Hometown Revisited

SOMETHING said at the Conspirators’ luncheon table started it. The SingleTaxer, in an interval of silence vouchsafed by the string band between twinges of La Bohème, had propounded, —

‘ What would happen to us, I wonder, if we went back to live in our home towns?’

‘Had n’t you better ask,’ amended the Christian Socialist, ‘what would happen to our home towns?’

He was recommended not to flatter himself that he, or any other clergyman not quite resolved to give up the church, could quell the knew-him-when-he-wasa-youngsterizings of his birthplace. A certain supreme failure was cited. Your tongue might be touched with Pentecostal flame: there would always be some one who made a point of remembering that your Uncle Jim had died of delirium tremens.

‘Just a moment,’ objected the Party Socialist; ‘I am unable to see how the small towns can be much more hopeless for our purposes than these sodden suburbs, where the whole mental energy of the community is focused on lawnmowers and furnaces. Make the small towns understand what is wrong, and they will help you right it.’

This notion was, of course, contemptuously flouted by the Syndicalist: ‘Small towns inevitably react to the bourgeois influences. The revolution has nothing to hope from them. It must rest its case with the working class.’

‘Yes, but,’ interposed the SingleTaxer,‘my question was: What would happen to us if we were forced to go back to our home towns to live?’

‘The question is a foolish question,’ snorted the Syndicalist. ‘None of us would ever go back to our home towns to live. We would rather die.’

Whereupon the party, amid fresh spasms of Puccini from the band, adjourned to a capitalist, or as yet unregenerate, world.

It was remarked afterwards that the Fabian had not shared in the dispute. He had listened with eyes fixed glassily on the carafe, as men do when what they hear is at work on their subconscious minds. Next week, the luncheon table of the Conspirators saw him not. But the week after that he was first in his place.

The Fabian is of an inquiring turn. While we speculated, he had experimented. He had, at no small trouble and some expense, negotiated a flying pilgrimage to his home town — somewhere in the Mississippi Valley; in the interests of generalization I make a point of forgetting the name of the place. He was back with the news. And here, as nearly as I can remember, it is.

I

It was partly a sentimental journey, I may as well confess. The estate is to be broken up and the house sold. I had a hankering to eat and sleep once more in the old rookery before it went under the hammer. Nobody inhabits it now except a care-taker, but the furniture all remains exactly as it was when I clutched at it, learning to walk — the old stage-set intact. How would my, your, anybody’s new costumes fit the old scenery? Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of us, in the past four decades, have left just such homes and fared into the cities. For better or for worse? How stands the balancesheet? Did I say it was a sentimental pilgrimage? Well, at any rate, it soon ceased to be personal. If I felt

it was as the envoy of the multitudes who must be wondering exactly the same things I was wondering — the multitudes who picked up and cleared out of these small towns on the reiterated plea that in them ‘there was nothing for the young people to do.’

Not to rely too implicitly on my own verdicts, I took the precaution of including Talcott in the expedition. As the chief resident physician in St. Benedict’s, Talcott has some standing as a diagnostician. He is, likewise, a smalltown product. Not a few of the successive phases of the translation from rus to urbs we had weathered together. His stethoscope, I opined, would register a few heart-throbs which might elude the naked ear. As to this, Talcott was skeptical — but then, Talcott is always skeptical. That is half his value.

The town? It has a Main Street and a stone bridge of three arches to span a river which freshets obstreperously each spring. The churches are late black walnut and pre-social-settlement, individual-salvation theological; the high school prepares for college if perchance the dean hath dined well; there is one rich man, whose residence, the show place, is not infrequently mistaken for the county courthouse; and, I regret to record, a Carnegie library smelling of the blood and sweat of the steel industry. An interurban streetcar line communicates with a country club where the newest dances are duly solemnized to phonograph records of the punctiliously newest Broadway ‘successes.’

And then there are the side streets of white houses behind the shade rows of maples; the kind voices and the glad greetings; the dimmed eyes and the thin, eager, old hands clinging as if stretched out for a little warmth from the glowing past. These are the old neighbors who called on one’s parents when they were a bridal pair, who had helped and been helped in sickness, who had snatched us from in front of teams when we were tow-headed toddlers. Yes, there is something more to be said for the man who remembers that your Uncle Jim died of the D.T.’s. As likely as not he was the only man in town with the nerves to stay by through the horror of those last ravings. Why has n’t he good cause to remember?

