A LONG WAYS FROM HOME
Two days of downpour greeted us at Galveston while we waited for our
car to arrive. It was the climax of three months of rain which had
followed three drouthy years. The storm swept waves and spray over the
breakwater toward the frame town which has sprung up hopefully after
twice being devoured by the sea monster. A city of khaki tents dripped
mournfully under the drenching; wet sentries paced the coast-line, and
looked suspiciously at two ladies--all women are ladies in Texas--who
cared to fight their way along the sea-wall against such a gale. Toby
and I were bored, when we were not eating Galveston’s oysters.
The city, pleasant enough under the sun, had its usual allotment of
boulevards, bronze monuments, drug stores, bungalows of the modest
and mansions of the local plutocrats, but it had not the atmosphere
of New Orleans. We were soon to learn that regardless of size, beauty
or history, some towns have personality, others have about as much
personality as a reception room in a Methodist dormitory.
Next day, news came that our boat had docked, and telephoning revealed
that the car was safely landed. There are joys to telephoning in the
South. Central is courteous and eager to please, and the voices of
strangers with whom one does curt business at home become here so soft
and winning that old friendships are immediately cemented, repartee
indulged in, and the receiver hung up with a feeling of regret. That is
the kind of voice the agent for the Mallory Line had. To be sure, it
took us a day to get the car from the dock to the street, when it would
have taken half an hour at home, but it was a day devoted to the finer
shades of intercourse and good fellowship. I reached the dock half an
hour before lunch time.
“Yes’m, the office is open, but I reckon yo’ won’t find any hands to
move yo’ car,” was the accurate prediction of the official to whom I
applied. “Pretty nearly lunch time, yo’ know.”
So I waited, filling in time by answering the guarded questions the
watchman put to me. I was almost as fascinating an object of attention
to him as his Bull Durham, though I must admit that when there was a
conflict between us, I never won, except once, when he asked where the
car and I came from.
“Massachusetts?” Bull Durham lost.
A great idea struggled for expression. I could see him searching for
the right, the inevitable word. I could see it born, as triumph and
amusement played over his features. Then caution--should he spring it
all at once or save it for a climax? Nonchalantly, as if such epigrams
were likely to occur to him any time, he got it off.
“You’re a long ways from _home_, ain’t yo’?”
With the air of saying something equally witty, I replied, “I surely
am.”
Like “When did you stop beating your wife,” his question was one of
those which has all the repartee its own way. For six months, we were
to hear it several times daily, but it always came as a shock, and
as if hypnotized, we were never to alter our response. And it was so
true! We _were_ a long ways from home, further than we then realized.
At times we seemed so long that we wondered if we should ever see home
again. But we were never too far to meet some man, wittier than his
fellows, who defined our location accurately.
After his diagnosis and my acceptance of it, further conversation
became anticlimactic. The “hands” were still absent at lunch, so I
followed their example, and returning at two, found them still at
lunch. But at last the agent drifted in, and three or four interested
and willing colored boys. Everybody was pleasant, nobody was hurried,
we exchanged courtesies, and signed papers, and after we really got
down to business, in a surprisingly few minutes the car was rolled
across the street by five-man power, while I lolled behind the steering
wheel like Cleopatra in her galley. At the doorway the agent halted me.
“Massachusetts car?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” said I. Were there to be complications?
In a flash he countered.
“Yo’ surely _are_ a long ways from home.”
I laughed heartily, and with rapier speed replied,
“I surely _am_.”
* * * * *
They told us the road from Gal_ves_ton to Houston (Hewston) was
good--none better.
“Good shell road all the way. You’ll make _time_ on that road.” This
is the distinction between a Southerner and a Westerner. When the
former tells you a road is good, he means that it once was good. When
a Westerner tells you the same thing, he means that it is going to be
good at some happy future date. In Texas the West and South meet.
We crossed the three-mile causeway which Galveston built at an expense
of two million dollars, to connect her island town with her mainland.
On all sides of us flatness like the flatness of the sea stretched
to the horizon, and but for the horizon would have continued still
further. The air was balmy as springtime in Italy. Meadow larks perched
fat and puffy on fenceposts, dripping abrupt melodies which began and
ended nowhere. The sky, washed with weeks of rain, had been dipped in
blueing and hung over the earth to dry. After enduring gray northern
skies, we were intoxicated with happiness.
