Chapter 9

In fact the only classes we have are the privileged class who merely ride in automobiles and the oppressed class who ride and have to pay for them, too. Lately the latter class has begun to feel itself abused and has been grumbling a little, but we overlook it. No appeal to prejudice and jealousy can move us. Of course, I don't think that an automobile owner should be expected to leave his wife at home in order to accommodate his neighbors, and there may be some just complaint when an owner is called up late at night and asked to haul friends home from a party to which he hasn't been invited. But on the whole the automobile owners are very well treated. Suppose we spectators should band together and refuse to ride in the things or talk about them! The market would be glutted with second-hand cars in a month.

We have no trouble with the speed limit in Homeburg either. This may be due partly to our good sense, but it is mostly due to our peculiar crossings. Homeburg is paved with rich black dirt, and in order to keep the populace out of the bosom of the soil in the muddy seasons, the brick crossings are built high and solid, forming a series of impregnable "thank-ye-marms" all over the town. One of our great diversions during the tourist season is to watch the reckless strangers from some other State dash madly into town at forty miles an hour and hit the crossing at the head of Main Street. There is a crash and a scream as the occupants of the tonneau soar gracefully into the top. There is another crash and more screams at the other side of the street, and before the driver has diagnosed the case, he has hit the Exchange Street crossing, which sticks out like the Reef of Norman's Woe. When he has landed on the other side of this crossing, he slows down and goes meekly out of town at ten miles an hour, while we saunter forth and pick up small objects of value such as wrenches, luncheon baskets, hairpins, hats, and passengers.

Last summer we picked up an oldish man who had been thrown out of an unusually jambangsome touring car. He had been traveling in the tonneau alone, and even before he met our town he had not been enjoying himself. The driver and his accomplice had not noticed their loss, and when we had brushed off and restored the old gentleman, he said "Thank God!" and went firmly over to the depot, where he took the next train for home, leaving no word behind in case his friends should return--which they did that afternoon and searched mournfully at a snail's pace for over twenty miles on both sides of our town.

Since the automobile has begun to rage in our midst, the garage is the center of our city life. The machine owners stop each day for lubricating oil and news and conversation; the non-owners stroll over to inspect the visiting cars and give advice when necessary; and the loafers have abandoned the implement store, Emerson's restaurant, and the back of McMuggins' drug store in favor of the garage, because they find about seven times as much there to talk about. The city garage can't compare with ours for adventure and news. I have spent a few hours in your most prominent car-nurseries and I haven't heard anything but profanity on the part of the owners and Broadway talk among the chauffeurs.

In the country it's different. Take a busy day at Gayley's, for instance. It usually opens about three A.M., when Gayley crawls out of bed in response to a cataract of woe over the telephone and goes out nine miles hither or yon to haul in some foundered brother. Gayley has a soft heart and is always going out over the country at night to reason with some erring engine; but since last April first, when he traveled six miles at two A.M. in response to a call and found a toy automobile lying bottom-side up in the road, he has become suspicious and embittered, and has raised his prices.

At six A.M. Worley Gates, who farms eight miles south, comes in to catch an early train and delivers the first bulletin. The roads to the south are drying fast, but he went down the clay hill sidewise and had to go through the bottom on low. At seven, Wimble Horn and Colonel Ackley and Sim Bone drop in while waiting for breakfast. Bone thinks he'll drive to Millford, but doesn't think he can get in an hour's business and get back by noon.

This starts the first debate of the day, Colonel Ackley contending that he has done the distance easily in an hour-ten, and Sim being frankly incredulous. Experts decide that it can be done with good roads. Colonel says he can do it in mud and can take the hills on high; says he never goes into low for anything. Bill Elwin, one of our gasless experts, reminds him of the time he couldn't get up Foster's Hill on second and was passed by three automobiles and fourteen road roaches. This is a distinct breach of etiquette on Bill's part, for he was riding with Colonel at the time and should have upheld him. The discussion is just getting good when Ackley's wife calls him home to breakfast over the 'phone, and the first tourist of the day comes in.

