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HOMEBURG MEMORIES
[Illustration: Finally the bass catches up with the cornets.
FRONTISPIECE. _See Page 176_]
Homeburg Memories
BY
GEORGE FITCH
AUTHOR OF "AT GOOD OLD SIWASH,"
"SIZING UP UNCLE SAM," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
IRMA DÉRÈMEAUX
[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1915
_Copyright, 1915_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published, February, 1915
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. SIMONDS CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.
TO
_MY FATHER_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE 4:11 TRAIN 1
II. THE FRIENDLY FIRE-FIEND 26
III. HOMEBURG'S TWO FOUR-HUNDREDTHS 47
IV. THE SERVANT QUESTION IN HOMEBURG 71
V. HOMEBURG'S LEISURE CLASS 91
VI. HOMEBURG'S WORST ENEMY 116
VII. THE HOMEBURG WEEKLY DEMOCRAT 142
VIII. THE HOMEBURG MARINE BAND 171
IX. THE AUTO GAME IN HOMEBURG 200
X. THE HOMEBURG TELEPHONE EXCHANGE 230
XI. A HOMEBURG SCHOOL ELECTION 254
XII. CHRISTMAS AT HOMEBURG 278
ILLUSTRATIONS
FINALLY THE BASS CATCHES UP WITH THE
CORNETS _Frontispiece_
IT SEEMED TO ME THEN AS IF SHE MUST
HAVE COME FROM HEAVEN BY AIR-LINE PAGE 18
"SHE'S OUT, BOYS," HE SAYS " 148
IN HOMEBURG YOU COME HOME TO THE
WHOLE TOWN " 284
Homeburg Memories
I
THE 4:11 TRAIN
_In Which the World Comes Once a Day to Visit Homeburg_
Hel-lo, Jim! Darn your case-hardened old hide, but I'm glad to see you!
Wait till I unclamp my fingers from this suit case handle and I'll shake
hands. Whoa--look out!! That's the fourth time that chap's tried to tag
me with his automobile baggage truck. He'll get me yet. I wish I were a
trunk, Jim. Why aren't they as kind to the poor traveler as they are to
his trunk? I don't see any electric truck here to haul me the rest of
the way into New York. It's a long, long walk to the front door of this
station, and my feet hurt.
That's the idea. Let the porter lug that suit case. I'd have hired one
myself, but I was afraid I couldn't support him in the style you fellows
have made him accustomed to. It was mighty nice of you to come down and
meet me, Jim. I've been standing here for five minutes in this infernal
mass meeting of locomotives, trying to keep out from underfoot, and
getting myself all calm and collected before I surged out of this
howling forty-acre depot and looked New York in the eye. It's nothing
but a plain case of rattles. I have 'em whenever I land here, Jim. Dump
me out on Broadway and I wouldn't care, but whenever I land back in the
bowels of a Union Station I'm a meek little country cousin, and I always
want some one to come along and take me by the hand.
It's the fault of your depots. They're the biggest things you have, and
it isn't fair for you to come at me with your biggest things first.
Every time I start for New York I swear to myself that I'm going to go
into a fifty thousand dollar dining-room full of waiters far above my
station, and tuck my napkin in my collar, just to show I'm a free-born
citizen; and I'm going to trust my life to crossing policemen, and go by
forty-story buildings without even flipping an eye up the corner and
counting the stories by threes. I'm mighty sophisticated until I hit the
city and get out into a depot which has a town square under roof and a
waiting-room so high that they have to shut the front door to keep the
thunder storms out. Then I begin to shrink. And by the time I've walked
from Yonkers or thereabouts, clean through the station and out of a
two-block hallway, with more stores on either side than there are in all
Homeburg, and have committed my soul to the nearest taxicab pirate, I
feel like a cheese mite in the great hall of Karnak.
No, sir; when I get into a big city depot, I'm a country Jake, and I
need a compass and kind words. I've suffered a lot from those depots. I
missed a train in Washington once because I figured it would take me
only ten minutes to go from my hotel to the train. But I counted only
the distance to the front door of the Union Station. By the time I'd
journeyed on through the fool thing, my train had gone. Once I missed a
train in the Boston station because I didn't know which one of the
thirty tracks my train was on. I guessed it was somewhere to the right,
and I guessed wrong. It was twenty-four tracks away to the left, and I
couldn't get back in time. So I went into their waiting-room, which is
as big as a New England cornfield and has all the benches named for
various towns. I had to stand up two hours because I couldn't find the
Homeburg bench.
I'm an admirer of big cities, Jim, and I wouldn't have you take a foot
off your Woolworth building, or a single crashity!! bang!! out of your
subways, but I wish there was a little more coziness in your depots.
Why, at Homeburg I'm nearer the train at my house than I am in New York
after I've got to the station. It's great to have a depot so big that it
takes the place of mountain scenery, but it's hard on the poor traveler,
even if it does have all the comforts of away-from-home in it. And then
it swallows up things so. It takes away all the pleasure of having a
railroad in the town. I suppose five hundred trains come into this
station every day, but they're just trains--nothing more. You don't get
any fun or information or excitement out of them. You can't even chase
them--they bang a gate in your face when you try. I'll bet you don't get
as much comfort and fun out of all these five hundred trains, Jim, as we
do out of the 4:11 train at Homeburg.