‘To think,’ says Magda Schwartz, in Sudermann’s play, ‘that from this window to that door was once my world! ’

It appeared that both Talcott and I had been thinking of that play all along as charting pretty much the whole predicament of home-coming. For while, in my ears, the echoes of industrial revolt jangled horribly out of tune with this small-town tranquillity, in his, scientific training was in just as strident clash with its evangelical theology. Scenes from Magda kept confronting us at every street corner. It was positively as if we had wandered ‘on’ into some unrehearsed fifth act.

To rummage among the musty pigeon-holes of reawakened memories was to suffer many a wry face at the keepsakes they yielded to the light. So these were our jewels in the days when Plancus was consul and Mr. Maurice Grau engaged the singers for the Metropolitan! Item, one bundle of vainglorious ambitions, slightly damaged; item, one packet of idolatrous worship of the charlesdanagibsonizings of the eighteen-nineties; item, full-page portraits of Men in the Public Eye and Captains of Industry. (Query: Where are the Captains of yester year?) Money? No: we had not exactly craved that prize, except by way of craving the prizes which we did not then know that it would buy — though we were quite docilely disposed to swallow any quantity of magazine chatter about smart sets in general and marble cottages at Newport in particular. What we craved was a certain nebulous condition best defined, perhaps, as the state of being in the swim. We did passionately and painfully desire that, and so intensely that we were quite willing to accept the attached condition of its being a sink-or-swim — chiefly, as we were later to learn, a sink.

The influence of the popular magazines of those years, in moulding our minds and ambitions, is fearful to me now to contemplate — even in retrospect; nor am I able to perceive that the tune has altogether changed. Our tastes, our social criticism (so far as we had any), our estimates of worth-whileness, were ruled by the invisible hand of magazine art, magazine fiction, and magazine reviewing. Oh, tempered and supplemented, it is true, by the Victorian poets and novelists, escorted by the mid-nineteenth-century New Englanders, on most of whom, save Hawthorne and Emerson, be it confessed, we had already begun to sniff a faint odor of mediocrity.

The newspapers were impossible. But the magazines at least registered the pulse of the time. And whether that pulse was normal or feverish was not so much the point of bane or blessing as that it beat in tempo, not with Hometown, but with Urbopolis. It was city cookery for country stomachs; and it frequently caused acute indigestion. Your fictionist, your illustrator, your commentator on men and events were — save for brief spasms of summer rustication, during which they patronized ‘natives’ within an inch of their lives—in and of the city. From the city their impressions and illustrations were mostly drawn. They idealized the city; they gilded it with false sentiment, false beauty, false romance. On much, if not most, extra-urban existence fell the implied stigma of a derided provincialism.

I am not picking a belated quarrel with the great gods of journalism as she was journed in the late nineties. I am, with the aid of an expert diagnostician, registering symptoms many of which I know to be still extant.

The difficulty was just here: the city life was conscious of itself; the smalltown life was not. An army of fairly competent minds was busy interpreting the life of the city to itself, and this so thoroughly that not a teamster or ribbon-counter clerk of the urban lot but had his spokesman in the public prints, and partook somewhere of the typical. And the salesperson who has once seen salespeople elevated to the rank of printed or acted comedy or tragedy is conscious of a new sense of personal consequence which years of obscurity are powerless wholly to erase. To have had one’s social setting touched by the wand of art is to have shaken hands with a celebrity: life is never afterwards quite the same drab commonplace.

But the small town, save for a few scattered ‘story-writers of locality,’ had never had its leaden metal transmuted into this gold of self-consciousness. A few county histories, a few Indian legends, a few volumes of short tales, were the only glances that art had deigned to cast our way. What the small town needed — and needs — was to be interpreted to itself: to be able to say at this moment and that, ’This is typical.’ In the large sense, what we wanted was the news. The news did not come fast enough, there was not enough of what did come, and what did come was not the right kind. A cityconcocted brew of mental stimulant taught us to value what we had not. It did not teach us to appreciate what we had.

