Homeburg Memories

IV

I know all about it. The great sorrow has come upon you, and there's only one comfort—there are others. It falls upon all who try to get out of doing their own housework in New York. And I'll bet you were good enough to the last cook, too—only asked her for one night out a week, came to her meals promptly, didn't demand more than a fair living wage, and let her have the rest. Yes, of course you did. And you're going to let the next one have the best room and ring for her breakfast in the morning, aren't you? What? Draw the line at that? Well, Jim, I admire your nerve. You're one of the grand old rugged patriots who will not be trodden on. Why did your last cook leave, anyway?

Didn't like the kitchen, eh? And being in a flat you couldn't tear it out and rebuild it. Yes, I agree with you. The servant problem in New York is getting to be very serious. To-day you are gay and happy with luxury and comfort all about you, and to-morrow you are picking sardines out of a can with a fork for dinner. I am certainly glad I live in the country, where servant girls do not come on Monday with two trunks and go away early Thursday morning with three trunks and a bundle.

We have no servant problem in Homeburg. However, I exclude Mrs. Singer from this "we." There are only two servants in the whole town. Mrs. Singer has them. That is, she tries to have them. Mrs. Singer's attempt to have servants in a town which is full of hired girls is one of the things which make life worth living and talking about in Homeburg.

How do I know about it? Bless you, we all know about it. It's a public tragedy. Can't help ourselves. We've had four of Mrs. Singer's ex-servants in our house in six years, and they have all told their troubles. Mrs. Singer trains girls for the entire town. She's twice as good as a domestic science school, and she doesn't charge any tuition. She is devoting her life to the training up of perfect hired girls, and we revel in the results. It is ungrateful of us to blame her for taking away our hired girls, because, as a matter of fact, she is our greatest blessing. Right at this minute in Homeburg I know that two eager families are sitting around waiting for the latest Singer class in domestic science to graduate and come back to them for jobs. It ought to come most any time. The course rarely lasts over three months.

You see, Mrs. Singer isn't one of us. She came to Homeburg from a large city, and she brought her ideas with her. She's not the kind of a woman, either, who is going to cut those ideas down to fit Homeburg. Her plan is to change Homeburg over to fit her ideas. She's been working at it for fifteen years now, and I must say she's won out in several cases. Dress suits are now worn quite unblushingly, we have a country club half a mile from the post-office—that's the advantage of a small town, you can get away from the rush and bustle of the city into the sweet cool country in about four jumps—and no one thinks of serving a party dinner without salad any more. But she's fallen down on one thing. She can't keep servants. That problem has been too much for her. Mrs. Payley, her rival, has had the same hired girl for sixteen years or more; but Mrs. Singer scorns a hired girl. She must have servants, two of them, and while she has a remarkable constitution and has stood up for years under the fight, I don't see how she can keep it up much longer.

A hired girl in Homeburg is a very reasonable creature. We never have any trouble with them, and they have very little with us. We usually catch them green and wild, just off the steamer, and they come to us equipped with a thorough working knowledge of the Swedish language, and nothing else to speak of. Our wives take them in and teach them how to boil water, make beds, handle a broom, use clothespins, and all the simpler tricks of housework, to say nothing of an elementary knowledge of English, which they usually acquire in a month; and we pay this kind a couple of dollars a week, and they wash the clothes, take care of the furnace, and mow the lawn with great pleasure. They usually stay a year or so and then they go to Mrs. Singer's finishing school. They do not go because they are discontented, but because she offers them five dollars a week, which is a pretty fair-sized chunk of the earth to a young Swedish girl just learning to do a few loops and spirals in English and saving up the steamer fare to bring her sister over.

Mrs. Singer takes our nice, green, young hired girls, who are willing to do anything up to the capacity of a stout back, and she tries to make servants out of them. She gives them embroidered aprons and caps and makes them keep house her way. And after they have spent a couple of months making coffee to suit Mrs. Singer, and going over the mahogany to suit Mrs. Singer, and arranging the magazines on the table to suit Mrs. Singer, and taking up the breakfast to Miss Sally to suit Mrs. Singer, and going over the back hall again to suit Mrs. Singer, and keeping their mouths closed tightly all day to suit Mrs. Singer, and only going out on Thursday afternoons to suit Mrs. Singer, they sort of get tired of the job, and one after another they stop Mrs. Singer at a favorable moment and say these fatal words:

"Aye gass aye ent stay eny longer."

Then some Homeburg family joyfully seizes on the deserter, and Mrs. Singer starts out all over again on the job of making a servant out of a hired girl.