No; it's not any better than your trains. It's not as good. You can't
get raw oysters and magazines and individual cocktails and shaves on it.
All you can get is cinders and peanuts, and I would advise you, if you
were hungry, to eat the former and put the latter in your eye. It's the
kind of a train you New Yorkers would ride on and then write home
telling about the horrors of travel in the great West. But it means
everything to Homeburg. It means a lot more than the half dozen limited
trains which roar through our town fifty miles an hour every day and
have made us so expert at dodging that we will develop kangaroo legs in
another generation. It's our train. Here in New York a hundred trains
come in each morning from Chicago, New Orleans, Everywhere and points
beyond, and the office-boy next door to the depot doesn't stop licking
stamps long enough to look up. But when old Number Eleven, which is its
official railroad name, pulls into Homeburg from Chicago each
afternoon, loaded with mail, news, passengers, home-comers, adventurers,
mysterious strangers, friends, brides, heroes, widows and coffins, you
can just bet we're there to see her.
It's the town pastime. We all do it. Whenever a Homeburg man has nothing
else to do at four o'clock, he steps over to the depot and joins the
long line which leans up against the depot wall and keeps it in place
during the crisis. Some of them haven't missed a roll-call in years. Old
Bill Dorgan, the drayman, has stood on the platform every day since the
line was built, rain or shine. Josh James, the colored porter of the
Cosmopolitan Hotel, knows more traveling men than William J. Bryan. If
he was absent from his post, the engineer wouldn't know where to stop
the train. The old men come crawling down on nice days and sun
themselves for an hour before the train arrives. The boys sneak slyly
down on their way from school and stand in flocks worshiping the train
butcher, who is bigger than the Washington Monument to them. Sometimes a
few girls come down too, and hang around, giggling. But that doesn't
last long. We won't stand for it in our town. Some missionary tells the
girls' parents, and then they suddenly disappear from the ranks and look
pouty and insulted for a month, and we know, without being told, that a
couple of grown-up young ladies of sixteen or more have been spanked in
the good old-fashioned way. Homeburg is a good town, and it makes its
girls behave even if it has to half kill them.
You haven't any idea, Jim, how much bustle and noise and excitement and
general enthusiasm a passenger train can put into a small town for a few
minutes. Just imagine yourself in Homeburg on a cold winter afternoon.
It's four o'clock. The sun has stood the climate as long as it can and
is getting ready to duck for shelter behind the dreary fields to the
west. If you ran an automobile a mile a minute down the walk on Main
Street you wouldn't have to toot for a soul. Now and then a farmer comes
out of a store, takes a half hitch on the muffler around his neck, puts
on his bearskin gloves and unties his rig. You watch him drive off, the
wheels yelling on the hard snow, and wonder if it isn't more cheerful
out in the frozen country with the corn shocks for company. It's the
terrible half hour of bleak, fading light before the electricity is
turned on and the cozy dark comes down--the loneliest hour of the
winter's day.
You've stood it about as long as you can, when you notice signs of life
across the street. Three men carrying satchels are steering for the
depot. Dorgan's dray is rattling down the street. Dorgan's dray would
make a cheerful noise if it was the last sound on earth. Little flocks
and groups of people begin plodding across the square. You know them
all. Gibb Ogle is going over to watch the baggageman load trunks. It is
Gibb's life work. Pelty Amthorne is a little late, but he'll have time
to arrange himself against the east end door and answer the roll-call,
as he has for thirty years. Miss Ollie Mingle is going over too. She
must be expecting that Paynesville young man again. If the competition
between her and Ri Hawkes gets any keener, Ollie will have to meet the
train down at the crossing and nab the young man there. Sim Atkinson is
taking a handful of letters down to the station as usual. Ever since he
had his row with Postmaster Flint, he has refused to add to the receipts
of the office, and buys his stamps of the mail clerk. It is Sim's hope
and dream that sometime the annual receipts of the Homeburg post-office
will just miss being enough to bring a raise in salary. Then Sim will
bring it to Flint's attention that he would have bought his ten
dollars' worth of stamps that year at home, if Flint hadn't advertised
his lock box for rent when he neglected the quarterly dues. Watching Sim
thirst for revenge is as much fun as having a real Indian in town.
There's the headlight half a mile down the track! She's coming fast, ten
minutes late, and, because you've been lonesome all afternoon and need
exercise, you slip into your coat and hustle down. Just as you get to
the depot, Number Eleven comes in with a crash and a roar, bell ringing,
steam popping off, every brake yelling, platforms loaded, expectation
intense, confusion terrific, all nerves a-tingle, and fat old Jack Ball,
the conductor, lantern under arm, sweeping majestically by on the bottom
step of the smoker. Young Red Nolan and Barney Gastit, two of the
station agent's innumerable amateur helpers, race for the baggage car
with their truck, making a terrible uproar over the old planks. The mail
clerk dumps the sacks. Usually he gets a stranger in the shin with
them. Nothing doing to-day. Just missed a traveling man. We still tell
of the time the paper sack scooted across the icy platform and stood
Mayor Andrews on his head. He wanted to abolish the whole post-office
department.
