pride, and performs this humiliating act in secret. But grocers tell me
that he is always offering to dispose of broken-up crackers, stale
cheese and old mackerel. "I'll just carry that out for you," he says.
And they understand and let him do it. One night as he hurried past me,
a package dropped from under his coat and broke at my feet. It was
food--dry bread and a bologna skin with a little meat in the end. He
stopped and told me how hard it was to find food for a dog in which he
was interested. But that was a fib. With all his faults Gibb never
maintained a dog in idleness.
In summers Gibb leads a care-free, happy life, sunning himself all day
and sleeping comfortably at night in any one of a dozen places. He is
our village grasshopper, taking no thought of the chill future. How he
lives through our fierce winters is a mystery. He sleeps in barns. He
sleeps on the coal in the electric light power house. If the clerk at
the hotel happens to be a friend of his, he curls up in a chair in the
lobby. Sometimes all of these fail him. I have heard that he spent one
winter in an empty room over a store, and thawed out his toes on
several mornings. We are always afraid some crackling January dawn will
find Gibb frozen hard on the streets, and it is a relief when spring
comes and he begins to fatten up a little and drink in sunshine again.
We'd like to send Gibb to the county home. Some of us are even willing
to contribute to his support, scandalous as it would be. But it is hard
to do, because Gibb is no pauper. He is a gentleman of leisure with the
dignity of an Indian. His worn suits are neat, and he is as dapper with
a battered hat and a four-year-old celluloid collar as if he spent real
money on his wardrobe. He chooses his life and lives it without
complaint. Periodically we strive heroically to make him work. The boys
at the planter factory, who are a rough lot but have some hold on Gibb
because they entertain him out of their lunch boxes, kidnap him about
twice a year and drag him in to the superintendent to get a job for
him. Gibb protests frantically that he has business which can't be
neglected--that he is just closing a deal for a good position at the
hotel--that he is going away on a trip--but nothing helps him. He
accepts the job with ill-concealed horror, and the factory boys climb up
on the roof of the main building and hoist a flag. We all know what it
means. Gibb is working again. And we all know what will happen next.
About two days later Gibb will be limping to the factory very late with
his off-foot done up in an enormous comforter. "That's what you have
done, boys," he will say with simple dignity, "you've hurt that old sore
foot of mine. It's never been right since I hurt it with the fire
company. It's in awful shape now. I guess I'll lose it at last. You
oughtn't to have done it, boys. Goodness knows, I'd have worked all
these years if I'd had any foot to speak of."
Then he goes in and resigns--after which the foot recovers in great
haste, and Gibb stands on it relentlessly twelve hours a day in the old
way, while he watches the world go round and waits for the judgment day.
You'd think from the way we hammer at both DeLancey and Gibb to go to
work that they would hang together, being in the same class. But they
don't. In fact they have the greatest contempt for each other. DeLancey
will not speak to Gibb, and thinks it is a crime that he isn't sent to
the stone pile; while Gibb speaks of DeLancey in pitying accents as a
young man who ought to know better than to waste his time herding a
little white pill into a hole in a cow pasture. Gibb is very severe on
the frivolities of the prosperous. He can't bear to see them frittering
away their time.
That's our leisure class in Homeburg, and it isn't growing. If it was
we'd be worried, and the Commercial Club would hold meetings about it.
And I'm just telling you these things so that you'll see why I am so
warped and foolish regarding Williston; it's just my small town
ignorance--My, I wish that chap would get a job!
VI
HOMEBURG'S WORST ENEMY
_How Old Man Opportunity Stands Outside the Town and Beckons to her
Greatest Men_
You don't say, Jim! Gosh, let me look! Where? Behind the big fellow in
the two-gallon plug hat? There--I see him! Yes, sir! It's he! I could
tell him anywhere. Do you suppose we could get up nearer? What, go up in
the elevator with him? Say, I haven't the nerve. No, I don't want--This
is close enough--Why, there isn't even a crowd! You mean to say he comes
down here just like this right along? Do you see him often?
Why, when I go home and tell the boys I watched Teddy Roosevelt go down
the street common as dirt and could have gone up in the same elevator
with him, they'll want me to give a lecture in the Woodmen Hall. It
certainly beats all what you can see in New York for nothing.
