Part 16

"'Don't you see,' she says, 'don't you see, Mis' Sykes, that's what Mis' Lacy meant?'

"'How so?' says Mis' Sykes, short.

"I'll never forget how sweet and shy and unexpected and young Letty looked, but she answered, as brave as brave:--

"'Otie Daniel is sick,' she said, 'and all us women can do is to carry him broth and bread and nurse him. It's only the men that can bring about the things to make him well. And they haven't done it. It's been the women who have been urging it--and not getting it done. Wasn't it our work to do, too?'

"I see Elbert looking at her--like he just couldn't bear to have her speak so, like some men can't. And I guess he spoke out in answer before he meant to:--

"'But let them do it womanly, Letty,' he said, 'like your mother did and my mother did.'

"Letty turned and looked Elbert Sykes straight in the face:--

"'_Womanly!_' she says. 'What is there womanly about my bathing and feeding a child inside four clean walls, if dirt and bad food and neglect are outside for him? Will you tell me if there is anything more womanly than my right to help make the world as decent for my children as I would make my own home?'

"I looked at Letty, and looked; and I see with a thrill I can't tell you about how Letty seemed. For she seemed the way she had that morning on my kitchen stoop, when she spoke of her children and when I felt like I'd ought to turn away--the way I'd used to when my mother showed me my baby dress and told me who it would be for. Only now--only now, somehow, I didn't want to turn away. Somehow I wanted to keep right on looking at Letty, like Elbert was looking. And I see what he see. How Letty was what she'd said that morning that she was--and that I was--and that we all was: A mother, then and there, whether she ever had any children or not. And she was next door to owning up to it right there before them all and before Elbert. We didn't speak so when I was a girl. We didn't own up, out loud, that we ever thought anything about what we was for. But now, when I heard Letty do it....

" ... Now, when I heard Letty do it, all to once, I looked into a window of the world. And instead of touching hands like I had with the women that use' to be, I looked off and off down all the time there's going to be, and for a minute I touched, tip-fingers, the hands of the other women that's coming towards me; and out of places inside of me that I didn't know before had eyes, I see them, mothers to the whole world, _inside their four walls and out_. And they wasn't coming with poultices and bread and broth in their hands, to patch up what had been left undone; nor with the keys to schoolhouses that they'd got open by scheming; nor with newspapers full of health that they'd had to run down back alleys to sell; nor national holidays that they'd got a-hold of through sheer accident; nor yet with nice new headstones for cemetery improvements on the dead and gone--no, sir, their hands wasn't occupied with any of these ways of serving that they'd schemed for and stole. But their hands--was in men's hands, closer and nearer than they'd ever been before. And their eyes was lit up with a look that was a new look, and that give new life to the old original left-over blaze. And I looked across to that row of tired men, not so very much dressed up, and I thought:--

"'You're the men of this world and we're the women. And there ain't no more thrilling fact in this universe, save one, _save one_: And that's that we're all human beings. That your job and ours is to make the world ready for the folks that are to come, and to make the folks that come fit to live in that new world. And yet over there by Black Hollow one of our children is dying from something that was your job _and_ ours to do, and we didn't take hold of hands and do it!'

"'Oh, Letty!' I says out. 'And Silas and all of you! Let's pretend, just for a minute, that we was all citizens and equal. And let's figure out things for Otie, just like we had the right!'

"I'd asked Letty to spend the night with me, and Elbert walked home with us. And just as we got there, he says to her again:--

"'Oh, Letty--you ain't _strong_ enough to help carry things along!'

"'You've got more strength,' she says to him, 'and more brains. But it isn't so much the strength or the brains in women that is going to help when the time comes. It's the--mother in them.'

"And I says to myself:--

"'And it's the--_human beingness_ of them.' But Letty didn't know that yet.

"Elbert answered, after a minute:--

"'You may be right and you may be wrong, but, Letty, Letty, what a woman you are!'

"And at that Letty looked up at him, just as she had looked at him that morning--just for a minute, and then she dipped down the brim of her big hat. I donno what she answered him. I didn't care. I didn't care. For what I see was the old wild joy of a woman in being glorified by a male creature. And I knew then, and I know now, that that won't never die, no matter what.

"Elbert put out his hand.

"'Good night, Letty,' he said.

"She gave him hers, and he closed over it light with his other hand.

"'May I see you to-morrow?' he asked her.

"'Oh, I don't know,' said Letty. 'Come and see if I'll see you--will you?'

"He laughed a little, looking in her eyes.

"'At about eight,' he promised. 'Good night....'

