Neighborhood Stories

And even Silas broke down and smiled like he don’t think no president had ought to do. And everybody else kind of laughed and looked at each other and felt the kind of a feeling that don’t run around among folks any too often. And when Silas put the motion, kind of grudging, we all voted for it abundant. And Bess set there showing pleased, like an empty room that has had a piece of furniture got for it.

I dunno what it was that minute done to us all. I’ve often wondered since, what it was. But somehow everybody kind of felt that they all knew something each other knew, only they couldn’t rightly name it. Ab and Joe Betts, Mame Holcomb and Eppleby, Gertie and Mis’ Toplady and me – we all felt it. Everybody did, unless it was Silas and Mis’ Sykes. Silas didn’t sense nothing much but that he hoped the meeting was going to run smooth, and Mis’ Sykes – well, right in the middle of that glowing minute I see her catch sight of Mame Holcomb’s new red waist and she set there thinking of nothing but waist either with eyes or with mind.

But the rest of us was sharing a big minute. And I liked us all to be feeling that way – I ain’t never liked anything better, without it’s the Christmas feeling or the Thanksgiving feeling. And this feeling was sort of like all two. And I betted if only we could make it last – Absalom wouldn’t be getting done out of his arm’s money-value by Silas, nor the Bettses out of their decent roof by Timothy, nor they wouldn’t be no club formed to dole out charity stuff, but we would all know a better way. And things would be different. Different.

I leaned clear past three chairs and nudged Mis’ Toplady. She looked round, and I see she was just wiping her eyes on her apron-string – Mis’ Toplady never can find her handkerchief when she most wants to cry. And I never said a word – I didn’t need to – but we nodded and we both knew what we both knew: that there was a bigger thing in the room that minute than ever Silas knew or guessed when he planned out his plan. And it was what Mis’ Toplady had meant when she told him there was something “greater than these” – as most folks mean ’em.

I didn’t lose the feeling through the piece by the band that come next, nor through the selection by Silas’s niece. The music really made the feeling more so – the music, and our all setting there hearing it together, and everybody in the room being givers, and nobody givees. But when the music stopped, and while I was still feeling all glorified up, what did Mis’ Sykes do but break in, something like throwing a stone through a window.

“I should think we might as well get the club name settled to-night,” she says with her little formal pucker. “Ain’t the Charity Club that we spoke of real nice and dignified for our title?”

It was Mis’ Toplady that exploded. It just bare happened it wasn’t me, but it turned out to be her.

“Land, land,” she says, “no! Not one person in fifteen hundred knows what charity means anyhow, and everybody’d get the wrong idee. Let’s call it just its plain natural name: The Friendship Village Club. Or, The Whole World Club. Or I dunno but The Universe Club!”

I knew I wouldn’t have the sense to keep still right through things. I never do have.

“No, sir!” I says out, “oh, no sir! Universe Club ain’t big enough. For if they is any other universe anywhere maybe that might feel left out.”

Long before we had settled on any one name, I remember Mis’ Toplady come out from behind the refreshments screen and says: “Mr. President, the coffee and sandwiches has come to a boil. Can’t you peter off the meeting and adjourn it for one week?”

Which wasn’t just exactly how she meant to say it. But it seemed to come in so pat that everybody rustled, spontaneous, in spite of themselves. And us ladies begun passing the plates.

After they’d all gone, we was picking up the dishes when Silas come in to see to the stoves.

“Oh, Silas,” I says, “wasn’t it a splendid meeting? Wasn’t it?”

Silas was pinching, gingerish, at the hot stove-door handle, rather than take his coat-tail for a holder.

“I s’pose you’re satisfied,” he says. “You fed ’em, even if we didn’t get much done.”

“Not get much done!” I says – “not get much done! Oh, Silas, what more did you want to do than we see done here to-night?”

“Well, what kind of a charity meeting was that?” says he, sour and bitter rolled into one.

I went up to him with all of Mis’ Toplady’s fringed tea-napkins in my hands that it was going to take her most of the next day to do up.

“Why, Silas,” I says, “I dunno if it was any kind of a charity meeting. But it was a town meeting. It was a folks’ meeting. It was a human meeting. Can’t you sense it? Can’t you sense it, Silas?” I put it to him: “We got something else besides charity going here to-night – as sure as the living sun.”