The materials of art were all present, in rich profusion. To perceive them is easy enough now. The porch life in summer: whole families living on vinedraped verandas and visiting, in clans, from porch to porch of a mild evening; the church festivals, embroiling neighborhoods in hectic excitements and theatrical thrills; the adjournment of households to a semi-barbarous existence of canvas tent and mosquito netting on the shores of woods-embowered streams and lakes; the evenings of innocent peanut debauchery at the hurdygurdified ‘amusement parks’; the lecture courses, of which Mr. Robert Nourse and Mr. Russell H. Conwell were kings; sleigh-rides and coasting parties which included everybody from grandmother to the four-year-old; the one week of February when the river froze solidly enough for skating, and business was suspended while the whole town strapped on its skates; the long, cosy winter evenings by the fire, with sessions of Thackeray and Shakespeare read aloud from the moment the supper dishes were done until a reluctant bedtime; the valiant amateur struggles with Schubert’s songs and Mozart’s sonatas; and finally, the perpetual and perennial sheer delight of old and young, whether conscious or unconscious, in the majestic procession of the seasons; the warm throb of night wind on the first fair evenings of April; the delight of blossom-time and of fruit-time; and the Alpine pageantry of that cloud-land which is so incomparably splendid on the great plains.

Here it was, an Ali Baba’s cave of treasure; and most of us who were within it felt it to be, not a treasure-house but a prison, because that art which is the vehicle of community self-consciousness was wanting to interpret it to us. The doors of the outer world would not open, for the only words we knew were, not ‘Open Sesame,’ but ‘Open Barley.’

II

And here, after the lapse of a decade or more, so vivid were the memories of that hunger and thirst after urbanities that, if candor is to have her perfect work, neither Talcott nor I can deny a secret elation in walking those familiar lanes and byways with a sense of having outgrown them. ‘From this window to that door was once my world.’ In this upper chamber, on a still, summer afternoon a dozen years ago, we had sat staring at the snowy gleam of the silver birch amid its mist of greenery, with eyes that saw it not, with a spirit that burned to be at a trial of strength in the city: to struggle; to win; to lose; to feel the tug and strain of muscles at tension; to know the dust and sweat of the day; to have borne a share in it, however obscure; to have been one of the great crowd, suffering, aspiring, and to have heaved a shoulder against the eternal burdens along with the rest.

Well, all this we have done. And it was worth the fee. Nothing much came of it, perhaps, unless it be that solemn, man’s-estate elation voiced by the mate in Mr. Joseph Conrad’s story, Youth: —

‘And there was somewhere in me the thought: By Jove! this is the deuce of an adventure — something you read about; and it is my first voyage as second mate — and I am only twenty — and here am lasting it out as well as any of these men.’

The romance of the great towns! — Do the city-bred ever thrill to it as we of the small towns? I wonder. Not vulgar bedazzlement with glitter and swirl, — your minor poet or Broadway dramatist can dish up that emotion, — but the mental intoxication of guessing at the epic sweep of human destinies interwoven in these inscrutable buildings, these teeming streets. I mean a glamour as of first hearing a majestic symphony, long ago learned from a piano score, performed by full orchestra: I mean those first weeks of our Great Adventure, of the sense and sound of the city drenching us with hope and dread; of lifting eyes to the upper murk, rose-pink from the glare of boulevards; of the muffled roar borne vaguely up into remote brick courts as from spring freshets thundering in deep woods over the cataracts of life.

To be sure, nothing much happens. But anything might. A pair of closed shutters shrouds what malign secrets? The merest hall bedroom, exhibited by the frowsiest of garrulous landladies during the room-hunt, — what devotions, ecstasies, heroisms, passions, lusts, despairs have been enacted in the scant nine feet between ‘ this window and that door’! — And in this illimitable, mysterious human flood we are, somehow, swimming and keeping heads out. This was what we had planned to do, and we are managing to do it. The cup for which we thirsted is a cup of trembling, a shuddering intoxication. Gone is the shelter of neighborly interest, gone the placid security of home.

At a certain moment in a memorable contest came a raucous whisper from the quarter-back, ‘Anything goes, fellows; the referee’s not watching.’ At a certain moment in the contest comes a sinister whisper from the city to the small-town transplantee, ‘Anything goes; the referee’s not watching.’

It sounds credible. The crowd has opened its jaws and swallowed us — human atoms. One letter a week is the slender thread leading back to any former identity which may have been ours. Not a human eye keeps watch over our comings-in or our goings-out. Sweeping repeal of that half-kindly, halfspiteful surveillance of gossip over good repute; the annihilation of a whole army of neighborly recording angels. And this on the heels of that staggering revelation of our personal unimportance. At home we were, always would be, Somebody, — even if only ‘Charley Lamson’s boy ; here— ‘Mr. Nobody of Nowhere. Humiliation. Loneliness. Anxiety. Appetite for pleasure. Youth. Homesickness. Beckoning of soft occasion. Now if character is in, let it out and mount guard. For it is under the assault of this insidious sense of irresponsibility that the first battles are lost or won. We are surprised by a rapid beating of the heart for no apparent reason; we are brimming with a fierce, secret exultation over nothing in particular. Now comes the test of principles with a severity which rarely assails the city-bred, whose mentors have grown up with them. No one seems to care what we do. It does not seem to matter. It is only long afterwards that we learn that the future is thronged with those who care. For the present, if we have the force of character to withstand these incitements of namelessness in the solitude of the crowd, it is either from a fear of evil consequences, which, though not an exalted inhibition, is better than none, or from habit of right behavior or sheer strength of will and loyalty to abstract principles.

