Part 17

She took the letter that Mis' Fire Chief Merriman had composed for me, and right while forty folks were waiting for her, she stood and read it. She had a wonderful kind of tender smile, and she smiled with that. And then all she says to me was all I wanted:

"I'll come. When do you want me?"

Never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget the day that I got back to Friendship Village. When it came in sight through the car window, I saw it--not sitting down on its green cushions now, but standing tip-toe on its heaven-kissing hills--waiting to see what we could do to it. When you come home from a big convention like that, if you don't step your foot on your own depot platform with a new sense of consecration to your town, and to all living things, then you didn't deserve your badge, nor your seat, nor your privilege. And as I rode into the town, thinking this, and thinking more than I had words to think with, I wanted to chant a chant, like Deborah (but pronounced Déborah when it's a relative). And I wanted to say:

"Oh, Lord. Here we live in a town five thousand strong, and we been acting like we were five thousand weak--and we never knew it.

"And because we had learned to sweep up a few feet beyond our own door-yard, and had found out the names of a few things we had never heard of before, we thought we were civic. We even thought we were social.

"Civic. Social. We thought these were new names for new things. And here they are only bringing in the kingdom of God, that we've known about all along.

"Oh, it isn't going to be brought in by women working along alone. Nor by men working along alone. It's going to come in by whole towns rising up together men and women, shoulder to shoulder, and nobody left out, organized and conscious and working like one folk. Like one folk."

Mis' Amanda Toplady and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss were at the depot to meet me. I remember how they looked, coming down the platform, with an orange and lemon and water-melon sunset idling down the sky.

And then Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss says to me, with her eye-brows all pleased and happy:

"Oh, Calliope, we've got the new seats for the County House Yard. They're iron, painted green, with a leaf design on the back."

"And," chimes in the other one, "we've got them to say they'll wash the blankets in the calaboose every quarter."

I wanted to begin right then. But I didn't. I just walked down the street with them, a-carrying my bag and my umbrella, and when one of them says, "Well, I'm sure your dress don't look so very much wore after all, Calliope," I answered back, casual enough, just as if I was thinking about what she said: "Well, I give you my word, I haven't once thought about myself in con-nection with that dress."

Together we went down Daphne Street in the afternoon sun. And they didn't know, nor Friendship Village didn't know, that walking right along with us three was the tramp and the tramp of the feet of a great convention that had come home with me, right there to our village. Oh, I mean the tramp and the tramp of the feet of the folks in the whole world.

FOOTNOTE:

[12] Copyright, 1914, _La Follette's Magazine_.

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End of Project Gutenberg's Peace in Friendship Village, by Zona Gale