I've always realized what the city gate must have meant to the medieval
loafers, because I've watched Homeburg's city gate at the 4:11 train so
often. There's Mrs. Sim Estabrook getting home. Must have been
unexpected. No one to meet her. Wonder if Sim's sick again. I'll call up
pretty soon. Wimble Horn's been to Chicago again, evidently. Wonder if
he'll dump his last eighty acres into the Board of Trade. Who's the
fine-looking duck in the fur-lined coat? Not a transient, evidently. He
passed Josh by. Must be visiting somebody. Yes; Mrs. Ackley's kissing
him. That might mean a scandal in New York, but at home it means
relatives. Poor old Jedson Bane's back, I see. Looks pretty bad.
Hospital didn't help him. Guess he's not long for us. Hello, Jed, old
man! How are you? Better? That's fine. You're looking great! For the
love of Mike, will you take a swift look at what's got off? I believe
it's from college. They don't wear clothes like that anywhere else. Oh,
yes, of course, that's why the Singers' automobile came down. Don't know
what we'd do, now that the circus has passed us up, if it wasn't for
Sally Singer. She imports a new specimen from the University about every
two weeks.
The crowd is off, and you hurl a few good-bys at the travelers getting
on. Our two editors check them off as they go. The _Argus_ and the
_Democrat_ get all their news at this train. There's no slipping in and
out of town in Homeburg. One and all we face the gantlet. Young Andy
Lowes hates to have us beg him not to miss the morning train back, as we
do three times a week; but he simply has to go to Jonesville that
often, and we all know why, and he knows we know. The Parsons are rid of
their Aunt Mary at last. She's worse than an oyster. Put her in a
guest-room and she grows fast to it. They've had her for six months now.
Hello! Peter Link's son is going down to Jonesville. Guess he's got his
job back. Andy would be a good boy if he would only stop trying to make
the distilleries work nights. There goes old Colonel Ackley on his
weekly trip. Wonder if he thinks he fools any one with that suit case.
Ever since the town went dry, he's had business in the next county.
Hello, Colonel! Don't drop that case. You'll break a suit of clothes!
Watch him glare.
The engine has gotten its breath by this time. Ever notice how human an
engine sounds when it stops after a long run and the air-brake apparatus
begins to pant? Old Ball has been fussing for a minute and now he yells
"'Board." Aunt Emma Newcomb gets in a few more kisses all around her
family. She's going down to the next station. The engine gives a few
loud puffs, spins its wheels a few times, and the cars begin moving
past. Hurrah! Something doing to-day. That grocery salesman who gets
here once a week is coming across the square two jumps to a rod. Go it,
old man! Go it, train! Ball will always stop for a woman, but the
drummers have to take her on the fly. There! He's on--all but his hat.
Red Nolan will keep that for him till his next trip.
She's moving fast now. The brakeman hops the next to the last car with
grace and carelessness. From every platform devoted friends and
relatives are spilling--it is a point of honor in Homeburg to remain
with your loved ones in the car as long as you dare before leaping for
life. The last car sweeps by. The red and green lights begin to grow
smaller with businesslike promptness. There is a parting clatter as the
train hits the last switch frog two blocks away. Then it's over. The
noise, bustle, confusion, and joyful excitement follow the flying
cinders out of town, and silence resumes its reign. I've never heard
anything so still as Homeburg after the 4:11 has pulled out.
But we're too busy to notice it as we string across the square to the
post-office. We have the day's cargo to digest. We have to wait for the
evening mail to be distributed, read the evening newspapers, shake hands
with all the returned Homeburgers, size up the brand new Homeburgers and
investigate the strangers. And it keeps us busy until supper time.
I've lived in Homeburg thirty-five years and more, and the 4:11 train
has been tangled up in my biography all the way. I remember the first
time I ever rode on it. The cars were funny-looking coops then, and the
engine had a sixty-gallon smokestack. I was four, and I yelled with
fear when the train came in and kept it up for the first twenty miles
after they lugged me on board. The conductor chucked me under the chin
and gave me his punch to play with. He was a young man then. He'd
carried my father and mother on their wedding journey, and twenty years
after that first ride of mine he carried me and my wife on our wedding
journey. The other day we gave our oldest girl two dollars and sent her
on her first trip down to Jonesville, by herself. Old Ball was on the
train, and he grinned at me and promised to take good care of her. He's
pretty gray now, but I hope he stays long enough to start another
generation of our family on its travels.
I went to my first circus, to Jonesville, on old Number Eleven. And I
went down there at sixteen, a member of the Republican Club, with a
torch, and the proudest boy in the State. The next year I started to
college with an algebra and a tennis racket under my arm (they wouldn't
jam into the trunk), and a dozen friends came down to see me off. On
Number Eleven that day I met four other boys going to the same school.
We are still close chums, though one is on the coast, another's here in
New York, and the third is in the Philippines.
[Illustration: It seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven
by air-line.]
It was the next year that I noticed a girl as she stepped off of Number
Eleven and was met by one of the Homeburg girls. I didn't know who she
was, but it seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven by
air-line, and I felt so friendly toward the girl who met her that I had
to go down to her house to call that very night. The visitor had come to
stay--her father was starting a new store in Homeburg. I'll tell you,
when a snorty old train, which assays two pecks of cinders per car,
hauls the most wonderful girl on earth into your town and dumps her
into your arms--so to speak, and bunching up events a little--you're
bound to love that train.
