Zona Gale

“ 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.” ”

“ You know when you live in a village you always know whether the moon is new or to the full or where it is and when it’s going to be; but when you live in a city you just look up in the sky some night and say “Oh, that’s so, there’s the moon,” and go right on thinking about something else. Here in the village that December everything was getting ready, deliberate, for a full-moon Christmas, like long ago. The moon and the cold and the snow, and all them public things, was doing their best, together, for our common Christmas. All but us. ”

“ And life will be richer when friends come true—not just this planet, and that star, and these constellations,—but when the whole great company of friends, in homes, in churches, in mines, in prisons, in factories, in brothels, shall be known to us, and set free to be real bodies for the souls stirring and beating in them now—and trying to speak. And not till then will that spirit in outdoors and in cities and in us—the same spirit, trying to say the same thing—not till then can that spirit ever get it said. ”

“ All I say now is, Why not take in Lisbeth?”
“Why not put a premium on evil-doing and have done with it?” says Mis’ Fire-Chief Merriman, majestic and deep-toned.
“Well,” I says, “we’ve done that to the father’s evil. Maybe you can tell me why we fixed up his premium so neat?”
“Oh, well,” says Mis’ Sykes, “surely we needn’t argue it. Why, the whole of civilization is on our side and responsible for our way of thinking. You ain’t got no argument, Calliope,” she says. “Besides, it ain’t what any of us thinks that proves it. It’s what’s what that counts.” ”

“ Three days before election it happened I was up early to mix my bread. The clock showed half-past six just as I got through with my breakfast, and the sun come in so nice and slanting acrost my kitchen floor that I stepped to the open door to get the smell of it. All outside lay sweet and surprised, like the first notes of something being played. Before I knew it, I went out and down the path, between the things that hadn’t come up yet—ain’t it like all outdoors was friendly and elbow near, the way it keeps pulling at you to be out there with it? ”

“ So I ran along and tried not to think about it—except the work part. ’Most always, the work part of anything’ll steady you.
The great cedar-of-Lebanon-looking tree, standing down there on the edge of the Market Square and acting as if it had been left from some long-ago forest, on purpose, had been hung round with lines and lines of strung pop-corn—the kind that no Christmas tree would be a Christmas tree without, because so many, many folks has set up stringing it nights of Christmas week, after the children was in bed, and has kept it, careful, in a box, so’s it’d do for next year. ”

“ We are beginning to be ashamed of charity and to see that our half dozen dependent families need not have been dependent, if their own gifts had been developed and their industry had not been ill-directed or exploited. And if that is true of the Rickers and the Hennings and the Hasketts and the Bettses and the Doles, we begin to suspect that it may be true of all poverty. We are beginning to be ashamed of many another inefficiency and folly which anciently we took for granted as necessary evils. ”

“ Well—if it just happens that you live in any town whatever in the civilized world, I think you’ll know about what I had said to me.
On the one hand it went about like this, from Mis’ Timothy Toplady and the Holcombs and the Hubbelthwaits and a lot more:
“Well, land knows, it’d save us lots of back-aching work—but—will the children like it?”
“Like it?” I says. “Try ’em. Trust ’em without trying ’em if you want to. I would. Remember,” I couldn’t help adding, “you like to be with the children a whole lot oftener than they like to be with you. What they like is to be together.” ”

“ Nobody was absent to the club that afternoon, but Mis’ Elkhorn’s sitting-room was big enough so’s we could get in. None of us could bear a parlor club meeting. Our ideas always set in our heads to a parlor-meeting, called to order by rapping on something. But here at Mis’ Elkhorn’s we were out in the sitting-room, with the red table-spread on and the plants growing and the spice-cake smelling through the kitchen door. And you’d think things would of gone as smooth as glass. ”

“ And us that stood together broke into a run, and it was Silas and Mis’ Merriman and me that run together, and rushed together up the stairs of Bitty’s little grocery, to where he lived, and into the back room. And there set Bessie Marshall in the back room, putting her baby to sleep as tranquil as the blue sky and not knowing a word of what was going on, and by the window was Bitty’s old mother, shelling pop-corn.
I never see anybody work like Silas worked them next few minutes. If he’d been a horse and a giant made one he couldn’t have got more quick, necessary things out of the way. ”

