Part 3 (1/2)
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 was.h.i.+ng. And when she goes to Europe for the summer on the same s.h.i.+p with the Astors and the Vanderbilts, it sounds more magnificent than it really is. She is on the same s.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.s her around from farm to farm for months, while she does amateur business agent work for the steams.h.i.+p 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 embarra.s.sing appet.i.te. 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 gla.s.s washtub or something of the kind--and we sighed wearily.
V
HOMEBURG'S LEISURE CLa.s.s
_It is not as large as New York's but it is twice as ingenious_
Confound it, Jim, I wish you hadn't told me that your friend Williston never worked a day in his life! You don't know how it disappointed me.
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 friends.h.i.+p 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 Gast.i.t, who was the prettiest, best-dispositioned, and most capable girl in Homeburg, but who had a gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 embarra.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 appet.i.te 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 acc.u.mulated 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 ch.o.r.es 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 G.o.dsend, 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 a.s.sociation, 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 cla.s.s in Homeburg, however, outside of the retired farmers, who really can't help themselves. Our genuine metropolitan leisure cla.s.s 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.