Zona Gale

“ FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
"My gracious," says Mis' Sykes, "I never heard of such a thing since the world began."
"Land, land!" says Mis' Toplady. "But what does it mean?"
"What does it mean?" says Silas Sykes. "What are we all being a party to?"
"I guess it's who are we being a party to, Silas," I says, mild.
They all looked at me. And then they looked where I was looking, and I was looking at something hard. Coming out of the main tent was a mass of struggling, wriggling, dancing humanity—little humanity—in short, the boys that had rode in the big wagon. And walking in the midst of them was a man. ”

“ I'm glad—for Gramma."
Calliope sat smiling, looking, in her delicate color and frailty and the black and white of her dress, like some one on a fan, exquisitely and appropriately painted.
"I was thinking," she said brightly to Hannah, "going without a thing is some like a jumping tooth. It hurts you before-hand, but when it's gone for good all the hurt sort of eases down and peters out and can't do you any more harm." ”

“ I saw that I had to be as wise as ten folks and as harmless as none, if I was to help her—and help him. And all at once I felt as if I was ten folks, and as if I'd got to live up to them all.
Because I didn't underestimate the minute. No woman can underestimate that minute when it comes [Pg 114] to any other woman. For out of it there are likely to come down onto her the issues of either life or death; and the worst of it is that, ten to one, she never once sees that it's in her power, maybe, to say whether it shall be life or death that comes. ”

“ From before the train started he begun stirring and whimpering—that way a baby does when it wants nothing in the world but a hand to be laid on it. Isn't it as if its mother's hand was a kind of healing that big folks forget about needing? By the time the train was out on the road in earnest, the little chap, he was in earnest, too. ”

“ I wonder if the death of any beauty or any life is as much Nature's will as we still think it is....
This is why I shrink from telling what next happened to Jeffro—what I knew must happen to him if he came here and lived the life of his kind—of my kind. Lived it, I mean, with his eyes open. There are plenty who live it and never know anything about it, after all. But Jeffro would know. ”

“ Are you the Christian woman, Mis' Sykes, to turn your nose up at them?"
"Don't throw my faith in my face," says she, irritable.
"Well," I says, "I won't twit on facts. But anybody'd think the Golden Rule's fitted neat onto some folks to deal with, and is left flap at loose ends for them that don't match our skins. Is that sense, or ain't it?"
"It ain't the skin," she says. "Don't keep harping on that. It's them. They're different by nature."
Then she says the great, grand motto of the little thin slice of the human race that's been changed into superiority.
"You can't change human nature!" ”

“ You and I. These are your tasks and mine and the tasks of those who have not our cleanliness nor our leisure, but who will help as fast as ever we learn how to share that help—as fast as ever we all learn how to work as one.... Oh, my friends, we must dream far. We must dream the farthest that folks can go. For life is something other than that which we believe it to be. ”

“ Mis' Sykes had a suggestion. She always does have a suggestion, being she loves to have folks disciple after her. "Why, ladies," she says, "there's some talking more military preparedness right off, I hear. That means for another war. Why not us start in and knit for it now?" And she beamed around triumphant.
"Well," says Mame Holcomb, reasonable, "if the men are going to prepare in any way, it does seem like women had ought to be getting ready too. Why not knit? And have a big box all setting ready, all knit up, to match the other preparednesses?" ”

“ In came the Hewitts, and land—in one glance I saw there was nothing about them that was like what we'd always imagined—nothing grand or sweeping or rustling or cold. I guess that kind of city folks has gone out of fashion, never to come back. The Hewitts didn't seem like city folks at all—they seemed just like folks. It made a real nice surprise. And we all got to be folks, short off. For when I ushered them into my parlor, there were all the wire dress-forms setting around with nothing whatever on. ”

“ It makes me feel happy and good and like two folks instead of one.
"Look here," I said, brisk, "this is where I get off. This is home. And I'm going to take this baby with me. You go on to your visiting place—so be you'll help me off," I says, "with my baby and my bundles that's for half of Friendship Village."
"Friendship Village!" he said over, as if he hadn't heard the man call. "Is this Friendship Village? Why, then this," he said, "is where I'm going too. This is where the Proudfits live, isn't it?" ”

