Sometimes DeLancey can abduct some busy young chap and make him play a round of golf on week-day afternoons, but not often. That's the difference between our clubs and yours. We have clubs, but we don't use them. We wouldn't think of spending time there if we could spend it at business. Nothing is lonelier on week days than our golf club, and one of the chief duties of the caretaker at the Commercial Club is to dust off the reading table. We have our clubs, and that is the main object. We know that they are there, and that we could enjoy them if we wanted to. Perhaps we do want to. But it's a hard art to learn. And, oh, how patiently and earnestly DeLancey is trying to teach us! If it were any one but he, we might learn faster. But he sort of figures as a horrible example. It's like a battered and yellowed wreck advocating cigarettes, or a bald-headed barber pushing his own hair tonic.
Gibb Ogle, the other member of our leisure class, is a very different kind of a bird. His art is more sublime than DeLancey's because he has no one to support him. He has worked down to his present state from nothing at all. He is a self-unmade man. With no resources, not even a loving wife with a wash tub, he lives a life of perfect ease and idleness. He doesn't even have to hunt for means of killing time, as DeLancey does. Time with him dies a natural death. He is not implicated in the sad event in any way. All he does is to watch its demise. He watches whole hours pass away while leaning against the door-frame of the Delmonico Hotel. Chet Frazier and Sim Bone got into an argument one day, and to settle it they went over and took Gibb away from the building. It didn't fall, and Sim won. Gibb has watched several thousand hours expire while propping up the Q. B. & C. depot. He is the chief spectator at every fire, runaway, dog fight and public event. He is a movable landmark, as permanent as the Republican flagpole in the city park. I have never yet gone down-town in the morning without seeing Gibb on the street. And very seldom have I gone home at night, even in the howling blizzards of winter, without passing Gibb leaning against the warm bright show window of the last open place of business, and waiting with placid greediness for one final event of some kind to transpire before going to his well-earned repose.
Beside Gibb's leisure, DeLancey's is poor amateurish stuff. Gibb's total income during the year would hardly exceed twenty-five dollars, and it doesn't do him much good at that. When he gets any money, he eats it up in the most determined and hasty fashion. I have seen him eat a dollar's worth of ham sandwiches in an afternoon—because he had the dollar. What he does between dollars is a town mystery. He doesn't beg. He is believed by some to absorb sustenance from the air, like a plant. But I happen to know that he absorbs a good deal of sustenance from the Delmonico Hotel. He has attached himself to this hotel as a sort of retainer, and through all its changes of ownership he has hung on. He will not work, but he gives the place his moral support and speaks highly of it to all comers. He will even carry a satchel across to the depot, but only as an accommodation to the hotel. In return he asks nothing and thus saves his proud spirit from the insult of a refusal. But I think he has first pick of the scattered remains of the dinners that leave the kitchen door whenever the cook is good-natured.
I say I think so, because few of us have seen Gibb Ogle eat. He has a pride, and performs this humiliating act in secret. But grocers tell me that he is always offering to dispose of broken-up crackers, stale cheese and old mackerel. "I'll just carry that out for you," he says. And they understand and let him do it. One night as he hurried past me, a package dropped from under his coat and broke at my feet. It was food—dry bread and a bologna skin with a little meat in the end. He stopped and told me how hard it was to find food for a dog in which he was interested. But that was a fib. With all his faults Gibb never maintained a dog in idleness.
In summers Gibb leads a care-free, happy life, sunning himself all day and sleeping comfortably at night in any one of a dozen places. He is our village grasshopper, taking no thought of the chill future. How he lives through our fierce winters is a mystery. He sleeps in barns. He sleeps on the coal in the electric light power house. If the clerk at the hotel happens to be a friend of his, he curls up in a chair in the lobby. Sometimes all of these fail him. I have heard that he spent one winter in an empty room over a store, and thawed out his toes on several mornings. We are always afraid some crackling January dawn will find Gibb frozen hard on the streets, and it is a relief when spring comes and he begins to fatten up a little and drink in sunshine again.
We'd like to send Gibb to the county home. Some of us are even willing to contribute to his support, scandalous as it would be. But it is hard to do, because Gibb is no pauper. He is a gentleman of leisure with the dignity of an Indian. His worn suits are neat, and he is as dapper with a battered hat and a four-year-old celluloid collar as if he spent real money on his wardrobe. He chooses his life and lives it without complaint. Periodically we strive heroically to make him work. The boys at the planter factory, who are a rough lot but have some hold on Gibb because they entertain him out of their lunch boxes, kidnap him about twice a year and drag him in to the superintendent to get a job for him. Gibb protests frantically that he has business which can't be neglected—that he is just closing a deal for a good position at the hotel—that he is going away on a trip—but nothing helps him. He accepts the job with ill-concealed horror, and the factory boys climb up on the roof of the main building and hoist a flag. We all know what it means. Gibb is working again. And we all know what will happen next.
About two days later Gibb will be limping to the factory very late with his off-foot done up in an enormous comforter. "That's what you have done, boys," he will say with simple dignity, "you've hurt that old sore foot of mine. It's never been right since I hurt it with the fire company. It's in awful shape now. I guess I'll lose it at last. You oughtn't to have done it, boys. Goodness knows, I'd have worked all these years if I'd had any foot to speak of."
Then he goes in and resigns—after which the foot recovers in great haste, and Gibb stands on it relentlessly twelve hours a day in the old way, while he watches the world go round and waits for the judgment day.
You'd think from the way we hammer at both DeLancey and Gibb to go to work that they would hang together, being in the same class. But they don't. In fact they have the greatest contempt for each other. DeLancey will not speak to Gibb, and thinks it is a crime that he isn't sent to the stone pile; while Gibb speaks of DeLancey in pitying accents as a young man who ought to know better than to waste his time herding a little white pill into a hole in a cow pasture. Gibb is very severe on the frivolities of the prosperous. He can't bear to see them frittering away their time.
That's our leisure class in Homeburg, and it isn't growing. If it was we'd be worried, and the Commercial Club would hold meetings about it. And I'm just telling you these things so that you'll see why I am so warped and foolish regarding Williston; it's just my small town ignorance—My, I wish that chap would get a job!