Early in the day the two foremen each visit the rival plants, ostensibly
to borrow some type and a little gasoline, but in reality to count the
advertisements and to see how late the rival sheet is going to be. All
afternoon the forces work feverishly, reports drifting in occasionally
to the effect that over in the other shop they are locking up the forms.
The minute the press turns in the _Democrat_ office, Ayers grabs the
first paper, folds it and saunters hastily over toward the _Argus_.
Sometimes he meets Simpson half way over with a copy of the _Argus_ in
his pocket, and sometimes he gets clear over and has a chance to swell
around for a minute with his new-born paper in plain sight, watching the
mad foreman lock up the forms. The first paper into the post-office gets
distributed first, while the subscribers of the other paper hang around
in a state of frenzy and waver in their allegiance in a manner to make
the stoutest heart quail. And one of the weekly diversions in Homeburg
is watching this race. If it isn't too late in starting, we hang around
and make mild bets on the result. One week old man Ayers and his
foreman will hurry out from the _Democrat_ office and trot hastily over
to the post-office carrying the week's issue of the paper between them
in a wash basket. And the next week Simpson and the office devil will
beat them to it. Now and then they will both appear at the same time and
race side by side, bareheaded, coatless, breathless, and full of hate. I
hear a good deal about the exertions to which your papers go to be on
the street first with extras, but I'll bet there has never been more
voltage in the competition here than there was in Homeburg the night old
man Ayers and young Simpson arrived at the post-office door at precisely
the same second and got their baskets and themselves in a hopeless jam.
Postmaster Flint had to appoint a peace conference to settle the
dispute.
Ayers is getting pretty old, and for several years we have been worrying
about his future. Since a cruel Government has decided that a newspaper
publisher must keep his subscription list paid up or go out of business,
times have been pretty hard for Ayers; formerly he could let a
subscription account run for ten years and then take a second-hand buggy
or a quarter of beef, or a few odd size grindstones on account; but of
late he has had to dun us every year, and of course that makes us mad,
and we quit his paper with great frequency and vim. I don't know what
would have happened to the old man if Wilson hadn't been elected. But
that, of course, has settled things for him. He will be our next
postmaster. Every one has conceded that except Pash Wade, Emery
Billings, Colonel Ackley, and Sim Askinson, who are also candidates.
However, old man Ayers's petition is as long as all the rest put
together, and when he is appointed and begins to draw down fifteen
hundred dollars a year for handing out his own paper to his
subscribers, we will sigh with relief, and Simpson's yells will be sweet
music in our ears.
If I had my way, I would put a clause in the Constitution giving all
third-class postmasterships to third-class editors, anyway. It's the
only chance they have of accumulating enough of a surplus to be able to
go into a store with their hats on one side and buy things like other
people.
VIII
THE HOMEBURG MARINE BAND
_Where Music is Cherished for its own Sweet Sake Regardless of
Dividends_
Where you New Yorkers get farthest ahead of us Homeburgers, Jim, is the
fact that you can go out and soak yourself in real, soul-hoisting music
whenever you feel like it--provided, of course, that you have the price
and that some speculator hasn't cornered the tickets, and that you can
get home at night in time to get dressed in time to go back to town, and
that you have sufficient nerve and endurance to go four rounds with your
celebrated subway in the same twenty-four hours.
You can't realize what having music constantly on tap means to a
pilgrim from a town where two concerts in a winter is a gorge, and where
about the only regular musical diversion is going to church on Sunday
morning and betting on where the veteran soprano in the choir is going
to hang on to the key or skid on the high turns. You laugh at me because
I can't eat down-town unless I am encouraged by a bull fiddle, and
because I gulp at free concert tickets like a young robin swallowing
worms. But if most of your life had been spent listening to Mrs. Sim
Estabrook jumping for middle C about as successfully as a dog jumps for
a squirrel in a hickory tree, you'd splash around in melody, too, while
you had the chance.