“ I tried to ask them.
"That's it," says Mis' Toplady. "Everybody voted to have a public meeting to honor the soldiers—the colored soldier with the rest. But that's as far as it will go."
"But he don't want to be honored!" I cried. "He wants to be neighbored—the way anybody does when they're worth it."
"Mis' Sykes says," says Mis' Toplady, "that we mustn't forget what is fitting and what isn't."
And Mis' Holcomb added: "She carried it off grand. Everybody thinks just the way she does." ”

“ Calliope said wistfully; and since I was far too tall and madame not sufficiently "slendaire," Calliope cried:
"There's Hannah! She's downstairs helping, ain't she? Couldn't Hannah come upstairs a minute and put it on? We're most of a size!"
And indeed they were, as I had noted, cast in the same mold of proportion and prettiness.
So, with madame just leaving for the city, and I obliged to go down to the village, Calliope and Hannah Hager were left alone with the rose-pink silk gown, which fitted them both. ”

“ And then, all of a sudden, I remembered her little boy, and Jeffro's little boy. I remembered Joseph. Awful little he was, but with sturdy legs and arms, and the kind of a face that makes you wonder why all little folks don't look the same way. It seems the only way for them to look. ”

“ Nothing matters—except that even when we have made the struggle, then we're despised no less. We don't often talk to you about it—it's the surprise of this—you must forgive me. But I want you to know that from the time I began my school life, there have been many who despised, and a few who helped, but never until to-night have there been any of your people with the look and word of neighbor—never once in our lives until to-night. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All at once I got kind of mad at the two of them.
"And here for a little tinkering matter about screens for the parlor, you go and spoil all my fun by not speaking to each other!" I scolded, sharp.
It was that, I think, that turned the tide and made them laugh. They both did laugh, hearty—and they looked at each other and laughed—I noticed that. For two folks can not look at each other and laugh and stay mad same time. They can not do it. ”

“ How a man could fight with his arms part full of raspberry jam and hard cookies and remedies and apple butter, I'm sure I don't know. But the whole village tugged stuff there for days beforehand. Jeffro was our one hero. He was the only soldier Friendship Village had—except old Bud Babcock, with his brass buttons and his limp and his perfectly everlasting, always-coming-on and never-going-off reminiscences. And so, when Jeffro started off, the whole town turned out to watch him go; and when I say that Silas Sykes gave him a store-suit at cost, more no one could say about nothing. ”

“ I kind of felt what all of us was feeling, and what everybody was going to feel down there in the big tent, when they knew. But far, far more, I sensed the thing that Nick Nordman, walking there with us, with about a hundred and fifty boys all waiting to sit down side of him at his circus—the thing that Nick Nordman had found out.
"God bless you, Calliope," says he, when he got a chance.
"Oh!" I says. "He has. He has! He's made folks so awful nice—when they just let it show through!" ”

“ I saw the side faces of the Flats folks and the bunk car folks, while they hummed away, broken, at that tune that they knew about. Oh, if you want to know what to do next with your life, go somewhere and look at a foreigner in this country singing "America," when he doesn't know you're looking. I don't see how we rest till we get our land a little more like what he thinks it is. And while I was listening, it seemed as if Europe was there in the room. ”

“ We all began moving back to the village, before much of anybody knew it—the automobile with Jeffro in it, and Jeffro's wife, and Jeffro's little boy. And with the car went, not soldiers, not flags, not [Pg 291] the singing of any one nation's airs—but the children, with those symbols of the life that is living and building life—as fast as we'll let it build. ”

“ The Art and Loan Dress Exhibit recalls a story of my early association with Calliope Marsh in Friendship Village, when yet she was not well known to me—her humanity, her habit of self-giving, her joy in life other than her own.
Afterward I knew that I had never seen a woman more keenly and constantly a participant in the lives of others. ”

“ Life is something else than what we think it is. That is true. Life is something else than what we think it is. When we find it out, we shall stop this devil's madness."
Just then a little cry came from somewhere over back in the road.
"My papa! It is my papa!" it said. And there came running Joseph, that had heard his father's voice, and that we had forgot' all about. We let him through the crowd, and he climbed up in the car, and his father took him in his one arm. And there they sat, with the globe that Joseph carried, the world that he carried, in beside them. ”