That's where you have all the luck, Jim--you big city folks. You keep
your interesting people at home; there's nowhere bigger for them to go.
No matter how famous or successful they are, they have to stick around
and mingle unless they get Europitis of the intellect. When you grow up
with a chum in New York and he discovers a talent that has been kicking
around in his garret ever since he was born, you don't lose him. He just
stays at home and grows up to fit the town. But when I want to see my
old Homeburg playmates who have succeeded, I have to go to New York or
Chicago or San Francisco, or some other big place where old Opportunity
keeps a wrecking crew busy all the time beating in doors. Opportunity
doesn't come into a small town and knock. He stands outside and beckons.
Life in Homeburg is one long bereavement because of this fact. Seems as
if the world was always looking Homeburg men over, the way a housewife
looks over an asparagus patch, and yanking out the ones who stick up a
little higher than the rest. We don't worry about the good who die young
in Homeburg; but the interesting who go early and forget to come back
make us sad and sore. No sooner does a Homeburg man begin to broaden out
and get successful and to hoist the town upward as he climbs himself,
than we begin to grieve. We know what is coming. Presently he will go
down to the _Democrat_ office and insert a notice, advertising for sale
a seven-room house with gas and water, good cistern, orchard with
bearing trees, good barn and milch cow, cement walks and watertight
cellar. And he will sell that place at a sacrifice, which he can well
afford, and go off to the city, where he will learn to wear a fur-lined
coat, kick about the financial legislation and visit us on Christmas Day
once per decade.
I sometimes wonder what Homeburg would be like if all her bright boys
and girls should come back. Don't suppose the town could hold them at
all. It would be stretched out of shape in a week. But it would be a
glorious place to live in, and wouldn't we shine in art and music and
politics and finance--to say nothing of baseball! Suppose we had Forrest
Brady back home, catching for the Homeburg team! He gets seven thousand
dollars a year from Boston now; but I remember when he helped put dents
in Paynesville baseball pride for nothing, and would pay some youngster
a quarter to hustle baggage at the depot in his absence. And suppose the
Congregational choir still had Mary Saunders! Why, we could charge a
dollar a seat for ordinary services, and people would come down from
Chicago to attend! When I think what she gets for one concert now, and
then think how long the Ladies' Aid Society has been working to paint
the church and haven't made it yet, it makes me wish we could put
Homeburg on wheels and haul it after some of our distinguished children.
And what if we had Alex McQuinn to write up the _Democrat_ again? Every
month we almost ruin ourselves at home buying all the magazines he
writes for; but when he was a fat young thing in spectacles hunting
locals and trying to write funny things for the _Democrat_, he wasn't
appreciated at all. Old Judge Hicks, who had no sense of humor, chased
him several miles once for telling how he tried to stop the 4:11 train
by yelling "Whoa" at it. And Editor Ayers had to fire Alex to keep the
peace.
When Rollin Derby, who draws pictures for your New York paper, went to
school, he could climb a tree by digging his bare toes into the rough
bark, but was not otherwise distinguished. When Maurice Gadby was a boy
in Homeburg, he went barefooted in summer with the rest of us, and who
could have guessed that he would grow up to give tango teas for your
four hundred and only allow the better quality of them to pay him
twenty-five dollars per cup at that? But the career that amuses me most
is Jack Nixon--"Shinner" Nixon, we used to call him. He commands a
battleship for a living now; and Homeburg is exactly seven miles from
the nearest stream that is navigable by a duck. We used to walk out to
that stream Saturday mornings, spend four hours building a dam and then
swim painfully on our elbows and knees in the puddle we had made until
dark, but Shinner wouldn't go in. He was a regular young Goethals when
it came to dam building, but he abhorred water, especially behind the
ears.
Back of my generation the batting average was just about as good. It
seemed to have been the fashion of Homeburg boys of thirty years ago to
go out and run Nebraska politically. Two governors and a representative
have come from our town. If we had them here now, we wouldn't have to
fight so desperately to get a county surveyor or coroner on the ticket
every four years. Samuel P. Wiggins, who now lives in a stone hut
covering an acre in Chicago and owns a flock of flour mills, was once
Sam Wiggins, who bought grain in our town and married the daughter of
one of our most reliable washerwomen. She comes back occasionally now,
and we can't see but that she's as nice as she used to be when she
hauled our family wash home in a little wagon every Saturday night.
