Homeburg Memories Part 1

Homeburg Memories.

by George Helgesen Fitch.

I

THE 4:11 TRAIN

_In Which the World Comes Once a Day to Visit Homeburg_

Hel-lo, Jim! Darn your case-hardened old hide, but I'm glad to see you!

Wait till I unclamp my fingers from this suit case handle and I'll shake hands. Whoa--look out!! That's the fourth time that chap's tried to tag me with his automobile baggage truck. He'll get me yet. I wish I were a trunk, Jim. Why aren't they as kind to the poor traveler as they are to his trunk? I don't see any electric truck here to haul me the rest of the way into New York. It's a long, long walk to the front door of this station, and my feet hurt.

That's the idea. Let the porter lug that suit case. I'd have hired one myself, but I was afraid I couldn't support him in the style you fellows have made him accustomed to. It was mighty nice of you to come down and meet me, Jim. I've been standing here for five minutes in this infernal ma.s.s meeting of locomotives, trying to keep out from underfoot, and getting myself all calm and collected before I surged out of this howling forty-acre depot and looked New York in the eye. It's nothing but a plain case of rattles. I have 'em whenever I land here, Jim. Dump me out on Broadway and I wouldn't care, but whenever I land back in the bowels of a Union Station I'm a meek little country cousin, and I always want some one to come along and take me by the hand.

It's the fault of your depots. They're the biggest things you have, and it isn't fair for you to come at me with your biggest things first.

Every time I start for New York I swear to myself that I'm going to go into a fifty thousand dollar dining-room full of waiters far above my station, and tuck my napkin in my collar, just to show I'm a free-born citizen; and I'm going to trust my life to crossing policemen, and go by forty-story buildings without even flipping an eye up the corner and counting the stories by threes. I'm mighty sophisticated until I hit the city and get out into a depot which has a town square under roof and a waiting-room so high that they have to shut the front door to keep the thunder storms out. Then I begin to shrink. And by the time I've walked from Yonkers or thereabouts, clean through the station and out of a two-block hallway, with more stores on either side than there are in all Homeburg, and have committed my soul to the nearest taxicab pirate, I feel like a cheese mite in the great hall of Karnak.

No, sir; when I get into a big city depot, I'm a country Jake, and I need a compa.s.s and kind words. I've suffered a lot from those depots. I missed a train in Washington once because I figured it would take me only ten minutes to go from my hotel to the train. But I counted only the distance to the front door of the Union Station. By the time I'd journeyed on through the fool thing, my train had gone. Once I missed a train in the Boston station because I didn't know which one of the thirty tracks my train was on. I guessed it was somewhere to the right, and I guessed wrong. It was twenty-four tracks away to the left, and I couldn't get back in time. So I went into their waiting-room, which is as big as a New England cornfield and has all the benches named for various towns. I had to stand up two hours because I couldn't find the Homeburg bench.

I'm an admirer of big cities, Jim, and I wouldn't have you take a foot off your Woolworth building, or a single cras.h.i.ty!! bang!! out of your subways, but I wish there was a little more coziness in your depots.

Why, at Homeburg I'm nearer the train at my house than I am in New York after I've got to the station. It's great to have a depot so big that it takes the place of mountain scenery, but it's hard on the poor traveler, even if it does have all the comforts of away-from-home in it. And then it swallows up things so. It takes away all the pleasure of having a railroad in the town. I suppose five hundred trains come into this station every day, but they're just trains--nothing more. You don't get any fun or information or excitement out of them. You can't even chase them--they bang a gate in your face when you try. I'll bet you don't get as much comfort and fun out of all these five hundred trains, Jim, as we do out of the 4:11 train at Homeburg.

No; it's not any better than your trains. It's not as good. You can't get raw oysters and magazines and individual c.o.c.ktails and shaves on it.

