That Home-Town Feeling
We all have our ambitions. Mine is to sit in a rocking-chair on
the sidewalk at the corner of Clark and Randolph Streets, and watch
the crowds go by. South Clark Street is one of the most
interesting and cosmopolitan thoroughfares in the world (New
Yorkers please sniff). If you are from Paris, France, or Paris,
Illinois, and should chance to be in that neighborhood, you will
stop at Tony's news stand to buy your home-town paper. Don't
mistake the nature of this story. There is nothing of the
shivering-newsboy-waif about Tony. He has the voice of a fog-horn,
the purple-striped shirt of a sport, the diamond scarf-pin of a
racetrack tout, and the savoir faire of the gutter-bred. You'd
never pick him for a newsboy if it weren't for his chapped hands
and the eternal cold-sore on the upper left corner of his mouth.
It is a fascinating thing, Tony's stand. A high wooden
structure rising tier on tier, containing papers from every corner
of the world. I'll defy you to name a paper that Tony doesn't
handle, from Timbuctoo to Tarrytown, from South Bend to South
Africa. A paper marked Christiania, Norway, nestles next to a
sheet from Kalamazoo, Michigan. You can get the War Cry, or Le
Figaro. With one hand, Tony will give you the Berlin Tageblatt,
and with the other the Times from Neenah, Wisconsin. Take your
choice between the Bulletin from Sydney, Australia, or the Bee from
Omaha.
But perhaps you know South Clark Street. It is honeycombed
with good copy--man-size stuff. South Clark Street reminds one of
a slatternly woman, brave in silks and velvets on the surface, but
ragged, and rumpled and none too clean as to nether garments. It
begins with a tenement so vile, so filthy, so repulsive, that the
municipal authorities deny its very existence. It ends with a
brand-new hotel, all red brick, and white tiling, and Louise Quinze
furniture, and sour-cream colored marble lobby, and oriental rugs
lavishly scattered under the feet of the unappreciative guest from
Kansas City. It is a street of signs, is South Clark. They vary
all the way from "Banca Italiana" done in fat, fly-specked letters
of gold, to "Sang Yuen" scrawled in Chinese red and black.
Spaghetti and chop suey and dairy lunches nestle side by side.
Here an electric sign blazons forth the tempting announcement of
lunch. Just across the way, delicately suggesting a means of
availing one's self of the invitation, is another which announces
"Loans." South Clark Street can transform a winter overcoat into
hamburger and onions so quickly that the eye can't follow the hand.
Do you gather from this that you are being taken slumming?
Not at all. For the passer-by on Clark Street varies as to color,
nationality, raiment, finger-nails, and hair-cut according to the
locality in which you find him.
At the tenement end the feminine passer-by is apt to be
shawled, swarthy, down-at-the-heel, and dragging a dark-eyed,
fretting baby in her wake. At the hotel end you will find her
blonde of hair, velvet of boot, plumed of head-gear, and prone to
have at her heels a white, woolly, pink-eyed dog.
The masculine Clark Streeter? I throw up my hands. Pray
remember that South Clark Street embraces the dime lodging house,
pawnshop, hotel, theater, chop-suey and railway office district,
all within a few blocks. From the sidewalk in front of his
groggery, "Bath House John" can see the City Hall. The trim,
khaki-garbed enlistment officer rubs elbows with the lodging house
bum. The masculine Clark Streeter may be of the kind that begs a
dime for a bed, or he may loll in manicured luxury at the
marble-lined hotel. South Clark Street is so splendidly
indifferent.
Copy-hunting, I approached Tony with hope in my heart, a smile
on my lips, and a nickel in my hand.
"Philadelphia--er--Inquirer?" I asked, those being the city
and paper which fire my imagination least.
Tony whipped it out, dexterously.
I looked at his keen blue eye, his lean brown face, and his
punishing jaw, and I knew that no airy persiflage would deceive
him. Boldly I waded in.
"I write for the magazines," said I.
"Do they know it?" grinned Tony.
