Part 14

It makes you feel real helpless when folks in black lace tell you to be practical, as if that came before everything else--especially when their "practical" and your "practical" might as well be in two different languages. And yet Madame Proudfit is kind and good too, and she understands that you've got to help or you might as well not be alive; and she gives and gives and gives. But _this_--well, she saw the need and all that, but her way that night would have been to give money and send the little chap away. You know how some are. They can understand everything good and kind--up to a certain point. And that point is, _keep him_. They can't seem to get past that.

"_Keep him!_" she says. "Make your bachelor apartment into a nursery? Or you, Calliope, leave him to mind the house while you are canvassing? Be practical. What, _exactly_, are you going to do?"

Then the Brother-man frowned a little--I hadn't known he could, but I was glad he knew how.

"Really," he said, "I haven't decided yet on the cut of his knickerbockers, or on what college he shall attend, or whether he shall spend his vacations at home or abroad. The details will get themselves done. I only know I mean to _keep him_."

She shook her head as if she was talking to a foreign language; then we heard somebody coming--a little rustle and swish and afterwards a voice. These three things by themselves would have made somebody more attractive than some women know how to be. I'll never forget how she seemed when she came to the door--Miss Clementina, waiting to speak with her mother and not knowing anybody else was with her.

Honest, I couldn't tell what her dress was--and me a woman that has turned her hand to dressmaking. It was all thin, like light, and it had all little ways of hanging that made you know you never could make one like it, so's you might as well enjoy yourself looking and not fuss with trying to remember how it was put together. But her dress wasn't so much like light as her face. Miss Clementina's face--oh, it was like the face of a beautiful woman that somebody tells you about, and that you never do get to see, and if you did, like enough she might not be so beautiful after all--but you always think of her as being the way you mean when you say "beautiful." Miss Clementina looked like that. And when I saw her that night I could hardly wait to have her face and eyes soften all to Summer, that wonderful way she had.

"Oh, Miss Clementina," I says, "I've got a baby. At least, he's only half mine. I mean--"

Then, while she was coming toward us along the lamp-light, as if it was made to bring her, the little chap began waking up. He stirred, and budded up his lips, and said little baby-things in his throat, and begun to cry, soft and lonesome, as if he didn't understand. Oh, isn't it true? A baby's waking-up minute, when it cries a little and don't know where it is, ain't that like us, sometimes crying out sort of blind to be took care of? And when the little thing opened his eyes, first thing he saw was Miss Clementina, standing beside him. And what did that little chap do instead of stopping crying but just hold out one hand toward her, and kind of bend across, same as if he meant something.

With that the Brother-man, that Madame Proudfit hadn't had a chance yet to present to Miss Clementina, he says to her all excited:

"He wants you to kiss his hand! Kiss his hand and he'll stop crying!"

Miss Clementina looked up at him like a little question, then she stooped and kissed the baby's hand, and we three watched him perfectly breathless to see what he would do. And he done exactly what that up-hill note had said he would--he stopped crying, and he done more than it said he would--he smiled sweet and bright, and as if he knew something else about it. And we three looked at each other and at him, and we smiled, too. And it made a nice minute.

"Clementina," said Madame Proudfit, like another minute that wasn't so very well acquainted with the one that was being, and then she presented the Brother-man. But instead of a regular society, say-what-you-ought-to-say answer to her greeting, the Brother-man says to her:

"Miss Proudfit, you shall arbitrate! Somebody left him to this lady and me--or to anybody like, or unlike us--on the train. Shall we find his own mother that has run away from him? Or shall we send him to an institution? Or shall we keep him? Which way," he says, smiling, "is the way that _is_ the way?"

She looked up at him as if she knew, clear inside his words, what he was talking about.

"Are you," she ask' him, half merry, but all in earnest too, "are you going to decide with your heart or your head?"

"Why, with my soul, I hope," says the Brother-man, simple.