“I like to know what?” he snaps back, and slammed the stove door.

Mis’ Toplady, she looked at him tranquil over the tops of her two pairs of spectacles.

“Something that’s in folks,” says she – and went on hunting up her spoons.

THE TIME HAS COME

When the minister’s wife sent for me that day, it was a real bad time, because I’d been doing up my tomato preserves and I’d stood on my feet till they was ready to come off. But as soon as I got the last crock filled, I changed my dress and pushed my hair up under my hat and thought I’d remember to keep my old shoes underneath my skirt.

The minister’s parlor is real cool and shady – she keeps it shut up all day, and it kind of smells of its rose jar and its silk cushions and the dried grasses in the grate; and I sank down in the horse-hair patent rocker, and was glad of the rest. But I kept wondering what on earth the minister’s wife could want of me. It wasn’t the season for missionary barrels or lumberman’s literature – the season for them is house-cleaning time when we don’t know what all to do with the truck, and we take that way of getting rid of it and, same time, providing a nice little self-indulgence for our consciences. But this was the dead of Summer, and everybody sunk deep in preserves and vacations and getting their social indebtedness paid off and there wasn’t anything going around to be dutiful about for, say, a month or six weeks yet, when the Fall woke up, and the town begun to get out the children’s school-clothes and hunt ’em for moths.

“Well, Calliope,” says the minister’s wife, “I s’pose you wonder what I’ve got important to say to you.”

“True,” says I, “I do. But my feet ache so,” I says graceful, “I’m perfectly contented to set and listen to it, no matter what it is.”

She scraped her chair a little nearer – she was a dear, fat woman, that her breathing showed through her abundance. She had on a clean, starched wrapper, too short for anything but home wear, and long-sleeved cotton under-wear that was always coming down over her hands, in July or August, and making you feel what a grand thing it is to be shed of them – I don’t know of anything whatever that makes anybody seem older than to see long, cotton undersleeves on them and the thermometer 90° at the City Bank corner.

“Well,” says she, “Calliope, the Reverend and I – ” she always called her husband the Reverend – “has been visiting in the City, as you know. And while there we had the privilege of attending the Church of the Divine Life.”

“Yes,” says I, wondering what was coming.

“Never,” says she, impressive, “never have I seen religion at so high an ebb. It was magnificent. From gallery to the back seat the pews were filled with attentive, intelligent people. Outside, the two sides of the street were lined with their automobiles. And this not one Sunday, but every Sunday. It was the most positive proof of the interest of the human heart in – in divine things. It was grand.”

“Well, well,” says I, following her.

“Now,” she says, “the sermon wasn’t much. Good, but not much. And the singing – well, Lavvy Whitmore can do just as good when she sets about it. Then what made folks go? The Reverend and I talked it over. And we’ve decided it isn’t because they’re any better than the village folks. No, they’ve simply got in the habit of it, they see everybody else going, and they go. And it give us an idea.”

“What was that?” says I, encouraging, for I never see where she was driving on at.

“The same situation can be brought about in Friendship Village,” says she. “If only everybody sees everybody going to church, everybody else will go!”

I sat trying to figger that out. “Do you think so?” says I, meantime.

“I am sure so,” she replies, firm. “The question is, How shall we get everybody to go, till the example becomes fixed?”

“How, indeed?” says I, helpless, wondering which of the three everybodys she was thinking of starting in on.

“Now,” she continues, “we have talked it over, the Reverend and I, and we have decided that you’re the one to help us. We want you to help us think up ways to get this whole village into church for, say, four Sundays or so, hand-running.”

I was trying to see which end to take hold of.

“Well-a,” I says, “into which church?”

The minister’s wife stared at me.

“Why, ours!” says she.

“Why into ours?” I ask’ her, thoughtful.

“My goodness,” says she, “what do you s’pose we’re in our church for, anyway?”

“I’m sure,” says I, “I don’t know. I often wonder. I’m in our particular one because my father was janitor of it when I was a little girl. Why are you in it?”

She looked at me perfectly withering.

“I,” she says cold, “was brought up in it. There was never any question what one I should be in.”

“Exactly,” says I, nodding. “And your husband – why is he in our special church?”