He has come from the west and has had heavy weather. He asks about the roads east. Gibb Ogle, our leading pessimist, hastens to inform him that very likely the roads are impassable, because the Highway Commissioners have been improving them. Out our way road improvement consists of tearing the roads out with a scraper and heaping them up in the middle. It takes a road almost a year to recover from a good, thorough case of improvement.

The stranger goes on dejectedly, and about nine A.M. young Andy Link roars in with his father's car, which he has taken away from the old man and converted into a racer by the simple process of taking off the muffler and increasing the noise to one hundred miles per hour. Andy declares that there has been no rain to the northwest and that he has done sixty miles already this morning, but can't get his carbureter to working properly, as usual. By this time several owners and a dozen critics have assembled, and the morning debate on gasoline versus motor spirit takes place. It ends a tie and both sides badly winded, when Pelty Amthorne drives in, very mad. He has been over to Paynesville and back. This is only twenty miles, but owing to the juicy and elusive condition of the roads, his rear wheels have traveled upward of two thousand miles in negotiating the distance and he has worn out two rear casings.

Right here I wish to state that Homeburg roads are not always muddy. We average three months of beautiful, smooth, resilient and joltless roads each year. The remaining nine months, however, I mention with pain. Illinois boosters say our beautiful rich black soil averages ten feet in depth, but I think this understates the case--at least our beautiful black dirt roads seem to be deeper than that in the spring. What we need in the spring in Illinois are locks and harbor lights, and the man who invents an automobile buoyant enough to float on its stomach and paddle its way swiftly to and fro on the heaving bosom of our April roads will be a public benefactor.

Pelty is justly indignant, because he had hoped to get another thousand miles of actual travel out of his tires. We sympathize with him, but in the middle of his grief Chet Frazier drives up. When he sees his ancient enemy, he climbs out of his car, comes hastily over to where Pelty is erupting, and starts trading autos with him.

Did you ever hear a couple of seasoned horse traders discussing each other's wares? Horse traders are considerate and tender of each other's feelings compared with two rural automobile owners who are talking swap with any enthusiasm.

"Hello, Pelty," says Chet. "Separator busted again?"

Everybody laughs, and Chet walks all around the machine. "Why, it ain't a separator at all," he finally says. "What is it, Pelty?"

"If you'd ever owned an automobile you'd know," grunts Amthorne, hauling off a tire. "What's become of that tinware exhibit you used to block up traffic with?"

Chet gets the laugh this time.

"That tinware exhibit stepped over from Jenniesburg in thirty minutes flat this morning," says Chet. "Lucky you weren't on the road. I'd have thrown mud on your wind shield."

"Say!" Pelty shouts. "Your machine couldn't fall ten miles in thirty minutes. Why don't you get a real automobile? What will you give me to boot for mine?"

They are off, and business in the vicinity suspends.

"I'll trade with you, Pelty," says Chet calmly--quite calmly. "Let me look it over."

He walks carefully around the auto, opens the hood and looks in. "Funny engine, isn't it? I saw one like that at the World's Fair."

Pelty has the hood of Chet's machine open too and is right there with the retort courteous. "Is this an engine or a steam heater?" he asks. "What pressure does she carry?"

"She never heats at all except when I run a long time on low," Chet says eagerly.

"Oh, yes," says Pelty, "I never have to go into low much--"

"Gosh!" Chet explodes. "When you go up Sanders Hill, they have to close two district schools for the noise."

"Only time you ever heard me I was hauling you up with your broken jack-shaft," snorts Pelty. "You ought to get some iron parts for your car. Cheese has gone out of style."

"You still use it for tires, I see," says Chet.

"Never mind," says Pelty wrathfully. "I get mileage out of my machine; I don't drive around town and then spend two days shoveling out carbon."

"Peculiar radiator you've got," says Chet, changing the subject. "Oh, I see; it's a road sprinkler. What do you get from the city for laying the dust?"