All you can get is cinders and peanuts, and I would advise you, if you were hungry, to eat the former and put the latter in your eye. It's the kind of a train you New Yorkers would ride on and then write home telling about the horrors of travel in the great West. But it means everything to Homeburg. It means a lot more than the half dozen limited trains which roar through our town fifty miles an hour every day and have made us so expert at dodging that we will develop kangaroo legs in another generation. It's our train. Here in New York a hundred trains come in each morning from Chicago, New Orleans, Everywhere and points beyond, and the office-boy next door to the depot doesn't stop licking stamps long enough to look up. But when old Number Eleven, which is its official railroad name, pulls into Homeburg from Chicago each afternoon, loaded with mail, news, pa.s.sengers, home-comers, adventurers, mysterious strangers, friends, brides, heroes, widows and coffins, you can just bet we're there to see her.

It's the town pastime. We all do it. Whenever a Homeburg man has nothing else to do at four o'clock, he steps over to the depot and joins the long line which leans up against the depot wall and keeps it in place during the crisis. Some of them haven't missed a roll-call in years. Old Bill Dorgan, the drayman, has stood on the platform every day since the line was built, rain or shine. Josh James, the colored porter of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, knows more traveling men than William J. Bryan. If he was absent from his post, the engineer wouldn't know where to stop the train. The old men come crawling down on nice days and sun themselves for an hour before the train arrives. The boys sneak slyly down on their way from school and stand in flocks worshiping the train butcher, who is bigger than the Washington Monument to them. Sometimes a few girls come down too, and hang around, giggling. But that doesn't last long. We won't stand for it in our town. Some missionary tells the girls' parents, and then they suddenly disappear from the ranks and look pouty and insulted for a month, and we know, without being told, that a couple of grown-up young ladies of sixteen or more have been spanked in the good old-fashioned way. Homeburg is a good town, and it makes its girls behave even if it has to half kill them.

You haven't any idea, Jim, how much bustle and noise and excitement and general enthusiasm a pa.s.senger train can put into a small town for a few minutes. Just imagine yourself in Homeburg on a cold winter afternoon.

It's four o'clock. The sun has stood the climate as long as it can and is getting ready to duck for shelter behind the dreary fields to the west. If you ran an automobile a mile a minute down the walk on Main Street you wouldn't have to toot for a soul. Now and then a farmer comes out of a store, takes a half hitch on the m.u.f.fler around his neck, puts on his bearskin gloves and unties his rig. You watch him drive off, the wheels yelling on the hard snow, and wonder if it isn't more cheerful out in the frozen country with the corn shocks for company. It's the terrible half hour of bleak, fading light before the electricity is turned on and the cozy dark comes down--the loneliest hour of the winter's day.

You've stood it about as long as you can, when you notice signs of life across the street. Three men carrying satchels are steering for the depot. Dorgan's dray is rattling down the street. Dorgan's dray would make a cheerful noise if it was the last sound on earth. Little flocks and groups of people begin plodding across the square. You know them all. Gibb Ogle is going over to watch the baggageman load trunks. It is Gibb's life work. Pelty Amthorne is a little late, but he'll have time to arrange himself against the east end door and answer the roll-call, as he has for thirty years. Miss Ollie Mingle is going over too. She must be expecting that Paynesville young man again. If the compet.i.tion between her and Ri Hawkes gets any keener, Ollie will have to meet the train down at the crossing and nab the young man there. Sim Atkinson is taking a handful of letters down to the station as usual. Ever since he had his row with Postmaster Flint, he has refused to add to the receipts of the office, and buys his stamps of the mail clerk. It is Sim's hope and dream that sometime the annual receipts of the Homeburg post-office will just miss being enough to bring a raise in salary. Then Sim will bring it to Flint's attention that he would have bought his ten dollars' worth of stamps that year at home, if Flint hadn't advertised his lock box for rent when he neglected the quarterly dues. Watching Sim thirst for revenge is as much fun as having a real Indian in town.

There's the headlight half a mile down the track! She's coming fast, ten minutes late, and, because you've been lonesome all afternoon and need exercise, you slip into your coat and hustle down. Just as you get to the depot, Number Eleven comes in with a crash and a roar, bell ringing, steam popping off, every brake yelling, platforms loaded, expectation intense, confusion terrific, all nerves a-tingle, and fat old Jack Ball, the conductor, lantern under arm, sweeping majestically by on the bottom step of the smoker. Young Red Nolan and Barney Gast.i.t, two of the station agent's innumerable amateur helpers, race for the baggage car with their truck, making a terrible uproar over the old planks. The mail clerk dumps the sacks. Usually he gets a stranger in the shin with them. Nothing doing to-day. Just missed a traveling man. We still tell of the time the paper sack scooted across the icy platform and stood Mayor Andrews on his head. He wanted to abolish the whole post-office department.