I could write the history of Homeburg from the 4:11 too. In fact, the
train has hauled most of Homeburg into the town. Year after year we
watch strangers get off the train and turn around three times, in the
way a stranger does when he tries to orient himself and locate the
nearest hotel. We get acquainted with those strangers, and in the next
week we discover their business and antecedents and politics and
preferences in jokes, and whether they pull for the Chicago Cubs or the
White Sox. In two weeks they are old-time citizens and go down with us
to welcome the newcomers. Henry Broar came to us on the 4:11. I remember
he wore a loppy hat and needed a shave that day, and we didn't assess
him very highly. But he had a whacking law practice inside of a year,
ran for county judge two years later, and now we swell up to the danger
point when people mention Congressman Broar, and let it slip modestly
that we are intimate enough with Hank to trade shirts with him.
I remember well the day two imposing strangers got off of Number Eleven,
and made the town nearly explode with curiosity by walking out to the
Dover farm at the edge of town and pacing it off this way and that. Took
us a month to learn their business. That was the time we got the Scraper
Works. When Allison B. Unk arrived, he made a tremendous impression by
wearing a plug hat still in its first youth, and rolling ponderously
around town in a Prince Albert. We've despised Prince Alberts ever since
because the town fell for that one and deposited liberally in Unk's new
bank, which closed up a year later. And then there was the time when the
trainmen put off a scared and sick cripple, who lay in the depot
waiting-room with a ring of sympathetic incompetents around him until
Doc Simms could help him. He touched our hearts, and we shelled out
enough to send him on a hundred miles to his people. He came back ten
years later and kept Homeburg balanced magnificently in the air for a
week by showing us how much fun it is to chum with a millionaire. Even
sick cripples are likely to guess the market right in this country, you
know, and he never forgot us.
As they come in on Number Eleven, so they go. The young men come to
Homeburg full of hope, and their sons go on elsewhere loaded with the
same. Mothers weep on the station platform many times a year while their
Willies and Johns and Petes hike gaily off to chase their fortunes. And
many times a year the old boys come back from Chicago. Some of them are
rich and proud, and some of them are rich and friendly, and some of them
are just friendly. But they all get off of Number Eleven under our
keen, discriminating glare, and they all get the same greeting while we
size them up and wonder if their nobby thirty-five dollar suits are
their sole stocks-in-trade, and just how much a "lucrative position"
means in Chicago.
When the big strike was on, twenty-five years ago, Number Eleven didn't
run for two days. We might as well have been marooned on St. Helena. It
was awful. When a hand-car came sweeping into town the third day with a
big sail on, we hailed it like starving sailors. It was Number Eleven
which took on a flat-car loaded with Paynesville's fire department
twenty years ago and saved our business section. When President Banks,
of the Great F. C. & L. Railroad, rolled into Homeburg in his private
car, to become "Pudge" Banks again for a day or two and revisit the
scenes of his boyhood, he came on Number Eleven of course. The train
hung around while the band played two selections and the mayor gave an
address of welcome. That was her longest visit in Homeburg.
The old train even bursts into local politics and social affairs now and
then. It managed to jump the track in the campaign of '96, leaving four
distinguished Democratic speakers, fizzing with oratory, in the
cornfields, and ruining the only rally the Dems attempted to pull off.
And it took DeLancey Payley down after all the rest of the town had
failed, in a manner which kept us tearful with delight for a week.
DeLancey was sequestered in an Eastern college by his loving parents,
and when he was graduated he came home and started an exclusive circle
composed mostly of himself. He was unapproachably haughty, until one day
he accompanied a proud beauty, who was visiting the Singers (our other
hothouse family) to Number Eleven, and lingered too long after the train
started. DeLancey got off, but in doing so he performed a variety of
difficult and instructive feats of balancing on his ear which were
viewed by a large audience with terrific enthusiasm. When DeLancey was
haughty after that, we always praised this feat, and you'd be surprised
to see how soon he got his nose down out of the zenith.
Every day old Number Eleven brings in its mail-bag full of hopes and
triumphs, of good news, bad news, and tragedy. Every day it brings the
new ideas from the world outside and the latest wrinkles in hanging on
to this whirling old sphere in a pleasant and successful manner. We get
our styles from the Chicago men who step off of its platforms and tarry
with us. We send our brides off on it with an entire change of bill at
each performance. We get our peeps into wonderland and romance and
comedy from the theatrical troupes which straggle out of its cars and
rush to the baggage car to make sure that no varlet has attached their
trunks since the last stop. It is the magic carpet which carries our
youth forth into the great world to wonder and learn and prevail. And
now and then it is the kindly beast of burden who brings back some old
playmate, done with weariness and striving, and coming home to rest in
our cemetery beyond the south hill.
No, Jim, your thousand trains a day, with their parlor cars, bathrooms,
barber shops and libraries, are all right, but they're just trains.
Number Eleven is a whole lot more than a train. It is the world come to
visit us once a day--a moving picture of life which we enjoyed long
before Edison took out his patent. Do you wonder that it makes me sad to
see so many perfectly good trains going to waste in this roofed-over
township of yours? Take me out of it, please.
II
THE FRIENDLY FIRE-FIEND
_The Joys of Fighting Him with a Volunteer Fire Department_
Hello! Here comes the fire department! Watch the people swarm! Uumpp!
Ouch! Excuse me for living. This is no place for a peaceable spectator.
I'm going to cast anchor in this doorway until the mob gets past.