"I can stop that leak in two minutes with a handful of corn meal," says Pelty, busily surveying Chet's machine. "Do you still strip a gear on this thing every time you try to back?"

"Why do you carry a horn?" asks Chet. "You're wasteful; I heard your valves chattering when I was three blocks away."

"I didn't hear yours chatter much last Tuesday on Main Street," snorts Pelty. "You cranked that thing long enough to grind it home by hand."

"Ya-a! Talk, will you?" yells Chet earnestly. "Any man who begins carrying hot water out to his machine in a teakettle in September knows a lot about starting cars."

"Well, get down to business," says Pelty. "You want to trade, you say. I don't want that mess. It's an old back-number with tin springs, glass gears and about as much compression as a bandbox. Give me five hundred dollars and throw your automobile in. I need something to tie my cow to. She'd haul away anything that was movable."

"Give you five hundred dollars for that parody on a popcorn wagon?" snorts Chet. "Why, man, the poor old thing has to go into low to pull its shadow! You're delirious, Pelty. I'll tell you what I'll do. You give me a thousand dollars for my car, and I'll agree to haul that old calliope up to my barn, out of your way, and make a hen roost out of it. Come on now. It's your only chance."

Shortly after this they are parted by anxious friends, and the show is over. I've known Homeburg men to give up a trip to Chicago because Chet and Pelty began to trade their autos just before train time.

In New York an auto means comfort and pleasure and advertisement, like a fur-lined overcoat with a Persian lamb collar. But in Homeburg it means a lot more. It keeps us busy and happy and full of conversation and debate. It pulls our old, retired farmers out of their shells and makes them yell for improvements. It unbuckles our tight-wads and gives our ingenious young loafers something to do. It promotes town pride, and it keeps our money circulating so fast that every one has a chance to grasp a chunk as it goes by.

It has made us so independent of railroads that we feel now when buying a ticket to Chicago as if we were helping the poor old line out. Our Creamery has been collecting milk and shipping butter in an old roadster with a wagon bed thorax for a year. Two of our rural route mail carriers use small machines, except in wet weather, and good-roads societies in our vicinity are the latest fad. We raised one thousand five hundred dollars last spring to bring the Cannon Ball Trail from Chicago to Kansas City through our town, and our hotel-keeper contributed one hundred dollars of it. He says we'll be on the gas-line tourist route to the coast after the trail has been marked and drained and graded up well.

But mostly the automobile means freedom to us. We're no longer citizens of Homeburg but of the congressional district. We're neighbors to towns we hadn't heard of ten years ago, and the horizon nowadays for most of us is located at the end of a ten-gallon tank of gasoline. Why, in the old days, you had to go fifty miles east and double back to get into the north part of our county, and more of us had crossed the ocean than had been to Pallsbury in the north tier of townships. Now our commercial clubs meet together alternate months, and about seventeen babies in our town have proud grandparents up there.

That's part of what the automobile means to us, Jim. Can you blame me for being so interested in a new one? Maybe it will have some contrivance for scaring cows out of a narrow road.

X

THE HOMEBURG TELEPHONE EXCHANGE

_What Would Happen if We Tried to Get Along With a City Operator_

All right, Jim! Having now completed the task of telephoning to Murray Hill several thousand and something, I'm ready to join you at luncheon. I'm glad I telephoned. I won't have to spend the afternoon doing it now and, besides, I feel so triumphant. I got through this time without forgetting to get a nickel first. I usually go into one of those wooden overcoats and go through all the agonies of elbowing my way through half a dozen centrals into some one's ear several miles away, and then discover that I haven't anything but a half dollar. Then I have to stop and begin all over again.