Miss Clementina nodded a little, and I saw her face all Summer-soft as she answered him.

"Then," she said, "almost nobody will tell you so, but--there's only one way."

"I know it," says he, gentle.

"I know it," says I, solemn.

We three stood looking at each other from close on the same star, knowing all over us that if you decide a thing with your head you'll probably shift a burden off; if you decide with your heart you'll probably give, give, give, like Madame Proudfit does, to pay somebody else liberal to take the burden; but if you decide it with your soul, you give your own self to whatever is going on. And you know that's the way that _is_ the way.

All of a sudden, as if words that were not being said had got loose and were saying themselves anyway, the music--that had been tip-tapping along all the while since we came--started in, sudden and beautiful, with the Piano Lady and the Violin Man playing up there in the landing room. I don't know whether it was a lullaby--though I shouldn't be surprised if it was, because I think sometimes in this world things happen just like they were being stage-managed by somebody that knows. But anyway--oh, it had a lullaby sound, a kind-of rocking, tender, just-you-and-me meaning; that ain't so very far from the you-and-me-and-all-of-us meaning when they're both said right and deep down.

I looked up at Miss Clementina and the Brother-man--as you do look up when some nice little thing has happened that you think whoever you're with will understand. But they didn't look back at me. They looked over to each other. They looked over to each other, swift at the first, but lasting long, and with the faces of both of them softening to Summer. And the music went heavenly-ing on, into the room, and into living, and into everything, and it was as if the whole minute was turned into its own spirit and then was said out in a sound.

Miss Clementina and the Brother-man looked away and down at the little chap that Miss Clementina was holding his hand. It was as if there was a pulse in the room--the Great Pulse that we all beat to, and that now and then we hear. But those two didn't see me at all; and all of a sudden I understood, how there was still another star that I didn't know anything about, and that they two were standing there together, they two and the little chap--but not me. Oh, it was wonderful--starting the way great things start, still and quiet like stars coming out. So still that they didn't either of them know it. And I felt as if everything was some better and some holier than I had ever known.

Then Madame Proudfit, she leans out from her star, gracious and benign, and certain sure that her star was the only one that had eternal truth inside it; and she spoke with a manner of waving her hand good natured to all the other little stars, including ours:

"You mad, mad, children!" she said. "You _are_ mad. But you are very picturesque in your decisions, there's no denying that. He would probably be better cared for, more scientifically fed, and all that, in a good, hired, private family. But that's as you see it. Be mad, if you like--I'm here to watch over you!"

She had quite a nice tidy high point of view about it--but oh, it wasn't ours. It wasn't ours. We three--the Brother-man and Miss Clementina and me--we sort of hugged our own way. And the little chap he kept smiling, like he sort of hugged it too.

So that was the way it was. Miss Clementina and the Brother-man--that she'd been afraid to meet, 'count of thinking mebbe he didn't mean his writings for living--were in love from before they knew it. And I think it was part because they both meant life strong enough for living and not just for thinking, like the lukewarm folks do.

I kept the little chap with me the three months or so that went by before the wedding--and I could hardly bear to let him go then.

"Why don't you keep him for them the first year or so?" Friendship Village ask' me. But there's some things even your own town doesn't always understand. "It's so unromantic for them to take him now," some of them even said.

But I says to them what I say now: "There's things that's bigger than romantic and there's things that's bigger than practical, so be some of both is mixed in right proportion. And the biggest thing I know in this world is when folks say over, 'You and me and all of us,' like voices, speaking to everybody's Father from inside the dark."

FOOTNOTE:

[9] Copyright, 1913, _The Delineator_.

THE CABLE[10]

I says to myself: "What shall I do? What shall I do?"

I crushed the magazine down on my knee, and sat there rocking with it between my hands.

