my notion, and the notion of most of Friendship Village, it’s just what
you’re doing, Mis’ Fire Chief,” says I,--“in some respec’s.”
“Oh, even if I wasn’t, I don’t want to be the laughin’-stock to-day,”
says she, weak, and beginning to cry.
“Hettie and Amos,” says I, then, for form’s sake, “if Mis’ Merriman
agrees to this, do you agree?”
“Yes! Oh, _yes_!” says Amos, like the organ and the benediction and the
Amen, all rolled into one.
“Yes,” says Hettie, shy as a rose, but yet like a rose nodding on its
stalk, positive.
“And you, Mis’ Fire Chief?” says I.
She nodded behind her hands that covered up her face. “I don’t know what
to do,” says she, faint. “Go on ahead--all of you!”
My, if we didn’t have to fly around. They wasn’t no time for dress
changing. Hettie was in white muslin and Amos in every-day, but it was
all right because she was Hettie and because he looked like a king in
anything. And they was so many last things to do that none of us thought
of dress anyhow. It was four o’clock by then, and folks had been
stomping in “past the bell” and marching up-stairs and laying off their
things--being as everybody knows what’s what in Friendship Village and
don’t hev to be told where to go, same as some--till, judging by the
sound, they had all got there and was clacking in the parlor, and Mis’
Fire Chief’s party had begun. And Mis’ Fire Chief herself revived enough
to offer to tie the ribbins around the sandwiches.
“My land!” I says, “we can’t do that. We can’t have black ribbin round
the wedding sandwiches.”
But Hettie, she broke in, sweet and dignified, and before her aunt could
say a word. “Yes, we can,” she says, “yes, we can. I ain’t
superstitious, same as some. Uncle’s centerpiece an’ his willow on the
tablecloth an’ his blackribbin sandwiches,” says she, “is goin’ to stay
just the way they are, weddin’ or no weddin’,” says she. “Ain’t they,
Amos?” she ask’ him.
“You bet you,” says Amos, fervent, just like he would have agreed to
anything under heaven that Hettie said. And Mis’ Merriman, she looked at
’em then, grateful and even resigned. And time Amos had gone and got
back with the license and the minister we were all ready.
They sent me in to sort of pave the way. I slips in through the hall and
stood in the door a minute wondering how I’d tell ’em. There they all
was, setting sewing and rocking and gossiping, contented as if they had
a hostess in every room. And not one of ’em suspecting. Oh, I loved ’em
one and all, and I loved the way they was all _used_ to each other, and
talking natural about crochet patterns and recipes for oatmeal cookies
and what’s good to keep hands from chapping--not one of ’em putting on
or setting their best foot forwards or trying to act their best, same as
they might with company, but just being themselves, natural and
forgetting. And I was glad, deep down in my heart, that Maria Carpenter
hadn’t come near. Not glad that she had broke her wrist, of course--but
that she hadn’t come near. And when I stepped out to tell ’em what was
going to happen, I was so glad in my throat that I couldn’t say a word
only just--
“Friends--listen to me. What do you _s’pose_ is goin’ to happen? Oh,
they can’t none of you guess. So look. Look!”
Then I threw open the dining-room door and let ’em in--Hettie and Amos,
with Doctor June. And patterns and recipes and lotions all just simmered
down into one surprised and glad and loving buzz of wonder. And then
Hettie and Amos were married, and the world begun all over again, Garden
of Eden style.
There is one little thing more to tell. When the congratulations was
most over, the dining-room door creaked a little bit, and Amos, that
was standing by it, whirled around and see Mis’ Fire Chief Merriman
peeking through the crack to her guests. And Amos swung open the door
wide, and he grabbed her by the arm, and though she hung back with all
her strength Amos pulled her right straight into the room and kissed
her, there before them all.
“_Aunt_ Hettie,” he says to her, ringing, “_Uncle_--Hettie’s uncle an’
mine an’ your husband,--wouldn’t want you stayin’ out there in the
dinin’-room to-day on account o’ him!”
And when we all crowded around her, greeting her like guests should
greet a hostess and like dear friends should greet dear friends, Mis’
Fire Chief she wipes her eyes, and she left ’em shake her hands; and
though she wasn’t all converted, it was her and not me that ask’ ’em
please to walk out into the dining-room and eat the lunch that was part
wedding and part in memory of the Chief.
