Homeburg Memories Part 6

You can't realize what having music constantly on tap means to a pilgrim from a town where two concerts in a winter is a gorge, and where about the only regular musical diversion is going to church on Sunday morning and betting on where the veteran soprano in the choir is going to hang on to the key or skid on the high turns. You laugh at me because I can't eat down-town unless I am encouraged by a bull fiddle, and because I gulp at free concert tickets like a young robin swallowing worms. But if most of your life had been spent listening to Mrs. Sim Estabrook jumping for middle C about as successfully as a dog jumps for a squirrel in a hickory tree, you'd splash around in melody, too, while you had the chance.

Of course, I don't mean to say that the music canneries don't do as big a business out our way as they do anywhere. I'll bet they ship as much as ten barrels of a.s.sorted masterpieces a month into Homeburg for our graphophone cranks; and last winter Wimble Horn broke the piano-player record by tramping out Tannhauser in seven minutes flat. But while these things educate us and enable us to roll our eyes in the right place in a Wagner number, they don't satisfy the soul any more than souvenir cards from Europe take away a thirst for travel. We want the real thing, and year in and out we're music-hungry. We drive our young folks to the piano and listen to them heroically until they get good, and then they go away to the city where the gate receipts are better and leave us at Lutie Briggs's mercy again. Time and time again the only thing that has stood between Homeburg and a ghastly musical silence has been the Homeburg Marine Band.

That's right! Laugh, darn you! What if Homeburg is twenty miles from the nearest creek? Our band is a lot nearer salt water than your Cafe de Paris is to France. And, besides, there are only three names for a country band, anyway. If it isn't the Marine Band, it has to be the Military Band, or the Silver Cornet Band. Chet Frazier, who is our village cut-up, says that they named ours the Marine Band years ago, after it had waded out to the cemetery on a wet Memorial Day through our celebrated bottomless roads.

You can't realize what a comfort and pride a band is in a Cla.s.s X town, unless you have grown up in one. They say this isn't a musical country, but its intentions are certainly good as far as bra.s.s bands go. Long before an American town is big enough to have a post-office, its citizens have either organized a bra.s.s band or are trying to get another man to move in to complete a quorum. Life never gets so complicated out on the grain elevator circuit that the station agent, school princ.i.p.al, and the two rival blacksmiths, and the city marshal can't lug their horns down-town once a week in the evening and soar sweetly off into melody at band practice--that is, if they can get off on the same beat during the evening.

I can hear our home band now--up over McMuggins' Drug Store on a summer evening. It's hot--not hot enough to ignite the woodwork, but plenty warm enough to fry eggs on the sidewalks--and the whole town is out on the porches and lawns chasing a breeze, except the band. It is up in the super-heated lodge room of the Modern Woodmen, huddled around two oil lamps, because the less light it has the less heat will be generated, and it is getting ready to practice the "Washington Post March" for the Fourth of July parade. Our band has practiced the "Washington Post March" for over twenty years, but while the band has altered greatly, the grand old piece shows no sign of wear and is as fresh and unconquerable as ever.

Querulous, complaining sounds come from the lodge room. The tenor horns are crooning, and the ba.s.s horn blatting gently, while the clarionet players are chasing each other up and down the scale, like squirrels running round and round in a cage. The warming-up exercises are on. They will continue until Frank Sundell shaves his last customer and gets up to the hall with his trombone. You can tell when he comes. He pulls the slide in and out a couple of times with an unearthly chromatic grunt, and then there is a deep, pregnant silence. They are going to begin.

Usually they begin several times. It is as hard to get a band off together in practice as it is to send a dozen horses from the wire. But finally the ba.s.s catches up with the cornets, and the others sprint or put on the brakes, and they land on the fourth or fifth beat together.

For a few minutes it's great. They go over the first four bars in a bunch, and old Dobbs gets the half note and change of key in the ba.s.s, which usually floors him, like a professional. It is a proud and happy moment for the leader. But it doesn't last. It's too good to be true. Ad Smith strikes a falsetto with his cornet and stops for wind; this rattles his partner, who can't carry the air alone to save him. Dobbs sits down on the wrong key in the ba.s.s. The tenors weaken, discouraged by the cornet, and everybody hesitates. A couple of clarionets lose the place and get to wandering around at random, creating terrible havoc.

