I remember when the train left that morning, how I looked back on the village, sitting there in its big arm chair of hills, with green cushions of woods dropped around, and wreaths of smoke curling up from contented chimneys. And over on the South slope our big new brick county house, with thick lips and lots of arched eye-brows, the house that us ladies was getting seats to put in the yard of.
"Say what who will," thinks I, "I love that little town. And I guess it's just about as good as any of us could expect."
I got to the City just before the Convention's evening meeting. I brushed my hair up, and put on my cameo pin, and hurried right over to the hall. And when I showed them my card, where do you guess they took me? Up to one of the rows on the stage. Me, that had never faced an audience except with my back to them—as organist in our church. (That sounds so grand that I'd ought to explain that I can't play anything except what's wrote natural. So I'm just organist to morning service, when I can pick out my own hymns, and not for prayer meeting when anybody is likely to pipe up and give out a song just black with sharps and flats.) There were a hundred or more on the stage, and there were flowers and palms and lights and colors. I sat there looking at the pattern of the boards of the stage, and just about half sensing what was going on at first. Then I got my eyes up a little ways to some pots of blue hydrangeas on the edge of the stage. I had a blue hydrangea in my yard home, so they kind of gave me courage. Then my eye slipped over the foot-lights, to the first rows, to the back rows, to the boxes, to the galleries—over the length and breadth of that world of folks—thousands of them—as many as five times them in my whole village. And they were gathered in a room the size and the shape and—almost the height of a village green.
The woman that was going to talk that night I'd never even heard of. She was a woman that you wouldn't think of just as a woman or a wife or a mother or a teacher same as some. No, you thought of her first of all as folks. And she had eyes like the living room, with all the curtains up. She'd been talking a little bit before I could get my mind off the folks and on to her. But all of a sudden something she was saying rang out just like she had turned and said it to me. 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."
She said: "Well, let us see what, in clubs, our social work has been: At first, Clean-up days, Planting, Children's Gardens, School Gardens, Bill Boards, the Smoke Nuisance. That is fine, all of it. These are what we must do to make our towns fit to live in.
"Then more and more came the need to get nearer to folks—and yet nearer. And then what did we have? Fly campaigns, Garbage Disposal, Milk and Food Inspection, Playgrounds, Vocational Guidance, Civic and Moral training in the schools, Sex Hygiene, Municipal Recreation, Housing. All this has brought us closer and closer to folks—not only to their needs but to what they have to give. That is fine—all of it. That is what we have to do.
"But who is it that has been doing it? Those of us to whom life has been a little kind. Those of us on whom the anguish and the toil of life do not fall the most heavily. We are free to do these things. Clean, cleanly clothed, having won—or been given—a little leisure, we are free to meet together and to turn our thought to the appearance of our cities—and to the other things. That is a great step. We have come very far, my friends.
"But is it far enough?