It was just a story about a little fellow with a brick. They met him, a little boy six years old, somewhere in Europe, going along up toward one of the milk stations, at sunrise. They wondered why he carried a brick, and they asked him: "Why do you have the brick?" "You see," he says, "it's so wet. I can get up on this." And he stood on his brick in the mud before the milk station for five hours, waiting for his supplies that was a pint of milk to take home to his mother.

Mebbe it was queer that this struck me all of a heap, when the big war I'd got used to. But you can't get used to the things that hurt a child.

And then I kept thinking about Bennie. Supposing it had been Bennie, with the brick? Bennie was the little boy that his young father had gone back to the old country, and Bennie hadn't any mother. So I had him.

Because I had to do something, I went out on the porch and called him. He came running from his swing--his coat was too big for him and his ears stuck out, but he was an awful sweet little boy. The kind you want to have around.

"Bennie," I says, "I know little boys hate it. But _could_ you leave me hug you?"

He kind of saw I was feeling bad--like a child can--and he came right up to me and he says:

"I got one hug left. _Here_ it is!"

And he hugged me grand.

Then he ran back down the path, throwing his legs out sideways, kind of like a little calf, the way he does. And I set down on the side stoop, and I cried.

"Oh, blessed God," I says, "supposing Bennie was running round Europe with a brick, waiting five hours in the mud for milk for his ma, that he ain't got none?"

When I feel like that, I can't sit still. I have to walk. So I opened the side gate and left Bennie run through into Mis' Holcomb's yard, that was ironing on her back porch, and I says to her to please keep an eye on him. And then I headed down the street, towards nothing; and my heart just filled out ready to blow up.

As I went, I heard a bell strike. It was a strange bell, and I wondered. Then I remembered.

"The new Town Hall's new bell," I thought. "It's come and it's up. They're trying it."

And it seemed like the voice of the town, saying something.

In the door of the newspaper office sat the editor, Luke Norris, his red face and black hair buried behind a tore newspaper.

"Hello, Luke," I says, sheer out of wanting human looks and words from somebody.

He laid down his newspaper, and he took his breath quick and he says: "I wish't Europe wasn't so far off. I'd like to go over there--with a basket."

I overtook little Nuzie Cook, going along home,--little thin thing she was, with such high eye-brows that her face looked like its windows were up.

"Nuzie," I says, "how's your ma?" And that was a brighter subject, because Mis' Cook has only got the rheumatism and the shingles.

"Ma's in bed," says Nuzie. "She's worried about her folks in the old country--she ain't heard and she can't sleep."

I went to a house where I knew there was a baby, and I played with that. Then I went to call on Mis' Perkins, that ain't got sense enough to talk about anything that is anything, so she kind of rested me. But into Mis' Hunter's was a little young rabbit, that her husband had plowed into its ma's nest, and he'd brought it in with its leg cut by the plow, and they was trying to decide what best to do. And I begun hurting inside again, and thinking:

"Nothing but a rabbit--a baby rabbit--and over there...."

I didn't say anything. Pretty soon I turned back home. And then I ran into the McVicars--three of them.

The McVicars--three of them--had Spring hats trimmed with cherries and I guess raisins and other edibles; the McVicars--mother and two offspring, sprung quite a while back--are new-come to the village, and stylish. They hadn't been in town in two months when they'd been invited twice to drive to the cemetery in the closed carriages, though they hadn't known either corpse, personally. They impressed people.

"Oh, Mis' Marsh," says Mis' McVicar, "we wanted to see you. We're getting up a relief fund...."

I went down in my pocket for a quarter, automatic. I heard their thanks, and I went on. And it came to me how, all over the country, the whole 100,000,000 of us, more or less, had been met up with to contribute something to relief, and we'd all done it. And it had gone over there to this country and to that. But our hearts had ached, individual and silent, the way mine was aching that day--and there wasn't any means of cabling that ache over to Europe. If there was, if that great ache that was in all of us for the folks over there, could just be gathered up and got over to them in one mass, I thought it would do as much as food and clothes and money to help them.

