Part 12

So I said what I had to say about them I’d been to see, and what they had said about the club. And then I come to the heart of it, and I held up David’s little clock. I told ’em about it, and about him. I suppose everybody else has stories to tell like David’s, about the folks, young or old, that is living graves, little or big, of the kind of skill and energy and patience that they’ve never had the chance or the courage or the little will-power inside ’em--to develop. And there it stays in ’em, undeveloped, till they die. I believe it’s truer of all of us--of you and me--than we’ve any idea of. And this is what I tried to say to ’em that night, when I showed ’em David’s little clock. I didn’t say anything about the girls to Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house--I kept them, and the rest of ’em, in my heart, along with that crocheted dress up to the County House, and Grandma Stuart’s wreck of a home--the man’s knife, the child’s ring, the door-key. And I says:

“Now, we’ve visited all these folks that the Evening Club was thought of for. And we’ve found most of ’em in favor of having the club. I’m free to confess that I hoped some of ’em wouldn’t be. I hoped some of ’em would say they’d rather be paid better wages than to be give a club. But perhaps it’s all right. Mebbe the club is one step more we’ve got to take before we can get down to the big thing underneath it all. But it ain’t the last step--and I’d almost rather not bother with it--I’d almost rather get on to the big thing right away.”

“May I ask,” snaps out Silas, clean forgetting his chairmanshipping and acting like he was talking to me in the Post-Office store beside the cheese, “may I ask what you mean by the ‘big thing’?”

“Oh,” I says, “that’s what I’ve been thinking about while I set here. Oh,” I says, “you men--you’ve made the town. You’ve done everything once. Do it again--now when the next thing is here to do. You’ve done your best with your own property and your own homes. Now do your best with folks!”

“Ain’t that the purpose of this here club we’re a-talking about?” says Silas. “Ain’t that what I been a-saying? What do you mean--folks?” Silas winds up, irritable. Silas knows customers, agents, correspondents, partners, clients, colleagues, opponents, plaintiffs, defendants _and_ competitors. But he don’t know _folks_.

“Folks,” I says. “Why, folks, Silas. Why, here in this room with you that we say have made Friendship Village, are setting them sixty-one employees of yours that have helped make it too. And all the tens that will come afterward, and that have come before to help to make the village by the work of their hands. They belong--they’re the village. They’re us. Oh, let’s not do things _for_ them--let’s do things _with_ them. Let’s meet all together, employers and employees, men and women, and let’s take up together the job of being a town. Let’s not any of us have more than our share, and then deal out little clubs, and old furniture, and magazines, and games to the rest of us. You men are finding out that all your old catch words about advancing the town and making business opportunities, have got something lacking in them, after all. And us women are beginning to see that twenty houses to a block, each keeping clean and orderly and planted on its own hook, each handing out old clothes and toys down to the Flats, each living its own life of cleanliness and home and victual-giving-at-Christmas, that that ain’t being a town after all. It isn’t enough. Oh, deep inside us all ain’t there something that says, I ain’t you, nor you, nor you, nor five thousand of you. I’m all of you. I’m one. ‘When,’ it says, ‘are you going to understand, that not till I can act like one, one united one, can I give any glimpse whatever of what people might be?’ Don’t let’s us go on advancing business and multiplying our little clubs and philanthropies. Instead, let’s get together--in the kind of meetings they use’ to have in the old first days in America--and let’s just talk over the next step in what’s to become of us. Let’s dream--real far. Let’s dream farther than gift-giving--and on up to wages--and mebbe a good deal farther than that. Let’s dream the farthest that folks could go....”

I didn’t know but they’d think I was crazy. But I’d be glad to be that kind of crazy. And the glory is that more folks and more folks are getting crazy the same way.

But they didn’t think so--I know they didn’t. Because when I got through, they clapped their hands, hard and hearty--all but Silas, that don’t think a chairman had ought to show any pleased emotion. And times now when I’m lonesome, I like to remember the rest of the talk, and it warms my heart to remember it, and I like to think about it.