The altos stop, being in doubt. Ad recovers and launches out with terrific vim half a beat behind. There is a rally, but it is too late.

You can hear fragments of five different keys, and presently every one stops except Mahlon Brown, who plays the ba.s.s drum and always bangs away through fire or water until some one turns him off.

Then there is silence--a good deal of it. We all know what is happening. Sim Askinson, the leader, is making a few well-chosen remarks, and each player is turning around in his chair and going over the faults of his neighbor in the most kindly and thorough fashion. Ed Smith empties out his baritone horn and takes a little practice run, and then they commence to begin--or begin to start--or start to commence--whatever it is, all over again. But when they stop at ten o'clock, they haven't played the "Washington Post March" clear through in any one heat.

Doesn't sound encouraging for the Fourth, does it? But, pshaw, that's only practice! When the big day comes and the boys put on their caps and coats and such trousers as will come nearest to blending with the said coats and march down the street, do they falter and blow up in the back stretch? Not much. They canter through that air as if they had been born whistling it. There's a wonderful inspiration in marching to a band man--give him a horn, a ragged slip of music, and about four miles of road, and he will prance down the street, climbing over ruts, wading through mud, reading at night by the light of a torch carried by a boy who is twenty feet away fighting with another boy; and he will blow his immortal soul into his horn for hours at a stretch without missing a note.

Part of the reason for the difference at home is because we always carry a few amateurs, who are privileged to come in at practice and do all the damage they can, but who have to keep mighty quiet on the march. They can carry their horns, puff out their cheeks and look as grand as they please, but if they'd presume to cut loose with some real notes and smear up a piece, they'd be fired in no time.

We have always been mighty proud of our Homeburg band. n.o.body knows how old it is. We think it arrived with the first inhabitants. These are all dead, but some of the original horns are still doing duty, and the bra.s.s on them is worn thin and almost bright. Our band is much better than the average band. That's one of the great Homeburg comforts.

Whenever we get blue about the muddy streets and the small stores, and the great need of a sewage system, and the disgraceful condition of the stove in the Q. B. & C. Depot, we think of our band and are comforted.

It has at least twenty members right along, most of whom can play their instruments, and Sim Askinson, who is a professional music teacher, has conducted it off and on for twenty-five years. Citizens from other towns get mighty jealous when they come down to Homeburg Thursday evenings during the summer and listen to the magnificent concerts which our band gives. I've seen as many as three hundred rigs around the public square those nights. And when our band practices up on "Poet and Peasant,"

which is its star piece, and goes off to the big band contests which break loose in the summer and create great havoc, large numbers of our citizens go along and bet their good money in a manner which keeps the town poor for months afterward.

I don't know anything more magnificent than the way our band plays "Poet and Peasant" with Sim Askinson leading, Ad Smith and Henry Aultmeyer duetting perfectly for once with their cornets, and the clarionet section eating up the fast parts in a manner that sends goose flesh up and down your spine. We're head and shoulders above any other band that enters the contests, but that's the trouble. The judges are never educated up to "Poet and Peasant." They always give the prize to the Paynesville Military Band, which has a five-foot painted ba.s.s drum and has to play "Over the Waves" for a concert piece, because they haven't got a decent cornet player in town. Sometime they will get a real musician to judge these contests, and then we will win by seventeen toots.

You may not believe it, Jim, but I am an alumnus of the Homeburg band.

Didn't suspect that I was anything but an ordinary citizen, did you? But it's a fact. I am a band man. I'm too modest to brag about it, but I was carrying a horn and had a uniform before I was eighteen. I suppose there is nothing, not even the fire department, that fills a small town boy with such wild ambition as a band. When I was twelve, I used to watch that band in its more sublime pa.s.sages, feeling that if I ever could become great enough to play in it, others could run the country and win its great battles with no jealousy from me. The snare drummer at that time was a boy of sixteen. Of course, being snare drummer in the band, he didn't mix around much with the common kids, and I didn't know him.

