Neighborhood Stories

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?

I was to engage Lavvy Whitmore to lead our singing for the four Sundays, and I went over to see her the next afternoon. She was cleaning the lamps when I stepped up to the kitchen door, so I went right in and sat down at the end of the table, and helped her with the chimneys. She was a pretty little thing – little, but with black eyes that mentioned her thoughts before ever any of the rest of her agreed to announce ’em. And plenty of thoughts, too, Lavvy had. She wasn’t one of the girls that is turned out by the thousands, that wouldn’t recognize their own minds if they was to meet ’em unbeknownst; but one that her mind was cut out, careful, by a pattern part of her own selecting, and not a pattern just laid on to it, haphazard, by the folks that she lived neighbor to, and went with when she went.

“Lavvy,” I says, “we want to speak for you to sing to our church the four Sundays in September, when we have special services to get everybody to go, so’s everybody’ll see everybody else going, and go too. Can we? Will you?”

“I’ve been spoke for,” says she, “by the White Frame church for the four September Sundays. For the same reason.”

“Go on!” I says. “Do you mean to tell me that they’re going to have a competition revival?”

“Well,” she says, “they’re going to make an extra effort to get folks out for the four Sundays.”

“Copied it off’n us,” I says thoughtful. “Well, I guess the four Sundays can’t be regularly copyrighted by us, can they? But I thought their minister didn’t like revivals?” I says.

“Oh, he don’t – Elbert Kinsman don’t,” says Lavvy. “It’s the rest of ’em wants it. He told me he thought it was a mistake.”

“That young Elbert Kinsman,” I says, “he loves folks. I saw it in his face long ago.”

Lavvy went on trimming wicks.

“And then the Red Brick church,” says she, “they’ve spoke for me to sing for them for the four Sundays in September too.”

“Land of life,” I says, “they haven’t! What on earth have they done that for?”

“Oh,” says Lavvy, “to get everybody to go, so’s everybody’ll see everybody else going, and – ”

“Don’t, Lavvy,” I says. “That makes me feel kind of sick.”

“So it done to me,” she says. “And I’ll tell you the same as I told them: No, I won’t sing those four Sundays. I ain’t going to be here. I don’t know yet where I’m going, but I’ll go off somewheres – where things are better – if I have to go blackberrying in Shepherd’s Grove.”

“My land,” I says, “I’ve a great good notion to get my pail and go along with you.”

We talked about it quite a while that afternoon, Lavvy and me. And though all along I’d been feeling sort of sore and sick over the whole idea – and I might have known that I was, by the chip-shouldered way I had talked to our minister – still, it wasn’t till there by the lamps that I come to a realization of myself, and of some other things just as foolish, and that I faced around and begun to ask myself, plain, what in the world was what.

For it was as true as possible: As soon as it got out around that our church was laying plans for a revival – not an evangelist revival, but a home-made one – it had happened just as might have been expected. The other two churches was afraid we’d get their folks away from them, and they says they’d make an extra effort to get folks out, as well. They fell into the same hope – to “fill up” the churches, and see if we couldn’t get folks started attending regular. Somebody suggested having a month’s union services in each of the three churches, but they voted that three months of this would get monotonous, while the novelty of the other way would “get folks out.”

No sooner had we all settled on that, then we slipped, by the gradualest degrees, into the next step, that was as inevitable as two coming after one. We begun being secret about what we meant to have, not telling what the order of exercises was going to be, or what special music we was getting up. And then come along the next thing, as regular as three coming after two – we begun sort of running one another to see who could get the most folks. At first we sent out printed invitations addressed to likely spots; then we took to calling to houses by committees, and delivering invitations in person. Now and then rival visiting committees would accidentally meet to the same house and each try to out-set the other. And from this, one or two things developed, as things will, that made a little uppishness here and there. For out of certain situations, uppishness does seem to arise, same as cream out of milk, or dust out of furniture.

One afternoon I looked out my window, and I see the three Sunday school superintendents come marching up my brick walk – ain’t it funny how, when men goes out with a proposition for raising pew-rent, or buying a new furnace for the manse, or helping along the town, they always go two or three strong? If you notice, they do.

“Come right in, gentlemen,” I says. “If it’s money, I can’t give you a cent. If it’s work, I’m drove to death as it is. But if it’s advice, I do enjoy myself giving that.”

It was our own superintendent that spoke, as being the least foreign to me, I s’pose, – though it happened that I was better acquainted with both the other two.

“It’s neither, Miss Marsh,” he says, “it’s some ideas we want off’n you. We’ve got,” says he, “a plan.”

Then he unrolled it, assisted by the other two.

“We thought,” he says, “that in all this added interest in church attendance which we are hoping to stimulate, the three churches had ought to pull together a little.”

At that my heart jumped up. It was what I had been longing for, and grieving because it didn’t come true.

“We thought we’d ought to have a little more community effort,” says the White Frame superintendent, clearing his throat. I guess he knew how that word “community” always gets me. I’d rather read that one word than half the whole books on the market.

“Oh, yes,” I says. “Yes! I think so too.”

“We thought we’d ought to make the experience one of particular blessing and fellowship,” says the Red Brick superintendent, fairly beaming.

And me, the simple soul, I beamed back.

“Count on me,” says I, fervent, “to do anything in the world to help on a thing like that!”

“We were sure of it,” said our superintendent, “and that is why we have come to you. Now,” says he, “the idea is this: We thought we’d each take a color – give each church a color, you know.”

“A color?” says I.

“Exactly,” says he. “The White Frames white. The Red Bricks red. And us blue. Then on each of the four Sundays the number present in the three churches will be kept track of and totaled at the end of the month. And, at the end of the month, the church having had the largest attendance for the whole time shall be given a banquet by the other two. What do you say to that?”

What did I say to that? Somehow I got them out of the house, telling them I’d send them word later. When I feel as deep as I did then, I know I can’t do justice, by just thoughts or just words, to what I mean inside. So I let the men go off the best I could. And then I went back into my sitting room, with the August sun pouring in all acrost the air like some kind of glory that we didn’t understand; and I set down in it, and thought. And the thing that come to me was them early days, them first days when the first Christians were trying to plan ways that they could meet, and hoping and longing to be together, and finding caves and wild places where they could gather in safety and talk about their wonderful new knowledge of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and the divine experience of the spirit, here and after. And then I thought of this red, white and blue denominational banquet. Oh, what a travesty it was even on the union that the three colors stand for. And I thought of our talk about “getting people out,” and “filling up the churches,” and I thought of the one hundred and fourteen or more social calls that we require a month from our pastors. And I says to myself:

“Oh, Calliope Marsh, has it come to this —has it? Is it like this only in Friendship Village? Or is it like this out in the world too? And, either way, what are we going to do about it?”

There was one thing I could do about it. I went to see our minister and his wife, and I told ’em firm that I couldn’t have anything more to do about the extra September services, and that they would have to get somebody else to play the organ for all four Sundays. They was both grieved – and I hated to hurt them. That’s the worst about being true to something you believe – it so often hurts somebody else. But there wasn’t any other way to do.