“ We all came into the Market Square, in the afternoon sunshine, with our little still, peaceful street—laying and listening, and never knowing it was like heaven at all. Every soul in town was there, I don't know of one that didn't go. Even Luke Norris was there, his wind-pipe forgot. We didn't have much exercises. Just being there was exercise enough. ”

“ Railroad wrecks, volcanoes, diamonds, conventions and such never seemed real real to us in the village.
"It seems to be some kind of a once-in-two-years affair," Mis' Toplady went on, "and I read in the paper how it had a million members, and how they came 10,000 to a time to their meetings. Well, now," she ends up, serene, "I've rose to propose that, bein' it's so near, Sodality send a delegate up there next week to get us some points."
"What points do we need, I should like to know," says Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestic. "Ain't we abreast of whatever there is to be abreast of?" ”

“ When Mis' Toplady don't know quite what to do with a minute, she always brings her hands together in a sort of spontaneous-sounding clap, and kind of bustles her shoulders. She done that now.
"I motion I'll take charge of the refreshments," she says. "Who'll volunteer? I'm crazy to see what-all we've brought."
Everybody laughed, and rustled, easy. And I slipped over to the daughter, standing by herself by the fire-place.
"You take, don't you?" I ask' her.
"'Take?'" she says, puzzled.
"Music, I mean," I told her. (We always mean music when we say "take" in Friendship Village.) ”

“ All of a sudden Ellen sat up straight in her chair.
"See," she says, "it's only eight o'clock. Why can't the four of us go to the theater?"
The two women sort of gasped, in two hitches.
"Us?" they says.
Ellen jumped up. "Quick, Calliope," she says. "Get your things on. Delia can stay with the baby. I'll telephone for a taxi. We can decide what to see on the way down. You'll go, won't you?" she asks 'em.
"Go!" says they, in one breath. "Oh—yes, sir!"
In no time, or thereabouts, we found ourselves down-stairs packing into the taxicab. ”

“ Mis' Sykes kind of stopped winking and breathing.
"I could make them do it, I bet you," she says, proud.
"Of course you could," I egged her on. "You could just take for granted everybody meant to be decent, and carry it off, matter-of-fact."
She stood up and walked around the room, her curl-papers setting strange on her proud ways.
"Don't figger on it, Mis' Sykes," I says. "Just think how much easier it is to be leading folks into something they ain't used to than to have them all laughing at you behind your back for getting come up with." ”

“ You know the kind of evening?
We straggled up to the depot, not in regular marching order at all, but just bunched, friendly. Mis' Sykes was walking at the head of her D. A. R. detachment, and she had sewed red and blue to her white duck skirt, and she had a red and blue flower in her hat, and her waist was just redded and blued, from shoulder to shoulder, with badges and bows. Mis' Sykes was awful patriotic as to colors, but I didn't blame her. She'd worn mourning so much, her only chance to wear the becoming shades at all was by putting on her country's colors. ”

“ I cut it out of the paper afterwards—this is it, word for word:
"You who believe yourselves to be interested in social work, ask yourselves what it is that you are interested in really. I will tell you. Well, whether you know it or not, fundamentally what you care about is PEOPLE. Let us say it in a better way. It is FOLKS."
I never took my eyes off her face after that. For "folks" is a word I know. Better than any other word in the language, I know that word "folks." ”

“ We've got so used to thinking of religion—and one or two brands of patriotism—as the only holy things there are. I didn't know but when I mentioned having Science and Art and Friendship and Beauty and Plenty and Understanding and Peace at my Sunday evening service, they might think I was over-stepping some. ”

“ They looked so energetic that finally Mis' Toplady pulled out the wardrobe a little mite and peeked behind it.
"I thought mebbe it'd got itself stuck in here," she explains, bringing her head back with a great streak of dust on her cheek—and I didn't take it as any reflection whatever on my housekeeping. I've always believed that there's some furniture that the dust just rises out of, in the night, like cream—and of those the backs of wardrobes are chief. ”