Being rich hasn't hurt her at all, though it has spoiled her figure
beyond the utmost and most heartrending efforts of her clothes to
conceal.
Then there's Mrs. Maysworth. When she comes down from Chicago for a
visit, the old town fairly hums for a month. We pick up our interest in
art and woman's suffrage and cheap trips to Europe and Dante's
_Inferno_; the Shakespeare Club is revived, the bookstore sells its copy
of Browning, and the tone of the afternoon teas goes up about two
hundred per cent. Mrs. Maysworth was the ruling spirit of a little bunch
of prosperous Homeburg people who lived at the end of Milk Street--we
used to call it the cream end of Milk Street. When they were with us,
Homeburg was called the Athens of the Steenth Congressional District. We
heard singers and lecturers, who jumped towns of fifty thousand on
either side of us. We had state presidents of Women's Federations and
Church Societies. We had a free library before Mr. Carnegie had a bank
account. North Milk Street established it, and every Saturday afternoon
the muddy feet of the tough south side kids scuffled over Mrs.
Maysworth's hardwood floors, the first west of Chicago, while their
owners drew out books, the said library being located in an extinct
conservatory, which protruded from the house like a large wart.
Homeburg was a Mecca of learning and refinement in those days; and then
six of these families pulled out in the same year and moved to Chicago,
where they could soak up a little more culture instead of giving away
all they had. They left a chasm in our midst as big as the Grand Canyon.
It never has been filled--for me at least. I feel, when I wander up that
fine old shady street, past those houses filled with people who are only
as wise as I am, as if I were wandering through the deserted haunts of
an ancient and irreplaceable civilization.
That's the way it goes with us--one bereavement after another. It's
mighty hard to be a mother of sons in Homeburg. I worked in the
post-office for a year once--handed out mail--and I got to know just
exactly what most of the mothers in town wanted. I could please them
with a new magazine and mystify them with a circular or a business
letter. But if I wanted to light them up until they took the shadows out
of the corners as they went out, I would give them a letter from a son,
way off somewhere, making good. The best of them didn't write any too
often. Once a week is pretty regular, I suppose, from the other end; but
you should see the mother begin to come in hungry again the second day
after her letter came. And when a boy came home successful and
prosperous, and his proud mother towed him down Main Street on pretense
of getting him to carry a spool of thread home for her, it used to go
to my heart to see the wistful looks of her women friends. There is
hardly a family in Homeburg of the right age which hasn't a grown-up son
off at war somewhere--fighting failure. It's grand when they win; but I
hate to think of some of our boys who haven't come back.
If it's hard on the mothers, it's even harder on the Homeburg girls.
They say there are one hundred thousand old maids in Massachusetts. I'll
bet that's just about the number of Massachusetts young men who have
gone West or somewhere, and haven't remembered the things they said at
parting as well as the girls did. We've got plenty of girls in Homeburg
who are getting intimately acquainted with the thirties--fine girls,
still pretty, bright, and keeping up with the world. Young men come into
town and do their best to get on a "thou-beside-me" footing, but somehow
the girls don't seem to marry. At the root of almost every case there's
an old Homeburg boy. Maybe he's making good somewhere, and they're both
waiting until he does. Maybe he isn't making good and is too proud to
ask her to wait. Maybe she's waiting alone--because some other girl was
handier in the new place. And maybe it wasn't a case of wait at all,
only the boy who went away looked better to some Homeburg girl than any
of those who stayed at home. That was the case with Sam Flanburg and
Minnie Briggs a few years ago.
Sam is on the Chicago Board of Trade and is one of our old-time boys.