THE BIGGEST BUSINESS
I donno whether you’ve ever lived in a town that’s having a boom? That’s
being a boom town, as they call it? There ain’t any more boom to
Friendship Village than there is to a robin building a nest. There ain’t
any more boom to Friendship Village than there is to growth. We just go
along and go along, and behave ourselves like the year does: Little
spurt of Spring now and then, when two-three folks build new houses and
we get a new side-walk or two or buy a new sprinkling cart. Little dead
time, here and there, when the tobacco or pickle factory closes down to
wait for more to grow, and when somebody gets most built and boards up
the windows till something else comes in to go on with. But most of the
time Friendship Village keeps on pretty even, like the year, or the
potato patch, or any of them common, growing things.
But now over to Red Barns it ain’t so. Red Barns is eight miles away,
and from the beginning the two towns sort of set with their backs to
each other, and each give out promiscuous that the other didn’t have a
future. But, same time, the two towns looked out of the corners of their
eyes enough to set quite a few things going for each other unconscious:
Red Barns got a new depot, and Friendship Village instantly petitioned
for one. Friendship Village set aside a little park, and Red Barns
immediately appropriated for one, with a little edge more ground. Red
Barns got a new post office, and Friendship Village started out for a
new library. And so on. Just like a couple of boys seeing which could
swim out farthest.
Then all of a sudden the Interurban come through Red Barns and left
Friendship Village setting quiet out in the meadows eight miles from the
track. And of course after that Red Barns shot ahead--Eppleby Holcomb
said that on a still night you could hear Red Barns chuckle. Pretty soon
a little knitting factory started up there, and then a big tobacco
factory. And being as they had three motion-picture houses to our one,
and band concerts all Summer instead of just through July, the folks in
Silas Sykes’s Friendship Village Corn Canning Industry and in Timothy
Toplady’s Enterprise Pickle Manufactory began to want to go over to Red
Barns to work. Two left from Eppleby Holcomb’s Dry Goods Emporium. Even
the kitchens of the few sparse ones that kept hired help begun to
suffer. And the men begun to see that what was what had got to be helped
to be something else--same as often happens in commercial circles.
Things was about to this degree when Spring come on. I donno how it is
with other people, but with me Spring used to be the signal to run as
far as I could from the place I was in, in the hopes, I guess, of
getting close up to all outdoors. I used to want to run along country
paths all squshy with water, and hang over a fence to try to tell
whether it’s a little quail or a big meadowlark in the sedge; I wanted
to smell the sweet, soft-water smell that Spring rain has. I wanted to
watch the crust of the earth move because May was coming up through the
mold. I wanted to climb a tree and be a bud. And one morning I got up
early bent on doing all these things, and ended by poking round my
garden with a stick to see what was coming up--like you do. It was real
early in the morning--not much after six--and Outdoors looked
surprised--you know that surprised look of early morning, as if the day
had never thought of being born again till it up and happened to it? And
I had got to the stage of hanging over the alley fence, doing nothing,
when little David Beach come by. He was eating a piece of bread, and
hurrying.
“Morning, David,” I sings out. “Where’s your fish-pole?”
He stopped running and stopped biting and looked up at me. And then he
laughed, sharp and high up.
“Fish-pole!” says he.
“Is it swimming, then?” I says. And then I felt sick all over. For I
remembered that David had gone to work in Silas Sykes’s canning factory.
“Oh, David,” I patched it up. “I forgot. You’re a man now.”
At that he put back his thin little shoulders, and stuck out his thin
little chest, and held up his sharp little chin. And he said:
“Yup. I’m a man now. I get $2.50 a week, _now_.”
“Whew!” says I. “When do you bank your first million?”
He grinned and broke into a run again. “I’m docked if I’m late,” he
shouts back.
I looked after him. It didn’t seem ten days since he was born. And here
he was, of the general contour of a clay pipe, going to work. His father
had been crippled in the factory, his mother was half sick, and there
were three younger than David, and one older.
“Kind of nice of Silas to give David a job,” I thought. “I don’t suppose
he’s worth much to him, he’s so little.”
And that was all I thought, being that most of us uses our heads far
more frequent to put hats on than for any other purpose.
Right after breakfast that morning I took a walk down town to pick out
my vegetables before the flies done ’em too much violence in Silas
Sykes’s store window. And out in front of the store, I come on Silas
himself, sprinkling his wilted lettuce.
The minute I see Silas, I knew that something had happened to make him
pleased with himself. Not that Silas ain’t always pleased with himself.