"I got the key out from under the mat to a tune inside me. Because I'd heard, and I knew that Letty had heard, that tone in Elbert's voice that is the human tone--I can't rightly name it, but every woman in the world knows it when she hears it--a tone that says: _If I have my way, you and I are going to live out our lives together_.

"And I knew then, and I know now, that that tone won't ever die, either. And some day, away off in a new world right here on this earth, I believe there's going to be a wilder joy in being men and women than all the men and women up to now have ever lived or dared or dreamed.

XIII

"'Miss Marsh,' says Christopher.

"Mis' Emmons's living-room was like a cup of something cool, and I set there in the after-supper light having such a nice rested time drinking it in that at first I didn't hear him.

"'Miss Marsh,' he says again, and pulled at my dress. I put out my hand to him and he took it. Sometimes I donno but hands are a race of beings by themselves that talk and answer and do all the work and act like slaves and yet really rule the world.

"'Is it me telling my feet where to go or do they tell me where I go?' asked Christopher.

"'You can have it either way you want,' I told him. 'Some does one way and some does the other. Which way do you like?'

"He thought for a minute, twisting on one foot with the other up in his hand.

"'I'd like 'em to know how without our sayin' so,' he announces finally.

"'Well,' I says, 'I left out that way. That's really the best way of all.'

"He looked at me eager.

"'Is it a game?' he says.

"'Yes,' I told him.

"'What's its name?' he ask' me.

"'Game of Life,' I told him again.

"He thought about it, still twisting. Then he done one of his littlest laughs, with his head turned away.

"'My feet heard you,' he says. 'Now they know how to play.'

"'I hope so, Christopher,' says I, and kissed him on the back of his neck. That made him mad, like it usually done.

"'My neck is my neck,' says he, 'and it's shut in my collar. It ain't home to-day.'

"'Is your mouth home?' I ask' him.

"And it was.

"I could of set there talking with him all evening, but not on the night of Sodality's Annual. I'd stopped by for Mis' Emmons. She was getting ready, and while I waited I could hear folks passing on their way to the schoolhouse where the meeting was. For the town was all het up about what the meeting was going to do.

"I'd seen half-dozen or so of us that afternoon when we was putting plants on the hall platform, and we'd all spoke our minds.

"'I'm gaspin',' observed Mis' Sturgis, 'to take a straw vote of us on this amendin' business. Near as I can make out, it's going through.'

"'Near as I can make out,' says Marne Holcomb, 'a good deal more than amending is going on here to-night. It looks to me as if Sodality was just going to get into its own Cemetery and be forgot, and as if something else was coming to meet us--something big!'

"Mis' Toplady spoke up, comfortable, down on her knees putting green paper on the pots.

"'Well, my land!' she says, 'I've noticed two-three things in my lifetime. And one is, that do what whoever will, things do change. And so whenever a new change pops up, I always think: "Oh, I guess you're comin' along anyway. I donno's I need to help." An' yet somethin' in me always prances to pitch in, too.'

"Timothy was there, occupying himself with the high places us ladies couldn't get up to.

"'Well,' says he, 'if folks stop dying, like Sodality evidently intends they shall if it goes out of business, maybe you'll stay home some, Amandy, and not always be off laying folks out.'

"'I know it,' Mis' Toplady returns, 'I've laid out most everybody I know, and of course I'm real glad to do it. But the last dead's hair I done up, I caught myself thinking how much more interesting it'd be if they was alive an' could find fault. Doin' for the dead gets kind of monotonous, _I_ think.'

"'_I_ don't,' says Timothy, decided. 'The minute you work for the living, you get all upset with being criticised. I s'pose the dead would find fault, if they could, over the way you cut the grass for 'em. But they can't an' so there's an end to it, an' we get along, peaceful. If they was living folks layin' there, you can bet they'd do some back talk.'

"'Well,' says I, 'I've been sick of Sodality for years. But it was about the most what-you-might-call society I had, and I hated to give it up.'

"'Me, either,' says Mame Holcomb.

"'Me, either,' says Mis' Uppers. 'I declare I've often said I wouldn't know what _to_ do if folks stopped dyin' so's Sodality would have to close out.'

"Mis' Sykes was setting watching the rest of us.

"'Well,' she observes, cold, 'if I was usin' the dead to keep in society, I donno's I'd own it up.'

"Silas Sykes had just come over from the store to see if there was anything he could meddle in.

"'Heh!' says he, showing his teeth. 'Not many of Sodality, as I can see, _deserves_ to die and be done for, civilized.'