Two years ago he came back, roaringly prosperous, to visit for the first
time since he had left, and pretty suddenly he discovered to his
amazement that on packing up ten years before he'd left a pearl of great
price behind, said pearl being Minnie. In other words he fell in love
over his ears with her, and Minnie, who was one of our very nicest
girls, with a disposition like triple distilled extract of charity,
treated him like a dog. He stayed around for a month cluttering up the
Briggs's front porch day and night, while Minnie put up an imitation of
haughty indifference and careless frivolity which was as good as a show
for every one in town except Sam, who couldn't see through it. That's
one of our small town assets--you get to look on at most of the love
affairs. We watched Minnie and Sam with our hearts in our mouths for
fear she'd carry it too far and lose him, for every one had it straight
from Mary Askinson, who is intimately acquainted with a close friend of
Minnie's old school chum, that Minnie had been in love with Sam since
they graduated from the high school together. It was all we could do
from breaking in and interfering, especially when Sam went off his feed
and began to throw out ugly talk about going to the Philippines or some
place where fever can be gotten cheap. But one morning Sam came
down-town, and the first man who saw his face called up his wife and
told her the good news. Talk about extra editions for distributing news!
Before a city paper could have gotten an extra on the street, five
intimate friends of Minnie's had dropped in casually to see her, and
when they saw her face, of course they fell on her neck. Sam told Chet
Frazier next day that it made him so mad to think he'd lived twenty
years in the same town with Minnie and had never appreciated his
blessings that he felt like climbing Pikes Peak and kicking himself off.
There's Mary Smith. She's our prize old maid and dresses like a mail
sack full of government seeds, but they say she was the prettiest girl
in Homeburg when young Cyrus McCord went to Chicago to carve out his
future so that he could come home and marry her. But Cyrus didn't carve
out his future. He married it instead, and Mary is almost fifty now,
living alone and getting peculiar, like so many of our lonely old folks
do.
Taking it all around, you can't blame us for feeling a little bit
hostile to the big grabby towns which reach out like tax collectors
every year and take a tithe of our boy and girl crop--first choice too.
But of course we're enormously proud of our Homeburg people who go out
and help run the world, and we watch their careers like hawks. When
Chester Arnett was running for a state office out West, I'll bet twenty
Homeburg families subscribed for a Denver paper to read about him; and
when Deacon White was making his great plunges in Wall Street, Homeburg
looked at the financial page of the Chicago papers first and then read
the baseball. We're as happy over their success as if they were our
children--but it's always embarrassing for a little while when a
Homeburg man who has made good comes back to visit in the old town.
We're aching to rush up and wring his arm off, but we want to know how
he feels about it first. One or two experiences have made us gun-shy. We
can't forget Lyla Enbright, who moved away with her family years ago and
married a national bank or something of the kind in the East. She didn't
come home for ten years, but finally the father died and Lyla came back
to sell off some property. A lot of us had made mud pies with Lyla, and
while she hadn't shown any great genius in that or anything else, she
was jolly and we liked her, so we tried to rush up and greet her
rapturously.
Those who didn't do it say it was one of the funniest things that ever
happened in Homeburg, but I couldn't see it at the time. I was one of
the rushers. Lyla waited until my outstretched hand was within reaching
distance, and then she pulled a lorgnette on me. Say, Jim, did you ever
get right squarely in range of both barrels of an honest-for-God
lorgnette with about a thousand dollars worth of dry goods and a pinch
of brains behind it? If my turn ever comes to face a Gatling gun I hope
to march right up to it like a little man--but lorgnettes? No! Any
hostile army could lick Homeburg by aiming lorgnettes at it. I gave one
look at the thing and fell over myself in heaps getting away. I wouldn't
speak to Sim Bone for a week because he laughed. But after I had
recovered a little, I hunted up Chet Frazier in a hurry and told him
Lyla wanted to see him. By that I got even with Chet for about a dozen
practical jokes. When he got in range of that lorgnette, he said "Gosh!"
and actually ran. Then we survivors lined up and got some comfort out of
it, watching the rest get theirs.
As I said, Lyla and one or two others who have brought home their
prosperous and expanded corporal beings, and nothing else to speak of,
have made us a little timid about greeting our successful Prods. We hang
around all ready for action, but we need encouragement. We wouldn't
speak first for a farm. We wait for some calloused gabbler to break the
ice. Gibb Ogle usually does it. Gibb would act as a reception committee
for the Angel Gabriel without a quiver. He's always on the street,
anyway, propping up some building or other, and he is always willing to
waddle up to a returned governor or financier or rising young business
man, and stick out his unwashed paw, while we hold our breath and wait
for the result.
As a rule it's cheering. Our Homeburg boys don't fall down once in
twenty times. No matter who the visitor is, he grabs Ogle's hand and
yells: "Why, hello, Gibb, you fat old scoundrel, how's your sore foot?"