I've always realized what the city gate must have meant to the medieval loafers, because I've watched Homeburg's city gate at the 4:11 train so often. There's Mrs. Sim Estabrook getting home. Must have been unexpected. No one to meet her. Wonder if Sim's sick again. I'll call up pretty soon. Wimble Horn's been to Chicago again, evidently. Wonder if he'll dump his last eighty acres into the Board of Trade. Who's the fine-looking duck in the fur-lined coat? Not a transient, evidently. He pa.s.sed Josh by. Must be visiting somebody. Yes; Mrs. Ackley's kissing him. That might mean a scandal in New York, but at home it means relatives. Poor old Jedson Bane's back, I see. Looks pretty bad.

Hospital didn't help him. Guess he's not long for us. h.e.l.lo, Jed, old man! How are you? Better? That's fine. You're looking great! For the love of Mike, will you take a swift look at what's got off? I believe it's from college. They don't wear clothes like that anywhere else. Oh, yes, of course, that's why the Singers' automobile came down. Don't know what we'd do, now that the circus has pa.s.sed us up, if it wasn't for Sally Singer. She imports a new specimen from the University about every two weeks.

The crowd is off, and you hurl a few good-bys at the travelers getting on. Our two editors check them off as they go. The _Argus_ and the _Democrat_ get all their news at this train. There's no slipping in and out of town in Homeburg. One and all we face the gantlet. Young Andy Lowes hates to have us beg him not to miss the morning train back, as we do three times a week; but he simply has to go to Jonesville that often, and we all know why, and he knows we know. The Parsons are rid of their Aunt Mary at last. She's worse than an oyster. Put her in a guest-room and she grows fast to it. They've had her for six months now.

h.e.l.lo! Peter Link's son is going down to Jonesville. Guess he's got his job back. Andy would be a good boy if he would only stop trying to make the distilleries work nights. There goes old Colonel Ackley on his weekly trip. Wonder if he thinks he fools any one with that suit case.

Ever since the town went dry, he's had business in the next county.

h.e.l.lo, Colonel! Don't drop that case. You'll break a suit of clothes!

Watch him glare.

The engine has gotten its breath by this time. Ever notice how human an engine sounds when it stops after a long run and the air-brake apparatus begins to pant? Old Ball has been fussing for a minute and now he yells "'Board." Aunt Emma Newcomb gets in a few more kisses all around her family. She's going down to the next station. The engine gives a few loud puffs, spins its wheels a few times, and the cars begin moving past. Hurrah! Something doing to-day. That grocery salesman who gets here once a week is coming across the square two jumps to a rod. Go it, old man! Go it, train! Ball will always stop for a woman, but the drummers have to take her on the fly. There! He's on--all but his hat.

Red Nolan will keep that for him till his next trip.

She's moving fast now. The brakeman hops the next to the last car with grace and carelessness. From every platform devoted friends and relatives are spilling--it is a point of honor in Homeburg to remain with your loved ones in the car as long as you dare before leaping for life. The last car sweeps by. The red and green lights begin to grow smaller with businesslike promptness. There is a parting clatter as the train hits the last switch frog two blocks away. Then it's over. The noise, bustle, confusion, and joyful excitement follow the flying cinders out of town, and silence resumes its reign. I've never heard anything so still as Homeburg after the 4:11 has pulled out.

But we're too busy to notice it as we string across the square to the post-office. We have the day's cargo to digest. We have to wait for the evening mail to be distributed, read the evening newspapers, shake hands with all the returned Homeburgers, size up the brand new Homeburgers and investigate the strangers. And it keeps us busy until supper time.