But I watched him until my ribs swelled out and cracked with envy; and I used to wonder how fortune ever happened to reach down and yank that particular boy so far up into the rarefied upper regions of glory.

When I was fourteen, I went after his job. But I never could learn to play the snare drum. You have to learn to "roll," and I couldn't make my left hand behave. I tried a year and would probably be trying yet but for the fact that when Ed Norton left town, he traded me his ruinous old alto horn for three dollars and a dog. There was about as much music left in it as there is in a fish horn, but I was as delighted as if it had been a pipe organ, and when the folks wouldn't let me practice at home on it, I took it out in the country and kept it in Smily Garrett's barn. After a while I learned how to fit my face into the mouthpiece in just the right way, and as the sounds I made became more human, I sort of edged into town, until finally I was practicing in our own barn. And the next year Askinson let me come into the band and "pad" as second alto during the less important engagements.

I played with the band for five years, and while I never got out of the "thump section," which was what the trombonists and snare drummers and the other aristocrats of the band call the altos, I had all the fun and adventures that a high-priced musician could have had, and was perfectly happy. I can still remember with pride the deep-green looks on the faces of Pete Amthorne and Billy Madigan and Snoozer Ackley, as they watched me marching grandly down the street lugging my precious old three bushels of bra.s.s in my arms, and "ump-umping" until my eyes stuck out of my head. Of course they didn't know that most of the time I was watching a change in my notes half a bar away and wondering if I could make it without falling all over the treble clef. I looked like Sousa to them, and when I leaned grandly back in my chair at the band concerts and borrowed a page of music from my neighbor--said page being mostly Hebrew to me--I felt like a Senator or Chief Justice letting the common herd have a look at him.

I pity the poor city boys who have to grow up nowadays and depend on taxicabs and vaudeville for their excitement. Belonging to the band was more fun than belonging to the baseball team or the torchlight brigade or anything else. We got in on everything. They couldn't pull off a rally or celebration, or even a really successful church social, without us. I might say that the importance of a Homeburg citizen in the old days was determined by whether or not the Homeburg Band escorted him to his tomb. When great doings occurred in the neighboring towns, plain citizens dug down in their pockets for car-fare, and then dug painfully down once more for our car-fare. When an ordinary Homeburger wanted to help boost McKinley to victory by parading in some distant town with a torch, it cost him five dollars and a suit of clothes. But we not only went free, but got two dollars apiece for plowing a wide furrow of glory down the streets between rows of admiring eyes.

Those two dollars counted a lot in those days, too. It looked like an easy income to us. All we had to do to earn it was to beg off from our employers for half a day, travel thirty miles or so by train, usually standing up and protecting our horns from the careless mob, march eight or ten miles over unknown streets, picking out dry places underfoot and notes from a piece of music bobbing up and down in the shadows above our horns, and then drive home across country after midnight, getting home in time to go to work in the morning. Why, it was just like finding money; I've never had so much fun earning it since. I started once to figure out how many miles our band marched during the first Bryan campaign, but I gave it up. We never felt it at that time, but it made me so tired counting that I quit with a distinct footsore feeling.

The most worrisome task about a Homeburg band was keeping it alive. I suppose all small town bands have the same trials. We worked against incredible difficulties. If city people had the same devotion to music which we displayed, you would have a ten-thousand-piece philharmonic orchestra in New York playing twenty-four hours a day for glory. We were always building up our band with infinite pains, only to have Fate jerk the gizzard out of it just as perfection was in sight. Talent was scarce, and the rude, heartless city was forever reaching down into Homeburg and yanking some indispensable players away. Of course there was always a waiting list of youngsters who would coax a few hoa.r.s.e toots out of the alto horn, and we always had a bunch of kid clarionetists who would sail along grandly through the soft parts and then blow goose notes whenever they hit the solo part. But try as we would, we could never get more than two cornets. One of these was Ad Smith. He was a b.u.m cornetist, but his brother Ed was a good baritone, and we had to have both or none. The other was usually some anxious young student who got along pretty well on plain work, but who would come down the chromatic run in the "Chicago Tribune March" like a fat man falling down the cellar stairs with an oleander plant.