But that day he looked extra-special self-pleased.
“Hello, Calliope,” he says, “you’re the very one I want to help me.”
That surprised me, but, thinks I, I’ve asked Silas to do so many things
he ain’t done that I’ve kind of wore grooves in the atmosphere all
around him; and I guess he’s took to asking me first when he sees me,
for fear I’ll come down on to him with another request. So I followed
him into the post-office store where he motioned me with his chin, and
this was what he says:
“Calliope,” says he, “how’d you like to help me do a little work for
this town?”
I must just of stared at Silas. I can keep from looking surprised, same
as the best, when a neighbor comes down on to me, with her eyebrows up
over a piece of news--and I always do, for I do hate to be expected to
play up to other folks’s startled eyebrows. But with these words of
Silas’s I give in and stared. For of some eight, nine, ten plans that
I’d approached him with to the same end, he had turned down all them,
and all me.
“With who?” says I.
“For who?” says he. “Woman, do you realize that taking ’em all together,
store and canning factory combined, I’ve got forty-two folks a-working
for me?”
“Well!” says I. “Quite a family.”
“Timothy Toplady’s got twelve employees,” he goes on, “and Eppleby’s got
seven in the store. That’s sixty-one girls and women and then ...
er....”
“Children,” says I, simple.
“Young folks,” Silas says, smooth. “Sixty-one of ’em. Ain’t that pretty
near a club, I’d like to know?”
“Oh,” I says, “a club. A club! And do them sixty-one want to _be_ a
club, Silas?”
Silas scowled. “What you talking?” he says. “Of course they want all
you’ll do for ’em. Well, now: Us men has been facing this thing, and
it’s so plain that even a woman must see it: Friendship Village is going
to empty itself out into Red Barns, same as a skin, if this town don’t
get up and do something.”
“True,” says I, attentive. “Even a woman can take in that much, Silas,
if you put it right before her, and lead her up to it, and point it out
to her and,” says I, warming up to it, “put blinders on her so’s not to
distract her attention from the real fact in hand.”
“What you talking?” says Silas. “I never saw a woman yet that could keep
on any one subject no more than a balloon. Well, now, what I thought was
this: I thought I’d up and go around with a paper, and see how much
everybody’d give, and we’d open an Evening Club somewheres, for the
employees--folks’s old furniture and magazines and books and some
games--and give ’em a nice time. Here,” says Silas, producing a paper
from behind the cheese, “I’ve gone into this thing to the tune of Fifty
Dollars. Fifty Dollars. And I thought,” says he direct, “that you that’s
always so interested in doing things for folks, might put your own name
down, and might see some of the other ladies too. And I could report it
to our Commercial club meeting next Friday night. _After_ the business
session.”
I looked at him, meditative.
“If it’s all the same to you, Silas,” I says, “I’ll take this paper and
go round and see some of these sixty-one women and girls, instead.”
Silas kind of raised up his whole face and left his chin hanging, idle.
“See them women and girls?” says he, some resembling a shout. “What have
they got to do with it, I’d like to know?”
“Oh,” says I, “ain’t it some their club too, Silas? I thought the whole
thing was on their account.”
Silas used his face like he’d run a draw string down it.
“Women,” he says, “dum women. Their minds ain’t any more logical
than--than floor-sweepings with the door open. Didn’t I just tell you
that the thing was going to be done for the benefit of Friendship
Village and to keep them folks interested in it?”
“Well, but,” I says, “ain’t them folks some Friendship Village too?”
“What’s that got to do with it?” shouts Silas. “Of course they are. Of
course we want to help ’em. But _they_ ain’t got anything to do with
it. All they got to do with it is to be helped!”
“Is it!” I says. “Is that all, Silas?” And while he was a-gathering
himself up to reply, I picked up the subscription paper. “It can’t do
’em no harm,” I says, “to tell ’em about this. Then if any of ’em is
thinking of leaving, it may hold on to ’em till we get a start. If it’s
all the same to you, I’ll just run around and see ’em to-day. Mebbe they
might help--who knows?”
“You’ll bawl the whole thing up,” says Silas. “I wish’t I’d kep’ my
mouth shut.”
“Well,” I says, “you’d ought to know by this time that I ain’t any great
hand to do things _for_ folks, Silas. I like to do ’em _with_ ’em.”
Silas was starting in to wave both arms when somebody come in for black
molasses. And he says to me:
“Well, go on ahead. You’ll roon my whole idea--but go on ahead and see
how little hurt you can do. I’ve got to have some lady-help from
somewheres,” says he, frank.