Of course, I don't mean to say that the music canneries don't do as big
a business out our way as they do anywhere. I'll bet they ship as much
as ten barrels of assorted masterpieces a month into Homeburg for our
graphophone cranks; and last winter Wimble Horn broke the piano-player
record by tramping out Tannhäuser in seven minutes flat. But while these
things educate us and enable us to roll our eyes in the right place in a
Wagner number, they don't satisfy the soul any more than souvenir cards
from Europe take away a thirst for travel. We want the real thing, and
year in and out we're music-hungry. We drive our young folks to the
piano and listen to them heroically until they get good, and then they
go away to the city where the gate receipts are better and leave us at
Lutie Briggs's mercy again. Time and time again the only thing that has
stood between Homeburg and a ghastly musical silence has been the
Homeburg Marine Band.
That's right! Laugh, darn you! What if Homeburg is twenty miles from the
nearest creek? Our band is a lot nearer salt water than your Café de
Paris is to France. And, besides, there are only three names for a
country band, anyway. If it isn't the Marine Band, it has to be the
Military Band, or the Silver Cornet Band. Chet Frazier, who is our
village cut-up, says that they named ours the Marine Band years ago,
after it had waded out to the cemetery on a wet Memorial Day through our
celebrated bottomless roads.
You can't realize what a comfort and pride a band is in a Class X town,
unless you have grown up in one. They say this isn't a musical country,
but its intentions are certainly good as far as brass bands go. Long
before an American town is big enough to have a post-office, its
citizens have either organized a brass band or are trying to get another
man to move in to complete a quorum. Life never gets so complicated out
on the grain elevator circuit that the station agent, school principal,
and the two rival blacksmiths, and the city marshal can't lug their
horns down-town once a week in the evening and soar sweetly off into
melody at band practice--that is, if they can get off on the same beat
during the evening.
I can hear our home band now--up over McMuggins' Drug Store on a summer
evening. It's hot--not hot enough to ignite the woodwork, but plenty
warm enough to fry eggs on the sidewalks--and the whole town is out on
the porches and lawns chasing a breeze, except the band. It is up in the
super-heated lodge room of the Modern Woodmen, huddled around two oil
lamps, because the less light it has the less heat will be generated,
and it is getting ready to practice the "Washington Post March" for the
Fourth of July parade. Our band has practiced the "Washington Post
March" for over twenty years, but while the band has altered greatly,
the grand old piece shows no sign of wear and is as fresh and
unconquerable as ever.
Querulous, complaining sounds come from the lodge room. The tenor horns
are crooning, and the bass horn blatting gently, while the clarionet
players are chasing each other up and down the scale, like squirrels
running round and round in a cage. The warming-up exercises are on. They
will continue until Frank Sundell shaves his last customer and gets up
to the hall with his trombone. You can tell when he comes. He pulls the
slide in and out a couple of times with an unearthly chromatic grunt,
and then there is a deep, pregnant silence. They are going to begin.
Usually they begin several times. It is as hard to get a band off
together in practice as it is to send a dozen horses from the wire. But
finally the bass catches up with the cornets, and the others sprint or
put on the brakes, and they land on the fourth or fifth beat together.
For a few minutes it's great. They go over the first four bars in a
bunch, and old Dobbs gets the half note and change of key in the bass,
which usually floors him, like a professional. It is a proud and happy
moment for the leader. But it doesn't last. It's too good to be true. Ad
Smith strikes a falsetto with his cornet and stops for wind; this
rattles his partner, who can't carry the air alone to save him. Dobbs
sits down on the wrong key in the bass. The tenors weaken, discouraged
by the cornet, and everybody hesitates. A couple of clarionets lose the
place and get to wandering around at random, creating terrible havoc.
The altos stop, being in doubt. Ad recovers and launches out with
terrific vim half a beat behind. There is a rally, but it is too late.
You can hear fragments of five different keys, and presently every one
stops except Mahlon Brown, who plays the bass drum and always bangs away
through fire or water until some one turns him off.
Then there is silence--a good deal of it. We all know what is
happening. Sim Askinson, the leader, is making a few well-chosen
remarks, and each player is turning around in his chair and going over
the faults of his neighbor in the most kindly and thorough fashion. Ed
Smith empties out his baritone horn and takes a little practice run, and
then they commence to begin--or begin to start--or start to
commence--whatever it is, all over again. But when they stop at ten
o'clock, they haven't played the "Washington Post March" clear through
in any one heat.