No, thank you. I'll not join the Marathon. But you don't know how
homesick and happy it makes me to see this crowd run! I've been in New
York a week now, and honestly this is almost the first really human
impulse I've seen a citizen give way to. Until this minute I've felt as
if I were a hundred thousand miles from Homeburg, with all train
service suspended for the winter. If I could find the man who stepped on
my heels while chasing that engine, I'd thank him and ask him what
volunteer fire department he used to run with. See 'em scramble.
Whoop! Here comes the hook-and-ladder truck! This is nothing but
Homeburg on a big scale. I'm beginning to envy you city chaps now. That
makes the fourth engine that's come past. You get more for your money
than we do. Look at that chief hurdling curbstones in his little red
wagon. If Homeburg ever gets big enough to have a chief's wagon, I'll
suffocate with pride.
I see it's the same old story. Fire's all out. It always is by the time
you've run nine blocks. Watch the racers coming back. Stung, every one
of them--gold-bricked. There's a fat fellow who's run half a mile, I'll
bet. If his tongue hung out any farther, he'd trip up on it. But he'll
do it again next time. They all do. Learning to stop running to fires is
as hard as learning to stop buying mining-stock in the West. And it's
just as big a swindle too. The returns from running to fires are
marvelously small. They tell me that a hundred million dollars a year
goes up in flames in this country. I don't believe it. If it does, I
want to know who gets to see all the fun. I don't.
I've run to fires all my life, until lately, and I've drawn about three
hundred and seventy-five blanks. Once I almost saw a big grain-elevator
burn in a Western town. That is, I would have seen it, if I had looked
out of my hotel window. But I'd run two miles to see a burning haystack
in the afternoon, and I was so dead tired that I slept right through the
performance that night. And once I did see a row of stores burn, back in
Homeburg--at the distance of a mile. I was in school, and the teacher
wouldn't dismiss us. By stretching my neck several feet I could just see
the flames leaping over the trees, but that was all. Some of the bad
boys sneaked out of the door, but I was a good boy, and waited one
thousand years until school was out and the fire was ditto. I've never
felt quite the same since toward either goodness or education.
Some men run faithfully to fires year after year and view a fine
collection of burning beefsteaks and feverish chimneys and volcanic
wood-sheds, while others stroll out after dinner in a strange city and
spend a pleasant evening watching a burning oil-refinery make a Vesuvius
look pale and sickly in comparison. Luck is distributed in a dastardly
way, and as for myself I've quit trying. I don't run to fires at all any
more. The big cities have fooled me long enough by sending out forty
pieces of apparatus to smother a defective flue. I stay behind and
watch the crowd. It's more amusing and not half so much work.
Of course in Homeburg it's different. You city people don't realize what
a blessing the fire-fiend is to a small town. Fires mean a whole lot to
us. They keep us from petrifying altogether during the dull seasons. And
they don't have to be real fires, either. Any old alarm will do. Our
fire-bell sounds just as terrible for a little brush fire as it would
for a flaming powder-mill. It's an adventure merely to hear the thing.
Take a winter night in the dull season after Christmas, for instance.
You have begun to go to sleep right after supper. You've finished the
job at nine o'clock, and by two A.M. you're sailing placidly southwest
of Australia in a seagoing automobile.
Suddenly the pirate-ship in the rear, which you hadn't noticed before,
slips up and begins potting away at you with a dull metallic boom. The
auto slips its clutch, and the engine begins to clang and clatter, and
somebody off behind a red-hot mountain in the distance begins ringing an
enormous bell just as you slide downward into a crater of flame--and
then you wake up entirely, and the fire-bell is going
"clang-clang-clang-clang-clang," while below you hear the ringing crunch
of your neighbor's feet on the cold snow, and outside the north window
there is a red glare which may be either the end of the world or another
exploded lamp in 'Bige Brinton's chicken-incubator; you won't know which
until you have stabbed both feet into one pants-leg, crawled all over
the cold floor for a missing sock, and run half a mile, double-reefing
your nightshirt to keep it from trailing out from under your overcoat.
That's what a fire-alarm means in Homeburg.
It's just as interesting in the daytime too. Imagine a summer afternoon
in Homeburg about three o'clock. It's hotter than a simoon in the
Sahara, and the aggregate business being done along Front Street is
nineteen cents an hour. The nearest approach to life on the street is
Sam McAtaw sitting in a shady spot on the edge of the sidewalk and
leaning against a telephone-pole, sound asleep. You're sitting in your
office chair, with your feet on the desk, dozing, when suddenly you hear
footsteps outside. Whoever is making them is turning them out with great
rapidity, and that in itself is novel enough to be interesting. The
footsteps go by, and you look at their maker. It is Gibb Ogle surging up
the walk and yanking his ponderous feet this way and that with
tremendous energy. Nothing but a fire or a loose lion can make Gibb run,
and you don't take any stock in the lion theory; so you tumble out after
him.
By this time Sim Bone is on the street, and Harvey McMuggins is coming
up behind, while half a dozen heads have suddenly sprouted from as many
doorways. Your heart beats with suspense when Gibb comes to the
town-hall corner. Hurrah! He's steering for the fire-house. You're
overhauling him rapidly, and by a big sprint you beat out Clatt
Sanderson, and grab one handle of the fire-bell ropes. Gibb grabs the
other, and then you let her have it for all there is in you.