“Lady-help,” thinks I, a-proceeding down the street. “Lady-help. That’s
me. Kind of auxiliarating around. A member of the General Ladies’ Aid
Society. Lady-help. Ain’t it a grand feeling?”
I went straight to Abigail Arnold that keeps the Home Bakery. Abigail
lives in the Bakery, and I donno a nicer, homier place in town. She
didn’t make the mistake of putting up lace curtains in the store, to
catch the dust.... I always wonder when the time’ll come that we’ll be
content not to have any curtains to any windows in the living rooms of
this earth, but just to let the boughs and the sun and the day smile in
on us, like loving faces. Fade things? Fade ’em? I wonder they didn’t
think of that when they made the sun, and temper it down to keep the
carpets good.... Sometimes I dream of a house on a hill, with meadows of
grass and the line of the sky and the all-day sun for neighbors, and not
a thing to say to ’em: “Keep out. You’ll fade me.” But, “Come in. You’ll
feed me.”
Well, Abigail Arnold was making her home-made doughnuts that morning,
and the whole place smelled like when you was twelve years old, and
struck the back stoop, running, about the time the colander was set on
the wing of the stove, heaped up with brown, sizzling, doughnut-smelling
doughnuts.
“Set right down,” she says, “and have one.” And so I done. And for a few
minutes Silas and Red Barns and Friendship Village and the industrial
and social relations of the entire country slipped away and was sunk in
that nice-tasting, crumpy cake. Ain’t it wonderful--well, we’d ought not
to bother to go off into that; but sometimes I could draw near to the
whole human race just thinking how every one of us loves a fresh
doughnut, et in somebody’s kitchen. It’s a sign and symbol of how alike
we are--and I donno but it means something, something big.
But with the last crumb I come back to commerce.
“Abigail,” I says, “Silas wants to start a club for his and Timothy’s
and Eppleby’s employees.”
“Huh!” says Abigail, sticking her fork down in the kettle. “What’s the
profit? Ain’t I getting nasty in my old age?” she adds solemn. “I meant,
Go on. Tell me about it.”
I done so, winding up about the meeting to be held the coming Friday in
Post-Office Hall, at which Silas was to report on the progress of the
club, after the business session. And she see it like I see it: That a
club laid on to them sixty-one people had got to be managed awful
wise--or what was to result would be considerable more like the stuff
put into milk to preserve it than like the good, rich, thick cream that
milk knows how to _give_, so be you treat it right.
Abigail said she’d help--she’s one of them _new_ women--oh, I ain’t
afraid of the word--she’s one of them new women that catches fire at a
big thing to be done in the world just as sure as another kind of woman
flares up when her poor little pride is hurt. I’ve seen ’em both in
action, and so have you. And we made out a list--in between
doughnuts--of them sixty-one women and girls and children that was
working in Friendship Village, and we divided up the list according to
which of us was best friends with which of ’em--you know that’s a sort
of thing you can’t leave out in the sort of commercial enterprise we was
embarking on--and we agreed to start out separate, right after supper,
and see what turned out to be what.
I went first to see Mary Beach, little David Beach’s sister. They lived
about half a mile from the village on a little triangle of land that had
been sold off from both sides and left because it was boggy. They had a
little drab house, with thick lips. David’s mother set outside the door
with a big clothes-basketful of leggings beside her. She was a strong,
straight creature with a mass of gray hair, and a way of putting her
hands on her knees when she talked, and eyes that said: “I know and I
think,” and not “I’m sure I can’t tell,” like so many eyes are built to
represent. Mary that I’d come to see might have been a person in a
portrait--she was that kind of girl. And little David was there, laying
sprawled out on the floor taking a clock to pieces and putting the items
in a pie-tin.
“You won’t care,” says Mis’ Beach, “if I keep on with the leggings?”
“Leggings?” says I.
She nodded to the basket. “It’s bad pairs,” she said. “They leave me
catch up the dropped stitches.”
“How much do they give you?” says I, brutal. If it had been Silas Sykes
I’d never have dreamt of asking him how much anybody give him for
anything. But--well, sometimes we hound folks and hang folks and ask
folks questions, merely because they’re poor.
“Six cents a dozen,” she says.
