IN ROCHELLE
Twenty-four hours in a town like this and we feel as though we knew it
and the people intimately. In many ways it suggests a toy-land town. Its
streets are so straight and evenly laid, its houses so white and shining,
its gardens so green, its shops so freshly painted, its displays in the
windows so new, and its people so friendly.
“Strangers in town!” they seem to say to themselves as they look at us,
but instead of looking at us in a “wait until we know who you are before
we take any notice of you,” they seem quite ready to smile and begin a
conversation.
Our most particular friend, as well as our oldest acquaintance, is the
fire chief. E. M. has, of course, one or two other particular friends
in the garage. If he can only find a mechanic or two to talk to, he is
perfectly happy. Celia’s and my chief diversion has been going to the
moving picture theaters, which is evidently the fashionable thing to do
here. In the evening we saw three real theater parties. One of them was
a very important affair; they met in the lobby and went down the aisle
two by two; the ladies all had many diamonds, brand-new white-kid gloves
quite tight, picture hats, corsage bouquets and boxes of candy.
Celia and I had neither gloves nor hats on, and when we ran into the
theater parties, we felt almost like urchins that had been caught
wandering into the foyer of the Metropolitan Opera House. Like our hatred
of caraway seeds, our love of hatlessness must be a family failing.
In Chicago two different papers took the trouble to mention E. M.’s
carelessness in the matter of head-covering. “Scorning to wear a hat even
on occasions when it is generally considered to be convenable,” said one.
The other described him as “such a disciple of fresh air that he was seen
driving a big racing machine on Michigan Avenue without a hat!” Yet isn’t
it a popular supposition that the West is freer from conventions than the
East?
The rain has finally stopped and this morning the sun is trying hard to
shine. To do much good it will have to shine steadily for about three
days. We walked to the end of the brick paving down one of the streets a
little while ago and looked at the black wet Lincoln Highway leading to
Sterling.
On our way back we met our friend the fire chief.
“Been to look at the mud?” asked he, cheerfully. “It isn’t a bit bad now.
You ought to see it when it’s muddy! Why, it took me eight hours to go
twenty-one miles! I did have to get a team of horses to pull me out of
one bog, but otherwise I got through all right.”
“Didn’t you strain your engine?” I asked him. “Oh, yes,” he said
cheerfully; “I guess I did, but I couldn’t help that.”
“Well, maybe you couldn’t,” I agreed, then added with confidential
finality, “but I tell you what we’re going to do! We’re going to put ours
on a nice, dry, comfortable freight car tomorrow morning and ship it past
the mud district—which is probably the width of the continent.”
His warmth of manner fell suddenly to zero. I feared we had in some way
offended him because we thought his state muddy. “Of course it is a
lovely country to grow things in,” I added quickly, “but you see we want
particularly to get to San Francisco, and the surest way is by freight.”
But we could not put the broken conversation together again. In fact,
our friend the fire chief doesn’t smile any more. Our other friends, the
garage men, also look at us askance—in fact in some way we seem to have
lost our popularity.