If the city-bred are not required to undergo this ordeal, they never quite earn the invulnerability of those by whom it has, more or less creditably, been passed. For after this temptation in the desert of loneliness, no temptation is ever quite so severe. That is why, I think, such small-towners as surmount it emerge in a stoic temper. Stoic it may have left us, but the ordeal will have failed of half its purpose if it has not left us compassionate as well. Five-line tragedies in the newspapers are meaningful to us. Now we know how such things can happen. That we escaped may be as much good luck as good management. But to have realized how narrow are the margins between guilt and innocence is at once a rebuke to pride and a claim on measureless pity.

And then, to our new-opened eyes, the tragedy of the city begins to reveal itself. Do you, who have grown up in the midst of it, look on it with a vision so sensitized? I doubt. To us it has not only the terror of strangeness, but also the terror of the might-have-been.

The romance, by this time, has grown somewhat grim: not Thackeray at his most genteel, but Dickens at his most grisly. This is now not a stage play or a story book; nor is life ‘copy’ for inspired fiction. This is real blood and tears. These shrieks are genuine; this despair is the hollow throat-rattle of exhaustion; this sin is vile; this suffering unbearable. We see it now, we smalltowners, with eyes washed clean by our own temptations, defeats, self-conquests, and with hearts that know from the sweet, wholesome neighborly intercourse in which we were reared that people were never meant to live like this.

The drawn underlip of the rouged woman in the café; the wail of the wife as the verdict-grinding magistrate pronounces sentence; the sodden face of the pawer-over of garbage barrels; the haggard glare of the drug fiend; the frail girl taking her first day at the telephone switchboard — she is too faint to touch her luncheon of toast and tea; the man of forty in quest of a job; the teamster, asleep from exhaustion, rolled from his seat, and run over by his own wagon. The child struck by a motor-truck driven by a lad who has been out since four that morning: it is now seven of the evening, and he was speeding home. A scream, a pool of blood, a limp little body, a mother’s shriek. An ambulance call. The young doctor in the ambulance shakes his head. (It was Talcott.) ‘Honest, Doc,

I never seen her. It was so dark. A driver out of a job; a mother out of a child. — Must these things be? Well, they are. Think on them. And then let us be gay. Crack a joke. Lively places, these cities. Glamour. Romance. Majestic public buildings. Hear the sweet young thing exclaim, ‘I perfectly adore New York!’ Meaning that she perfectly adores luncheon at the Plaza and a box at the Metropolitan.

So why spend good money for cheap imitation tragedies in theatres when the raw material of the real thing jostles us off the curbing? I do not say that the city-bred are invariably desensitized to such sights. What I say is that we of the small towns look on them with a sensitiveness to the human side of things which sharpens our capacities for suffering and stimulates our consciences to seek a remedy. We know that if such things had happened in our home towns we could and would have ‘done something’ about it. It is the knowledge that, here in the cities, half the time, there is not much to be done, that causes us to take it so to heart.

III

Well, and what do we propose to do about it?

The dramatis personœ of the party at the luncheon table is one hint. But what sort of reception would such a cast of characters as you fellow Conspirators — sartorially irreproachable, but politically outrageous — receive in the home town?

As we sat there in the family pew that golden Sunday morning, and afterwards, as we strolled home under the maple shade-rows through the sultry, drowsing noon, this is what Talcott (who signs himself in gay little notes, ' For the revolution ’) and I were asking ourselves. How can these placid gentlefolk be expected to comprehend the secret horror and the public danger, even to their very selves, of a city slum? Whimsically we amused ourselves by speculating as to what would happen were one of us, after sitting docilely under the sterile theology of the eighteen-seventies, to mount the horse-block before the church portal, and, as the congregation poured out, preach the new gospel of industrial democracy and social revolt. We imagined the Sunday dinners curdled with horror: the stoning with missiles of blank stupefaction and outraged decorum. — ‘Christ a labor agitator! The priests and politicians who crucified him the capitalist class of Judea! “Wage slavery” worse than the black slavery of the South? — Don’t I seem to remember, Jane, that every once in a while some one in that family has had a slate off?’