"Just beginning to be faintly aware. Your stand looks like a
story to me. Tell me, does one ever come your way? For instance,
don't they come here asking for their home-town paper--sobs in
their voice--grasp the sheet with trembling hands--type swims in a
misty haze before their eyes--turn aside to brush away a tear--all
that kind of stuff, you know?"
Tony's grin threatened his cold-sore. You can't stand on the
corner of Clark and Randolph all those years without getting wise
to everything there is.
"I'm on," said he, "but I'm afraid I can't accommodate,
girlie. I guess my ear ain't attuned to that sob stuff. What's
that? Yessir. Nossir, fifteen cents. Well, I can't help that;
fifteen's the reg'lar price of foreign papers. Thanks. There, did
you see that? I bet that gink give up fifteen of his last two bits
to get that paper. O, well, sometimes they look happy, and then
again sometimes they--Yes'm. Mississippi? Five cents. Los Vegas
Optic right here. Heh there! You're forgettin' your change!--an'
then again sometimes they look all to the doleful. Say, stick
around. Maybe somebody'll start something. You can't never tell."
And then this happened.
A man approached Tony's news stand from the north, and a woman
approached Tony's news stand from the south. They brought my story
with them.
The woman reeked of the city. I hope you know what I mean.
She bore the stamp, and seal, and imprint of it. It had ground its
heel down on her face. At the front of her coat she wore a huge
bunch of violets, with a fleshly tuberose rising from its center.
Her furs were voluminous. Her hat was hidden beneath the cascades
of a green willow plume. A green willow plume would make Edna May
look sophisticated. She walked with that humping hip movement
which city women acquire. She carried a jangling handful of
useless gold trinkets. Her heels were too high, and her hair too
yellow, and her lips too red, and her nose too white, and her
cheeks too pink. Everything about her was "too," from the black
stitching on her white gloves to the buckle of brilliants in her
hat. The city had her, body and soul, and had fashioned her in its
metallic cast. You would have sworn that she had never seen
flowers growing in a field.
Said she to Tony:
"Got a Kewaskum Courier?"
As she said it the man stopped at the stand and put his
question. To present this thing properly I ought to be able to
describe them both at the same time, like a juggler keeping two
balls in the air at once. Kindly carry the lady in your mind's
eye. The man was tall and rawboned, with very white teeth, very
blue eyes and an open-faced collar that allowed full play to an
objectionably apparent Adam's apple. His hair and mustache were
sandy, his gait loping. His manner, clothes, and complexion
breathed of Waco, Texas (or is it Arizona?)
Said he to Tony:
"Let me have the London Times."
Well, there you are. I turned an accusing eye on Tony.
"And you said no stories came your way," I murmured,
reproachfully.
"Help yourself," said Tony.
The blonde lady grasped the Kewaskum Courier. Her green plume
appeared to be unduly agitated as she searched its columns. The
sheet rattled. There was no breeze. The hands in the too-black
stitched gloves were trembling.
I turned from her to the man just in time to see the Adam's
apple leaping about unpleasantly and convulsively. Whereupon I
jumped to two conclusions.
Conclusion one: Any woman whose hands can tremble over the
Kewaskum Courier is homesick.
Conclusion two: Any man, any part of whose anatomy can become
convulsed over the London Times is homesick.
She looked up from her Courier. He glanced away from his
Times. As the novelists have it, their eyes met. And there, in
each pair of eyes there swam that misty haze about which I had so
earnestly consulted Tony. The Green Plume took an involuntary step
forward. The Adam's Apple did the same. They spoke
simultaneously.
"They're going to pave Main Street," said the Green Plume,
"and Mrs. Wilcox, that was Jeri Meyers, has got another baby girl,
and the ladies of the First M. E. made seven dollars and sixty-nine
cents on their needle-work bazaar and missionary tea. I ain't been
home in eleven years."
"Hallem is trying for Parliament in Westchester and the King
is back at Windsor. My mother wears a lace cap down to breakfast,
and the place is famous for its tapestries and yew trees and family
ghost. I haven't been home in twelve years."
