Neighborhood Stories

I done so, winding up about the meeting to be held the coming Friday in Post-Office Hall, at which Silas was to report on the progress of the club, after the business session. And she see it like I see it: That a club laid on to them sixty-one people had got to be managed awful wise – or what was to result would be considerable more like the stuff put into milk to preserve it than like the good, rich, thick cream that milk knows how to give, so be you treat it right.

Abigail said she’d help – she’s one of them new women – oh, I ain’t afraid of the word – she’s one of them new women that catches fire at a big thing to be done in the world just as sure as another kind of woman flares up when her poor little pride is hurt. I’ve seen ’em both in action, and so have you. And we made out a list – in between doughnuts – of them sixty-one women and girls and children that was working in Friendship Village, and we divided up the list according to which of us was best friends with which of ’em – you know that’s a sort of thing you can’t leave out in the sort of commercial enterprise we was embarking on – and we agreed to start out separate, right after supper, and see what turned out to be what.

I went first to see Mary Beach, little David Beach’s sister. They lived about half a mile from the village on a little triangle of land that had been sold off from both sides and left because it was boggy. They had a little drab house, with thick lips. David’s mother set outside the door with a big clothes-basketful of leggings beside her. She was a strong, straight creature with a mass of gray hair, and a way of putting her hands on her knees when she talked, and eyes that said: “I know and I think,” and not “I’m sure I can’t tell,” like so many eyes are built to represent. Mary that I’d come to see might have been a person in a portrait – she was that kind of girl. And little David was there, laying sprawled out on the floor taking a clock to pieces and putting the items in a pie-tin.

“You won’t care,” says Mis’ Beach, “if I keep on with the leggings?”

“Leggings?” says I.

She nodded to the basket. “It’s bad pairs,” she said. “They leave me catch up the dropped stitches.”

“How much do they give you?” says I, brutal. If it had been Silas Sykes I’d never have dreamt of asking him how much anybody give him for anything. But – well, sometimes we hound folks and hang folks and ask folks questions, merely because they’re poor.

“Six cents a dozen,” she says.

I remember they had a fly-paper on the window sill, and the caught flies and the uncaught ones whirred and buzzed. I can see the room: The floor that sagged, the walls that cracked, the hot, nameless smell of it. And in it a woman with the strength and the figure of a race that hasn’t got here yet, and three children – one of them beautiful, and David, taking a clock to pieces and putting it together again, without ever having been taught. You know all about it – and so did I. And while I set there talking with her, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else but that hole of a home, and the three splendid beings chained there, like folks in a bad dream. Someway I never get used to it, and I know I never shall. It makes me feel as if I was looking on the inside of a table spoon and seeing things twisted, and saying: “Already such things can’t be. Already they sound old and false – like thumbscrews!”

And the worst of it was, David’s mother was so used to it. She was so bitter used to it. And oh – don’t things turn round in the world? A few years before if somebody like me had gone to see her, I’d of been telling her to be resigned, and to make the best of her lot, and trying to give her to understand that the Lord had meant it personal. And instead, when she said she was doing nice, I longed to say to her:

“No, no, Mis’ Beach! Don’t you make that mistake. You ain’t doing nice. As long as you think you are, this world is being held back. It’s you that’s got to help folks to know that you aren’t doing nice. And to make folks wonder why.”

But I didn’t say it to her. I s’pose I haven’t got that far – yet.

She said she’d like to come to the club that Silas proposed, and Mary, she said she’d come. They didn’t question much about it – they merely accepted it and said they’d come. And I went out into the April after-supper light, with a bird or two twittering sleepy, and an orange and lemon and water-melon sunset doing its best to attract my attention, and I says out loud to April in general:

“A club. A club. So we’re going to help that house with a club.”

Then I stopped to Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house. Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house faces the railroad tracks, and I never went by there without seeing her milk bottles all set out on her porch, indelicate, like some of the kitchen lining showing. Bettie Forkaw and Libbie Collins and Rose Miller and Lizzie Lane, pickle factory girls, lived there. They were all home, out on the smoky porch, among the milk bottles, laughing and talking and having a grand time. They had sleeves above their elbows and waists turned in at the throat with ruffles of cheap lace, and hair braided in bunches over their ears and dragged low on their foreheads, and they had long, shiney beads round their necks, and square, shiney buckles on their low shoes. Betty was pretty and laughed loud and had uncovered-looking eyes. Libbie was big and strong and still. Rose was thin, and she had less blood and more bones than anybody I ever see. And Lizzie – Lizzie might have been a freshman in any college you might name. She’d have done just as good work in figures as she did in pickles – only cucumbers come her way and class-rooms didn’t.

“Hello, girls,” I says, “how are you to-night? Do you want to be a club?”

“To do what?” says they.

“Have a good time,” says I. “Have music – eat a little something – dance – read a little, maybe. And ask your friends there. A club, you know.”

After we’d talked it over, all four of ’em said yes, they wished they had some place to go evenings and wouldn’t it be fine to have some place give to ’em where they could go. I didn’t discuss it over with ’em at all – but I done the same thing I’d done before, and that I cannot believe anybody has the right to ask, no matter how rich the questioner or how poor the questionee.

“Girls,” I says, “you all work for Silas Sykes, don’t you? How much do you get a week?”

They told me ready enough: Five and Six Dollars apiece, it was.

“Gracious,” I says, “how can you use up so much?” And they laughed and thought it was a joke. And I went along to the next place – and my thoughts come slowly gathering in from the edges of my head and formed here and there in kind of clots, that got acted on by things I begun to see was happening in my town, just as casual as meat bills and grocery bills – just as casual as school bells and church bells.