The notion of haranguing those old neighbors on these new issues held the raw materials of farce and melodrama, with just a possible dash of tragedy. We were wise youth. We did not preach, saying, ‘Repent, for ye know not at what hour the social revolution cometh.’ We withdrew, instead, to the rose-garden below the terraces, and there, stretched at full length on the velvety lawn, looked up into the sunveined foliage of the lindens and asked ourselves a few questions.

Why, after all, this frantic fluttering to quit Hometown the instant wings were fledged? Was there truly ‘nothing for young people to do’? Or was there merely nothing genteel for young people to do?

Partly both. A Hometowm which, with the flour dust of two grist-mills, whitens a Main Street jostled by thrice as many stores as an adjacent farming territory can comfortably maintain, will support only a limited number of white-collar men. Squire, doctor, parson, and pedagogue well-nigh exhaust the professional list. Add a few clerks, officials, and small merchants, and the clean-linen positions are all filled.

But our college-entrance, high-school curriculum had created in us a mystic conviction that our talents were henceforth dedicated to ‘ brain work ’ — by which we meant indoor jobs. Also, it meant a flavor of the gentility hereinbefore mentioned. Hearing, therefore, that such posts were running round the cities crying to be eaten, and mindful of a mercanto-literary tradition of poorboys-who-became-exploiters, we stampeded thither to hang, in the majority of cases for the rest of our days, by the skin of our teeth on the ragged edge of that self-same gentility. Whether or not there were, specificially, acres enough for us all, did it occur to any of us, I wonder, that had we been willing, as Tolstoï admonishes, to do our own bread-labor with our own hands, all these things of culture which really count might have been added unto us — or, if they were not, it had been no great matter? Culture was a nineteenth-century society-saving gospel which had grown somewhat ragged at the edges in the twentieth, even before it began to be spelled with a K.

Explicitly, how fared it with the children of the Exodus? Had their urban Land of Promise flowed with milk and honey? It had flowed with hall bedrooms and dairy lunches — loneliness, underpayment, precarious employment, every inducement to commercialize friendships, and always the gnawing suspicion that while this might be ‘life’ it certainly was not living. So much for certified milk and canned honey.

It is not that we should be told, when we fare forth on these errands, that the prizes are mostly blanks. That is not true. What we should be told is that they are not prizes at all, but extremely moderate stipends for years of plodding toil, and that the premium is a possibly wider mental life than that of the small towns. What we are instructed to believe is that for every one willing to pay the fee in stoical endurance of hardship and temptation, there is reputation, or riches, or great place. And this, we have begun to learn, is a thundering lie.

If you put it on a profit-and-loss basis, perhaps better bargains at life’s counter are to be had in the country store. Perhaps, and again perhaps, we could spare the city better than the city could spare us. Our trial balance is not all debit. Once we were sure of meals, clothes, and a roof; we gave our days to administering charities which the shrewder of us detected to be something like genteel conscience-money; we gave our reputations to be burned attacking corrupt administrations; and that the cities are no more terrible than they are is owing somewhat to the small-town conscience and the smalltown courage.

But our forfeitures have been heavy. Not for us those neighborly intimacies in which lifelong friendships ripen as choice vintages mellow, to decant sparkling and fresh at the last; not for us that majestic processional of the seasons, unvexed by the clatter of scurrying routines; not for us the deliberate maturing of projects ‘too great for haste, too high for rivalry’; nor the sundrenched ripening of quiet days, alone with the Great Silences.

I am not talking of an elegant loaf.

I am talking of ‘ toil unsevered from tranquillity.’ Can it be ours in the cities? Or do we ‘spend our lives in posting here and there,’ mistaking St. Vitus for St. Francis?

Come. Let us out with it. Fools who revisit their home towns to scoff remain to pray. The tinsel that drew us away is tarnished; the lottery ticket dishonored. For the mouthings of drama and the posturings of opera, we have bartered neighbors who could know enough about us to be able to trust us; for painted canvas in art galleries, the splendor of nature’s nakedness; for concert rooms, the music of evening breeze and robin’s song: in three words, imitation for reality. We know it. So now, if we remain, it must be not from any illusion as to what we can get, but from a stern knowledge of what we ought to give.