For we give up having the club. Nobody said much of anything more about it, after we got Silas silenced. And this was the notice we put the next night in the Friendship _Evening Daily_. Nobody knows better than I the long road that there is to travel before we can really do what we dreamed out a little bit about. Nobody better than I knows how slow it is going to be. But I tell you, it is going to be. And the notice we put in the paper was the first little step we took. And I believe that notice holds the heart of to-day.

It said:

“Will all them that’s interested in seeing Friendship Village made as much a town as it could be, for all of us and for the children of all of us, meet together in Post-Office Hall to-morrow night, at 7 o’clock, to talk over if we’re doing it as good as we could.”

For there was business. And then there was big business. But the biggest business is taking employers and employees, and all men and women--yes, and inmates too--and turning them into folks.

THE PRODIGAL GUEST

Aunt Ellis wrote to me:

“DEAR CALLIOPE: Now come and pay me the visit. You’ve never been here since the time I had sciatica and was cross. Come now, and I’ll try to hold my temper and my tongue.”

I wrote back to her:

“I’ll come. I was saving up to buy a new cook-stove next fall, but I’ll bring my cook-stove and come in time for the parade. I did want to see that.”

She answered:

“Mercy, Calliope, I might have known it! You always did love a circus in the village, and these women are certainly making a circus parade of themselves. However, we’ll even drive down to see them do it, if you’ll really come. Now you know how much I want you.”

“I might have known,” I said to myself, “that Aunt Ellis would be like that. The poor thing has had such an easy time that she can’t help it. She thinks what’s been, is.”

She wrote me that she was coming in from the country an hour after my train got there, but that the automobile would be there for me. And I wrote her that I would come down the platform with my umbrella up, so’s her man would know me; and so I done, and he picked me out real ready.

When we got to her big house, that somehow looked so used to being a big house, there was a little boy sitting on the bottom step, half asleep, with a big box.

“What’s the matter, lamb?” I says.

“Beg pad’, ma’am, he’s likely waitin’ to beg,” says the chauf---- that word. “I’d go right by if I was you.”

But the little fellow’d woke up and looked up.

“I can’t find the place,” he says, and stuck out his big box. The man looked at the label. “They ain’t no such number in this street,” says he. “It’s a mistake.”

The little fellow kind of begun to cry, and the wind was blowing up real bitter. I made out that him and his family made toys for the uptown shops, and somebody in our neighborhood had ordered some direct, and he was afraid to go home without the money. I didn’t have any money to give him, but I says to the chauf----

“Ask him where he lives, will you? And see if we’d have time to take him home before Mis’ Winthrop’s train gets in.”

The chauf---- done it, some like a prime minister, and he says, cold, he thought we’d have time, and I put the baby in the car. He was a real sweet little fellow, about seven. He told me his part in making the toys, and his mother’s, and his two little sisters’, and I give him the rest o’ my lunch, and he knew how to laugh when he got the chance, and we had a real happy time of it. And we come to his home.

Never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget the looks of that back upstairs place he called home, nor the smell of it--the smell of it. The waxy woman that was his mother, in a red waist, and with a big weight of hair, had forgot how to look surprised--that struck me as so awful--she’d forgot how to look surprised, just the same as a grand lady that’s learned not to; and there was the stumpy man that grunted for short instead of bothering with words; and the two little girls that might of been anybody’s--if they’d been clean--one of ’em with regular portrait hair. I stayed a minute, and give ’em the cost of about one griddle of my cook-stove, and then I went to the station to meet Aunt Ellis. And I poured it all out to her, as soon as she’d give me her cheek to kiss.

“So you haven’t had any tea!” she said, getting in the automobile. “I’m sorry you’ve been so annoyed the first thing.”

“Annoyed!” I says over. “Annoyed! Well, yes,” I says, “poor people is real annoying. I wonder we have ’em.”

I was dying to ask her about the parade, but I didn’t like to; till after we’d had dinner in front of snow and silver and sparkles and so on, and had gone in her parlor-with-another-name, and set down in the midst of flowers and shades and lace, and rugs the color of different kinds of preserves, and wood-work like the skin of a cooked prune. Then I says:

“You know I’m just dying to hear about the parade.”