"'Don't you worry yourself, Silas Sykes,' says I, 'we're going to be done things for before we die hereafter, and more civilized than ever you dreamed of, all up and down your ledger. That's where you do dream, ain't it, Silas?' I says. And though I said it gay, I meant it frank.

"I remember I looked off down the room, and all of a sudden I see it as it would be that night, packed with folks. Somehow, we'd got to saying less about the Sodality part of the meeting, and more about the _open_ part. Most of the town would be there. We'd got the School Board to leave us announce the second party for that night, following the meeting, and music was coming, and us ladies had froze the ice-cream, and the whole time reminded me of a big bud, flowered slow and bursting sudden.

"'Land, land,' I says, fervent, 'I feel like Friendship Village was a person that I was going to meet to-night for the first time.'

"'You express yourself so odd sometimes, Calliope,' says Mis' Sykes, distant--but Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, they both looked up and nodded, and they knew.

"I set holding Christopher in Mis' Emmons's living-room, and thinking about this and most everything else, when I looked out and see Insley going along. He hadn't been back in town since Christopher's father's funeral, two days before, and I'd been wanting to talk over with him a thing or two that was likely to come up at the meeting, that of course he was going to be at, and that had to be handled with thimbles on every finger, or somebody'd get pricked. So I rapped smart on the upper sash and called to him through the screen, but not before I had seen the look on his face. I've caught that special look only once or twice in my life--the look of somebody passing the house that is different to them from all other houses in the world. The look that wants to be a look and won't let itself be, that tries to turn the other way and can't start, that thinks it's unconscious and knows it isn't, and that finally, with Insley, give it up and looked Mis' Emmons's house straight in the face for a minute, as if he might anyhow let himself have that much intimacy.

"I had a little list of things I wanted to see go through that night. Enough of us was ready to have Sodality perform its last cemetery rite and bury itself so that that was pretty sure to go through, but I wanted more than that, and several of us ladies did; and it looked to me like the schoolhouse and the young folks and the milk and the meat of this town could be done nice things to, so be we managed the meeting right. I even had a wild dream that the whole new society might adopt Christopher. Well, I donno why that's funny. It ain't funny when a club makes a building or a play or a bazaar or a dinner. Why shouldn't it make a man?

"I told some of this to Insley, and he caught fire and lit up into a torch and had it all thought out beforehand, better than I could of dreamed it. But he made me feel bad. Haunted folks--folks haunted by something that was and that isn't--always makes me feel bad. How is it possible, I see he was asking himself the old, wore-out question, to drive out of the world something that is the world?

"While we talked, Christopher went off to sleep in my arms, and even while I was so interested, I was enjoying the change that comes--the head growing heavier and heavier on my arm, as if sleep weighed something.

"'Poor little kiddie,' I says, stupid.

"'Rich little kiddie,' Insley says, wistful.

"'Dear little kiddie,' says somebody else.

"In the dining room doorway Robin stood--in a doorway as we had first seen her.

"'Put him over here on the couch, do,' she says. 'It's much too hot to hold him, Calliope.'

"She'd called me that at Mr. Bartlett's funeral, and I recollect how my throat went all over me when she done so. Ain't it funny about your own first name? It seems so _you_ when somebody nice says it for the first time--more you than you ever knew you were.

"Insley lifted Chris in his arms to do as she said, and then stood staring at her across the child.

"'I've been thinking,' he said, blunt--it's like watching the sign of folks to watch the different kind of things that makes them blunt. 'It's not my affair, but do you think you ought to let Chris get so--so used to you? What will he do when you're--when you go away?'

"At this she said nothing for a moment, then she smiled up at him.

"'I meant what I told him that night his father died,' she answered. 'I'm going to keep Chris with me, always.'

"'Always?' He stared at her, saw her face mean what she said. 'How fine of you! How fine of Mr. Proudfit!' said Insley.

"She waited just a breath, then she met his eyes, brave.

"'Not fine of me,' she says--'only fine for me. And not--Mr. Proudfit at all. I ought to take back what I told you--since I did tell you. That is not going to be.'

"I don't think Insley meant for a minute to show any lack of formal respect for Christopher's sleep. But what Insley did was simply to turn and sit him down, bolt upright, on my lap. Then he wheeled round, trying to read her face.

"'Do you mean you aren't going to marry him?' he demanded, rough--it's like watching another sign of folks to watch for the one thing that will make one or another rough.

"'We are not going to be married,' she said. 'I mean that.'

"I suppose likely the room went away altogether then, Christopher and me included, and left Insley there in some place a long ways from everywhere, with Robin's face looking at him. And he just naturally took that face between his hands.