“My dear Calliope,” says she, regal, “he was born in it. His father was minister of it – ”

“Exactly,” I says again. “Then there’s Mame Holcomb, her mother sung in our choir, so she joined ours. And Mis’ Toplady, they lived within half a mile of ours out in the country, and the other churches were on the other side of the hill. So they joined ours. And the Sykeses, they joined ours when they lived in Kingsford, because there wasn’t any other denomination there. But the rest of the congregation, I don’t happen to know what their reasons was. I suppose they was equally spiritual.”

The minister’s wife bent over toward me.

“Calliope Marsh,” says she, “you talk like an atheist.”

“Never mind me,” I says. “Go on about the plan. Everybody is to be got into our church for a few Sundays, as I understand it. What you going to give them when you get them there?”

She looked at me kind of horror-struck.

“Calliope,” says she, “what has come over you? The Reverend is going to preach, of course.”

“About what?” says I, grim. “Describin’ the temple, and telling how many courts it had? Or giving us a little something exegitical – whatever that means?”

For a minute I thought she was going to cry, and I melted myself. If I hadn’t been preserving all the morning, I wouldn’t never have spoke so frank.

“Honest,” I says, “I don’t know what exegitical does mean, but I didn’t intend it insulting. But tell me this – just as truthful as if you wasn’t a minister’s wife: Do you see any living, human thing in our church service here in the village that would make a living, human young folk really want to go to it?”

“They’d ought to want to go to it,” says she.

“Never mind what they’d ought to want,” says I, “though I ain’t so clear they’d ought to want it, myself. Just as truthful as if you wasn’t a minister’s wife – do you?”

“No,” says she, “but – ”

“Now,” I says, “you’ve said it. And what is true for young is often true for old. If you want to meet that, I’m ready to help you. But if you just want to fill our church up full of folks, I don’t care whether it’s full or not – not that way.”

“Well,” she says, “I’m sure I only meant what was for the best in my husband’s work – ”

I put out my hand to her. All of a sudden, I saw her as she was, doing her level best inside the four walls of her – and I says to myself that I’d been a brute and, though I was glad of it, I’d make up for it by getting after the thing laying there underneath all the words.

For Friendship Village, in this particular, wasn’t any different from any other village or any other town or city of now. We had fifteen hundred folks and we had three churches, three ministers at Eight Hundred Dollars apiece annually, three cottage organs, three choirs, three Sunday School picnics in Summer, three Sunday School entertainments in Winter, three sets of repairs, carpets, conventions and delegates, and six stoves with the wood to buy to run ’em. And out of the fifteen hundred folks, from forty to sixty went to each church each Sunday. We were like that.

In one respect, though, we differed from every other town. We had Lavvy Whitmore. Lavvy was the town soprano. She sung like a bird incarnate, and we all got her for Sunday School concerts and visiting ministers and special occasions in general. Lavvy didn’t belong to any church. She sort of boarded round, and we couldn’t pin her down to any one choir.

“For one reason,” she said, “I haven’t got enough clothes to belong to any one choir. I’ve been driven distracted too many times looking at the same plaid waist and the same red bird and the same cameo pin in choirs to do it for anybody else. By kind of boarding round the way I do, I can give them all a change.”

The young minister over to the White Frame church – young Elbert Kinsman – he took it harder than the rest.

“How are your convictions, Miss Lavvy?” he had once been heard to say.

“My convictions?” she answered him. “They are that there isn’t enough difference in the three to be so solemn and so expensive over. Especially the expensive,” she added. “Is there now?”

“No,” young Elbert Kinsman had unexpectedly replied, “I myself don’t think there is. But – ”

“The only thing is,” Lavvy had put in irreverent, “you can’t get rid of that ‘but,’ and I have!”

“You send for Lavvy,” I says now to our minister’s wife. “She’ll think of something.”

So there we were, with a kind of revival on our hands to plan before we knew it, because our minister’s wife was like that, much more like that than he was. He had a great deal of emphasis, but she had a great deal of force.