She lifted her hand and shut her eyes, brief.

“Calliope,” she says, “I don’t know what has come over women. They seem to want to attract attention to themselves. They seem to want to be conspicuous and talked about. They seem to want----”

“They want lots o’ things,” says I, dry, “but it ain’t any of them, Aunt Ellis. What time does the parade start?”

“You’re bound to see it?” she says. “When I think of my dear Miss Markham--they used to say her school taught not manners, but manner--and what she would say to the womanhood of to-day.... We’ll drive down if you say so, Calliope--but I don’t know whether I can bear it long.”

“Manner,” I says over. “Manner. That’s just what we’re trying to learn now, manner of being alive. We haven’t known very much about that, it seems.”

I kept thinking that over next day when we were drawn up beside the curb in the car, waiting for them to come. “We’re trying to learn manner at last--the manner of being alive.” There were lots of other cars, with women so pretty you felt like crying up into the sky to ask there if we knew for sure what all that perfection was for, or if there was something else to it we didn’t know--yet. And thousands of women on foot, and thousands of women in windows.... I looked at them and wondered if they thought we were, and life was, as decent as we and it could be, and, if not, how they were preparing to help change it. I thought of the rest that were up town in colored nests, and them that were down town in factories, and them that were to home in the villages, and them that were out all along the miles and miles to the other ocean, just the same way. And here was going to come this little line of women walking along the street, a little line of women that thought they see new life for us all, and see it more abundant.

“Manner,” I says, “we’re just beginning to learn manner.”

Then, way down the avenue, they began to come. By ones and by fours and by eights, with colors and with music and with that that was greater than all of them--the tramp and tramp of feet; feet that weren’t dancing to balls, nor racking up and down in shops buying pretty things to make ’em power, nor just paddling around a kitchen the same as mine had always done--but feet that were marching, in a big, peaceful army, towards the place where the big, new tasks of to-morrow are going to be, that won’t interfere with the best tasks of yesterday no more than the earth’s orbit interferes with its whirling round and round.

“That’s it,” I says, “that’s it! We’ve been whirling round and round, manufacturing the days and the nights, and we never knew we had an orbit too.”

So they come, till they begun to pass where we were--some heads up, some eyes down, women, women, marching to a tune that was being beat out by thousands of hearts all over the world. I’d never seen women like this before. I saw them like I’d never seen them--I felt I was one of ’em like I’d never known that either. And I saw what they saw and I felt what they felt more than I ever knew I done.

Then I heard Aunt Ellis making a little noise in her breath.

“The bad taste of it--the bad taste of it, Calliope!” she said. “When I was a girl we used to use the word ladylike--we used to strive to deserve it. It’s a beautiful word. But these----”

“We’ve been ladylike,” says I, sad, “for five or ten thousand years, and where has it got us to?”

“Oh, but, Calliope, they like it--they like the publicity and the notoriety and the----”

I kept still, but I hurt all over me. I can stand anything only hearing that they like it--the way Aunt Ellis meant. I thought to myself that I bet the folks that used to watch martyrs were heard to say that martyrs prob’ly thought flames was becoming or they wouldn’t be burnt. But when I looked at Aunt Ellis sitting in her car with her hand over her eyes, it come over me all at once the tragedy of it--of all them that watch us cast their old ideals in new forms--their old ideals.

All of a sudden I stood up in the car. The parade had got blocked for a minute, and right in front of the curb where we stood I saw a woman I knew; a little waxy-looking thing, that couldn’t look surprised or exalted or afraid or anything else, and I knew her in a minute--even to the red calico waist and the big weight of hair, just as I had seen her by the toy table in her “home” the night before. And there she was, marching. And here was Aunt Ellis and me.

I leaned over and touched Aunt Ellis.

“You mustn’t mind,” I says; “I’m going too.”

She looked at me like I’d turned into somebody else.

“I’m going out there,” I says, “with them. I see it like they do--I feel it like they do. And them that sees it and feels it and don’t help it along is holding it back. I’ll find my way home....”

I ran to them. I stepped right out in the street among them and fell in step with them, and then I saw something. While I was making my way through the crowd to them the line had passed on, and them I was with was all in caps and gowns. I stopped still in the road.

