see about places ask us: "Do I have to eat in the kitchen?" and the
other half ask: "Do I have to eat with the family?" And of course it's
just our luck that the people who wish to dine by themselves never can
find girls who prefer the kitchen, and the people who insist on
associating with their help usually lose them because said help has been
spoiled somewhere else by being allowed to eat in the kitchen, far from
the domestic squabbles and the children with the implacable appetite for
spread bread.
But on the whole this problem doesn't bother us much, and our hired
girls are a great comfort. They usually stay with us until they are
married or retire from old age, and after they've been ten years in a
house they're pretty much one of the family. The Payleys' girl has been
with them sixteen years, as I said before, and when she wants to go to
the opera-house to an entertainment, Wert Payley makes young DeLancey
Payley take her. It's the only use he's found for DeLancey as yet. We
keep out of the kitchen after supper, unless too strongly pressed by
thirst, because usually from seven to ten some hardworking young Swedish
man sits bolt upright in a straight-backed chair, his head against the
wall, discussing romance and other subjects of interest with a scared,
resolute expression. Usually this goes on for about three years before
anything happens. Then the girl admits, with some hesitation, that she
is going to get married, and our wife or mother, as the case may be,
hustles around and helps make the trousseau and pick out the linen. The
wedding takes place in the parlor, and about a year later the young
Swedish-American citizen who arrives is named after whatever member of
our family is the most convenient as to sex.
We never entirely lose a good hired girl in Homeburg. They pass us on to
their relatives when they are married, and come back to visit with great
faithfulness. In this topsy-turvy Eldorado of ours where a man
sometimes becomes rich before he really knows what anything larger than
five dollars looks like, many of our girls draw prizes in the shape of
good farmers and prosperous young merchants. But their heads aren't
turned by it. They come around in their new automobiles and take us out
riding, just as if we had money too. The wife of our mayor used to work
for us, and when the electric light gang stuck a light where it would
shine straight into our back porch, thus reducing the value of our house
105 per cent. as a place of employment for a nice, attractive girl in
summers, I stepped over to the mayor's office and asked him if he
remembered how he used to sit on that porch himself. He smiled once,
winked twice, and three minutes afterward four men were on their way to
relocate that pole.
If I have any criticism of the hired girls in our town, it is because
they go to Europe too much. Now, of course, it's no worse for a hired
girl to go to Europe for the summer than it is for any one else to
indulge themselves in that way. But that's the irritating part. Nobody
else goes. Outside of Mrs. Wert Payley and one or two school teachers, I
don't suppose any Homeburg people have crossed the Atlantic. But half a
dozen of our hired girls go every year. They leave late in the spring,
and during the hot weary summer their mistresses toil patiently along
keeping the job open if they can't find a substitute who will work for a
few months, for the girls who go to Europe are usually pearls of great
price and must be gotten back at all cost. I don't suppose anything is
harder on the temper than to work over a hot kitchen stove all day in
July, and then to sit down to supper, a damp and wilted mess of
weariness, and read a souvenir card from your hired girl, said card
depicting a cool and inviting Swedish meadow with snow-topped mountains
in the distance.
Our girl has been to Europe three times. She has crossed on the
_Mauretania_, the old _Deutschland_ and the new _Olympic_. Two years
from this summer she thinks she will try the _Imperator_. Often in the
evening she tells us of the wonders of these great vessels--of the
beauty of the sunset at sea, and of the smoke and noise and majesty of
London. I suppose it indicates a jealous disposition, but it makes me
mad sometimes to think that it takes practically all the money I can
earn, working steadily and with two weeks off per year, to send that
girl abroad.
Of course I don't mean it just that way. She doesn't get all of it. In
fact she gets three dollars a week of it. Out of this she saves about
three dollars and twenty-five cents because sometimes she gets a dollar
extra for doing the washing. And when she goes to Europe for the summer
on the same ship with the Astors and the Vanderbilts, it sounds more
magnificent than it really is. She is on the same ship, but about
eleven decks down, in a corner of the steerage close to the stern, where
the smells are rich and undisturbed. And she doesn't visit ruins and art
galleries in Europe, but a huge circle of loving relatives, who pass her
around from farm to farm for months, while she does amateur business
agent work for the steamship lines, talking up the wonders of America
and--allow me to blush--the saintliness of her employers, and coming
blithely back home in the fall with three or four old childhood chums
for roommates.
