Part 11

“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.

The second night I was sitting on my porch when I heard my back gate slam. My back gate has a chain for a spring, weighted with a pail of stones, and when it slams the earth trembles, and I have time to get my hands out of the suds or dough or whatever; and it’s real handy and practical. This time there come trotting round my house David Beach. My, my but he was a nice little soul. He had bright eyes, that looked up quick as a rabbit’s. And a smile that slipped on and off, swift as a frisking squirrel. And he had little darting movements, like a chipmunk’s. There was something wild about him, like the wind. Silas’s pickle factory did seem a queer place for us to have put him.

“Look, Miss Marsh!” he says. And he was holding out his clock. “I got it all together,” he says, “and it’ll go. And it’ll go right.”

“Did you now?” I says. And it was true. He had. It did. That little alarm clock was ticking away like a jeweller-done job.... Yes, Silas’s pickle factory did seem a queer place for us to have put him.

When the little lad had gone off through the dusk, with his clock under his arm, I looked down the street after him. And I thought of this skill of his. And then I thought of the $2.50 a week Silas was giving him for shelling corn. And then I thought of this club that was to keep him and the rest of ’em contented. And I begun to see, dim, just the particular kinds of fools we was making of ourselves.

There was yet one thing more happened that wasn’t so much a window as a door. The next night was to be the Business Men’s meeting, and just before supper I went to pay my last visit on my list. It was out to the County House to see the superintendent’s niece that had just resigned from Eppleby’s store, and that they were afraid was going to Red Barns to work.

The County House. Ain’t that a magnificent name? Don’t we love to drape over our bones and our corpses some flying banner of a word like sarcophagus? The County House sets on a hill. A hill is a grand place for a County House. “Look at me,” the County House can say, “I’m what a beneficent and merciful people can do for its unfit.” And I never go by one that I don’t want to shout back at it: “Yes. Look at you. You’re our biggest confession of our biggest sham. What right have we, in Nineteen Hundred Anything, to have any unfit left?”

Right in front of the County House is a cannon. I never figured out the fitness of having a cannon there--in fact, I never can figure out the fitness of having a cannon anywhere. But one thing I’ve always noticed: When public buildings and such do have cannon out in front of them, they’re always pointing _away_ from the house. Never toward the house. Always going to shoot somebody else. That don’t seem to me etiquette. If we must keep cannon for ornament, aren’t we almost civilized enough to turn ’em around?

Seems the superintendent’s niece wasn’t going to Red Barns at all--she’d merely resigned to be married and had gone to town to buy things--a part of being married which competes with the ceremony, neck and neck, for importance. In the passageway, the matron called me in the office. She was a tall, thick woman with a way of putting her hand on your back to marshal you, as mothers do little children in getting them down an aisle. Yes, she was a marshaling woman.

“Look here,” says the matron, proud.

They’d put a glass case up in the office and it was all hung with work--crocheted things, knit and embroidered things, fringed things. “Did by the inmates,” says she, proud. That word “inmates” is to the word “people” what the word “support” is to the word “share.” It’s a word we could spare.

I looked at the things in the case--hours and hours and hours the fingers of the women upstairs had worked on ’em--intricate counting, difficult stitches, pretty patterns. And each of them was marked with a price tag. The County House inmates had got ’em hung out there in the hope of earning a little money. One was a bed-spread--a whole crocheted bed-spread. And one--one was a dress crocheted from collar to hem, and hung on with all sorts of crazy crocheted ends and tassels so--I knew--to make the job last a little longer. And when I saw that, I grabbed the tall, thick matron by the arm and I shook her a little.

“What was we doing,” I says, “that these folks wasn’t taught to do some kind of work so’s they could have kept out of the poor house?”

She looked at me odd and cool.

“Why,” she said, “my dear Miss Marsh, it’s being in here that gives ’em the leisure to make the things at all!”

What was the use of talking to her? And besides being unreasonable, she was one of them that you’re awful put to it to keep from being able not to right down dislike. And I went along the passage thinking: “She acts like the way things are is the way things ought to be. But it always seems to me that the way things ought to be is the best way things could be. For the earth ain’t so full of the fulness thereof but that we could all do something to make it a little more so.”

And then the thing happened that opened the door to all I’d been thinking about, and let me slip through inside.

Being I was there, I dropped in a minute to see old Grandma Stuart. She was one of the eighty “inmates.” Up in the ward where she was sitting, there were twenty beds. And between each two beds was a shelf and a washbasin, and over it a hook. And old Grandma Stuart sat there by her bed and her shelf and her hook. She was old and white, and she had fine wrinkles, like a dead flower. She drew me down to her, with her cold hands.

“Miss Marsh,” she said, “I got two-three things.”

“Yes,” I says, “well, that’s nice,” I says. And wondered if that was the right thing to say to her.

“But I ain’t got any box,” she says. “They keep the things and bring ’em to us clean every time. And I ain’t got any box.”

“That’s so, you ain’t,” says I, looking at her shelf.

“I put my things in my dress,” she says, “but they always fall out. And I’ve got to stop to pick ’em up. And _she_ don’t like it.”

No. The matron wouldn’t like it. I knew that. She was one of them that the thing was the thing even if it was something else.