"'Robin,' he said, 'don't make me wait to know.'

"Insley was the suddenest thing. And land, what it done to her name to have him say it. Just for a minute it sounded as if her name was the population of the world,--but with room for everybody else, too.

"I think she put up her hands to take down his hands, but when she touched them, I think hers must have closed over his, next door to on purpose.

"'Dear,' she says, 'tell me afterward.'

"In that minute of stillness in which any new heaven is let down on a suitable new earth, a little voice piped up:--

"'Tell it now,' says the voice. 'Is it a story? Tell it now.'

"And there was Christopher, wide awake where he had been set down rude on my knee, and looking up at them, patient.

"'I was dreamin' my dream,' he explained, polite. 'It was about all the nice things there is: You and you and you and hot ice-cream and the house's party.... Is they any more?' he asked, anxious.

"Robin put out her arms for him, and she and Insley and I smiled at one another over his head.

"'Ever so many more,' we told him.

"I slipped out then and found Mis' Emmons, and I guess I come as near shining as anything that's like me can.

"'What's the matter?' she says to me. 'You look as if you'd turned up the wick.'

"'I did. They have. I won't tell,' I says. 'Oh, Mis' Emmons, I guess the meeting to-night won't need to adopt Christopher.'

"She looked up at me quick, and then she started shining, too.

"'What a universe it is,' she says, '--what a universe it is.'

"Then we went off down to the meeting together. And the village was wonderful to go through, like a home some of us had hollowed out of the hills and was living in, common. As we went walking to the schoolhouse, the sidewalks seemed to me no more than ways dickered up to fasten us together, and to fasten us to them whose feet had wore the road before us, and to lead us to them that was coming, coming after: Christopher and Eph and Spudge Cadoza and Otie Daniel, or them like these. Otie Daniel had died the night before. Dr. Barrows had said Eph would not be lame, but we see he wan't sure of the value of the boy's physical life. But even so, even so we had a chance with Chris, and we had a chance with Spudge, and we had millions more. My feet wanted to run along them roads to meet the millions and my fingers tingled to get things ready. And as we went down Daphne Street to that meeting, I see how we all _was_ getting things ready, and I could of sung out for what I saw:--

"For Mame Holcomb, sprinkling clothes on the back porch and hurrying to get to the hall.

"For Mis' Uppers, picking her currants before she went, so's to get an early start on her jam in the morning.

"For Viny Liberty, setting sponge for her bread loud enough so we heard her clear out in the street, and for Libby, shutting up her chicken coop that they earned their own living with.

"For Mis' Toplady, driving by with Timothy, and her in the brown silk she'd made herself, like she's made all she's got.

"For Abagail Arnold, wiping out her window to be filled to-morrow with the pies of her hand.

"For little Mis' Sparks, rocking her baby on the front stoop and couldn't come to the meeting at all, 'count of having nobody to leave him with.

"For them that had left cloth bleaching in their side yards and was saving the price of buying bleached. For them that had done their day's work, from parlour to wood-shed, and had hurried up the supper dishes and changed their dress and was on their way to the schoolhouse. For them that had lived lives like this and had died at it. For all the little dog-eared, wore-out account books where every one of them women figured out careful what they couldn't spend. And I looked down the street till I couldn't see no farther, and yet Daphne Street was going on, round and round the world, and acrost and acrost it, full of women doing the same identical way. And I could see away off to the places that Daphne Street led past, where women has all these things done for them and where the factories is setting them free, like us here in the village ain't free just yet, and I felt a wicked envy for them that can set their hands to the New Work, that us here in Friendship Village is trying so hard to get in between whiles. And I could see away ahead to times when sponge and currants and clothes and coops and similar won't have to be mothered by women 'most as much as children are; but when women, Away Off Then, will be mothers and workers and general human beings such as yet we only know how to think about being, scrappy and wishful. But all the time, in their arms and in ours and nowheres else, lays all the rest of the world that is ever going to be. And something in me kind of climbed out of me and run along ahead and looked back at me over its shoulder and says: 'Keep up, keep up, Calliope.' And before I knew it, right out loud, I says: 'I will. I will.'

"An hour later, up in the schoolhouse, Silas Sykes stood arguing, to the top of his tone, that the first work of the reorganized society--that was to take in the whole town--had ought to be to buy a bargain Cupid-and-fish fountain he knew of, for the market square.

"'It's going to take years and years to do--everything,' says Mis' Emmons to me, low.

"But that didn't seem like much of anything to either of us. 'What if it is,' I says. And she nodded."