Doesn't sound encouraging for the Fourth, does it? But, pshaw, that's
only practice! When the big day comes and the boys put on their caps and
coats and such trousers as will come nearest to blending with the said
coats and march down the street, do they falter and blow up in the back
stretch? Not much. They canter through that air as if they had been born
whistling it. There's a wonderful inspiration in marching to a band
man--give him a horn, a ragged slip of music, and about four miles of
road, and he will prance down the street, climbing over ruts, wading
through mud, reading at night by the light of a torch carried by a boy
who is twenty feet away fighting with another boy; and he will blow his
immortal soul into his horn for hours at a stretch without missing a
note.
Part of the reason for the difference at home is because we always carry
a few amateurs, who are privileged to come in at practice and do all the
damage they can, but who have to keep mighty quiet on the march. They
can carry their horns, puff out their cheeks and look as grand as they
please, but if they'd presume to cut loose with some real notes and
smear up a piece, they'd be fired in no time.
We have always been mighty proud of our Homeburg band. Nobody knows how
old it is. We think it arrived with the first inhabitants. These are
all dead, but some of the original horns are still doing duty, and the
brass on them is worn thin and almost bright. Our band is much better
than the average band. That's one of the great Homeburg comforts.
Whenever we get blue about the muddy streets and the small stores, and
the great need of a sewage system, and the disgraceful condition of the
stove in the Q. B. & C. Depot, we think of our band and are comforted.
It has at least twenty members right along, most of whom can play their
instruments, and Sim Askinson, who is a professional music teacher, has
conducted it off and on for twenty-five years. Citizens from other towns
get mighty jealous when they come down to Homeburg Thursday evenings
during the summer and listen to the magnificent concerts which our band
gives. I've seen as many as three hundred rigs around the public square
those nights. And when our band practices up on "Poet and Peasant,"
which is its star piece, and goes off to the big band contests which
break loose in the summer and create great havoc, large numbers of our
citizens go along and bet their good money in a manner which keeps the
town poor for months afterward.
I don't know anything more magnificent than the way our band plays "Poet
and Peasant" with Sim Askinson leading, Ad Smith and Henry Aultmeyer
duetting perfectly for once with their cornets, and the clarionet
section eating up the fast parts in a manner that sends goose flesh up
and down your spine. We're head and shoulders above any other band that
enters the contests, but that's the trouble. The judges are never
educated up to "Poet and Peasant." They always give the prize to the
Paynesville Military Band, which has a five-foot painted bass drum and
has to play "Over the Waves" for a concert piece, because they haven't
got a decent cornet player in town. Sometime they will get a real
musician to judge these contests, and then we will win by seventeen
toots.
You may not believe it, Jim, but I am an alumnus of the Homeburg band.
Didn't suspect that I was anything but an ordinary citizen, did you? But
it's a fact. I am a band man. I'm too modest to brag about it, but I was
carrying a horn and had a uniform before I was eighteen. I suppose there
is nothing, not even the fire department, that fills a small town boy
with such wild ambition as a band. When I was twelve, I used to watch
that band in its more sublime passages, feeling that if I ever could
become great enough to play in it, others could run the country and win
its great battles with no jealousy from me. The snare drummer at that
time was a boy of sixteen. Of course, being snare drummer in the band,
he didn't mix around much with the common kids, and I didn't know him.
But I watched him until my ribs swelled out and cracked with envy; and I
used to wonder how fortune ever happened to reach down and yank that
particular boy so far up into the rarefied upper regions of glory.
When I was fourteen, I went after his job. But I never could learn to
play the snare drum. You have to learn to "roll," and I couldn't make my
left hand behave. I tried a year and would probably be trying yet but
for the fact that when Ed Norton left town, he traded me his ruinous old
alto horn for three dollars and a dog. There was about as much music
left in it as there is in a fish horn, but I was as delighted as if it
had been a pipe organ, and when the folks wouldn't let me practice at
home on it, I took it out in the country and kept it in Smily Garrett's
barn. After a while I learned how to fit my face into the mouthpiece in
just the right way, and as the sounds I made became more human, I sort
of edged into town, until finally I was practicing in our own barn. And
the next year Askinson let me come into the band and "pad" as second
alto during the less important engagements.