The great, soft light of fellow feeling and sympathy glowed in
the eyes of each. The Green Plume took still another step forward
and laid her hand on his arm (as is the way of Green Plumes the
world over).
"Why don't you go, kid?" she inquired, softly.
Adam's Apple gnawed at his mustache end. "I'm the black
sheep. Why don't you?"
The blonde lady looked down at her glove tips. Her lower lip
was caught between her teeth.
"What's the feminine for black sheep? I'm that. Anyway, I'd
be afraid to go home for fear it would be too much of a shock for
them when they saw my hair. They wasn't in on the intermediate
stages when it was chestnut, auburn, Titian, gold, and orange
colored. I want to spare their feelings. The last time they saw
me it was just plain brown. Where I come from a woman who dyes her
hair when it is beginning to turn gray is considered as good as
lost. Funny, ain't it? And yet I remember the minister's wife
used to wear false teeth--the kind that clicks. But hair is
different."
"Dear lady," said the blue-eyed man, "it would make no
difference to your own people. I know they would be happy to see
you, hair and all. One's own people----"
"My folks? That's just it. If the Prodigal Son had been a
daughter they'd probably have handed her one of her sister's mother
hubbards, and put her to work washing dishes in the kitchen. You
see, after Ma died my brother married, and I went to live with him
and Lil. I was an ugly little mug, and it looked all to the
Cinderella for me, with the coach, and four, and prince left out.
Lil was the village beauty when my brother married her, and she
kind of got into the habit of leaving the heavy role to me, and
confining herself to thinking parts. One day I took twenty dollars
and came to the city. Oh, I paid it back long ago, but I've never
been home since. But say, do you know every time I get near a news
stand like this I grab the home-town paper. I'll bet I've kept
track every time my sister-in-law's sewing circle has met for the
last ten years, and the spring the paper said they built a new
porch I was just dying to write and ask'em what they did with the
Virginia creeper that used to cover the whole front and sides of
the old porch."
"Look here," said the man, very abruptly, "if it's money you
need, why----"
"Me! Do I look like a touch? Now you----"
"Finest stock farm and ranch in seven counties. I come to
Chicago once a year to sell. I've got just thirteen thousand
nestling next to my left floating rib this minute."
The eyes of the woman with the green plume narrowed down to
two glittering slits. A new look came into her face--a look that
matched her hat, and heels and gloves and complexion and hair.
"Thirteen thousand! Thirteen thous---- Say, isn't it chilly
on this corner, h'm? I know a kind of a restaurant just around the
corner where----"
"It's no use," said the sandy-haired man, gently. "And I
wouldn't have said that, if I were you. I was going back to-day
on the 5:25, but I'm sick of it all. So are you, or you wouldn't
have said what you just said. Listen. Let's go back home, you and
I. The sight of a Navajo blanket nauseates me. The thought of
those prairies makes my eyes ache. I know that if I have to eat
one more meal cooked by that Chink of mine I'll hang him by his own
pigtail. Those rangy western ponies aren't horseflesh, fit for a
man to ride. Why, back home our stables were-- Look here. I want
to see a silver tea-service, with a coat-of-arms on it. I want to
dress for dinner, and take in a girl with a white gown and smooth
white shoulders. My sister clips roses in the morning, before
breakfast, in a pink ruffled dress and garden gloves. Would you
believe that, here, on Clark Street, with a whiskey sign overhead,
and the stock-yard smells undernose? O, hell! I'm going home."
"Home?" repeated the blonde lady. "Home?" The sagging lines
about her flaccid chin took on a new look of firmness and resolve.
The light of determination glowed in her eyes.
"I'll beat you to it," she said. "I'm going home, too. I'll
be there to-morrow. I'm dead sick of this. Who cares whether I
live or die? It's just one darned round of grease paint, and sky
blue tights, and new boarding houses and humping over to the
theater every night, going on, and humping back to the room again.