I have to admire the woman for her eternal grit. She won't give up for a minute. She is going to run her house just so if she has to train up a million girls and lose them all. Half the time she has to do her own work, but I'll bet that when she has the luncheon ready she puts her little white lace napkin on her hair and comes in and announces it to herself in the proper style; and I'll bet, too, that she doesn't talk to herself while she is working in the kitchen, either. She says the way Homeburg women talk to their servants is disgraceful; that it lowers a servant's respect for her mistress. I'd give a lot to see Mrs. Singer looking at herself coldly in the glass after breakfast and giving herself orders for the day in a tone that would brook no familiarity whatever.

Our women-folks, who are familiar with the Singer residence, say that it is a beautiful thing full of monogrammed linen and embroidered towels and curtains that have to be washed as often as a white shirt, and that whenever they call they are pretty sure to find Mrs. Singer trying to teach some new and slightly dizzy second girl how to take care of the house without breaking off the edges.

You observe the fluency and ease with which I say "second girl." We all do in Homeburg. We're used to talking about second girls since Mrs. Singer has tried to keep one. As far as her experience has taught us, we are firmly convinced that having a second girl is like having mumps on the other side too. When Mrs. Singer isn't busy trying to teach her cook how to run the oven and the plate heater and serve the soup all at the same time, she is attempting to give a new second girl some inkling of the general ideas of her duties. Trouble is most of them are ten-second girls. They listen to the program in the Singer household and then they sprint for safety to some family where they will work twice as hard, but will give three times as much satisfaction. Then Mrs. Singer arms herself with the dust rag and clear-starch bowl, and subs on the job until she finds a new second girl—after which the cook gives up her job with a loud report, and Mr. Singer stays down-town for dinner at the Delmonico Hotel until the Singer house management is staved off the rocks again.

We feel sorry for the Singers and invite them out a good deal while they are hunting cooks. And they pay us back royally as soon as the household staff is fully recruited once more. We eat strange but delicious dishes made by a reluctant and mystified girl, plus Mrs. Singer's persuasiveness and will power; and said girl, still reluctant, and scared into the bargain, serves the dinner with a lace-edged apron and a napkin on her hair, Mrs. Singer egging her in loud whispers like the prompter in grand opera. Steering a green cook through a dinner party, and keeping up a merry conversation at the same time, calls for about as much social skill as anything I know of. I myself stand in awe of Mrs. Singer.

As for the rest of us—we have no servant problem, having no servants. And about the only hired girl problem we have is the following: "Shall the girl eat with the family or in the kitchen?" Mrs. Singer wished that on us. Ten years ago there was no question at all. The girl ate with the family, and waited on the table when something was needed which couldn't be reached. Then Mrs. Singer came to town and made her eat in the kitchen, since which time the question has raged with more or less fury and the whole town has chosen up sides on it. Half of us want the girl to eat in the kitchen, and the other half are invincibly democratic and have her at the table.

As for the girls, they are divided too. Half of the girls who come to 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

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.

I say I think so, because few of us have seen Gibb Ogle eat. He has a 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

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?"

"Remember!" shouted Banks. "What do you think I am?—Methuselah? I remember more things than you ever heard of. Why, Sadie and I went skating the night you couldn't find your fat horse and sleigh."

"Ya-a-a—" yelled Payley, with a sudden shriek of laughter. "Never knew who took your rig, did you, Sim?"

"You—you—" said Sim, glaring at Banks. "You confounded horse thief, I believe you took Sadie in my own sleigh."

"Ain't he bright, Pudge," gasped Payley, "only took him thirty years to catch on."

"Well, Banksie," said Sim, "Sadie's been more particular about her young men since that night. We've been married twenty-five years, and I guess I'll let you come up and eat this evening, anyway. She lets me bring most any old pelter home."

"Gosh, boys, I can't."

"Say, what are you? the porter on that varnished car down there?" demanded Sim. "Won't they let you off a minute?"

"Tell you what we'll do," said Pelty Amthorne. "We'll take you to band practice to-night. Sim still runs it, but he won't let me play any more."

"I haven't touched a horn since I left Homeburg," laughed Banks. "But I'd give ten dollars to see you and Wimble Horn blat away on those altos again, with your eyes bulging out of your cheeks."

"We'll get Wimble and we'll break up band practice if you'll stay over."

"I—"

"No, you don't," said Sim. "I won't have riff-raff loafing around my band."

"You won't, eh?" said Banks. "We'll show you. Come down to the car while I send about forty telegrams, and then we'll fix you, Mister Askinson."

Which they did that night, while most of the town looked on. The next fall Banks came back and stayed three days, and his conduct and that of his old companions in crime set an example to our younger generation which didn't wear off for years. They went out orchard robbing in an automobile, and Banks said he never realized before the wonder of modern conveniences.