As for trombones, there was a positive fatality among them; we were always losing them. Trombone players have to be born, anyway, and there was no hope of developing one. Besides, the neighbors wouldn't allow it.

Young Henry Wood showed promise once, but after his father had listened to him for about six months, he took the slip end of his horn away from him and beat carpets with it, until it was extinct as far as melody was concerned.

For a year we had Mason Peters, who was a wonder on the slide trombone.

But he was only getting twelve dollars a week in Snyder's Shoe Emporium, and Paynesville, which never tired of putting up dirty tricks on us, hustled around and got him an eighteen dollar job up there--after which they came down to Homeburg at the first opportunity with their band to parade Peters before our eyes. It would have been a grand success if they hadn't put Peters in the front row. He lived for his art, Peters did, paying no attention to anything but his trombone, and besides he was quite deaf. He got confused about the line of march, and when the band swung around the public square he kept right on up Main Street all alone, playing in magnificent form and solitary grandeur while the band swung off the other way. The whole town followed him with tears of joy, and he traveled two blocks before he became aware of the vast and appalling silence behind him; then he kept right on for the city limits on the run. It was a great comfort to us, and by the time we had gotten through apologizing to the Paynesville boys for following Peters under the impression that he was the real band, they had offered to fight us singly or in platoons.

We used to watch every new citizen like Russian detectives, only we searched them for horns instead of dynamite. Several times a trombonist came to town, and music revived noticeably. But none of them lasted.

Trombonists seem to be temperamental, and when they are not changing jobs they are resigning from the band because they are not allowed to play enough solos. Our greatest bonanza was a quiet chap named Williams, who came to town to work in the moulding room of the plow factory. After he had been there a week, we discovered that he had a saxophone. No one had ever heard or eaten a saxophone, but we looked it up, and when we found out what it was, we made a rush for him. At the next practice he appeared with a bright silver instrument covered with two bushels of keys and played a solo which sounded like three clarionets with the croup. We wept for joy and elected him leader on the spot.

This caused Sim Askinson to resign, of course, and he took Ad and Ed Smith with him, and they remained in dignified and awful silence for two years. But we didn't care. One saxophone was worth five baritones, and while Williams was in town, we were an object of envy to all of the other bands around. We changed our name to the Homeburg Saxophone Band, and the way we rubbed it into Paynesville was pitiful. He was a little fellow, Williams was, and short of wind, which caused him to gasp a good deal during the variation parts. But he was willing. There was no shirk about him. After a year our program usually consisted of eleven saxophone solos and some other piece which could be done almost entirely on the saxophone, and the jealous Paynesvillains used to ask why we used nineteen men to play the rests when one man could have produced as much silence at far less expense.

Those were glorious years; but of course they didn't last. Williams got to resigning at the foundry just for the pleasure of having us come down and plead with the proprietor to raise his pay. Finally he resigned so much that the proprietor fired him, and then we had to take our caps in hand and wheedle the Smiths and Askinson back into the band. I haven't belonged for years, but they are still there. When I drop in at practice, as many of the alumni do, Askinson greets me cordially and takes some young cub's horn away from him, so I can sit in. It is just like old times, especially when Ed Smith lays down his horn after a slight altercation with some one and goes home never to come back--just as he has done for the last thirty years.

That's the worst of music. One's art, you know, has so much influence over one's temper. To see our band soaring majestically down Main Street and playing "Canton Halifax" in one great throbbing rough-house of melody you would never believe that anything but brotherly love existed between the players. As a matter of fact, we never wasted any harmony among ourselves. We didn't have any to spare. It took all we had to produce the music. For twenty-five years the Smiths and c.o.o.ney Simpson, who plays first clarionet, have been at swords' points, each with a faction behind him. c.o.o.ney says it's a shame that a good band must limp along with a cornetist who always takes three strikes to hit a high note, and Ed Smith says c.o.o.ney wants to be leader and will not be satisfied until he can play the solo and ba.s.s parts at once on his clarionet. I can see Ed Smith now, after the band has run aground in practice, taking his horn down and glaring around at c.o.o.ney.

"What you gobstick players need is a time-table," says he, "instead of notes. Come in on the A about eight-fifteen. If you can do that well, we'll try to struggle along."