I've lived in Homeburg thirty-five years and more, and the 4:11 train has been tangled up in my biography all the way. I remember the first time I ever rode on it. The cars were funny-looking coops then, and the engine had a sixty-gallon smokestack. I was four, and I yelled with fear when the train came in and kept it up for the first twenty miles after they lugged me on board. The conductor chucked me under the chin and gave me his punch to play with. He was a young man then. He'd carried my father and mother on their wedding journey, and twenty years after that first ride of mine he carried me and my wife on our wedding journey. The other day we gave our oldest girl two dollars and sent her on her first trip down to Jonesville, by herself. Old Ball was on the train, and he grinned at me and promised to take good care of her. He's pretty gray now, but I hope he stays long enough to start another generation of our family on its travels.

I went to my first circus, to Jonesville, on old Number Eleven. And I went down there at sixteen, a member of the Republican Club, with a torch, and the proudest boy in the State. The next year I started to college with an algebra and a tennis racket under my arm (they wouldn't jam into the trunk), and a dozen friends came down to see me off. On Number Eleven that day I met four other boys going to the same school.

We are still close chums, though one is on the coast, another's here in New York, and the third is in the Philippines.

[Ill.u.s.tration: It seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven by air-line.]

It was the next year that I noticed a girl as she stepped off of Number Eleven and was met by one of the Homeburg girls. I didn't know who she was, but it seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven by air-line, and I felt so friendly toward the girl who met her that I had to go down to her house to call that very night. The visitor had come to stay--her father was starting a new store in Homeburg. I'll tell you, when a snorty old train, which a.s.says two pecks of cinders per car, hauls the most wonderful girl on earth into your town and dumps her into your arms--so to speak, and bunching up events a little--you're bound to love that train.

I could write the history of Homeburg from the 4:11 too. In fact, the train has hauled most of Homeburg into the town. Year after year we watch strangers get off the train and turn around three times, in the way a stranger does when he tries to orient himself and locate the nearest hotel. We get acquainted with those strangers, and in the next week we discover their business and antecedents and politics and preferences in jokes, and whether they pull for the Chicago Cubs or the White Sox. In two weeks they are old-time citizens and go down with us to welcome the newcomers. Henry Broar came to us on the 4:11. I remember he wore a loppy hat and needed a shave that day, and we didn't a.s.sess him very highly. But he had a whacking law practice inside of a year, ran for county judge two years later, and now we swell up to the danger point when people mention Congressman Broar, and let it slip modestly that we are intimate enough with Hank to trade shirts with him.

I remember well the day two imposing strangers got off of Number Eleven, and made the town nearly explode with curiosity by walking out to the Dover farm at the edge of town and pacing it off this way and that. Took us a month to learn their business. That was the time we got the Sc.r.a.per Works. When Allison B. Unk arrived, he made a tremendous impression by wearing a plug hat still in its first youth, and rolling ponderously around town in a Prince Albert. We've despised Prince Alberts ever since because the town fell for that one and deposited liberally in Unk's new bank, which closed up a year later. And then there was the time when the trainmen put off a scared and sick cripple, who lay in the depot waiting-room with a ring of sympathetic incompetents around him until Doc Simms could help him. He touched our hearts, and we sh.e.l.led out enough to send him on a hundred miles to his people. He came back ten years later and kept Homeburg balanced magnificently in the air for a week by showing us how much fun it is to chum with a millionaire. Even sick cripples are likely to guess the market right in this country, you know, and he never forgot us.

As they come in on Number Eleven, so they go. The young men come to Homeburg full of hope, and their sons go on elsewhere loaded with the same. Mothers weep on the station platform many times a year while their w.i.l.l.i.e.s and Johns and Petes hike gaily off to chase their fortunes. And many times a year the old boys come back from Chicago. Some of them are rich and proud, and some of them are rich and friendly, and some of them are just friendly. But they all get off of Number Eleven under our keen, discriminating glare, and they all get the same greeting while we size them up and wonder if their n.o.bby thirty-five dollar suits are their sole stocks-in-trade, and just how much a "lucrative position"

means in Chicago.