Going home that morning, I went a little out of my way and come round by Shepherd’s Grove. Shepherd’s Grove lays just on the edge of the village, not far from the little grassy triangle in the residence part – and it always rests me to go there. Walking through it that morning I remember I thought:

“Yes, I s’pose this kind of extry effort must be all right – even Nature enters into it real extensive. Every Summer is an extry effort – a real revival, I guess. But oh,” I says to myself, wishful, “that’s so spontaneous and unanimous! I wish’t folks was more like that…”

I was filling in for organist while ours was away on a vacation to her husband’s relatives. That sounds so grand and I’d ought to explain that I can only play pieces that are written in the natural. But by picking out judicious, I can get along through the morning and evening services very nice. I don’t dare ever attempt prayer-meeting, because then somebody is likely to pipe up and give out a hymn that’s in sharps or flats, without thinking. I remember one night, though, when I just had to play for prayer-meeting being the only one present that knew white notes from black. There was a visiting minister. And when he give out his first hymn, I see it was “There is a Calm for Those That Weep” in three flats, and I turned around on the stool, and I says, “Wouldn’t you just as lief play the piece on the opposite page? That’s wrote natural.” He done so, looking some puzzled, and well he might, for the one I mentioned happened to be, “Master, the Tempest is Raging.” I was a kind of a limited organist but then I filled in, vacations and such, anyhow. And it was so I was doing that Summer.

And so they left it to me to kind of plan the order of services for them four Sundays in September that they decided on. That was nice to do – I’d been hankering to get my hands on the services many a time. And a night or two afterwards, our minister come down to talk this over with me. I’d been ironing all that blessed day, and just before supper my half bushel of cherries had come down on me, unexpected. I was sitting on the front porch in the cool of the day, pitting them. The sun wasn’t down yet, and folks was watering lawns and tinkering with blinds and screens and fences, or walking round pinching off dead leaves; and being out there sort of rested me.

Our minister sat down on the top stoop-step. It had been an awful hot day, and he looked completely tuckered out.

“Hot, ain’t it?” says I, sympathetic, – you can sympathize with folks for the weather without seeming to reproach ’em, same as sympathy for being tired out does to ’em.

“Very warm,” says he. “I’ve made,” he says, “eleven calls this afternoon.”

“Oh, did you?” I says. “What was the occasion of them?”

He looked surprised. “Pastoral calls,” he says, explaining.

“Oh,” I says. “Sick folks?”

“Why no, no,” says he. “My regular rounds. I’ve made,” he adds, “one hundred and fourteen calls this month.”

I went on pitting cherries. When I look back on it now, I know that it wasn’t natural courage at all that made me say what I did. It was merely the cherries coming on top of the ironing.

“Ain’t life odd?” says I. “When you go to see folks, it’s duty. And when I go to see folks, I do it for a nice, innocent indulgence.”

He looked kind of bewildered and sat there fanning himself with the last foreign missionary report and not saying anything for a minute.

“What did you find to talk about with ’em?” I says, casual.

“Well,” he said, “I hardly know. The range of interests, I must say, is not very wide. There has been a good deal of sickness in the congregation this Summer – ”

“Yes,” I says, “I know. Mis’ Emmons’s limb has been troubling her again. Mis’ Temples’ headaches have come back. Old Mr. Blackwell has got hold of a new dyspepsia remedy. At the Holmans’ the two twins fell into an empty cistern and got scraped. And Grandma Oxner don’t see any change in the old complaint. I’m familiar with ’em.”

He smiled at that. “They have a good many burdens to bear,” he says, patient. “But – ”

“But,” I says, “don’t it seem wicked to ask a man to set and listen to everybody’s troubles for one hundred and fourteen calls a month, and expect him to feel he’s doing the Lord’s work?”

“The office of comforter – ” he began.

“When,” says I, “was complaints ever lessened by dwelling on ’em – tell me that? Oh,” I says, “it ain’t you I’m blaming, nor the other ministers either. I’m blaming us, that calls a minister to come and help us reveal the word of God to ourselves, and then expect a social call a month, or more, off’n him, once around the congregation – or else be uppish and mebbe leave the church.”

“The office of spiritual adviser always demands – ” he started in, and concluded it as might have been expected.

“How much religion really, really, do they let you talk on these calls?” I ask’ him. “Don’t it seem kind of bad taste if you say much about it? And as a matter of fact, don’t ministers pride themselves nowdays on being all-around men who can talk about everything, from concerts to motion pictures, and this here city gollif? Of course they do. That is, if folks keep off their complaints long enough to leave you prove how really broad your interests are.”

