Neighborhood Stories

“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?”