I dunno what it was that minute done to us all. I’ve often wondered since, what it was. But somehow everybody kind of felt that they all knew something each other knew, only they couldn’t rightly name it. Ab and Joe Betts, Mame Holcomb and Eppleby, Gertie and Mis’ Toplady and me—we all felt it. Everybody did, unless it was Silas and Mis’ Sykes. Silas didn’t sense nothing much but that he hoped the meeting was going to run smooth, and Mis’ Sykes—well, right in the middle of that glowing minute I see her catch sight of Mame Holcomb’s new red waist and she set there thinking of nothing but waist either with eyes or with mind.
But the rest of us was sharing a big minute. And I liked us all to be feeling that way—I ain’t never liked anything better, without it’s the Christmas feeling or the Thanksgiving feeling. And this feeling was sort of like all two. And I betted if only we could make it last—Absalom wouldn’t be getting done out of his arm’s money-value by Silas, nor the Bettses out of their decent roof by Timothy, nor they wouldn’t be no club formed to dole out charity stuff, but we would all know a better way. And things would be different. Different.
I leaned clear past three chairs and nudged Mis’ Toplady. She looked round, and I see she was just wiping her eyes on her apron-string—Mis’ Toplady never can find her handkerchief when she most wants to cry. And I never said a word—I didn’t need to—but we nodded and we both knew what we both knew: that there was a bigger thing in the room that minute than ever Silas knew or guessed when he planned out his plan. And it was what Mis’ Toplady had meant when she told him there was something “greater than these”—as most folks mean ’em.
I didn’t lose the feeling through the piece by the band that come next, nor through the selection by Silas’s niece. The music really made the feeling more so—the music, and our all setting there hearing it together, and everybody in the room being givers, and nobody givees. But when the music stopped, and while I was still feeling all glorified up, what did Mis’ Sykes do but break in, something like throwing a stone through a window.
“I should think we might as well get the club name settled to-night,” she says with her little formal pucker. “Ain’t the Charity Club that we spoke of real nice and dignified for our title?”
It was Mis’ Toplady that exploded. It just bare happened it wasn’t me, but it turned out to be her.
“Land, land,” she says, “no! Not one person in fifteen hundred knows what charity means anyhow, and everybody’d get the wrong idee. Let’s call it just its plain natural name: The Friendship Village Club. Or, The Whole World Club. Or I dunno but The Universe Club!”
I knew I wouldn’t have the sense to keep still right through things. I never do have.
“No, sir!” I says out, “oh, no sir! Universe Club ain’t big enough. For if they is any other universe anywhere maybe that might feel left out.”
Long before we had settled on any one name, I remember Mis’ Toplady come out from behind the refreshments screen and says: “Mr. President, the coffee and sandwiches has come to a boil. Can’t you peter off the meeting and adjourn it for one week?”