Then we crowd around and fight for the next turn, and go home and
hastily spread the news that So-and-so has come home big and prosperous
as all get-out, and not spoiled a bit.
Sometimes they don't come back at all, of course, and nervy scouts who
look up the delinquents in their city offices come back with badly
frosted ears and spread the warning. But there are few of these. Even
President Banks of the great F. C. & L. Railroad System, who played on
the Homeburg baseball nine thirty-five years ago, will stop puzzling
over the financial situation long enough to give the glad hand to a
Homeburg man during office hours. Of course I don't mean that any one
from Homeburg can break in on him and pile his desk full of feet. You
have to be a thirty-third degree Homeburger from his standpoint; that
is, you or your father must have stolen apples with him--I belong to the
inner lodge. My father and President Banks ate a peck of peaches one
night in Frazier's orchard, between them, and got half way through the
pearly gates before they were yanked back by two doctors. That's why
Banks took me to lunch when I went to call on him last month. If the
Government would let him, he'd give me a pass home.
I'll never forget the day when Banks came back to Homeburg. He hadn't
been back for thirty years and hadn't the slightest intention of coming
either, as he admitted afterward. But he was going through on his
special car, and old Number Eleven, which was hauling him, performed the
most intelligent act of its career. The engine broke down right at the
depot, and when Banks found he was in for an hour or two, he got out and
strolled down Main Street to see the town in which he had begun his
life.
It was a most depressing occasion. No one who had ever come back had
changed as much as Banks. If he had worn a pigtail and talked Choctaw,
he couldn't have grown farther away. It wasn't his fault. He tried his
best. But he hadn't talked our language for years. He couldn't get down
near enough to converse. He passed most of his playmates without
remembering them, but when he saw Pash Wade's sign, he went in and shook
hands with him. About forty of us came in to trade and watched him do
it. It was pathetic. They stood there like strangers from different
lands, Banks trying to unbutton his huge, thick ulster of dignity, and
not succeeding, and Pash trying to say something that would interest
Banks--along the line of high finance of course--state of the country,
etc. They gave it up in a minute, and Banks went out. He found Pelty
Amthorne and shook hands with him. Pelty is pretty loquacious as a rule,
but he couldn't talk to Banks--not that Banks, anyway. He'd never seen
him before. He said "How-dy-do," and, "It's a long time since you were
here," and Banks said, "It is indeed. I hope you and your family are
well." And then Pelty oozed hastily back into the crowd with a relieved
air as if he had done his duty, and Banks looked bored and took out his
watch. But just then Sim Askinson came up all out of breath and burst
through the crowd.
Sim is little and meek and has a hard time holding his own, even in our
peaceful world. But when he saw Banks, he snorted like a war horse and
grew up three inches.
"Hello, Pudge, you old son-of-a-gun!" he said, with both hands in his
pockets.
"Hello, Sim!" said Banks, sort of startled.
"Where'd you come from?" demanded Sim, "and why ain't you come before?
You're a nice friendly cuss, you are. Sucked any turkey eggs lately?"
"No, you knock-kneed dishwasher," said Banks as a grin began to edge its
way across his face. "Have you tried to sell any more toads for
bullfrogs?"
"No, nor I ain't fought out any bumble-bees' nest since the time you got
one up your pant leg and pretty near pounded yourself to death with a
ball bat," said Sim. "Can you still run as fast as the time Wert Payley
and I dared you to ride Malstead's bull?"
"Where's Wert?" demanded Banks. They were shaking hands now, using all
four of them. "Say, I've got to see him and Wim. Horn. I've got to leave
in a few minutes."
"Like fun you have," growled Sim, linking arms with Banks. "You seem to
think some one's chasing you. You're going to stay all night, that's
what you're going to do."
"I am not," said Banks; "and I wouldn't stay with you, anyway. You had a
garter snake in the bed last time I slept with you. I've got to see some
more of the boys, though."
"He thinks he's going away in a few minutes," said Sim to Wert Payley,
who had heard his name and was now shaking hands with Banks. "Why, the
old fat snide, nobody wants to see him outside of Homeburg. He's going
to get a free supper to-night. Remember Sadie Warren?"