A LITTLE AMERICAN TOWN
Factoryville, as we found this morning, was one of these very small
places which, to one weary of metropolitan life, occasionally prove
entertaining through an extreme simplicity and a sense of rest and
peace. It was, as I saw sitting in my dressing gown in our convenient
wooden swing, a mere collection of white cottages with large lawns or
country yard spaces and flowers in profusion and a few stores. Dr. A. B.
Fitch, Druggist (I could see this sign on the window before which he
stood), was over the way sweeping off the sidewalk in front of his
store. I knew it was Dr. A. B. Fitch by his solemn proprietary air, his
alpaca coat, his serious growth of thick grey whiskers. He was hatless
and serene. I could almost hear him saying: “Now, Annie, you tell your
mother that this medicine is to be taken one teaspoonful every three
hours, do you hear?”
Farther down the street H. B. Wendel, hardware dealer, was setting out a
small red and green lawnmower and some zinc cans capable of holding
anything from rain water to garbage. This was his inducement to people
to come and buy. Although it was still very early, citizens were making
their way down the street, a working man or two, going to some distant
factory not in Factoryville, a woman in a gingham poke bonnet standing
at a corner of her small white home examining her flowers, a small
barefooted boy kicking the damp dust of the road with his toes. It
reminded me of the time when, as a youth in a similar town, I used to
get up early and see my mother browsing over early, dew-laden blossoms.
I was for staying in Factoryville for some time.
But Franklin, energetic soul, would have none of it. He had lived in a
small town or on a farm for the greater part of his life and, unlike me,
had never really deserted the country. Inside the room, on the balcony
of which I was already swinging and idly musing, he was industriously
shaving—a task I was reserving for some city barber. Presently he came
out and sat down.
“Isn’t it wonderful—the country!” I said. “This town! See old Dr. Fitch
over there, and that grocery man putting out his goods.”
“Yes!” replied Franklin. “Carmel is very much like this. There’s no
particular life there. A little small-town trading. Of course,
Indianapolis has come so near now that they can all go down there by
trolley, and that makes a difference.”
Forthwith he launched into amusing tales of Carmelite character—bits too
idle or too profane to be narrated here. One only I remember—that of
some yokels who were compelled to find a new hangout because the old
building they frequented was torn down. When Franklin encountered them
in the new place he said quite innocently: “This place hasn’t as much
atmosphere as the old one.” “Oh, yes, it has,” rejoined the rural. “When
you open the back windows.”
Speed was shaving too by now, inside, and, hearing me sing the delights
of rural life (windows and doors were open), he put in:
“Yes, that’s all well enough, but after you’d lived here awhile you
mightn’t like it so much. Gee! people in the country aren’t any
different from people anywhere else.”
Speed had a peculiarly pained and even frightened look on his face at
times, like a cloud passing over a landscape or something that made me
want to put my hand on his shoulder and say, “There, there.” I wondered
sometimes whether he had often been hungry or thrown out of a job or put
upon in some unkind way. He could seem momentarily so pathetic.
“I know, I know,” I said gaily, “but there are the cows and the trees
and the little flower gardens and the farmers mowing hay and——”
“Huh!” was all he deigned to reply, as he shaved. Franklin, in his large
tolerance of vagaries and mush, did not condescend to comment. I did not
even win a smile. He was looking at the drugstore and the hardware store
and an old man in a shapeless, baggy suit hobbling along on a cane.
“I like the country myself,” he said finally, “except I wouldn’t want to
have to farm for a living.”
I could not help thinking of all the days we (I am referring to a part
of our family) had lived in these small towns and how as a boy I used to
wish and wish for so many things. The long trains going through! The
people who went to Chicago, or Evansville, or Terre Haute, or
Indianapolis! A place like Brazil, Indiana, a mere shabby coal town of
three or four thousand population, seemed something wonderful. All the
world was outside and I, sitting on our porch—front or back—or on the
grass or under a tree, all alone, used to wonder and wonder. When would
I go out into the world? Where would I go? What would I do? What see?
And then sometimes the thought of my father and mother not being near
any more—my mother being dead, perhaps—and my sisters and brothers
scattered far and wide, and—I confess a little sadly even now—a lump
would swell in my throat and I would be ready to cry.
A sentimentalist?
Indeed!