IV

There, where the roses kindled their garnet flames, while the lindens stirred to leafy music as we lay, Talcott and I, thumbing pages of the last decade, — the shimmering heat of brick pavements; the litter of soiled papers beating from curb to curb under aimless gusts; forlorn alleys; weary men and women; babies gasping for life in stifling tenements, —how remote it all seemed from this bridal chamber of maidenly summer; how remote and yet how much more real!

To quit the cities while such things are?

Yes. For news travels faster in the city than in Hometown; and there is no slum like a rural slum. For if Hometown is to be the reservoir, it must learn to boil the water. Enough of community frolics and family festivals; enough of domestic-centric universes; there is mighty work to be done and Hometown must help to do it. Hometown must learn not to bristle at the suggestion that slavery did not cease on January 1,1863, but is going cheerfully on under the sleek alias of wages. Hometown must unlearn a whole rigid ritual of burgess history and burgess ethics. Hometown must learn not to blanch at the dire names of Emma Goldman and Bill Haywood, who might conceivably teach Hometowners many truths highly expedient for them to know. As yet, I believe, Hometown has progressed to the point of accepting Miss Jane Addams, which is excellent so far as it goes, but which, as I think Miss Addams would be the first to agree, is not the ultimate.

Such is the diagnosis. What is the prescription? Allopathic. A tablespoonful of radicalism after each meal and at bedtime, administered by Hometowners who have earned their diplomas by hard study and hard knocks in the great university of city life. The trouble, at present, is that the Hometowners who master the science of preventive medicine are mainly fighting epidemics in Urbia or Suburbia, whereas the social hygiene of Hometown is by no means impeccable.

Let Hometowners go to the cities, since go they will; only let them take heed that the city be not their journey’s end. I am very far from suggesting that they should return to the spot of their nativity, for I can scarcely conceive a more difficult lot than that of the radical who, having ‘got religion ’ in a great town, should endeavor to take it home with him to be introduced to his old neighbors — an ordeal compared to which the bride’s at the sewing circle is a Roman triumph. Nazareth has written a precedent which the centuries, unfortunately, do not erase.

Rather, let a new pioneer furnish the hint.

He had been a blazer of trails: from a Berkshire college he plunged directly into the boiling social vat of a city slum, to give two of the best years of his youth (the two when other men are ‘getting started’) to an errand of service. The two years are given. And now what?

‘It is back to the small town for me,’ says the pioneer.

‘Your home town ? ’

‘And lose two years disarming the hostility of old neighbors who grudge to admit that it is possible for a child to grow up? Not much! But to some other small town, where I can be a novelty, a mystery, a possibility. No money. No glory. But a human life. And a new profession, — about the newest, I fancy, in such a country as this, — that of giving more than you get.’

That was three years ago. He went; not to Hometown, but to East Hometown, where, as I gather, he is now the Main Splash, though that was not the object of the expedition.

To carry the news from the cities; to urge Hometown to know its blessings and recognize its failings; to keep the springs of life flowing pure and strong; and there to nourish a social conscience that shall help to shame the cities into decency: I wonder if that is not our return-trip ticket.

The sun had westered till the late yellow rays found the two of us under the lindens. Inside the French windows which gaped open on the terrace, a tali clock chimed four. There was dunnage to pitch into traveling bags, a train to catch.

It whistled at the bend. We were whirled away. In another hour, as we crossed a Sunday-jaded city square, Buonarotti, the I. W. W. organizer, just out of a Western jail, was lecturing the populace. Over their heads we had a parenthetical nod of recognition. It was to realize that while we had stepped out into the foyer to chat, the play was still going on.

Ten minutes later, in the great hospital, Talcott, in his whites, with his stethoscope in his hip pocket, had resumed his rounds and vigils. Two hours more, and a transcontinental limited, roaring across a moonlit countryside, was laying the states between Hometown and me.

It was all over. And yet it was not. For some day, remembering that the city is not all, is only a probation, we are going back, out there where lie the realities, and the duties — if not to Hometown, then to East Hometown. Thus the Fabian. And on all the host of well-greaved Achæans sat manycounseled Silence, brooding, brooding. On the Syndicalist especially, chin on breast, very glum.

Then the Single-Taxer, with that tactically invaluable knack of his for drawing fire to expose the enemy’s batteries, spoke these wingèd words: ‘Did n’t I hear that the revolution has nothing to hope from the small town?’

‘Well, what if you did?’ responded the Syndicalist, so mezzo forte for him that, to one who knew him, it was piteous; ‘I came from a white house up a side street myself. And I’m homesick.’