VI
HOMEBURG'S WORST ENEMY
How Old Man Opportunity Stands Outside the Town and Beckons to her Greatest Men
You don't say, Jim! Gosh, let me look! Where? Behind the big fellow in the two-gallon plug hat? There—I see him! Yes, sir! It's he! I could tell him anywhere. Do you suppose we could get up nearer? What, go up in the elevator with him? Say, I haven't the nerve. No, I don't want—This is close enough—Why, there isn't even a crowd! You mean to say he comes down here just like this right along? Do you see him often?
Why, when I go home and tell the boys I watched Teddy Roosevelt go down the street common as dirt and could have gone up in the same elevator with him, they'll want me to give a lecture in the Woodmen Hall. It certainly beats all what you can see in New York for nothing.
That's where you have all the luck, Jim—you big city folks. You keep your interesting people at home; there's nowhere bigger for them to go. No matter how famous or successful they are, they have to stick around and mingle unless they get Europitis of the intellect. When you grow up with a chum in New York and he discovers a talent that has been kicking around in his garret ever since he was born, you don't lose him. He just stays at home and grows up to fit the town. But when I want to see my old Homeburg playmates who have succeeded, I have to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco, or some other big place where old Opportunity keeps a wrecking crew busy all the time beating in doors. Opportunity doesn't come into a small town and knock. He stands outside and beckons.
Life in Homeburg is one long bereavement because of this fact. Seems as if the world was always looking Homeburg men over, the way a housewife looks over an asparagus patch, and yanking out the ones who stick up a little higher than the rest. We don't worry about the good who die young in Homeburg; but the interesting who go early and forget to come back make us sad and sore. No sooner does a Homeburg man begin to broaden out and get successful and to hoist the town upward as he climbs himself, than we begin to grieve. We know what is coming. Presently he will go down to the Democrat office and insert a notice, advertising for sale a seven-room house with gas and water, good cistern, orchard with bearing trees, good barn and milch cow, cement walks and watertight cellar. And he will sell that place at a sacrifice, which he can well afford, and go off to the city, where he will learn to wear a fur-lined coat, kick about the financial legislation and visit us on Christmas Day once per decade.
I sometimes wonder what Homeburg would be like if all her bright boys and girls should come back. Don't suppose the town could hold them at all. It would be stretched out of shape in a week. But it would be a glorious place to live in, and wouldn't we shine in art and music and politics and finance—to say nothing of baseball! Suppose we had Forrest Brady back home, catching for the Homeburg team! He gets seven thousand dollars a year from Boston now; but I remember when he helped put dents in Paynesville baseball pride for nothing, and would pay some youngster a quarter to hustle baggage at the depot in his absence. And suppose the Congregational choir still had Mary Saunders! Why, we could charge a dollar a seat for ordinary services, and people would come down from Chicago to attend! When I think what she gets for one concert now, and then think how long the Ladies' Aid Society has been working to paint the church and haven't made it yet, it makes me wish we could put Homeburg on wheels and haul it after some of our distinguished children. And what if we had Alex McQuinn to write up the Democrat again? Every month we almost ruin ourselves at home buying all the magazines he writes for; but when he was a fat young thing in spectacles hunting locals and trying to write funny things for the Democrat, he wasn't appreciated at all. Old Judge Hicks, who had no sense of humor, chased him several miles once for telling how he tried to stop the 4:11 train by yelling "Whoa" at it. And Editor Ayers had to fire Alex to keep the peace.