I remember they had a fly-paper on the window sill, and the caught flies
and the uncaught ones whirred and buzzed. I can see the room: The floor
that sagged, the walls that cracked, the hot, nameless smell of it. And
in it a woman with the strength and the figure of a race that hasn’t got
here yet, and three children--one of them beautiful, and David, taking a
clock to pieces and putting it together again, without ever having been
taught. You know all about it--and so did I. And while I set there
talking with her, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else but that hole
of a home, and the three splendid beings chained there, like folks in a
bad dream. Someway I never get used to it, and I know I never shall. It
makes me feel as if I was looking on the inside of a table spoon and
seeing things twisted, and saying: “Already such things can’t be.
Already they sound old and false--like thumbscrews!”
And the worst of it was, David’s mother was so used to it. She was so
bitter used to it. And oh--don’t things turn round in the world? A few
years before if somebody like me had gone to see her, I’d of been
telling her to be resigned, and to make the best of her lot, and trying
to give her to understand that the Lord had meant it personal. And
instead, when she said she was doing nice, I longed to say to her:
“No, no, Mis’ Beach! Don’t you make that mistake. You ain’t doing nice.
As long as you think you are, this world is being held back. It’s you
that’s got to help folks to know that you _aren’t_ doing nice. And to
make folks wonder why.”
But I didn’t say it to her. I s’pose I haven’t got that far--yet.
She said she’d like to come to the club that Silas proposed, and Mary,
she said she’d come. They didn’t question much about it--they merely
accepted it and said they’d come. And I went out into the April
after-supper light, with a bird or two twittering sleepy, and an orange
and lemon and water-melon sunset doing its best to attract my attention,
and I says out loud to April in general:
“A club. A club. So we’re going to help that house with a club.”
Then I stopped to Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house. Mis’ Cripps’s boarding
house faces the railroad tracks, and I never went by there without
seeing her milk bottles all set out on her porch, indelicate, like some
of the kitchen lining showing. Bettie Forkaw and Libbie Collins and Rose
Miller and Lizzie Lane, pickle factory girls, lived there. They were all
home, out on the smoky porch, among the milk bottles, laughing and
talking and having a grand time. They had sleeves above their elbows and
waists turned in at the throat with ruffles of cheap lace, and hair
braided in bunches over their ears and dragged low on their foreheads,
and they had long, shiney beads round their necks, and square, shiney
buckles on their low shoes. Betty was pretty and laughed loud and had
uncovered-looking eyes. Libbie was big and strong and still. Rose was
thin, and she had less blood and more bones than anybody I ever see. And
Lizzie--Lizzie might have been a freshman in any college you might name.
She’d have done just as good work in figures as she did in pickles--only
cucumbers come her way and class-rooms didn’t.
“Hello, girls,” I says, “how are you to-night? Do you want to be a
club?”
“To do what?” says they.
“Have a good time,” says I. “Have music--eat a little
something--dance--read a little, maybe. And ask your friends there. A
_club_, you know.”
After we’d talked it over, all four of ’em said yes, they wished they
had some place to go evenings and wouldn’t it be fine to have some place
give to ’em where they could go. I didn’t discuss it over with ’em at
all--but I done the same thing I’d done before, and that I cannot
believe anybody has the right to ask, no matter how rich the questioner
or how poor the questionee.
“Girls,” I says, “you all work for Silas Sykes, don’t you? How much do
you get a week?”
They told me ready enough: Five and Six Dollars apiece, it was.
“Gracious,” I says, “how can you use up so much?” And they laughed and
thought it was a joke. And I went along to the next place--and my
thoughts come slowly gathering in from the edges of my head and formed
here and there in kind of clots, that got acted on by things I begun to
see was happening in my town, just as casual as meat bills and grocery
bills--just as casual as school bells and church bells.
For the next two days I went to see them on my list. And then nights I’d
go back and sit on my porch and look over to Red Barns that was posting
itself as a nice, hustling, up-to-date little town, with plenty of
business opportunities. And then I’d look up and down Friendship Village
that was getting ready for its Business meeting in Post-Office Hall on
Friday night, and trying its best to keep up with its “business
reputation.” And then I’d go on to some more homes of the workers that
was keeping up their share in the commercial life of Friendship Village.
And then my thoughts would bring up at Silas’s club house, with the
necessary old furniture and magazines and games laid out somewheres,
tasty. And the little clots of thought in my brain somehow stuck there.
And I couldn’t think through them, on to what was what.
Then something happened that put a little window in the side of what was
the matter with Silas’s plan. And I begun to see light.