For the next two days I went to see them on my list. And then nights I’d go back and sit on my porch and look over to Red Barns that was posting itself as a nice, hustling, up-to-date little town, with plenty of business opportunities. And then I’d look up and down Friendship Village that was getting ready for its Business meeting in Post-Office Hall on Friday night, and trying its best to keep up with its “business reputation.” And then I’d go on to some more homes of the workers that was keeping up their share in the commercial life of Friendship Village. And then my thoughts would bring up at Silas’s club house, with the necessary old furniture and magazines and games laid out somewheres, tasty. And the little clots of thought in my brain somehow stuck there. And I couldn’t think through them, on to what was what.

Then something happened that put a little window in the side of what was the matter with Silas’s plan. And I begun to see light.

The second night I was sitting on my porch when I heard my back gate slam. My back gate has a chain for a spring, weighted with a pail of stones, and when it slams the earth trembles, and I have time to get my hands out of the suds or dough or whatever; and it’s real handy and practical. 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.”

“Did you now?” I says. And it was true. He had. It did. That little alarm clock was ticking away like a jeweller-done job… Yes, Silas’s pickle factory did seem a queer place for us to have put him.

When the little lad had gone off through the dusk, with his clock under his arm, I looked down the street after him. And I thought of this skill of his. And then I thought of the $2.50 a week Silas was giving him for shelling corn. And then I thought of this club that was to keep him and the rest of ’em contented. And I begun to see, dim, just the particular kinds of fools we was making of ourselves.

There was yet one thing more happened that wasn’t so much a window as a door. The next night was to be the Business Men’s meeting, and just before supper I went to pay my last visit on my list. It was out to the County House to see the superintendent’s niece that had just resigned from Eppleby’s store, and that they were afraid was going to Red Barns to work.

The County House. Ain’t that a magnificent name? Don’t we love to drape over our bones and our corpses some flying banner of a word like sarcophagus? The County House sets on a hill. A hill is a grand place for a County House. “Look at me,” the County House can say, “I’m what a beneficent and merciful people can do for its unfit.” And I never go by one that I don’t want to shout back at it: “Yes. Look at you. You’re our biggest confession of our biggest sham. What right have we, in Nineteen Hundred Anything, to have any unfit left?”

Right in front of the County House is a cannon. I never figured out the fitness of having a cannon there – in fact, I never can figure out the fitness of having a cannon anywhere. But one thing I’ve always noticed: When public buildings and such do have cannon out in front of them, they’re always pointing away from the house. Never toward the house. Always going to shoot somebody else. That don’t seem to me etiquette. If we must keep cannon for ornament, aren’t we almost civilized enough to turn ’em around?

Seems the superintendent’s niece wasn’t going to Red Barns at all – she’d merely resigned to be married and had gone to town to buy things – a part of being married which competes with the ceremony, neck and neck, for importance. In the passageway, the matron called me in the office. She was a tall, thick woman with a way of putting her hand on your back to marshal you, as mothers do little children in getting them down an aisle. Yes, she was a marshaling woman.

“Look here,” says the matron, proud.

They’d put a glass case up in the office and it was all hung with work – crocheted things, knit and embroidered things, fringed things. “Did by the inmates,” says she, proud. That word “inmates” is to the word “people” what the word “support” is to the word “share.” It’s a word we could spare.

I looked at the things in the case – hours and hours and hours the fingers of the women upstairs had worked on ’em – intricate counting, difficult stitches, pretty patterns. And each of them was marked with a price tag. The County House inmates had got ’em hung out there in the hope of earning a little money. One was a bed-spread – a whole crocheted bed-spread. And one – one was a dress crocheted from collar to hem, and hung on with all sorts of crazy crocheted ends and tassels so – I knew – to make the job last a little longer. And when I saw that, I grabbed the tall, thick matron by the arm and I shook her a little.

“What was we doing,” I says, “that these folks wasn’t taught to do some kind of work so’s they could have kept out of the poor house?”

She looked at me odd and cool.

“Why,” she said, “my dear Miss Marsh, it’s being in here that gives ’em the leisure to make the things at all!”

What was the use of talking to her? And besides being unreasonable, she was one of them that you’re awful put to it to keep from being able not to right down dislike. And I went along the passage thinking: “She acts like the way things are is the way things ought to be. But it always seems to me that the way things ought to be is the best way things could be. For the earth ain’t so full of the fulness thereof but that we could all do something to make it a little more so.”

And then the thing happened that opened the door to all I’d been thinking about, and let me slip through inside.

Being I was there, I dropped in a minute to see old Grandma Stuart. She was one of the eighty “inmates.” Up in the ward where she was sitting, there were twenty beds. And between each two beds was a shelf and a washbasin, and over it a hook. And old Grandma Stuart sat there by her bed and her shelf and her hook. She was old and white, and she had fine wrinkles, like a dead flower. She drew me down to her, with her cold hands.

“Miss Marsh,” she said, “I got two-three things.”

“Yes,” I says, “well, that’s nice,” I says. And wondered if that was the right thing to say to her.

“But I ain’t got any box,” she says. “They keep the things and bring ’em to us clean every time. And I ain’t got any box.”

“That’s so, you ain’t,” says I, looking at her shelf.

“I put my things in my dress,” she says, “but they always fall out. And I’ve got to stop to pick ’em up. And she don’t like it.”

No. The matron wouldn’t like it. I knew that. She was one of them that the thing was the thing even if it was something else.

“And so I thought,” says Grandma Stuart, “that if I had a pocket, I could put my things in that. I thought they wouldn’t fall out if I had a pocket. She says she can’t be making pockets for every one. But I keep thinking if I had a pocket… It’s these things I’ve got,” she says.

She took from her dress three things: A man’s knife, a child’s ring, and a door-key.

“It was the extry key to my house,” she said. “I – brought it along. And I thought if I had a pocket…”