Telephoning is one of the prices you have to pay to live in a metropolis, Jim. I suppose it will always hurt me to pay a nickel for telephoning. Seems like paying for a lungful of air--and bad air at that. Coming as I do from the simple bosom of the nation, where talk over the wires is so cheap that you sometimes have to wait half an hour while two women are planning a church social over your line, I can't seem to resign myself to paying the price of a street-car ride every time I breathe a few sentiments into a telephone. Now the street cars never fail to dazzle me. They are a wonderful bargain. When we are too tired to walk in Homeburg, we have to pay at least fifty cents for a horse from the livery stable, unless some automobile is going our way. Nothing is more pleasant to me than to slip a nickel to a street-car conductor and ride ten miles on it. But when we want to use a telephone, do we go through all this ceremony of dropping a nickel into a set of chimes? Not much. My bill at home at five cents per telephone call would be more than my income. Why, many a time I've called up as many as eight people in the west part of town to know whether the red glow in the sky was the sunset or the Rolling Mills at Paynesville burning down! And almost every day I telephone McMuggins, the druggist, to collar a small boy and send up an Eltarvia Cigar. If that call cost me five cents, I would be practically smoking ten-cent cigars, and all Homeburg would regard me with suspicion.

I suppose it will be a hundred years before we get over saying "Great invention, isn't it?" every time we have finished a satisfactory session over the telephone. But I don't think you city people realize how much of an invention it is. Of course, the telephone is more important in New York than it is in Homeburg. If you had to go back to the old-fashioned stationary messenger boy to do your business here, a good share of the city would have to close out at a sacrifice. You do things with your telephones which dazzle us entirely, like talking into parlor cars, calling up steamships, buying a railroad and saying airily "Charge it," and tossing a few hectic words over to Pittsburgh or Cincinnati at five dollars per remark, as casually as I would stop in and ask Postmaster Flint why in thunder the Chicago papers were late again--and that is about as casual as anything I know of.

I'm willing to admit that your telephones are much more wonderful than ours, not only because of what they do for you, but because of the amount of money they can get out of you without causing revolutions and indignation meetings. Why, they tell me that business firms here think nothing of paying one hundred dollars a year for a telephone! At home once, when we tried to raise the farmer lines from fifty cents to a dollar a month, we almost had to fortify the town. I take off my hat to a telephone which can collect one hundred dollars a year from its user without using thumbscrews. It must have more ways of working for you than I have ever dreamed of.

No, the telephone in Homeburg is a very ordinary thing, and we could get along without it quite nicely as far as exertion is concerned, it being only a mile from end to end of the town. But if we had to do without our telephone girls, we'd turn the whole town into a lodge of sorrow and refuse to be comforted. I know of no grander invention than the country town telephone girl. She's not only our servant and master, but she's our watch-dog, guardian, memorandum book, guide, philosopher and family friend. When our telephone can't give us convenience enough, she supplies the lack. When brains at both ends are scarce, she dumps hers into the pot; and when the poor overworked instrument falls down on any task, she takes up the job. She not only gives our telephone a voice, but she gives it feet and hands and something to think with.

I got into a big telephone exchange once and watched it for over a minute before I was fired out. It was a very impressive sight--rows on rows of switchboards, hundreds of girls, thousands of little flashing lights, millions of clickety-clicks and not enough conversation to run a sewing circle up to refreshment time. The company was very proud of it, and I suppose it was good enough for a city--but, pshaw, it wouldn't do Homeburg for a day. If some one were to offer that entire exchange to us free of charge, we'd struggle along with it for a few hours, and then we'd rise up en masse and trade it off for Carrie Mason, our chief operator, throwing in whatever we had to, to boot.

Our exchange is in the back room of the bank building up-stairs. You could put the entire equipment in a dray. Our switchboard is about as big as an old-fashioned china closet and has three hundred drops. I suppose an up-to-date telephone manager has forgotten what "drops" are and you can't be expected to know. But out our way the telephone companies are coöperative, and as every subscriber owns a share, we all take a deep personal interest in the construction and operation of the plant, discussing the need of a new switchboard and the advantage of cabling the Main Street lead, in technical terms.