I played with the band for five years, and while I never got out of the
"thump section," which was what the trombonists and snare drummers and
the other aristocrats of the band call the altos, I had all the fun and
adventures that a high-priced musician could have had, and was perfectly
happy. I can still remember with pride the deep-green looks on the faces
of Pete Amthorne and Billy Madigan and Snoozer Ackley, as they watched
me marching grandly down the street lugging my precious old three
bushels of brass in my arms, and "ump-umping" until my eyes stuck out of
my head. Of course they didn't know that most of the time I was
watching a change in my notes half a bar away and wondering if I could
make it without falling all over the treble clef. I looked like Sousa to
them, and when I leaned grandly back in my chair at the band concerts
and borrowed a page of music from my neighbor--said page being mostly
Hebrew to me--I felt like a Senator or Chief Justice letting the common
herd have a look at him.
I pity the poor city boys who have to grow up nowadays and depend on
taxicabs and vaudeville for their excitement. Belonging to the band was
more fun than belonging to the baseball team or the torchlight brigade
or anything else. We got in on everything. They couldn't pull off a
rally or celebration, or even a really successful church social, without
us. I might say that the importance of a Homeburg citizen in the old
days was determined by whether or not the Homeburg Band escorted him to
his tomb. When great doings occurred in the neighboring towns, plain
citizens dug down in their pockets for car-fare, and then dug painfully
down once more for our car-fare. When an ordinary Homeburger wanted to
help boost McKinley to victory by parading in some distant town with a
torch, it cost him five dollars and a suit of clothes. But we not only
went free, but got two dollars apiece for plowing a wide furrow of glory
down the streets between rows of admiring eyes.
Those two dollars counted a lot in those days, too. It looked like an
easy income to us. All we had to do to earn it was to beg off from our
employers for half a day, travel thirty miles or so by train, usually
standing up and protecting our horns from the careless mob, march eight
or ten miles over unknown streets, picking out dry places underfoot and
notes from a piece of music bobbing up and down in the shadows above our
horns, and then drive home across country after midnight, getting home
in time to go to work in the morning. Why, it was just like finding
money; I've never had so much fun earning it since. I started once to
figure out how many miles our band marched during the first Bryan
campaign, but I gave it up. We never felt it at that time, but it made
me so tired counting that I quit with a distinct footsore feeling.
The most worrisome task about a Homeburg band was keeping it alive. I
suppose all small town bands have the same trials. We worked against
incredible difficulties. If city people had the same devotion to music
which we displayed, you would have a ten-thousand-piece philharmonic
orchestra in New York playing twenty-four hours a day for glory. We were
always building up our band with infinite pains, only to have Fate jerk
the gizzard out of it just as perfection was in sight. Talent was
scarce, and the rude, heartless city was forever reaching down into
Homeburg and yanking some indispensable players away. Of course there
was always a waiting list of youngsters who would coax a few hoarse
toots out of the alto horn, and we always had a bunch of kid
clarionetists who would sail along grandly through the soft parts and
then blow goose notes whenever they hit the solo part. But try as we
would, we could never get more than two cornets. One of these was Ad
Smith. He was a bum cornetist, but his brother Ed was a good baritone,
and we had to have both or none. The other was usually some anxious
young student who got along pretty well on plain work, but who would
come down the chromatic run in the "Chicago Tribune March" like a fat
man falling down the cellar stairs with an oleander plant.
As for trombones, there was a positive fatality among them; we were
always losing them. Trombone players have to be born, anyway, and there
was no hope of developing one. Besides, the neighbors wouldn't allow it.
Young Henry Wood showed promise once, but after his father had listened
to him for about six months, he took the slip end of his horn away from
him and beat carpets with it, until it was extinct as far as melody was
concerned.
For a year we had Mason Peters, who was a wonder on the slide trombone.