Did I say anything about Homeburg being asleep? Forget it. Before you've
hit the bell a dozen taps you can't hear it for the tramp of feet. Every
store in town is belching forth proprietors and clerks. They are coming
bareheaded and coatless; some of them are collarless. Chief Dobbs, who
shoes horses in his less glorious moments and keeps his helmet hanging
on the forge-cover, dashes into the engine-room, grabs his trumpet, and
begins firing orders, not singly, but in broadsides. There's nobody
there to order yet, but he's just getting his hand in, and ten seconds
later, when the first member of the company arrives, he is saluted with
nineteen stentorian commands in one blast. Half a minute later the
engine-house is clogged with fire-fighters, and the air is a maelstrom
of orders, counter orders, suggestions, objections, and hoarse yells.
Then a roar of wheels sounds outside, and you drop the bell-rope handle
and go out to see the finest sight of all.
I suppose those old Romans thought the chariot-races were pretty nifty,
but if an old Roman should reassemble himself and watch the dray-race to
a Homeburg fire, he'd wonder how he ever managed to sit through a silly
little dash around an arena. From the south comes a cloud of dust and a
terrific racket. At an equal distance from the east comes another cloud
of dust and an even more terrible uproar, Clay Billings's dray having
more loose spokes than Bill Dorgan's. The clouds approach with
tremendous speed. Bill is a little ahead. He is lashing his horses with
the ends of the reins, while from the bounding dray small articles of no
value, such as butter-firkins and cases of eggs, are emerging and
following on the road behind.
But Clay isn't beaten--not by a thousand miles. He's going to make it a
dead heat or better--no, Bill hit the crossing first. By George! That
Clay boy is a wonder. He deliberately pulled in and shot across behind
Bill, cutting off a good fifty feet. His team stops, sliding on their
haunches, and ten seconds later is being hitched to the hose-cart, while
Clay is on the seat clanging the foot-bell triumphantly. It's the
fiftieth race, or thereabouts, between the two, and the score is about
even. The winner gets two dollars for the use of his team. I've seen
horse-races for a thousand-dollar purse which weren't half as exciting.
In the meanwhile more messengers have arrived from the fire. It is in
the Mahlon Brown barn, and late advices indicate terrible progress. As
fast as forty-nine rival fingers can do it, the tugs are fastened, and
the cart is off down the street with a long trail of citizens after it.
Bill's team, badly blown, is hitched to the hook-and-ladder truck, and
willing hands push it out through the door. There is always more or less
of a feud between the hook-and-ladder boys and the hose-cart boys,
because the former get the second team and rarely arrive at the fire in
time to hoist the beautiful blue ladders before the hose-cart gang puts
the conflagration out. Indeed, the feeling has gotten so strong at times
that the hook-and-ladder gang has threatened to double the prize-money
by private subscription and get their rig out first, but patriotism has
thus far prevented this.
You have rung the bell until you are tired, by this time, and, besides,
the human flood has rushed on, leaving no one to whom you can explain
just how you thought you smelled fire and beat the world to the
engine-house. So you set out for the fire yourself and jog over the
half-mile in pretty fair time, considering the heat. It is an impressive
sight--not the fire itself, but the event. Two thousand, two hundred and
nine people are there--that being the population of Homeburg minus the
sick and wandering.
In the midst of the seething mass are the hose-cart and the
ladder-truck. Around them dozens of red helmets are bobbing, while the
quivering air is cut and slashed and mangled with a very hurricane of
orders: "Bring up that hose--" "Whoa, keep that horse still--" "Bring
her round this way--" "Bring her round _this_ way--" "Hey, you chumps,
the fire's _this_ side--" "Back up that wagon--" "Come ahead with the
wagon--" "Get out of here till we get a ladder up--" "Axes here--" "Turn
on that water--" "Turn on that water--" "_Turn on that water!!--_"
"Jones, go down and tell that wooden Indian to turn on that water."
"Hold that water, you--" "_Hold that water!_" "Turn her on, I say."
"Turn her--" "Wow--turn that nozzle the other way--"
And then the water comes with a mighty rush, yanking the nozzlemen this
way and that and sweeping firemen and common citizens aside as if they
were mere straws.
As a rule, this is the climax, and the end comes rapidly. By this time
Brown, who had put the fire out with a few pails of water before the
alarm sounded, has persuaded the department to call off its hose, the
barn being full of valuable hay. So there isn't anything to do. The
water is turned off. Gibb Ogle explains to the one hundred and eleventh
knot of people how he was going past the place when he saw the tongue of
flame, and every one disperses after a pleasant social time.
Everybody is tolerably well satisfied except the hook-and-ladder gang,
which, as usual, is skunked again--never got a ladder out. A couple of
the axmen had a little fun with a rear window, but otherwise the affair
is a flat failure. They go back sullenly, but are comforted when the
roll is called, when each member who was present draws a dollar from the
city treasury. As usual, Pete Sundbloom is late, and tries to edge in to
roll-call, though he was a mile away from peril, but he can't make it
stick and gets the hoarse hoot when his little game is discovered.
I want to ask you--isn't that a pleasant interruption on a dead day? It
makes life worth living, and I really wonder that there isn't more
incendiarism in small towns throughout the United States.