Well, anyway, a drop is a little brass door which falls down with a clatter whenever the telephone which is hitched to that particular drop wants a connection. And Miss Carrie Mason, our chief operator, sits on a high stool with a receiver strapped over her rick of blond hair jabbing brass plugs with long cords attached into the right holes with unerring accuracy, and a reach which would give her a tremendous advantage in any boarding-house in the land. Sometimes she has one assistant, and in rush hours she has two. But on Sunday afternoons and other quiet times she holds down the whole job alone for hours at a time; and when I go up to her citadel and ask her to jam a toll call through forty miles of barbed wire and miscellaneous junk to Taledo by sheer wrist and lung power, she entertains me as follows while I wait:

"Yes, indeed, I'll get your call through as soon as I can, but the connection's--Nmbr--awful--Nmbr--bad to-day--Nmbr--They're not at home, Mrs. Simmons; they went to Paynesville--Nmbr--I'll ring again--Nmbr--Hello, Doctor Simms, Mrs. McCord told me to tell you to come right out to the farm; the baby's sick--Nmbr--The train's late to-day, Mrs. Bane, you've got plenty of time--Nmbr--I can't get them, Mrs. Frazier. I'll call up next door and leave word for them to call you--Nmbr (To me: "Hot to-day, isn't it? I tell 'em we ought to have an electric fan up here.")--Nmbr--("It would keep us better tempered.")--Nmbr--Oh, Mrs. Horn, will you tell Mrs. Flint when she comes home that Mrs. Frazier wants her to call her up?--Nmbr--Now, Jimmy, you haven't waited two seconds. I know you're anxious to talk to Phoeb, but she isn't home; she's at the cooking club--Nmbr--Cambridge, do see if you can't get through to Taledo. I've a party here that's in a hurry--Nmbr. (To me: "That Taledo line's awful. It's grounded somewhere on that farmer's line west of Tacoma.")--Nmbr--Yes, Mr. Bell, I'll call you quick as he comes in his office; I can see his door from my window--Nmbr--No, Mrs. Bane, the doctor's just gone out to the McCord farm. If you hurry, you can stop him as he goes past. He left about five minutes ago--Nmbr--Gee, Paynesville, you gave me an awful ring in the ear then! No, you can't get through, the line's busy. Well, you'll have to wait. I can't take the line away from them--Nmbr--Oh! (very softly) Hello, Sam. Oh, pretty well. I'm most melted--wait a minute--Nmbr--Hello, Sam (long silence) Oh, get out! My ear's all full of taffy--wait a minute--Nmbr--Nmbr--No, Mr. Martin, there hasn't been any one in his office all day. I think he's gone to Chicago--Hello, Sam--wait a minute, Sam--Nmbr--Nmbr--Hello, Sam--Say, I'm all alone and jumping sidewise. Call me up about six (very softly). G'by, Sam--Nmbr. Oh, Mrs. Lucey, is Mrs. Simms at your house? Tell her her husband will be home late to supper, he's gone out in the country--Hello. Hello. _Hello_, Taledo. Is your party ready? (To me: "All right, here they are. You'll have to talk pretty loud.") Hello, Taledo. All ready--Nmbr."

That is a fair sample of Carrie. We couldn't keep house without her. And that's why I feel an awful pang of jealousy when I hear that lobster Sam talking to her. Maybe it's just the ordinary joshing which goes on over the toll lines in the off hours. But maybe it isn't. Wherever Sam is and whoever he is, he is a danger to Homeburg. Perhaps he is a lineman at Paynesville, and then again he may be a grocer in some crossroads town near by, with a toll telephone in the back of his store. But if he talks to Carrie long enough and skilfully enough, he will come up to Homeburg, marry her, and bear her away to his lair, far from our bereaved ears. We've lost several telephone girls that way, and when a telephone girl knows all of your habits and customs and those of your friends, and can tell just where to find you or to find whomever you want found, and has the business of the town down to the smallest details stowed away in her capable head, it messes things up dreadfully to have her leave us high and dry and go to housekeeping--which any one can do.