In a little while we were called to breakfast in a lovely, homely
diningroom such as country hotels sometimes boast—a diningroom of an
indescribable artlessness and crudity. It was so haphazard, so slung
together of old yellow factory made furniture, chromos, lithographs,
flychasers, five jar castors, ironstone “china,” and heaven only knows
what else, that it was delightful. It was clean, yes; and sweet
withal—very—just like so many of our honest, frank, kindly psalm singing
Methodists and Baptists are. The father and mother were eating their
breakfast here, at one table. The little fair haired hired girl—with no
more qualification as a waitress than a Thibetan Llama—was waiting on
table. The traveling men, one or two of them at every breakfast no
doubt, were eating their fried ham and eggs or their fried steak, and
their fried potatoes, and drinking unbelievable coffee or tea.
Dear, crude, asinine, illusioned Americans! How I love them! And the
great fields from the Atlantic to the Pacific holding them all, and
their dreams! How they rise, how they hurry, how they run under the sun!
Here they are building a viaduct, there a great road, yonder plowing
fields or sowing grain, their faces lit with eternal, futile hope of
happiness. You can see them religiously tending store, religiously
running a small-town country hotel, religiously mowing the grass,
religiously driving shrewd bargains or thinking that much praying will
carry them to heaven—the dear things!—and then among them are the bad
men, the loafers, the people who chew tobacco and swear and go to the
cities Saturday nights and “cut up” and don’t save their money!
Dear, dear, darling Yankee land—"my country tis"—when I think of you and
all your ills and all your dreams and all your courage and your faith—I
could cry over you, wringing my hands.
But you, you great men of brains—you plotters of treason, of taxes which
are not honest, of burdens too heavy to be borne, beware! These be
simple souls, my countrymen singing simple songs in childish ignorance
and peace, dreaming sweet dreams of life and love and hope. Don’t awake
them! Let them not once suspect, let them not faintly glimpse the great
tricks and subterfuges by which they are led and harlequined and
cheated; let them not know that their faith is nothing, their hope
nothing, their love nothing—or you may see the bonfires of wrath
alight—in the “evening dews and damp,” the camps of the hungry—the
lifting aloft of the fatal stripes—red for blood and white for spirit
and blue for dreams of man; the white drawn faces of earnest seeking
souls carrying the symbols of their desire, the guns and mortars and
shells of their dreams!
Remember Valley Forge! Remember Germantown; remember the Wilderness;
remember Lookout Mountain! These will not be disappointed. Their faith
is too deep—their hope too high. They will burn and slay, but the fires
of their dreams will bring other dreams to make this old illusion seem
true.
It can hardly be said that America has developed a culinary art, because
so many phases of our cooking are not, as yet, common to all parts of
the country. In the southeast south you have fried chicken and gravy,
cornpone, corn pudding, biscuit, and Virginia ham, southern style; in
the southwest south you have broilers, chicken tamales, chile con carne,
and all the nuances acquired from a proximity to Mexico. In New England
one encounters the baked bean, the _cold_ biscuit, pie for breakfast,
and codfish cakes. In the great hotels and best restaurants of the large
cities, especially in the east, the French cuisine dominates. In the
smaller cities of the east and west, where no French chef would deign to
waste his days, German, Italian and Greek—to say nothing of Jewish—and
purely American restaurants (the dairy kitchen, for example) now contest
with each other for patronage. We have never developed a single,
dominating system of our own. The American “grill” or its companion in
dullness, the American “rathskeller,” boast a mixture of everything and
are not really anything. In all cities large and small may be found
these horrible concoctions which in their superficial treatment are
supposed to be Flemish or Elizabethan or old German combined with the
worse imaginings of the socalled mission school of furniture. Here
German pancakes, knackwurst and cheesecake come cheek by jowl with
American biscuit, English muffins, French rolls, Hungarian goulash,
chicken à la Maryland, steaks, chops, and ham and eggs. It’s
serviceable, and yet it’s offensive. The atmosphere is deadly—the idea
atrocious. By comparison with a French inn or a German family restaurant
such as one finds in Frankfort or Berlin, or even an English chophouse,
it is unbelievably bad. Yet it seems to suit the present day spirit of
America.
All restaurant forms are being tried out—French, Greek, Italian,
Turkish, English, Spanish, German—to say nothing of teahouses of all
lands. In the long run, possibly some one school will become dominant or
a compromise among them all. By that time American cooking will have
become a complex of all the others. I sincerely trust that in the
internecine struggle fried chicken, gravy, fresh hot biscuit, blackberry
pie and fried mush do not wholly disappear. I am fond of French cooking
and have a profound respect for the German art—but there! Supposing that
never anywhere, any more, was there to be any fried mush or blackberry
pie!!!