Of course all the alarms aren't fizzles. Sometimes we have a real fire,
and then the scene defies description. When a fair-sized house burns
down, Chief Dobbs is so hoarse that he can't talk for a week, and when
the row of wooden stores on the south side went up in flames a few years
ago, the old chief, Patrick McQuinn, burst a blood-vessel and had to
retire, the doctor having warned him that he must never use a
speaking-trumpet again.
I was away at the time, but they tell me that was a grand fire for the
hook-and-ladder boys. They were right in the middle of it, and every
ladder in the truck was out. There was some trouble over the fact that
the big extension ladder was too tall for the buildings, and when Art
Simms had climbed to the top, he managed to fall fifteen feet to the
roof of the furniture-store, bruising himself badly. But, on the whole,
great good was done, and the second story workers were kings that day.
When the hotel caught, and the hook-and-ladder gang got into it, the way
the upper windows belched mattresses, mirrors, toilet-sets, pictures and
beds was unbelievable. Almost everything in the building was saved, and
some of it was successfully repaired afterward.
The axmen had their innings that day, too. It was a great sight to see
Andy Lowes leap nimbly up the ladder and poke in window after window
with his spiked ax, stepping backward now and then into nozzleman
Jones's face in order to view the effect. The axmen got glory enough to
last for years, and it was an axman who put out the last scrap of fire.
Frank Sundell was the hero. He was sitting on the ridge-pole of
Emerson's restaurant when he noticed a few blazing spots on the shingle
roof beneath him. He might have called the hose department; but, as I
have said, there is a good deal of rivalry between the two, and,
besides, Sundell had had a slow time that day, Lowes doing most of the
display work. So Frank reached cautiously down with his trusty ax, cut
out a blazing section of shingles, and tossed it to the ground. The
crowd cheered, and he was so encouraged that he cut out the rest of the
hot spots and put out the fire single-handed. Sundell is one of our very
best firemen and stands in line for a nozzleman's position some day.
Of course a small-town fire department doesn't get as much practice in
twisting the fire-fiend's tail as a city fire company; but our boys have
a mighty good record, and we're proud of them. Since we've had
water-works, and the department hasn't had to depend on some cistern
which always went dry just at a critical moment, there hasn't been a
conflagration in Homeburg big enough to get into the city papers. The
boys may be a little overzealous now and then, but they are always on
the job ten minutes after the first tap of the bell, and the way they go
after a red tongue of flame on a kitchen roof reminds me of a terrier
shaking a rat. They are our real heroes,--the fire-laddies,--for outside
of Frank Ericson and Shorty McGrew, who work on the switching-crew, and
come sailing down through town hanging gracefully from the end of a
box-car ladder by one foot and hand, no one else has any chance to face
danger in Homeburg.
Of course our firemen don't face danger regularly, between meals, like
your big paid departments here, and about the most the ordinary business
man gets in the danger-line is the imminent peril of getting a new
twenty-five-dollar suit in line with the chemical hose; but we don't
forget in Homeburg how old Mrs. Agnew's house burned twenty years ago
this spring and the department was late, owing to the magnificent depth
of Exchange Street, the roads having broken up, and how, when it got
there, the house was a mass of flames, with the poor old lady, who had
been bedridden for years, shrieking inside, and a hundred neighbors
shrieking on the outside; and how Pat McQuinn and Henry Aultmeyer dove
in through a window, with wet coats around their heads and the
chemical-hose playing on their backs; and how they tugged and hauled at
Mrs. Agnew, who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and couldn't get a
grip on her, and finally upended the burning bed and dumped her out of
the window, breaking her hip, and then dumped themselves out and rolled
in the wet grass until their hair and mustaches and clothes quit
blazing--after which they retired into cotton-wool for a month.
Maybe your men would have done it more scientifically and entirely saved
poor Mrs. Agnew, who died the next month of the broken hip, but they
couldn't have stuck to the job any more heroically; and when Homeburg
citizens talk about "brave fire-laddies" and "homely heroes" at the
annual benefit supper of the Volunteer Company No. 1, they mean Pat and
Henry, and are perfectly willing to argue the question with any one.
So we worship our company to our heart's content, and when it comes
pacing slowly down the street at the head of every parade, with the
members looking handsomer than chorus girls in their dark-blue flannel
suits, red belts, and neat blue caps, we look at them full of pride and
confidence. Our little boys dream of the time when they will grow up and
join the company and wear seven-pound red helmets at fires, and come
home tired and muddy in the gray dawn after a fire and demand hot coffee
from their admiring women-folks; and as for the Homeburg girls--well,
the greatest social function of our town, or of the county for that
matter, is the annual ball of the Homeburg fire department.
And let me tell you, when the nine-piece orchestra--all home
talent--strikes up the grand march and Chief Dobbs, with his wide-gauge
mustache and vacuum-cleaned uniform, leads the company around the hall,
every hero with the girl or wife of his heart on his arm and a full
hundred couples of the mere laymen crowding in behind, in a long and
many-looped line, the Astor ball would have to do business with a brass
band and a display of fireworks to attract any more enthusiasm.
That's what the fire department means to us in Homeburg. We don't suffer
half so much from fires as we would from the lack of them; and when this
new concrete construction makes the world fire-proof, and the Homeburg
fire department rusts away and disappears, we will mourn it even more
sincerely than we did the opera house with a real gallery, which got
over-heated one night twenty-five years ago and burned, compelling us to
get along with a mere hall with a flat floor ever afterward.