Just the same, I envy our girls. I wish I could go to Europe in the
steerage, not being able to go any other way.
It's a fortunate thing for us that our hired girls do go back home and
proselyte for America, or else we would soon be jam up against the real
thing in help problems. If, for any reason, the Swedish nation should
cease contributing to Homeburg, we should have to do our own work. I
often wonder at the things our American girls will do rather than to go
on the fighting deck as commander of some one else's kitchen.
Twenty-five of our girls go up to Paynesville every morning at six on
the interurban and make cores in the rolling mills there all day.
Carfare and board deducted, they get less than a good hired girl--and
they don't go to Europe for the summers and never by any chance marry
some rising young farmer who has made the first payment on a quarter
section. Several of our middle-aged young ladies sew for a dollar a day
and keep house by themselves. And there's Mary Smith, who has been a
town problem. She's thirty-five and an orphan. She lives in a house
about as large as a piano box and tries to scare away the wolf by
selling flavoring extracts and taking orders for books. She's never more
than two meals ahead of an embarrassing appetite. Every fall we dig
down and buy her winter coal, and she hasn't bought any clothes for ten
years. Some one gives her an ex-dress and Mary does her best to make it
over, but she never looks much more enticing than a scarecrow in the
result.
Mary's hands are red with chilblains in the winter, and the poorhouse
yawns for her. But will she take a place as hired girl? Not she. Mary
has her pride. She'll sell you things you don't want, which is as near
begging as graft is to politics, and she'll wear second-hand clothes and
take home cold bread pudding from the hotel--but she will not be a hired
girl and go to Europe in the summer and marry into an automobile. Once
she did consent to become Mrs. Singer's second girl. Mrs. Singer was
desperate, and after a long defense Mary consented on condition that she
be called the "up-stairs maid." But she only lasted three days. Mary
could have drawn five dollars a week and Mrs. Singer's clothes, which
would have fitted her. But Mary couldn't take orders--not that kind. She
came back to take orders from us for a patent glass washtub or something
of the kind--and we sighed wearily.
V
HOMEBURG'S LEISURE CLASS
_It is not as large as New York's but it is twice as ingenious_
Confound it, Jim, I wish you hadn't told me that your friend Williston
never worked a day in his life! You don't know how it disappointed me.
Why? Because I don't know when I have met a man whom I liked so much at
first sight as I did Williston. He suited me from the ground up. I never
spent a more interesting afternoon with any one. No matter what he did,
he interested me--I enjoyed watching him handle his cigar as well as I
did hearing him tell about his Amazon adventures. Says I to myself:
"Here is a man whose friendship I will win if I have to live in New York
all my life to get it." And then you had to go and spoil it all.
Oh, yes, I know it's just my backwoods way of looking at things. I'm not
saying what I do as a boast. I'm making a confession of it. I know why
Williston doesn't work. It's because he owns a piano box full of bonds
left by his late lamented pa, and when he was educated, the word "work"
was crossed out of his spelling-book in red ink. And I'm not saying that
he isn't a fine fellow. He's intelligent and witty and companionable and
forty other desirable things. But he won't work. Somehow that sticks in
my vision of him. It reminds me of the case of Mamie Gastit, who was the
prettiest, best-dispositioned, and most capable girl in Homeburg, but
who had a glass eye. We didn't hold it up against her, but it made us
awfully sad. There were plenty of Homeburg girls who would have been
decorated by a glass eye. Why did Providence have to wish it on the
finest girl in town?
You say it is no crime not to work in New York? Bless you, I know it. In
fact, loafing in New York is the most fascinating business in the world.
Why, it seems as if you New York men actually struggle to get spare
time. I've sat in your office and watched you on Saturday morning
working yourself into a blue haze in your efforts to get done early
enough to cord up a fine big mess of leisure on Saturday afternoon.
That's the difference between New York and Homeburg. In Homeburg you
would have been stretching out your job to last until supper
time--unless you were one of our nineteen golfers, or the roads were
good enough to let you drive over to the baseball game at Paynesville.