When the big strike was on, twenty-five years ago, Number Eleven didn't run for two days. We might as well have been marooned on St. Helena. It was awful. When a hand-car came sweeping into town the third day with a big sail on, we hailed it like starving sailors. It was Number Eleven which took on a flat-car loaded with Paynesville's fire department twenty years ago and saved our business section. When President Banks, of the Great F. C. & L. Railroad, rolled into Homeburg in his private car, to become "Pudge" Banks again for a day or two and revisit the scenes of his boyhood, he came on Number Eleven of course. The train hung around while the band played two selections and the mayor gave an address of welcome. That was her longest visit in Homeburg.

The old train even bursts into local politics and social affairs now and then. It managed to jump the track in the campaign of '96, leaving four distinguished Democratic speakers, fizzing with oratory, in the cornfields, and ruining the only rally the Dems attempted to pull off.

And it took DeLancey Payley down after all the rest of the town had failed, in a manner which kept us tearful with delight for a week.

DeLancey was sequestered in an Eastern college by his loving parents, and when he was graduated he came home and started an exclusive circle composed mostly of himself. He was unapproachably haughty, until one day he accompanied a proud beauty, who was visiting the Singers (our other hothouse family) to Number Eleven, and lingered too long after the train started. DeLancey got off, but in doing so he performed a variety of difficult and instructive feats of balancing on his ear which were viewed by a large audience with terrific enthusiasm. When DeLancey was haughty after that, we always praised this feat, and you'd be surprised to see how soon he got his nose down out of the zenith.

Every day old Number Eleven brings in its mail-bag full of hopes and triumphs, of good news, bad news, and tragedy. Every day it brings the new ideas from the world outside and the latest wrinkles in hanging on to this whirling old sphere in a pleasant and successful manner. We get our styles from the Chicago men who step off of its platforms and tarry with us. We send our brides off on it with an entire change of bill at each performance. We get our peeps into wonderland and romance and comedy from the theatrical troupes which straggle out of its cars and rush to the baggage car to make sure that no varlet has attached their trunks since the last stop. It is the magic carpet which carries our youth forth into the great world to wonder and learn and prevail. And now and then it is the kindly beast of burden who brings back some old playmate, done with weariness and striving, and coming home to rest in our cemetery beyond the south hill.

No, Jim, your thousand trains a day, with their parlor cars, bathrooms, barber shops and libraries, are all right, but they're just trains.

Number Eleven is a whole lot more than a train. It is the world come to visit us once a day--a moving picture of life which we enjoyed long before Edison took out his patent. Do you wonder that it makes me sad to see so many perfectly good trains going to waste in this roofed-over township of yours? Take me out of it, please.

II

THE FRIENDLY FIRE-FIEND

_The Joys of Fighting Him with a Volunteer Fire Department_

h.e.l.lo! Here comes the fire department! Watch the people swarm! Uumpp!

Ouch! Excuse me for living. This is no place for a peaceable spectator.

I'm going to cast anchor in this doorway until the mob gets past.

No, thank you. I'll not join the Marathon. But you don't know how homesick and happy it makes me to see this crowd run! I've been in New York a week now, and honestly this is almost the first really human impulse I've seen a citizen give way to. Until this minute I've felt as if I were a hundred thousand miles from Homeburg, with all train service suspended for the winter. If I could find the man who stepped on my heels while chasing that engine, I'd thank him and ask him what volunteer fire department he used to run with. See 'em scramble.

Whoop! Here comes the hook-and-ladder truck! This is nothing but Homeburg on a big scale. I'm beginning to envy you city chaps now. That makes the fourth engine that's come past. You get more for your money than we do. Look at that chief hurdling curbstones in his little red wagon. If Homeburg ever gets big enough to have a chief's wagon, I'll suffocate with pride.

I see it's the same old story. Fire's all out. It always is by the time you've run nine blocks. Watch the racers coming back. Stung, every one of them--gold-bricked. There's a fat fellow who's run half a mile, I'll bet. If his tongue hung out any farther, he'd trip up on it. But he'll do it again next time. They all do. Learning to stop running to fires is as hard as learning to stop buying mining-stock in the West. And it's just as big a swindle too. The returns from running to fires are marvelously small. They tell me that a hundred million dollars a year goes up in flames in this country. I don't believe it. If it does, I want to know who gets to see all the fun. I don't.