I stood still by a picket fence I happened to be passing, and I looked down the little street. It had a brick sidewalk and a dirt road and little houses, and the fences hadn't been taken down yet. And all the places looked still and kind of dear.

"They all feel bad," I thought, "just as bad as I do, for folks that's starved. But they can't say so--they can't say so. Only in little dabs of money, sent off separate."

Bennie was swinging on Mis' Holcomb's gate, looking for me. He came running to meet me.

"I found a blue beetle," he says to me. "And that lady's kitty's home, with a bell on. And I got a new nail. An--an--an--"

And I thought: "He ain't no different from them--over there. The little tikes, with no pas and no suppers and nothing to play with, only mebbe a brick to lug."

And there I was, right back to where I started from. And I went out to get supper, with my heart hanging around my neck like a pail of rock.

II

Next day was Memorial Day. And Memorial Day in Friendship Village is something grand.

First the G. A. R. conducts the service in the Court House yard, with benches put up special, and a speech from out of town and paid for.

Right away afterward everybody marches or drives, according to the state of their pocket-book, out to the Cemetery, to lay flowers on the soldiers' graves; and it's quite an event, because everybody that's got anybody buried out there and that is still alive themselves, they all whisk out the day before and decorate up their graves, so's everybody can see for themselves how intimate their dead is held in remembrance. And everybody walks around to see if so-and-so has thought to send anything from Seattle, or wherenot, _this_ year. And if they didn't, it's something to tell about.

Then all the Ladies' Aid Societies serve dinners in the empty store buildings down town, and make what they can. And in the afternoon everybody lounges round and cuts the grass and tinkers with the screens and buys ice cream off the donkey-cart man.

I dressed Bennie up, clean and miserable, in the morning, and went down to the exercises. I couldn't see much, because the woman in front of me couldn't either, and she stood up; and I couldn't hear much, because the paid-for speaker addressed only one-half of his audience, and as usual I wasn't in the right half. But the point is that neither of them limitations mattered. I didn't have to see and I didn't have to hear. All that I had to do was to feel. And I felt. For I was alive at the time of the Civil War, and all you have to do to me is to touch that spring in me, and I'm back there: Getting the first news, reading about Sumter, sensing the call for 75,000 volunteers, hearing that this one and this one and this one had enlisted, peeking through the fence at Camp Randall where my two brothers were waiting to go; and then living the long four years through, when every morning meant news, and no news meant news, and every night meant more to hear. For years I couldn't open a newspaper without feeling I must look first for the list of the dead....

I set there on the bench in the spring sunshine, without anything to lean against, seeing the back breadths of Mis' Curtsey's gray flowered delaine, and living it all over again, with Bennie hanging on my knee. And it made it a thousand times worse, now that these Memorial Days were passing, with what was going on in Europe still going on.

And I thought: "Oh, I dunno how we can keep up feeling memorial for just our own soldiers, when the whole world's soldiers are lying dead, new every night...."

And getting a little more used to the paid speaker's voice, I could hear some of what he was saying. I could get the names,--Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Shenandoah, Missionary Ridge, all these, over and over. And my heart ached with every one. But it had a new ache, for names that the whole world will echo with for years to come. And sitting there, with nobody knowing, I says to myself:

"And, O Lord, I memorial all the rest of them--the soldiers of fifty years ago no more than the soldiers of now--the soldiers of Here no more than the soldiers of Over There. O Lord, I memorial them all, and I pray for them that survive over there--put all Your strength on them, Lord, as far as I am concerned, for us survivors here, we don't need You as much as they do--them that's new bereaved and new desolated. For Christ's sake. Amen."

On my way home, I saw Luke Norris sitting out by the door of his office again. He never went to any exercises because his wind-pipe was liable to shut up on him, and it broke up the program some, getting his breath through to him.