Leisure in New York means pleasure, excitement, and seven dozen kinds of
interest. But for many and many a long year in hundreds of Homeburg
homes, leisure has meant waiting for meal times--and not much of
anything else.
City people laugh at country people for beating the chickens to roost.
But what are you going to do when going to bed is the most fascinating
diversion available after supper? I've noticed that as fast as a small
town man discovers something else to do in the evening, his light bill
goes up and up. When crokinole was introduced into Homeburg twenty odd
years ago, the kerosene wagon had to make an extra mid-week trip. When
the magazines came down from thirty-five cents to ten and you could get
three of them and a set of books for one dollar down and a dollar a
month until death did you part, they had to put an operator in the
telephone exchange after 8 P.M. because of the general sleeplessness.
When the automobile came, and when two moving picture theaters, a
Chautauqua, and a Lyceum course opened fire in one year, and the
business men fitted up a club with an ancient pool table in it, Homeburg
got chummy with all the evening hours, and kicked so hard about the
electric lights going off at midnight that the company had to run them
an hour longer. And I suppose if any invader ever puts in an all-night
restaurant where you can have lobster and a soubrette on the table at
the same time, a certain proportion of us will get as foolish as you are
and will forget how to go to bed at all by artificial light.
We've changed that much from the past generation. We know what to do
with leisure in the evening. But we're still awkward and embarrassed
when we meet it by daylight. Since we have built our Country Club, a few
of us have learned to enjoy ourselves in a fitful and guilty fashion
late in the afternoon. But as a rule, even to-day, when you give a
Homeburg man a bright golden daylight hour of leisure, he has no more
use for it than he would have for a five-ton white elephant with an
appetite for ice-cream. And that, Jim, is why I can't speed myself up to
appreciate a young man who has never worked and never intends to. I
still have to look at him with my Homeburg eyes. And in Homeburg, when a
man doesn't work when he has a chance and takes what amusement we have
to offer as a steady diet in perfect content, we know something is the
matter with him--and we are sorry for him.
Leisure has killed more people in Homeburg than work ever did. For years
our biggest problem was the job of keeping our retired farmers alive.
When a farmer has worked forty years or so, and has accumulated a
quarter section of land, and a few children who need high school
education, he rents his farm and moves into town, where he lives
comfortably on eighty dollars a month and fills a tasty tomb in a very
few years. It isn't so hard on the farmer's wife, because she takes her
housework into town with her and keeps busy. But when the farmer has
settled down in town, far from a chance to work, he discovers that he
has about fourteen hours of leisure each day on his hands and nothing to
do with them but to eat. Out of regard for his digestion he can't eat
more than three hours a day. That leaves him eleven hours in which to go
down-town for the mail and do the chores around the house.
He stands it pretty well the first year. The second year is so long that
he begins to lay plans for his centennial, and about the third year he
takes to his bed and dies, with a sigh of relief. That's what leisure
does to a Homeburg man who isn't used to it. And that is one of the
reasons why, when I see a man in New York with nothing to do from
choice, I think of the sad army of the unemployed in Homeburg draping
themselves around the grain office every day in fine weather, and
wearing away the weary years in idleness because they are too old to
work, and don't have to, anyway.
Of late years we have been working earnestly to conserve our retired
farmers. They are fine men, and we hate to see them wasted. We have been
trying to reduce their leisure--just as a city man tries to reduce his
flesh. We elect them to everything possible. We have taught a number of
them how to play pool in the Commercial Club. We have started a farmers'
elevator, a farmers' bank and a planter factory, and have got them to
invest money. That has been a godsend, because it has kept a large
number of them busy and happy trying to save the said money. But where
we have saved one retired farmer, the automobile has saved ten. Whenever
one of our unemployed comes out with a machine, we sigh with relief and
stop worrying about him. It's just the same as if he had been given
wings and a world to explore. In summer, our retired farmers who have
autos loaf around the country from Indiana to Idaho and talk crops in
the garages of a thousand towns. And in winter they rebuild their cars,
and talk good roads. Twenty years ago you could talk good roads to a
farmer or bang him with a club, with the same result. But last year our
retired farmers organized a good roads association, and to amuse
themselves they have dragged the roads for miles around and have built a
mile of rock road leading south to the cemetery--where in the old April
days, as Henry Snyder says, the deceased was buried once, but the
mourners got buried twice--going out and coming back.