“Great land!” I says to the woman nearest, “you’re college, ain’t you? And I never even got through high school.”

She smiled and put out her hand.

“Come on,” she says.

Whatever happens to me afterward, I’ve had that hour. No woman that has ever had it will ever forget it--the fear and the courage, the pride and the dread, the hurt and the power and the glory. I don’t know whether it’s the way--but what is the way? I only know that all down the street, between the rows of watching faces, I could think of that little waxy woman going along ahead, and of the kind of place that she called home, and of the kind of a life she and her children had. And I knew then and I know now that the poverty and the dirt and some of the death in the world is our job, it’s our job too. And if they won’t let us do it ladylike, we’ll do it just plain.

When I got home, Aunt Ellis was having tea. She smiled at me kind of sad, as a prodigal guest deserved.

“Aunt Ellis,” I says, “I’ve give ’em the rest of my cook-stove money, except my fare home.”

“My poor Calliope,” she says, “that’s just the trouble. You all go to such hysterical extremes.”

I’d heard that word several times on the street. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Was that hysterics to-day?” I says. “I’ve often wondered what they’re like. I’ve never had the time to have them, myself. Well,” I says, tired but serene, “if that was hysterics, leave ’em make the most of it.”

I looked at her, meditative.

“Miss Markham and you and the women that marched to-day and me,” I says. “And a hundred years from now we’ll all be conservatives together. And there’ll be some big new day coming on that would startle me now, just the same as it would you. But the way I feel to-night, honest--I donno but I’m ready for that one too.”

MR. DOMBLEDON

He came to my house one afternoon when I was just starting off to get a-hold of two cakes for the next meeting of the Go-lightly club, and my mind was all trained to a peak, capped with the cakes.

Says he: “Have you got rooms to let?”

For a minute I didn’t answer him, I was so knee deep in looking at the little boy he had with him--the cutest, lovin’est little thing I’d ever seen. But though I love the human race and admire to see it took care of, I couldn’t sense my way clear to taking a boy into my house. Boys belongs to the human race, to be sure, just as whirling egg-beaters belongs to omelettes, but much as I set store by omelettes I couldn’t invite a whirling egg-beater into my home permanent.

Says I: “Not to boys.”

He laughed--kind of a pleasant laugh, fringed all round with little laughs.

“Oh,” he says, “we ain’t boys.”

“Well,” says I, “one of you is. And I don’t ever rent to ’em. They ain’t got enough silence to ’em,” I says, as delicate as I could.

Just then the little lad himself looked up innocent and took a hand without meaning to.

“Is your doggy home?” says he.

“Yes,” I says, “curled up on the back mat.” I felt kind of glad I didn’t have to tell him I didn’t have one.

“I’d like,” says he, grave, “to _fluffle_ it till you’re through.”

“So do,” says I, hearty, and he trotted round the house like a little minister.

I kind o’ tiptoed after him, casual. All of a sudden I wanted to see what he done. His father come behind me on the boards, and we saw the little fellow bend over and pat Mac, my water spaniel, as gentle as if he’d been cut glass. The little boy looked awful cute, bending over, his short hair sticking out at the back. I can see him yet.

“How much,” says I, “would you want to pay for your room?”

“Well,” says his father, “not much. But I give a guess your price is what it’s worth--no more, no less.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to him before that, but I see now he was a wonderful, nice-spoken little man, with the kind of eyes that look like the sitting-room--and not like the parlor. I can’t bear parlor eyes.

“Come and look at the room,” says I, and rented it to him out of hand. And Mr. Dombledon--his name was--and Donnie--that was the little fellow--went off for their baggage, and I went off for my cakes; and what they was reflecting on I donno, but my own reflect was that it’s a wise minute can tell what the next one is going to pop open and let out. But I like it that way. I’m a natural-born vaudevillian. I love to see what’s coming next.

Well, the next thing was, after I got my two club cakes both provided for, that it turned out Mr. Dombledon was an agent, selling “notions, knick-knacks and anything o’ that,” he told me; and he use’ to start out at seven o’clock in the morning, with his satchel in one hand and his little boy, more or less, in the other.