“And so I thought,” says Grandma Stuart, “that if I had a pocket, I could put my things in that. I thought they wouldn’t fall out if I had a pocket. _She_ says she can’t be making pockets for every one. But I keep thinking if I had a pocket.... It’s these things I’ve got,” she says.

She took from her dress three things: A man’s knife, a child’s ring, and a door-key.

“It was the extry key to my house,” she said. “I--brought it along. And I thought if I had a pocket....”

...I sat there with her till the lights come out. I promised to come next day and bring her a little calico pocket. And then I set and let her talk to me--about how things use’ to be. When at last the matron come to take ’em away to be fed, I went out, and I ran down the road in the dark. And it was one of the times when the world of life is right close up, and you can all but touch it, and you can almost hear what it says, and you know that it can hear you--yes, and you almost know that it’s waiting, eager, to hear what _you_ are going to say to it. For one force breathes through things, trying to let us know it’s there. It was speaking to me through that wrecked home of Grandma Stuart’s--through the man’s knife, the child’s ring, the door-key; and through the pitiful, clever, crocheted stuff in the glass case in the County House; and through David, and through all them that we were trying to fix up a club for--like a pleasant plaster for something that couldn’t be touched by the remedy.

Out there in the soft night, the world looked different. I donno if you’ll know what I mean, but it was like the world I knew had suddenly slipped inside another world--like a shell; and the other one was bigger and better and cut in a pattern that we haven’t grown to--yet. In the west a little new moon was showing inside the gold circle of the big coming full moon. And it seemed to me as if the world that I was in must be just the little thin promise of the world that could be--if we knew. Sometimes we do know. Sometimes, for just a minute, we see it. That night was a night when I know that I saw. After you see, you never forget.

“Life is something else than what we think it is,” I says to myself as I ran along the road in the dark. “It’s something better than we think it is.”

As I ran, I stopped in to Mis’ Beach’s house and asked for something. “Oh, Mis’ Beach,” I says, “Oh, David! Will you let me take something? Will you let me borrow the clock you put together without anybody telling you how? Just for this evening?”

They said they would and they didn’t question that, particular, either. And I took the clock. And being David was going for the yeast, he came out with me, and we went on together. He ran beside me, the little lad, with his hand in mine. And as I ran, it seemed to me that I wasn’t Calliope Marsh any more, but that I was the immemorial woman, running with the immemorial child, toward the hope of the better thing, always the better thing.

Past the Post-Office Hall I went, already lighted for the Business Meeting, and on to Abigail Arnold’s Home Bakery.

Abigail was sitting, dressed and ready, with her list in her hand. But when she saw me she burst out with some strange excitement in her face:

“Calliope!” she says. “Silas has been here. He said you hadn’t handed in your report. I--I don’t think he expects you to go to the meeting. I know he didn’t expect me.”

“Didn’t he now?” I says. “Very well then, he didn’t. Are you ready?”

“But, Calliope----” says she.

“Are you a business woman in this town, or are you not?” I asked her.

Abigail has had her Bakery for twenty years now, and has paid off its mortgage that her husband bequeathed her.

“Come,” says I. And she did.

We went down the street to the Post-Office store building, all lighted up. We went up the stairs, and slipped into some seats by the door. I don’t think Silas, the chairman, see us come in. He can’t of, because he failed to explode. He just kept on conducting the meeting called to consider the future prosperity of Friendship Village and balancing on his toes.

While they talked, I set there, looking at them. Sixty men or so they were--the men that had made Friendship Village. Yes, such as it was, these men had made it. It was Silas that had built up his business and added to it, till he employed forty-two folks. Timothy Toplady had done the same and had encouraged three-four others to come in to open up new things for the town. It was Timothy stood back of Zittelhof when he added furniture to his undertaking business, and that started the agitation for the cheese factory out in the hills, and that got the whole county excited about having good roads. And it was these men and Eppleby Holcomb and some others that had got the new bridge and the water works and more than these. And while I set there looking at them, it come flooding over me the skill and the energy and the patience and the dogged hard work that it had meant for them sixty men to get us where we were, and from my heart I was thankful to ’em. And then I put my mind on what they were a-saying:

“An up-to-date, hustling little town,” I kept hearing. “The newer business methods.” “Good openings.” “Opportunities for hustlers.” “Need of live wires.” “Encourage industry.” “Advance the town, advance the town, advance the town.” And the thoughts that had been formed in no account clots in my head suddenly took shape in one thought, with the whole of day-light turned on to it.

So, as quick as the business part seemed to me to be done, I rose up and told Silas we had our reports to make, Abigail and me, about the Evening Club.

“Well,” says Silas, “this whole thing is being done irregular. Most irregular. But you go on ahead, and we’ll be glad to listen if you think you have anything to say, bearing on to--er--what we’re up to.”

And that was all right, and I took it so, because it was meant right.

I donno what there was to be afraid of. All of those men we’d known for years. We’d worked with ’em shoulder to shoulder in church affairs. We’d stood equal to ’em in school affairs, and often agreed with ’em. We’d even repeatedly paid one of ’em our taxes. And yet because it was a Business Men’s meeting, we felt kind of abashed or askant or something, Abigail and me.

Abigail reported first, about the thirty odd she’d been to see. “But,” she winds up, “Calliope’s got something to say that I agree to, over and above the report. We’ve talked it over, her and me, and--” she adds with her nice dignity, “as a Friendship Village business woman, I’m going to leave her speak for me.”