For a few minutes it's great. They go over the first four bars in a bunch, and old Dobbs gets the half note and change of key in the bass, which usually floors him, like a professional. It is a proud and happy moment for the leader. But it doesn't last. It's too good to be true. Ad Smith strikes a falsetto with his cornet and stops for wind; this rattles his partner, who can't carry the air alone to save him. Dobbs sits down on the wrong key in the bass. The tenors weaken, discouraged by the cornet, and everybody hesitates. A couple of clarionets lose the place and get to wandering around at random, creating terrible havoc. The altos stop, being in doubt. Ad recovers and launches out with terrific vim half a beat behind. There is a rally, but it is too late. You can hear fragments of five different keys, and presently every one stops except Mahlon Brown, who plays the bass drum and always bangs away through fire or water until some one turns him off.
Then there is silence—a good deal of it. We all know what is happening. Sim Askinson, the leader, is making a few well-chosen remarks, and each player is turning around in his chair and going over the faults of his neighbor in the most kindly and thorough fashion. Ed Smith empties out his baritone horn and takes a little practice run, and then they commence to begin—or begin to start—or start to commence—whatever it is, all over again. But when they stop at ten o'clock, they haven't played the "Washington Post March" clear through in any one heat.
Doesn't sound encouraging for the Fourth, does it? But, pshaw, that's only practice! When the big day comes and the boys put on their caps and coats and such trousers as will come nearest to blending with the said coats and march down the street, do they falter and blow up in the back stretch? Not much. They canter through that air as if they had been born whistling it. There's a wonderful inspiration in marching to a band man—give him a horn, a ragged slip of music, and about four miles of road, and he will prance down the street, climbing over ruts, wading through mud, reading at night by the light of a torch carried by a boy who is twenty feet away fighting with another boy; and he will blow his immortal soul into his horn for hours at a stretch without missing a note.
Part of the reason for the difference at home is because we always carry a few amateurs, who are privileged to come in at practice and do all the damage they can, but who have to keep mighty quiet on the march. They can carry their horns, puff out their cheeks and look as grand as they please, but if they'd presume to cut loose with some real notes and smear up a piece, they'd be fired in no time.
We have always been mighty proud of our Homeburg band. Nobody knows how old it is. We think it arrived with the first inhabitants. These are all dead, but some of the original horns are still doing duty, and the brass on them is worn thin and almost bright. Our band is much better than the average band. That's one of the great Homeburg comforts. Whenever we get blue about the muddy streets and the small stores, and the great need of a sewage system, and the disgraceful condition of the stove in the Q. B. & C. Depot, we think of our band and are comforted. It has at least twenty members right along, most of whom can play their instruments, and Sim Askinson, who is a professional music teacher, has conducted it off and on for twenty-five years. Citizens from other towns get mighty jealous when they come down to Homeburg Thursday evenings during the summer and listen to the magnificent concerts which our band gives. I've seen as many as three hundred rigs around the public square those nights. And when our band practices up on "Poet and Peasant," which is its star piece, and goes off to the big band contests which break loose in the summer and create great havoc, large numbers of our citizens go along and bet their good money in a manner which keeps the town poor for months afterward.
I don't know anything more magnificent than the way our band plays "Poet and Peasant" with Sim Askinson leading, Ad Smith and Henry Aultmeyer duetting perfectly for once with their cornets, and the clarionet section eating up the fast parts in a manner that sends goose flesh up and down your spine. We're head and shoulders above any other band that enters the contests, but that's the trouble. The judges are never educated up to "Poet and Peasant." They always give the prize to the Paynesville Military Band, which has a five-foot painted bass drum and has to play "Over the Waves" for a concert piece, because they haven't got a decent cornet player in town. Sometime they will get a real musician to judge these contests, and then we will win by seventeen toots.
You may not believe it, Jim, but I am an alumnus of the Homeburg band. Didn't suspect that I was anything but an ordinary citizen, did you? But it's a fact. I am a band man. I'm too modest to brag about it, but I was carrying a horn and had a uniform before I was eighteen. I suppose there is nothing, not even the fire department, that fills a small town boy with such wild ambition as a band. When I was twelve, I used to watch that band in its more sublime passages, feeling that if I ever could become great enough to play in it, others could run the country and win its great battles with no jealousy from me. The snare drummer at that time was a boy of sixteen. Of course, being snare drummer in the band, he didn't mix around much with the common kids, and I didn't know him. But I watched him until my ribs swelled out and cracked with envy; and I used to wonder how fortune ever happened to reach down and yank that particular boy so far up into the rarefied upper regions of glory.
When I was fourteen, I went after his job. But I never could learn to play the snare drum. You have to learn to "roll," and I couldn't make my left hand behave. I tried a year and would probably be trying yet but for the fact that when Ed Norton left town, he traded me his ruinous old alto horn for three dollars and a dog. There was about as much music left in it as there is in a fish horn, but I was as delighted as if it had been a pipe organ, and when the folks wouldn't let me practice at home on it, I took it out in the country and kept it in Smily Garrett's barn. After a while I learned how to fit my face into the mouthpiece in just the right way, and as the sounds I made became more human, I sort of edged into town, until finally I was practicing in our own barn. And the next year Askinson let me come into the band and "pad" as second alto during the less important engagements.
I played with the band for five years, and while I never got out of the "thump section," which was what the trombonists and snare drummers and the other aristocrats of the band call the altos, I had all the fun and adventures that a high-priced musician could have had, and was perfectly happy. I can still remember with pride the deep-green looks on the faces of Pete Amthorne and Billy Madigan and Snoozer Ackley, as they watched me marching grandly down the street lugging my precious old three bushels of brass in my arms, and "ump-umping" until my eyes stuck out of my head. Of course they didn't know that most of the time I was watching a change in my notes half a bar away and wondering if I could make it without falling all over the treble clef. I looked like Sousa to them, and when I leaned grandly back in my chair at the band concerts and borrowed a page of music from my neighbor—said page being mostly Hebrew to me—I felt like a Senator or Chief Justice letting the common herd have a look at him.
I pity the poor city boys who have to grow up nowadays and depend on taxicabs and vaudeville for their excitement. Belonging to the band was more fun than belonging to the baseball team or the torchlight brigade or anything else. We got in on everything. They couldn't pull off a rally or celebration, or even a really successful church social, without us. I might say that the importance of a Homeburg citizen in the old days was determined by whether or not the Homeburg Band escorted him to his tomb. When great doings occurred in the neighboring towns, plain citizens dug down in their pockets for car-fare, and then dug painfully down once more for our car-fare. When an ordinary Homeburger wanted to help boost McKinley to victory by parading in some distant town with a torch, it cost him five dollars and a suit of clothes. But we not only went free, but got two dollars apiece for plowing a wide furrow of glory down the streets between rows of admiring eyes.