“ The day that they denominated Threat Hubbelthwait for mayor of Friendship Village was band-concert night. It’s real back-aching work to go to our band concerts, because we ain’t no seats—nothing but a bandstand in the middle of the market square; but yet we all of us do go, because it’s something to do. And you die—you die for some place to go to see folks and to move around among them, elbow near.
I was resting on the bottom step of the bandstand between tunes, when Mis’ Timothy Toplady come by. ”

“ We are coming to applaud divorce when shame or faithlessness or disease or needless invalidism have attended marriage, and for a village woman to continue to earn her livelihood by marriage under these circumstances is now to her a disgrace hardly less evident than that of her city sister. We continue to cover up far too much, just as in the cities they cover too much. But we do mention openly things which in the old days we whispered or guessed at or whose peril we never knew at all. ”

“ What if all that is the matter with us is just that we intelligences and spirits have not yet been harmonized and made one?
I’ve got a little old piano that the keys rattle, and Sunday mornings, for years now, I always go to that after breakfast, and sit down in my apron, and play some anthems that I remember: “As Pants the Hart,” and “Glory Be to God in the Highest,” and like that. I did it that first Autumn Sunday morning, with my windows open and the muslin curtains blowing and the sun slanting in, and a little smell of wild mint from the bed by the gate. ”

“ 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’s the invisible church of the living God—it’s the place that has grown out of the relation of men to you, out of the striving of men to find you, and out of their longing to draw together in search of you. It is our invisible church from the old time. Why then—when men read things into the visible church that never belonged there, when there has crept into and clung there much that is false, why is it that we who know this must be the{85} ones to withdraw? It is your church and the church of all those who try to know you. ”

“ Ain’t it funny how big things work out by homely means—by homely means? Sole because the choir-leader in one choir had resigned because the bass in that choir was the bass in that choir, and so they didn’t have anybody there to train their Christmas music, and sole because another congregation was hard up and was having to borrow its Christmas celebration money out of the foreign missionary fund—we got ’em to see sense. ”

“ It had always seemed to me that men that done things like this to other folks’s little business was wicked men in general. That they kind of got behind being legal and grinned out at folks and said: “Do your worst. You can’t stop us.” But now I see, like a blast of light, that it was no such thing; but that most of them was probably good husbands and fathers, like Silas; industrious, frugal, members of the Common Councils and of the school boards, elders in the church, charitable, kindly, and believing simple as the day that what they was doing was for the good of business. Business. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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{213} and employees, men and women, and let’s take up together the job of being a town. ”

“ As far as our experience goes, the most of us are democratic. But when there arises an issue transcending our experience, our tendency is to uncompromising conservatism. And there is hope in the fact that politically many of us are free and think for ourselves, and smile at the abuse that is heaped upon great leaders, and understand with thanksgiving—away here in the village—how often the demagogues of to-day are the demi-gods of to-morrow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And I looked along at the nice, neat little houses, with the front doors standing open to the spring night, and dishes clattering musical here and there in kitchens, getting washed up, and lights up-stairs where children were being put to bed. And I thought, “Never tell me that this little town don’t want everybody that belongs to it to live in it. The town is true. It’s folks that’s false.” I says that over: “The town is true. It’s folks that’s false. How you going to make them know it?”
When it come my turn to have the Homecoming committee meet to my house, things had begun to get exciting. ”

“ We just go along and go along, and behave ourselves like the year does: Little spurt of Spring now and then, when two-three folks build new houses and we get a new side-walk or two or buy a new sprinkling cart. Little dead time, here and there, when the tobacco or pickle factory closes down to wait for more to grow, and when somebody gets most built and boards up the windows till something else comes in to go on with. But most of the time Friendship Village keeps on pretty even, like the year, or the potato patch, or any of them common, growing things. ”

“ Somewhere there beyond, shining, is a new individualism, whose incarnations shall flow to no melting pot, but instead shall cling together, valued for their differentiation, and like a certain precious form of life, low in the scale, shall put out a thousand filaments, and presently move away together, a unit. ”

“ Few can be found who do not admit the anomaly of denominationalism, even while they cling to it. And it is no longer considered reprehensible to state openly, as well as to believe secretly, that the truth about living which Jesus taught has been told in certain forms whose ancient interpretation no thinking person holds. Something of the glory of the God-ward striving of all religions is felt, here and there, in the village, and now and then, in a village sitting-room, you come on some one who is cherishing a vision like that of John on Patmos, and saying nothing. ”

“ That’s being a boom town, as they call it? There ain’t any more boom to Friendship Village than there is to a robin building a nest. There ain’t any more boom to Friendship Village than there is to growth. ”