But he was only getting twelve dollars a week in Snyder's Shoe Emporium,
and Paynesville, which never tired of putting up dirty tricks on us,
hustled around and got him an eighteen dollar job up there--after which
they came down to Homeburg at the first opportunity with their band to
parade Peters before our eyes. It would have been a grand success if
they hadn't put Peters in the front row. He lived for his art, Peters
did, paying no attention to anything but his trombone, and besides he
was quite deaf. He got confused about the line of march, and when the
band swung around the public square he kept right on up Main Street all
alone, playing in magnificent form and solitary grandeur while the band
swung off the other way. The whole town followed him with tears of joy,
and he traveled two blocks before he became aware of the vast and
appalling silence behind him; then he kept right on for the city limits
on the run. It was a great comfort to us, and by the time we had gotten
through apologizing to the Paynesville boys for following Peters under
the impression that he was the real band, they had offered to fight us
singly or in platoons.
We used to watch every new citizen like Russian detectives, only we
searched them for horns instead of dynamite. Several times a trombonist
came to town, and music revived noticeably. But none of them lasted.
Trombonists seem to be temperamental, and when they are not changing
jobs they are resigning from the band because they are not allowed to
play enough solos. Our greatest bonanza was a quiet chap named Williams,
who came to town to work in the moulding room of the plow factory. After
he had been there a week, we discovered that he had a saxophone. No one
had ever heard or eaten a saxophone, but we looked it up, and when we
found out what it was, we made a rush for him. At the next practice he
appeared with a bright silver instrument covered with two bushels of
keys and played a solo which sounded like three clarionets with the
croup. We wept for joy and elected him leader on the spot.
This caused Sim Askinson to resign, of course, and he took Ad and Ed
Smith with him, and they remained in dignified and awful silence for two
years. But we didn't care. One saxophone was worth five baritones, and
while Williams was in town, we were an object of envy to all of the
other bands around. We changed our name to the Homeburg Saxophone Band,
and the way we rubbed it into Paynesville was pitiful. He was a little
fellow, Williams was, and short of wind, which caused him to gasp a good
deal during the variation parts. But he was willing. There was no shirk
about him. After a year our program usually consisted of eleven
saxophone solos and some other piece which could be done almost entirely
on the saxophone, and the jealous Paynesvillains used to ask why we used
nineteen men to play the rests when one man could have produced as much
silence at far less expense.
Those were glorious years; but of course they didn't last. Williams got
to resigning at the foundry just for the pleasure of having us come down
and plead with the proprietor to raise his pay. Finally he resigned so
much that the proprietor fired him, and then we had to take our caps in
hand and wheedle the Smiths and Askinson back into the band. I haven't
belonged for years, but they are still there. When I drop in at
practice, as many of the alumni do, Askinson greets me cordially and
takes some young cub's horn away from him, so I can sit in. It is just
like old times, especially when Ed Smith lays down his horn after a
slight altercation with some one and goes home never to come back--just
as he has done for the last thirty years.
That's the worst of music. One's art, you know, has so much influence
over one's temper. To see our band soaring majestically down Main Street
and playing "Canton Halifax" in one great throbbing rough-house of
melody you would never believe that anything but brotherly love existed
between the players. As a matter of fact, we never wasted any harmony
among ourselves. We didn't have any to spare. It took all we had to
produce the music. For twenty-five years the Smiths and Cooney Simpson,
who plays first clarionet, have been at swords' points, each with a
faction behind him. Cooney says it's a shame that a good band must limp
along with a cornetist who always takes three strikes to hit a high
note, and Ed Smith says Cooney wants to be leader and will not be
satisfied until he can play the solo and bass parts at once on his
clarionet. I can see Ed Smith now, after the band has run aground in
practice, taking his horn down and glaring around at Cooney.
"What you gobstick players need is a time-table," says he, "instead of
notes. Come in on the A about eight-fifteen. If you can do that well,
we'll try to struggle along."
"Don't get forte," Cooney replies cheerfully. "If you'd try to follow
both those cornets instead of rambling along by yourself, you'd split,
sure."
"Better play cornet, too, Cooney," says Ad Smith, whirling around.
"You've got enough mouth for both."
"Well, we ought to have a cornetist," says Cooney, "it's what we've
needed for years."