The happier I am, the faster I drive. The road of hard oyster shell we
knew was good. They had told us we could make time on it, in so many
words. Forty-eight miles an hour is not technically fast, but seems
fast when you suddenly descend into a hard-edged hole a foot and a half
deep.
When we had separated ourselves from our baggage, we examined the
springs. By a miracle they were intact. In first gear, the car took a
standing jump, and emerged from the hole. For one of her staid matronly
build, she did very well at her first attempt. Later she learned to
leap boulders, and skip lightly from precipice to precipice and if
we could have kept her in training six months longer, she could have
walked out halfway on a tight-rope, turned around and got back safely
to land.
The holes increased rapidly until there was no spot in the road free
from them. Our course resembled an earthworm’s. Except for the holes,
the road was all its sympathizers claimed for it. We maneuvered two
partly washed away bridges, and came to a halt.
Airplanes were soaring above us in every direction. We were passing
Ellington Field. But the immediate cause of our halt was two soldiers,
who begged a lift to Houston. We were glad to oblige them, but after a
hopeless glance at the tonneau piled high with baggage, they decided to
ride on the running board. If the doughboy on the left had only been
the doughboy on the right running board, this chapter would have been
two days shorter. It was Friday, and we had thirteen miles to go, and
Friday and thirteen make a bad combination.
Toby chatted with her soldier and I with mine, who was a mechanician at
the flying field. It was a disappointment not to have him an aviator,
though he admitted a mechanician’s was a far weightier responsibility.
Before the war, he had been a professional racer, had come in second
in a championship race between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and gave
such good reasons why he hadn’t come in first that he seemed to have
taken a mean advantage of the champion.
“Sixty-three miles is about as fast as I’ve ever driven,” I said in an
off-hand way.
“Sixty-three? That’s not fast. When you get going ninety-five to a
hundred, that’s something like driving.”
“This car,” I explained, “won’t make more than fifty. At fifty she
vibrates till she rocks from side to side.”
He looked at the wheel hungrily. “Huh! I bet I could bring her up to
seventy-five.”
Stung, I put my foot on the gas, and the speedometer needle swung to
the right. As we merged with the traffic of Houston, shell-holes were
left behind us, and passing cars were taking advantage of a perfect
concrete road. A Hudson with a Texas number passed us with a too
insistent horn, the driver smiled scornfully and looked back, and his
three children leaned out from the back to grin. And they were only
going a miserable thirty. The near-champion looked impotently at the
steering wheel, and in agonized tones commanded, “Step on it!”
The Hudson showed signs of fight, and lured us through the traffic
at a lively pace. My companion on the running board was dying of
mortification. I knew how he itched to seize the wheel, and for his
sake I redoubled my efforts. In a moment the impudent Hudson children
ceased to leer from the back of their car, and were pretending to
admire the scenery on the other side. Then suddenly the Hudson lost all
interest in the race.
“Turn down the side street,” yelled my passenger, frantically. I tried
to turn, wondering, but the carburetor sputtered and died.
I will say that it is almost a pleasure to be arrested in Texas.
Two merry motor-cops smiled at us winsomely. There was sympathy,
understanding and good fellowship in their manner,--no malice, yet
firmness withal, which is the way I prefer to be handled by the police.
As officers they had to do their duty. As gentlemen, they regretted it.
Toby, chatting about aviation with the man on her running-board, was
completely taken by surprise to hear “Ah’m sahry, lady, but we’ll jest
have to ask you-all to come along with us.”
What an embarrassing position for our passengers! They had accepted
our hospitality, egged us on to unlawful speed, and landed us in the
court-house,--with pay-day weeks behind. Their chagrin deepened as
their efforts to free us unlawfully went for naught. Our indulgent
captors could not have regretted it more if we had been their own
sisters, but they made it clear we must follow them.
“You go ahead, and I’ll show her the way,” suggested my tempter. That
he had traveled the same road many, many times became evident to us.
In fact, he confided that he had been arrested in every state in the
Union, and his face was so well known in the Houston court that the
judge had wearied of fining him, and now merely let him off with a
rebuke. So hoping our faces would have the same effect on the judge, we
trustingly following his directions into town, our khaki-clad friends
leading.