We have a real leisure class in Homeburg, however, outside of the
retired farmers, who really can't help themselves. Our genuine
metropolitan leisure class consists of DeLancey Payley and Gibb Ogle.
They are, as far as I know, the only two people in Homeburg who loaf
from choice year in and year out in perfect content. We have done our
best with both of them, but we have given up. Leisure is what they were
created for. It is a talent with them, and their only talent. They have
developed it to the best of their ability.
DeLancey's is the saddest case, because so much money was wasted on him.
Wert Payley is the richest man in our part of the country. He owns a
bank and one or two counties out West. He sent DeLancey East to school,
where he was educated regardless of expense or anything else and was
returned a few years ago a finished product, sublime, though a little
terrifying to look at, and reeking with knowledge of one kind or
another. I have heard it said that DeLancey can tell offhand what has
been the correct thing in dress for each of the last thirty-five years,
and that he can handle as many as fifteen articles of cutlery and
forkery at a dinner table with absolute accuracy.
DeLancey has been at home almost ten years now, and his chief mission
has been to ornament Homeburg and add to its elegance on state
occasions. His father had designed him for a captain of finance, and
when he first came home DeLancey was put in the bank in order that he
might work up by degrees into the bond business or some other auriferous
form of toil. Wert Payley almost had nervous prostration from overwork
that year, and in the end he had to give up. He couldn't carry his own
load and make DeLancey work too. It was too much. No human being should
be asked to do it. Wert often says that if he had had nothing else to do
he could have kept DeLancey at work at least part of the time, but that
he was too old to shoulder the task on top of his other duties. So
DeLancey left the bank, except as an enthusiastic check casher, and took
up his life work--I mean that, of course, figuratively. I mean his life
occupation--hang it, that won't do either! He took up his mission--the
work for which his ardent young soul was fitted. He began to specialize
in leisure.
For close to nine years DeLancey has loafed. It is a miracle to us. We
can't understand his endurance. Yet he thrives on it. Wert Payley has
given up trying to make him work, but he has taken what he considers to
be an awful revenge. He has refused to spend one cent for carfare.
DeLancey can hang around Homeburg until he dies, but if he wants to
leave, he must earn the money himself. And DeLancey hasn't been fifty
miles from Homeburg since he slipped the clutch out of his tired,
throbbing brain and let it rest, nine years ago.
We have to admire his ingenuity. He kills time so scientifically. They
say it takes him two hours to do himself up in the morning after he gets
out of bed, and that he has almost as many beautifying tools as an
actress. He doesn't get down-town before ten. It takes him from fifteen
minutes to half an hour to buy his morning cigar. That is, he talks to
McMuggins, the druggist, as long as Mac will stand for it. Mac has a
regular schedule. If Delancey buys a ten-cent cigar, Mac will talk with
him fifteen minutes. If he buys a fifteen-cent cigar, he will talk half
an hour, if business isn't too brisk. Mac keeps a box of fifteen-cent
cigars especially for DeLancey, but he says it is an awful risk. If
DeLancey were to die on him, he couldn't sell those cigars in a hundred
years.
The tellers at the bank are good for fifteen minutes or so after
DeLancey has bought his cigar; he strolls in and gossips with them
until his father begins to snort ominously in his little railed-off pen
marked "President." Cooney Simpson, the tailor, likes DeLancey, and they
talk clothes for half an hour almost every morning. Then it's noon, and
this is his hardest problem, because every one goes to dinner at noon
except the Payleys and Singers, who have luncheon at one. If DeLancey
can find Sam Singer, he is all right. But Sam, who used to loaf
enthusiastically with him, has rosy ideas about Mabel Andrews now, and
he is working hard in his father's bank and on the farms. It was a
bitter day for DeLancey when Sam went to work. It almost shook his faith
in idleness. But he stood firm.
Luncheon kills two hours for DeLancey, and then he goes up to the
Homeburg Commercial Club and shoots the pool balls around the table
until 4:30, waiting eagerly for some one to stop working and come to
play with him. Sometimes they come and sometimes they don't. If they
don't, he goes down to the hotel and talks with a traveling man. I often
see him in the lobby of the Delmonico, sitting in magnificent ease,
blowing large smoke rings and talking with an air of unconscious
grandeur to some eager-eyed drummer, who is delighted but mystified at
the ease with which he is breaking into the first families. DeLancey has
a quiet way of talking about the East and the great people thereof which
fools even us sometimes.