"Don't get forte," c.o.o.ney replies cheerfully. "If you'd try to follow both those cornets instead of rambling along by yourself, you'd split, sure."

"Better play cornet, too, c.o.o.ney," says Ad Smith, whirling around.

"You've got enough mouth for both."

"Well, we ought to have a cornetist," says c.o.o.ney, "it's what we've needed for years."

This riles the scrub cornet player, whoever he happens to be, and he gets up excitedly. "We'd get along a lot better without one or two human calliopes--" he begins.

"Set down, set down," says old Dobbs from the coils of his tuba. "Let 'em fight. They know it all between pieces--"

"Who asked you to horn in?" says Ed Smith, getting up preparatory to going home with his baritone horn and leaving a broken and forlorn world to grieve his loss.

Of course this is a crisis. But we never bust up. The Paynesville Band busts up about twice a year over the division of profits and the color of their new uniforms and the old question of whether the cornets or trombones shall march in front. But we never go entirely to pieces. This is largely because of Sam Green. He is our peacemaker and most faithful player. He has played second alto in the band for thirty-five years without a promotion, and is by all odds the worst player I ever saw, being only entirely at home in the key of C; and he can't play three-four time to save his soul. But his devotion is marvelous. He is always the first man down to practice. He lights the lamps, builds the fires, and when necessary goes out to Ed Smith's home and persuades him to come back into the band for just this night. And whenever the dispute between the factions gets to the point where Ed Smith begins gathering up his doll things, Sam interferes.

"Come on now, boys," he pleads, "we've got to get this piece worked up.

You're all good players. Why, if Paynesville had you fellows, she'd have a band. That was my fault that time. I'll get this here thing right sometime. I'll sit out in the trio now and you fellows take it."

And pretty soon, as he argues, Ed's proud heart softens, and he comes back with a glare at c.o.o.ney. Then Sim Askinson raps on his music rack and says: "Gentlemen and trombone players," as he has for a quarter of a century; and a minute later the band is tumbling eagerly through its piece once more, all feuds suspended in the desperate effort to come out even at the end with no surplus bars to be played by some floundering horn.

Some time during the evening, as a rule, the various sections get together on some pa.s.sage and swim grandly through, every horn in perfect time, and the parts blending like Mocha and Java. All differences are forgotten, and the band breaks up with friendly words, Ed Smith and c.o.o.ney going home together. Music has charms to soothe the savage beast, and it also has a wonderful power of taking the temper out of the grocer and the painter and the mahout of the waterwork's gasoline engine.

I never stepped so high or felt so grand as I did the first time I marched out with the boys and went down the street in the back row of the band next to the drums, a member in good standing, and dodging every time I pa.s.sed under a telephone wire to keep from sc.r.a.ping my cap off. I never expect to feel that grand again. But I have an ambition. If ever I should become so famous and successful that when I went back to Homeburg to visit my proud and happy parents and stepped off of the 4:11 train, I would find the Homeburg Marine Band there to meet me, I would know that I had made good, and I would be content. The only thing that encourages me in my ambition is that the band didn't come down to play when I went away. Do you know, Jim, it's the funniest thing--the fellows we played out-of-town in a blaze of glory never happened to be the chaps we came down to the train to meet afterward, somehow. But I imagine we weren't the only poor guessers in the world.

IX

THE AUTO GAME IN HOMEBURG

_It has Driven out Politics as a Subject of Debate_

Wait a minute, Jim. I want to look at this automobile.... Yes, I know it is the sixth machine I've walked around in seven blocks, but what's time to a New Yorker on Sat.u.r.day afternoon? This nifty little mile-eater has an electric gear shift, and I want to ask the chauffeur how he likes it.

Promised Ad Summers I would.

... Says it hangs a little if his voltage is low. That's what I'd be afraid of--Gee! there's a new Jacksnipe with a center searchlight. Never would do for rutty roads. How do you like the wire wheels, Jim? Bad for side strains, I should think. Look at those foxy inset lamps. Listen to that engine purr--two cycle, I'll bet. Say, Fifth Avenue is certainly one great street! I could walk up and down here for a month. There's a new Battleax--wonder if those two speed differentials are going to work out.