III
HOMEBURG'S TWO FOUR-HUNDREDTHS
_The Struggles of our Best Families to Impress Us_
Hold on, Jim. Don't hurry so. Remember I don't have a chance to walk up
Fifth Avenue every day. Give me a chance to astonish myself. Here are
ten thousand women going by in clothes that would make a lily turn red
and burn up with shame, and an equal number of proud gents with curlycue
collars on their overcoats, and I want to do the sight justice.
You see all this parade every day, but I don't, and I want to drink it
all in. See that feminine explosion in salmon plush! That would
paralyze business back home. Watch that hat crossing the street--it
ought to be arrested for being without visible means of support--Oh, I
see! There's a girl under it with one of those rifle-barrel skirts. Gee!
Ssh, Jim! Did you see the lady who just passed? Let's beg her pardon for
intruding on this earth. Say, you could peel enough haughtiness off of
her to supply eight duchesses and still have enough for the lady cashier
at my hotel. I'll bet she is one of your Four Hundred. For goodness'
sake, Jim, if we pass any of your social lighthouses, point them out to
me. I'm here to see the sights.
I know the rest of the country throws it up to New York a lot because of
its Four Hundred, and that the ordinary small-town man gets so scornful
when he talks of the idle and diamond-crusted rich, with their
poodle-dog pastimes, that he lives in constant danger of stabbing his
eyes with his nose. But I'm not that way; I'm interested. Nothing
fascinates me so much as the stories in your papers about Mrs. Clymorr
Busst's clever pearl earrings, made to resemble door knobs; and about
Mrs. Spenser Coyne's determination to have Columbia University removed
because it interferes with the view from her garage; and about little
Mrs. Justin Wright's charming innocence in buying a whole steamship
whenever she goes over to Europe. I'd go a long way to see your Four
Hundred perform; and moreover, after I had accumulated a precarious
balance on an iron spike fence in order to rest one eye on a genuine
duke while he fought his way out of a church with one of your leading
local beauties, who had just been affixed to him for life, I would not
squint pityingly on the heaving mass of spectators and hiss:
"We don't do this in Homeburg."
Because we would do it fast enough if we had a chance.
We don't have anything like your Smart Set, of course, but I desire to
say with pride that while there aren't enough tiaras in Homeburg to fill
a pill box, and the only limousine we possess is the closed carriage
which is used for the family of the deceased at funerals, we have our
exclusive and magnificent class just as New York has. We haven't a Four
Hundred in Homeburg, but we have a Two Four-Hundredths. If you get as
much real, solid pleasure and amusement in New York watching your Four
Hundred as we do watching the Payleys and the Singers, I envy you.
They're worth all the trouble they cause.
For a good many years, Mrs. Wert Payley, wife of the First National
Bank, was our Smart Set, all by herself. There was never any question of
it. She admitted it, and we didn't take the trouble to deny it. In a
way, she was regarded as a public benefactor. Nobody else cared to
spend the money necessary to be a Smart Set, and since Mrs. Payley was
willing to fight and be bled, so to speak, to give our town tone and
inject a little excitement into our prairie lives now and then, we felt
that the least we could do was to regard her as a social colossus.
The Payleys were the only people in Homeburg who had lunch at noon, and
as early as 1900 they ate it from the bare table. She was the only woman
in Homeburg who could "look in" on an afternoon gabble of any kind for a
few minutes and get away with it without insulting the hostess. When she
shook hands with you, you always grabbed in the wrong place, no matter
how much thought you put into it, and while you were readjusting your
sights and clawing for her fingers and perspiring with mortification,
she was getting a start on you which kept you bashfully humble as long
as she was in sight. She was real goods, Mrs. Payley was--not arrogant,
but just naturally superior. People who called at the Payleys' evenings
were the social lights of Homeburg, and whenever some lady wanted to
discharge a few fireworks indicating her social position, she would form
a hollow square around Mrs. Payley in public and get intimate with her
in full view of everybody. Mrs. Payley ran the town, and everybody was
comfortable and content about it until the Singers arrived.
The Singers came from Cincinnati to cashier in the Farmers' State Bank:
Mrs. Singer was city bred and city heeled and when she met Mrs. Wert
Payley she didn't even blink. She put out her hand a little
nor'-nor'east of her chatelaine watch, when Mrs. Payley put out her hand
some four inches southwest by south, and waited calmly for Mrs. Payley
to correct herself. There was an awful moment of suspense, and when it
became evident that the only way to get Mrs. Singer's hand down to the
other level would be to excavate beneath her and change her foundations,
Mrs. Payley gave in and reached.
War was declared that minute, and I shudder now when I think of the
months which followed.
Mrs. Payley, having been on the ground a long time, had fortified it, of
course, and was president of all the clubs. But inside of a month Mrs.
Singer flanked her position. She declined to join most of the clubs on
the plea of being a busy woman, and organized a flower mission. Its
object was to distribute flowers to the sick and needy, who generally
consisted of Pat Ryan. Pat was nearly smothered in flowers that year,
being good-natured, and as the work of collecting said flowers involved
a great deal of meeting in the Singer home and dancing in the Singer
attic, which was floored with hard maple that winter, Mrs. Singer had
the girls of the town organized into a Roman phalanx before spring.