I want to wash up some supper dishes with egg on 'em, and set some
yeast for bread, and pop a dishpan full of corn, and put a shawl
over my head and run over to Millie Krause's to get her kimono
sleeve pattern. I'm sour on this dirt and noise. I want to spend
the rest of my life in a place so that when I die they'll put a
column in the paper, with a verse at the top, and all the
neighbors'll come in and help bake up. Here--why, here I'd just be
two lines on the want ad page, with fifty cents extra for `Kewaskum
paper please copy.'"
The man held out his hand. "Good-bye," he said, "and please
excuse me if I say God bless you. I've never really wanted to say
it before, so it's quite extraordinary. My name's Guy Peel."
The white glove, with its too-conspicuous black stitching,
disappeared within his palm.
"Mine's Mercedes Meron, late of the Morning Glory Burlesquers,
but from now on Sadie Hayes, of Kewaskum, Wisconsin. Good-bye
and--well--God bless you, too. Say, I hope you don't think I'm in
the habit of talking to strange gents like this."
"I am quite sure you are not," said Guy Peel, very gravely,
and bowed slightly before he went south on Clark Street, and she
went north.
Dear Reader, will you take my hand while I assist you to make
a one year's leap. Whoop-la! There you are.
A man and a woman approached Tony's news stand. You are quite
right. But her willow plume was purple this time. A purple willow
plume would make Mario Doro look sophisticated. The man was
sandy-haired, raw-boned, with a loping gait, very blue eyes, very
white teeth, and an objectionably apparent Adam's apple. He came
from the north, and she from the south.
In story books, and on the stage, when two people meet
unexpectedly after a long separation they always stop short, bring
one hand up to their breast, and say: "You!" Sometimes,
especially in the case where the heroine chances on the villain,
they say, simultaneously: "You! Here!" I have seen people
reunited under surprising circumstances, but they never said,
"You!" They said something quite unmelodramatic, and commonplace,
such as: "Well, look who's here!" or, "My land! If it ain't Ed!
How's Ed?"
So it was that the Purple Willow Plume and the Adam's Apple
stopped, shook hands, and viewed one another while the Plume said,
"I kind of thought I'd bump into you. Felt it in my bones." And
the Adam's Apple said:
"Then you're not living in Kewaskum--er--Wisconsin?"
"Not any," responded she, briskly. "How do you happen to be
straying away from the tapestries, and the yew trees and the ghost,
and the pink roses, and the garden gloves, and the silver
tea-service with the coat-of-arms on it?"
A slow, grim smile overspread the features of the man. "You
tell yours first," he said.
"Well," began she, "in the first place, my name's Mercedes
Meron, of the Morning Glory Burlesquers, formerly Sadie Hayes of
Kewaskum, Wisconsin. I went home next day, like I said I would.
Say, Mr. Peel (you said Peel, didn't you? Guy Peel. Nice, neat
name), to this day, when I eat lobster late at night, and have
dreams, it's always about that visit home."
"How long did you stay?"
"I'm coming to that. Or maybe you can figure it out yourself
when I tell you I've been back eleven months. I wired the folks I
was coming, and then I came before they had a chance to answer.
When the train reached Kewaskum I stepped off into the arms of a
dowd in a home-made-made-over-year-before-last suit, and a hat that
would have been funny if it hadn't been so pathetic. I grabbed her
by the shoulders, and I held her off, and looked--looked at the
wrinkles, and the sallow complexion, and the coat with the sleeves
in wrong, and the mashed hat (I told you Lil used to be the village
peach, didn't I?) and I says:
"`For Gawd's sakes, Lil, does your husband beat you?'
"`Steve!' she shrieks, `beat me! You must be crazy!'
"`Well, if he don't, he ought to. Those clothes are grounds
for divorce,' I says.