“Yes, I know – well,” he says patient, “they expect the calls. What,” he adds, “had you thought of for the order of the four Sunday services?”

“I thought,” I says, “for the first fifteen minutes or so, we might sing together.”

“A short praise service,” says he, comprehending. “Well – that’s a little out of the order for the Sunday morning service, but it might be indulged.”

“Yes,” I says, dry. “Praise ought not to offend most people. And then I thought of it for what it does to people to sing together for a while. It makes real things seem sort of possible, I always think. After the Doxology, we might start in with ‘America,’ and – ”

“America?” says he.

I waited. I thought the next observation belonged to him.

“We’ve sung ‘America’ at Sunday evening mass meetings,” he says, “but for the opening hymn of the regular morning worship – still, of course it’s in the hymnal. I suppose there is really no objection.”

“That,” says I, “was how I looked at it. There’s no objection. Then the Lord’s prayer – all of us together. And the reading – something read from one heart right to another, wouldn’t it be? And then we might sing again – ‘Love For Every Unloved Creature,’ or something of that sort. I think,” I says, “we’d ought to be very careful what hymns we pick out, for these Sundays. Take just the religious ones, why don’t you?”

“I beg your pardon,” said our minister. “What did you say then?”

“Well, for instance,” I says…

“ ‘The Son of God goes forth to warA kingly crown to gain.His blood-red banner streams afar.Who follows in his train?’

“I call a good deal of that hymn immoral. Think of that gentle soul caring to gain a kingly crown. Think of his having a blood-red banner. Think of him going forth to war. It’s a wicked hymn, some of it.”

“Oh, well,” said our minister, “those things are just figurative. You mustn’t take them too literally, Miss Marsh.”

I looked over at him, across my cherries.

“We’re saying that pretty often these days,” I said. “Sometimes it’s glorious true and sometimes it’s stupid false.”

“Well,” he says, “that needn’t enter into the services for these Sundays. We might of course do well to pick out the hymns with care. What else had you thought of?”

“I thought,” I said, “of having the Sunday School come in then and march down the aisle, singing – not ‘We Are Little Soldiers,’ or anything like that, but ‘I Think When I Read That Sweet Story of Old,’ say. And then have them repeat something – well,” I says, “I found a little verse the other day. I never saw it before – mebbe you have. I’ve been meaning to ask the superintendent how it would be to have the children learn to say that.”

I said it for him:

“ ‘The year’s at the Spring,The day’s at the morn,Morning’s at seven,The hill-side’s dew-pearled.The lark’s on the wing,The snail’s on the thorn,God’s in his heaven,All’s right with the world.’

“And then,” I says, “have them add: ‘And oh God, help the last line to get to be true for everybody, and help me to help make it true. Amen,’ That,” I says, “might do for one day. Then you talk to ’em for five minutes. And then dismiss them.”

“Dismiss them?” he said. “Not have them remain to the service?”

“Why, no,” I says, “not unless you can interest and occupy them. Which no sermons do for little children.”

“Where would the mothers that are in church send their children to?” says he.

“We ought to have the rooms downstairs open,” I says, “and have somebody in charge, and have quiet exercises and story-telling and pictures for them.”

“My dear Miss Marsh,” he says, “that would be a revolution.”

“True,” says I, serene. “Ain’t life odd?” I adds. “One minute we’re saying, shocked: ‘But that would be a revolution.’ And the next minute we’re harping away on keeping alive the revolutionary spirit. I wonder which of the two we really mean?”

“Well, then, what else?” says he, pacific.

“Then,” I says, “I wish we could have five minutes of silent prayer. And then right off, the sermon – and no hymn after that at all, but let the sermon end with the benediction – a real cry to God to be with us and to live in us. That’s all.”

I had to go out in the kitchen then to empty a bowl of my pitted fruit, and when I come back the minister stood there, smiling.

“Ah, Miss Marsh,” he said, “you’ve forgotten a very important thing. You’ve forgotten the collection.”

“No,” says I. “No, I haven’t. Except on the days when it’s a real offering for some work for God. I’d take a collection then. The rest of the time I’d have the minister’s salary and the fuel and the kerosene paid for by checks, private.”

After he’d gone, I set there going over, miserable, the things I’d said to him about the services that it was his job to do. And though I was miserable enough – I honestly couldn’t be sorry. You know the difference in them two?