"Calliope," he says, "we want you should go on to the Committee for opening the new Town Hall, in about two months from now. We want the jim-dandiest, swell-upest celebration this town has ever had. Twenty years of unexampled prosperity--"

I stood still and stared down on him.

"Honest," I says, "do you want me to help in a prosperity celebration _this_ Summer?"

"Sure," he says, "women are in on it."

"Luke," I says. "I dunno how you'll feel about that when you come to think it over. But I feel--"

Bennie, fussing round on the side-walk, came over, tugging a chunk of wood. I thought at first he was carrying a brick.

I sat down in a handy chair, just inside Luke's door.

"Luke," I says, "Luke! That ain't the kind of a celebration this town had ought to have. You listen here to me...."

III

Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think about the next two Summer months. I lie awake and think how it all went, that planning, from first to last. I think about the idea, and about how it started, and kindled, and spread, and flamed. And I think about what finally came of it.

For one thing, it was the first living, human thing that Friendship Village ever got up that there wasn't a soul that kicked about. You can't name another thing that any of the town ever went in for, that the rest didn't get up and howl. Pavement--some of us said we couldn't afford it, "not now." New bridge--half of us says we was bonded to the limit as it was. Sewerage--three-fourths of us says for our town it was a engineering impossibility. Buying the electric light plant, that would be pure socialism. Central school building--a vast per cent of us allows it would make it too far for the children to walk, though out of school hours they run all over the town, scot-free and foot loose, skate, sled and hoop. As a town none of us would unite on nothing. Never, not till this time.

But this time it was different. And even if not anything had come of it, I'd be glad to remember the kind of flash I got from different folks, when we came to tell them about it.

I went first to the Business Men's Association, because it was them that was talking the Town Hall celebration the hardest. I'd been to them before, about playgrounds, about band concerts, about taking care of the park; and some of them were down on us ladies.

"You're always putting up propositions to give money _out_," says one of them once. "Why don't you propose us taking _in_ some? What do you think we are? Charity?"

"No," says I to him, "I don't. Nor yet love. You're dollar marks and ciphers, a few of you," I told him, candid, "and those don't make a number."

So when I stood up before them that night, I knew some of them were prepared to vote, automatic, against whatever we wanted. Some of them didn't even have to hear what us ladies suggested in order to be against it. And then I began to talk.

I told them the story of the little fellow with the brick. That stayed in my mind. I never see my milk-man go along, leaving big, clean bottles in everybody's doors that I didn't image up that little boy standing in the mud on his brick, waiting. And then I mentioned Bennie to them too, that they all knew about. We hadn't heard from his father in two months now, and of course there didn't any of us know....

"I don't need to remind you," I says to them, "how we feel about Europe. Every one of us knows. We try not to talk about it, because there's some of it we can't talk about without letting go. But it's on us all the time. The other day I was trying to think how the world use' to feel, and how I'd felt, before this came on us. I couldn't do it. There can't any of us do it. It's on us, like thick dark, whatever we do. Giving money don't express it. Talking don't express it.... Oh, let's do something in this town! Instead of our new Town Hall Prosperity celebration, let's us do something on August 4 to let Europe see how bad we feel. Let's us."

We talked a little more, and then I told them our plan, and we talked over that. I'll never forget them, in the little Town Room with the two gas jets and the chairman's squeaky swivel chair and the tobacco smoke. But there wasn't one voice that dissented, not one. They all sat still, as if they were taking off some spiritual hats that didn't show. It was as if their little idea of a Prosperity celebration sort of gave up its light to some big sun, blazing there on us, in the room.

The rest was easy. It kind of done itself. In a way it was already done. Something was in people's hearts, and we were just making a way for it to get out. And the air was full of something that was ready to get into people's hearts, and we made a way for it to get in. I don't know but these are our only job on this earth.

August 4--that's the Europe date that none of America can forget, because it's part our date too.

"What we going to do?" says Bennie, when I was dressing him. It was four months since we had had a letter from his father....