"Mr. Guy Peel, it took me just four weeks to get wise to the
fact that the way to cure homesickness is to go home. I spent
those four weeks trying to revolutionize my sister-in-law's house,
dress, kids, husband, wall paper and parlor carpet. I took all the
doilies from under the ornaments and spoke my mind on the subject
of the hand-painted lamp, and Lil hates me for it yet, and will to
her dying day. I fitted three dresses for her, and made her get
some corsets that she'll never wear. They have roast pork for
dinner on Sundays, and they never go to the theater, and they like
bread pudding, and they're happy. I wasn't. They treated me fine,
and it was home, all right, but not my home. It was the same, but
I was different. Eleven years away from anything makes it shrink,
if you know what I mean. I guess maybe you do. I remember that I
used to think that the Grand View Hotel was a regular little
oriental palace that was almost too luxurious to be respectable,
and that the traveling men who stopped there were gods, and just to
prance past the hotel after supper had the Atlantic City board walk
looking like a back alley on a rainy night. Well, everything had
sort of shriveled up just like that. The popcorn gave me
indigestion, and I burned the skin off my nose popping it.
Kneading bread gave me the backache, and the blamed stuff wouldn't
raise right. I got so I was crazy to hear the roar of an L train,
and the sound of a crossing policeman's whistle. I got to thinking
how Michigan Avenue looks, downtown, with the lights shining down
on the asphalt, and all those people eating in the swell hotels,
and the autos, and the theater crowds and the windows, and--well,
I'm back. Glad I went? You said it. Because it made me so darned
glad to get back. I've found out one thing, and it's a great
little lesson when you get it learned. Most of us are where we are
because we belong there, and if we didn't, we wouldn't be. Say,
that does sound mixed, don't it? But it's straight. Now you tell
yours."
"I think you've said it all," began Guy Peel. "It's queer,
isn't it, how twelve years of America will spoil one for afternoon
tea, and yew trees, and tapestries, and lace caps, and roses. The
mater was glad to see me, but she said I smelled woolly. They
think a Navajo blanket is a thing the Indians wear on the war path,
and they don't know whether Texas is a state, or a mineral water.
It was slow--slow. About the time they were taking afternoon tea,
I'd be reckoning how the boys would be rounding up the cattle for
the night, and about the time we'd sit down to dinner something
seemed to whisk the dinner table, and the flowers, and the men and
women in evening clothes right out of sight, like magic, and I
could see the boys stretched out in front of the bunk house after
their supper of bacon, and beans, and biscuit, and coffee. They'd
be smoking their pipes that smelled to Heaven, and further, and
Wing would be squealing one of his creepy old Chink songs out in
the kitchen, and the sky would be--say, Miss Meron, did you ever
see the night sky, out West? Purple, you know, and soft as soap-
suds, and so near that you want to reach up and touch it with your
hand. Toward the end my mother used to take me off in a corner and
tell me that I hadn't spoken a word to the little girl that I had
taken in to dinner, and that if I couldn't forget my uncouth
western ways for an hour or two, at least, perhaps I'd better not
try to mingle with civilized people. I discovered that home isn't
always the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place
where your everyday clothes are, and where somebody, or something
needs you. They didn't need me over there in England. Lord no!
I was sick for the sight of a Navajo blanket. My shack's glowing
with them. And my books needed me, and the boys, and the critters,
and Kate."
"Kate?" repeated Miss Meron, quickly.
"Kate's my horse. I'm going back on the 5:25 to-night. This
is my regular trip, you know. I came around here to buy a paper,
because it has become a habit. And then, too, I sort of
felt--well, something told me that you----"
"You're a nice boy," said Miss Meron. "By the way, did I tell
you that I married the manager of the show the week after I got
back? We go to Bloomington to-night, and then we jump to St. Paul.
I came around here just as usual, because--well--because----"
Tony's gift for remembering faces and facts amounts to genius.
With two deft movements he whisked two papers from among the many
in the rack, and held them out.
"Kewaskum Courier?" he suggested.
"Nix," said Mercedes Meron, "I'll take a Chicago Scream."
"London Times?" said Tony.
"No," replied Guy Peel. "Give me the San Antonio Express."
-THE END-
Edna Ferber's short story: That Home-Town Feeling
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