of course we both know Mis’ Sykes ain’t
the one to ever forgive a thing like that. I s’pose she’ll socially
ostrich-egg you--or whatever it is they say?”
“I s’pose she will,” says Mis’ Holcomb forlorn. “You know how Mis’ Sykes
is. From now on, if I say the sky is blue, Mis’ Sykes’ll say no, pink.”
They was often them feuds in Friendship Village--like this one, and like
Mis’ Merriman’s and my new one. It hadn’t ought to be so in a village
family, but then sometimes it is. I s’pose in cities it’s
different--they always say it makes folks broader to live in cities, and
they prob’ly get to know better. But it’s like that with us.
Well, of course the back-bone had dropped out of the morning for Mis’
Holcomb, and she didn’t take no more interest in going down street than
she would in darning--I mention darning because I defy anybody to pick
out anything uninterestinger. Up to the time I got to the Post-Office
Hall store, I was trying to persuade her to come in with me to see
Silas.
“I’d best not go in,” she says. “You know how one person’s quarrel is
catching in a family. And a potato bread receipt is as good as anything
else to be loyal about.”
But I made her go in, even if she shouldn’t say a word, but just act
constituent-like.
Silas was alone in the store, sticking dates on to a green paste-board
to make the word “Pure” to go over his confectionery counter. He had his
coat off, and his hair had been brushed with a wet brush that left the
print of the bristles, and his very back looked Busy.
“Hello, folks,” says he, “how’s life?”
“Selfish as ever,” I says. “Ain’t trade?”
“Well,” says Silas, “it’s every man for himself and the devil take the
hindmost in most everything now, ain’t it? As the prophet said, It beats
all.”
“It does that,” I says. “It beats everybody in the end. Funny they don’t
find it out. That’s why,” I adds serene, “we been so moved by your
generous cost sales of stuff, Silas. What you been doin’ that for
anyway?” I put it to him.
“For to bait trade,” says he.
“For what else?” I ask’ him.
“Why,” he says, beginning to be irritable, which some folks uses instead
of wit, “to push the store, of course. I ain’t been doin’ it for the fun
of it.”
“Ain’t you now?” I says. “I thought it was kind of a game with you.”
“What do you mean--game?” says Silas, scowling.
“Cat and mouse,” I says brief. “You the cat and Bitty Marshall the
mouse.”
Silas stood up straight and just towered at me.