“Turn off to the right here,” said my guide. I turned, and in a flash,
the motor-cycles wheeled back to us.
Smiling as ever, our captors shook their heads warningly.
“Now, lady, none of that! You follow right after us.”
Profusely my guide protested he had merely meditated a short cut to
the station house. Elaborately he explained the route he had intended
to take. Poor chap, D’Artagnan himself could not have schemed more
nimbly to rescue a lady from the Bastille. I saw how his madcap mind
had visioned the quiet turn down the side street, the doubling on our
tracks, the lightning change of himself into the driver’s seat, a gray
Cadillac streaking ninety miles an hour past the scattering populace of
Houston, then breathless miles on into the safety of the plains--the
ladies rescued, himself a hero----
Instead, we tamely drew up before a little brick station-house two
blocks beyond. He did all he could, even offering to appear in court
the next day and plead for us, but from what we now knew of his local
record, it seemed wiser to meet the judge on our own merits.
Our arrival caused a sensation. The police circles of Houston evidently
did not every day see a Massachusetts car piled high with baggage
driven by two women, flanked by a soldier on each running board. When
we entered the sheriff’s office, every man in the room turned his back
for a moment and shook with mirth. They led me to a wicket window with
Toby staunchly behind. The sheriff, in shirt sleeves and suspenders,
amiably pushed a bag of Bull Durham toward me. I started back at this
unusual method of exchanging formalities. A policeman, also in shirt
sleeves and suspenders, a twinkle concealed in his sweet Southern
drawl, explained,
“The lady thawt yo’ meant them fixin’s for her, Charley, instead of fo’
that mean speed-catcher.”
The sheriff took my name and address.
“Massachusetts?” he exclaimed. Then, all of a sudden, he shot back at
me. “Yo’re a lawng ways from _home_!”
“I wish I were longer,” I said.
“Never mind, lady,” he said, soothingly and caressingly. “Yo’ give me
twenty dollars now, and tell the jedge your story tomorrow, an’ seein’
as how you’re a stranger and a lady, he’ll give it all back to you.”
On that understanding, I paid him twenty dollars.
At three next afternoon, Toby and I sought the court-house to get
our twenty dollars back, as agreed. The ante-room was filled with
smoke from a group of Houstonians whose lurking smiles seemed to
promise indulgence. The judge was old and impassive, filmed with an
absent-mindedness hard to penetrate. Yet he, too, had a lurking grin
which he bit off when he spoke.
“Yo’ are charged with exceeding the speed limit at a rate of fo’ty-five
miles an hour.”
“Your Honor, this was my first day in the State, and I hadn’t learned
your traffic laws.”
He looked up over his spectacles. “Yo’re from Massachusetts?”
“Yes, sir!”
Toby and I waited in suspense. We saw a faint spark light the cold,
filmed blue eye, spread to the corner of his grim mouth, while a look
of benevolent anticipation rippled over his set countenance. It was
coming! I got ready to say with a spontaneous laugh “We surely _are_.”
And then he bit it off!
“Yo’ know speeding is a very serious offense----”
“I wouldn’t have done it for worlds, your Honor, if I hadn’t seen all
the Texas cars going quite fast, so I thought you wouldn’t mind if I
did the same. I only arrived yesterday from Massachusetts.”
“Thet’s so. Yo’re from Massachusetts?”
We waited hopefully. But again he bit it off.
“It’s a mighty serious offense. But, seein’ as yo’re a stranger and a
lady at that----”
His voice became indulgently reassuring. We felt we had done well to
wait over a day, and trust to Southern chivalry.
“Considering everything, I’ll be easy on you. Twenty dollars.”
His tone was so fatherly that I knew only gratitude for being saved
from two months in a Texas dungeon.
“Thank you, your Honor,” I faltered.
Outside, Toby looked at me in scorn.
“What did you thank him for?” she asked.
Whether it be contempt of court or no, I wish to state that subsequent
inquiry among the hairdressers, hotel clerks, and garage men of
Houston, revealed that a fine of such magnitude had never been imposed
in the annals of the town. The usual sentence was a rebuke for first
offenses, two dollars for the second and so on. The judge was right. I
_was_ a stranger----
But what could you expect from a soul of granite who could resist such
a mellowing, opportune, side-splitting bon mot?--could swallow it
unsaid?
I hope it choked him.