“Land,” says I to him after a few days, “don’t your little boy get wore to the bone tramping around with you like that?”

“Some,” says he; “but I carry him part of the way.”

“Carry him?” says I, “and tote that heavy knick-knack notion satchel?”

“Well,” says he, “I don’t mind it. What I’m always thinking is this: What if I didn’t have him to tote.”

“True enough,” says I, and couldn’t say another word.

But of course the upstart and offshoot of that was that before the week was out, I’d invited Mr. Dombledon to leave the little fellow with me, some days, while he went off. And he done so, grateful, but making a curious provision.

“It’d be grand for him,” says he; “they’s only just one thing: Would--would you promise not to leave him hear anybody say anything anyways cross?”

“Well,” says I, judicious, “I donno’s I’m what-you-might-say cross. Not systematic. But--I might be a little crispy.”

“I ain’t afraid o’ you,” says he, real flattering. “But don’t leave him hear anybody--well, snap anybody up.”

“All right,” says I, “I won’t. I like,” I says, “to get out o’ the way of that myself.”

“Well, and then,” he says, “I guess you’ll think I’m real particular. But--would you promise not to leave him go outside the yard?”

“Sure,” says I, “only when I’m with him.”

“I guess you’ll think I’m real particular,” he says again, in his kind of gentle voice without any sizin’ to it, “but I mean not even then. Days when you’re goin’ out, I’ll take him with me.”

“Sure,” says I, wondering all over me, but not letting on all I wondered, like you can’t in society. And I actually looked forward to having the little thing around the house with me, me that has always been down on mice, moths, bats and boys.

The next thing was, Would he stay with me? And looking to this end I contrived, some skillful, to be baking cookies the first morning his pa went off. Mis’ Puppy had happened in early to get some blueing, and she was sitting at one end of my cook table when Donnie came trotting out with his father, that always preferred the back door. (“It feels more like I lived here,” says he, wishful, “if you let me come in the back door.” And I was the last one to deny him that. Once when I went visiting, I got so homesick to go in the back door that it was half my reason for leaving ’em.)

“Now then,” I says to the little fellow that morning, “you just set here with us and see me make cookies. I’ll cut you out a soldier cooky,” says I.

“Wiv _buttins_?” he asks, and climbed up on his knees on a chair by the table and let his father go off without him, nice as the nicest. “I likes ’em wiv buttins,” he says--and Mis’ Puppy sort of kindled up in her throat, like a laugh that wants to love somebody.

I donno as I know how to say it, but he was the kind of a little chap that, when you’re young, you always think _your_ little chap is going to be. Then when they do come, sometimes they’re dear and all that, but they ain’t quite exactly the way you thought of them being--though you forget that they ain’t, and you forget everything but loving ’em. But it was like this little boy was the way you’d meant. It wasn’t so much the way he looked--though he was beautiful, beautiful like some of the things you think and not like a calendar--but it was the way he _was_, kind of close up to you, and his breath coming past, and something you couldn’t name gentling round him. His father hadn’t been gone ten minutes when the little thing let me kiss him.

“‘At was my last one,” he explained, sort of sorry, to Mis’ Puppy. “But you can have a bite off my soldier. That’s a better kiss.”

Mis’ Puppy watched him for a while--he was sitting close down by the oven door to hear his soldier say _Hurrah_ the minute he was baked, if you please--and she kind of moved like her thoughts scraped by each other, and she says--and spells one word of it out:

“Where do you s’pose his m-o-t-h-e-r is?”

“My land, d-e-d,” I answers, “or she’d be setting over there kissing the back of his neck in the hollow.”

“I’ve got,” says Mis’ Puppy, “kind of an idea she ain’t. Your boarder,” she says, “don’t look to me real what you might call a widower. He ain’t the air of one that’s had things ciphered out for him,” says she. “It’s more like he was still a-browsing round the back o’ the book for the answer.”

And that was true, when you come to think of it; he did seem sort of quick-moved and hopeful, more like when you sit down to the table than when you shove back.