DeLancey makes his toilet after dinner at night and that of course kills
an hour or more. Then he calls on Madeline Hicks, old Judge Hicks's
daughter, when she will let him. He has an idea he would like to marry
her, but while she likes him, they say she can't bring herself to marry
a man of leisure and have the whole town sorry for her. But he takes her
to all the parties, and about once a week his father lets him have the
automobile, if the chauffeur doesn't want to use it. On other nights
DeLancey comes down-town and buys another cigar at the restaurant. It is
as good as a show to see DeLancey buy his evening cigar. You'd think he
was taking over a railroad, he chooses it with such care. The young
farmer boys and the workers in the factory come down-town at night and
loaf around the restaurants without any excuse. They have to kill the
time. But that would be too coarse work for DeLancey. He doesn't come
down-town to loaf--Oh, no! He has merely dropped in on his orbit. It
takes him half the evening to buy his cigar and smoke it, conversing as
he does so with a few selected citizens on the benefits of slim-cut
clothes and the origin of the pussy-cat hat.
Sometimes DeLancey can abduct some busy young chap and make him play a
round of golf on week-day afternoons, but not often. That's the
difference between our clubs and yours. We have clubs, but we don't use
them. We wouldn't think of spending time there if we could spend it at
business. Nothing is lonelier on week days than our golf club, and one
of the chief duties of the caretaker at the Commercial Club is to dust
off the reading table. We have our clubs, and that is the main object.
We know that they are there, and that we could enjoy them if we wanted
to. Perhaps we do want to. But it's a hard art to learn. And, oh, how
patiently and earnestly DeLancey is trying to teach us! If it were any
one but he, we might learn faster. But he sort of figures as a horrible
example. It's like a battered and yellowed wreck advocating cigarettes,
or a bald-headed barber pushing his own hair tonic.
Gibb Ogle, the other member of our leisure class, is a very different
kind of a bird. His art is more sublime than DeLancey's because he has
no one to support him. He has worked down to his present state from
nothing at all. He is a self-unmade man. With no resources, not even a
loving wife with a wash tub, he lives a life of perfect ease and
idleness. He doesn't even have to hunt for means of killing time, as
DeLancey does. Time with him dies a natural death. He is not implicated
in the sad event in any way. All he does is to watch its demise. He
watches whole hours pass away while leaning against the door-frame of
the Delmonico Hotel. Chet Frazier and Sim Bone got into an argument one
day, and to settle it they went over and took Gibb away from the
building. It didn't fall, and Sim won. Gibb has watched several thousand
hours expire while propping up the Q. B. & C. depot. He is the chief
spectator at every fire, runaway, dog fight and public event. He is a
movable landmark, as permanent as the Republican flagpole in the city
park. I have never yet gone down-town in the morning without seeing Gibb
on the street. And very seldom have I gone home at night, even in the
howling blizzards of winter, without passing Gibb leaning against the
warm bright show window of the last open place of business, and waiting
with placid greediness for one final event of some kind to transpire
before going to his well-earned repose.
Beside Gibb's leisure, DeLancey's is poor amateurish stuff. Gibb's total
income during the year would hardly exceed twenty-five dollars, and it
doesn't do him much good at that. When he gets any money, he eats it up
in the most determined and hasty fashion. I have seen him eat a dollar's
worth of ham sandwiches in an afternoon--because he had the dollar. What
he does between dollars is a town mystery. He doesn't beg. He is
believed by some to absorb sustenance from the air, like a plant. But I
happen to know that he absorbs a good deal of sustenance from the
Delmonico Hotel. He has attached himself to this hotel as a sort of
retainer, and through all its changes of ownership he has hung on. He
will not work, but he gives the place his moral support and speaks
highly of it to all comers. He will even carry a satchel across to the
depot, but only as an accommodation to the hotel. In return he asks
nothing and thus saves his proud spirit from the insult of a refusal.
But I think he has first pick of the scattered remains of the dinners
that leave the kitchen door whenever the cook is good-natured.