Those two dollars counted a lot in those days, too. It looked like an easy income to us. All we had to do to earn it was to beg off from our employers for half a day, travel thirty miles or so by train, usually standing up and protecting our horns from the careless mob, march eight or ten miles over unknown streets, picking out dry places underfoot and notes from a piece of music bobbing up and down in the shadows above our horns, and then drive home across country after midnight, getting home in time to go to work in the morning. Why, it was just like finding money; I've never had so much fun earning it since. I started once to figure out how many miles our band marched during the first Bryan campaign, but I gave it up. We never felt it at that time, but it made me so tired counting that I quit with a distinct footsore feeling.
The most worrisome task about a Homeburg band was keeping it alive. I suppose all small town bands have the same trials. We worked against incredible difficulties. If city people had the same devotion to music which we displayed, you would have a ten-thousand-piece philharmonic orchestra in New York playing twenty-four hours a day for glory. We were always building up our band with infinite pains, only to have Fate jerk the gizzard out of it just as perfection was in sight. Talent was scarce, and the rude, heartless city was forever reaching down into Homeburg and yanking some indispensable players away. Of course there was always a waiting list of youngsters who would coax a few hoarse toots out of the alto horn, and we always had a bunch of kid clarionetists who would sail along grandly through the soft parts and then blow goose notes whenever they hit the solo part. But try as we would, we could never get more than two cornets. One of these was Ad Smith. He was a bum cornetist, but his brother Ed was a good baritone, and we had to have both or none. The other was usually some anxious young student who got along pretty well on plain work, but who would come down the chromatic run in the "Chicago Tribune March" like a fat man falling down the cellar stairs with an oleander plant.
As for trombones, there was a positive fatality among them; we were always losing them. Trombone players have to be born, anyway, and there was no hope of developing one. Besides, the neighbors wouldn't allow it. Young Henry Wood showed promise once, but after his father had listened to him for about six months, he took the slip end of his horn away from him and beat carpets with it, until it was extinct as far as melody was concerned.
For a year we had Mason Peters, who was a wonder on the slide trombone. But he was only getting twelve dollars a week in Snyder's Shoe Emporium, and Paynesville, which never tired of putting up dirty tricks on us, hustled around and got him an eighteen dollar job up there—after which they came down to Homeburg at the first opportunity with their band to parade Peters before our eyes. It would have been a grand success if they hadn't put Peters in the front row. He lived for his art, Peters did, paying no attention to anything but his trombone, and besides he was quite deaf. He got confused about the line of march, and when the band swung around the public square he kept right on up Main Street all alone, playing in magnificent form and solitary grandeur while the band swung off the other way. The whole town followed him with tears of joy, and he traveled two blocks before he became aware of the vast and appalling silence behind him; then he kept right on for the city limits on the run. It was a great comfort to us, and by the time we had gotten through apologizing to the Paynesville boys for following Peters under the impression that he was the real band, they had offered to fight us singly or in platoons.
We used to watch every new citizen like Russian detectives, only we searched them for horns instead of dynamite. Several times a trombonist came to town, and music revived noticeably. But none of them lasted. Trombonists seem to be temperamental, and when they are not changing jobs they are resigning from the band because they are not allowed to play enough solos. Our greatest bonanza was a quiet chap named Williams, who came to town to work in the moulding room of the plow factory. After he had been there a week, we discovered that he had a saxophone. No one had ever heard or eaten a saxophone, but we looked it up, and when we found out what it was, we made a rush for him. At the next practice he appeared with a bright silver instrument covered with two bushels of keys and played a solo which sounded like three clarionets with the croup. We wept for joy and elected him leader on the spot.
This caused Sim Askinson to resign, of course, and he took Ad and Ed Smith with him, and they remained in dignified and awful silence for two years. But we didn't care. One saxophone was worth five baritones, and while Williams was in town, we were an object of envy to all of the other bands around. We changed our name to the Homeburg Saxophone Band, and the way we rubbed it into Paynesville was pitiful. He was a little fellow, Williams was, and short of wind, which caused him to gasp a good deal during the variation parts. But he was willing. There was no shirk about him. After a year our program usually consisted of eleven saxophone solos and some other piece which could be done almost entirely on the saxophone, and the jealous Paynesvillains used to ask why we used nineteen men to play the rests when one man could have produced as much silence at far less expense.
Those were glorious years; but of course they didn't last. Williams got to resigning at the foundry just for the pleasure of having us come down and plead with the proprietor to raise his pay. Finally he resigned so much that the proprietor fired him, and then we had to take our caps in hand and wheedle the Smiths and Askinson back into the band. I haven't belonged for years, but they are still there. When I drop in at practice, as many of the alumni do, Askinson greets me cordially and takes some young cub's horn away from him, so I can sit in. It is just like old times, especially when Ed Smith lays down his horn after a slight altercation with some one and goes home never to come back—just as he has done for the last thirty years.
That's the worst of music. One's art, you know, has so much influence over one's temper. To see our band soaring majestically down Main Street and playing "Canton Halifax" in one great throbbing rough-house of melody you would never believe that anything but brotherly love existed between the players. As a matter of fact, we never wasted any harmony among ourselves. We didn't have any to spare. It took all we had to produce the music. For twenty-five years the Smiths and Cooney Simpson, who plays first clarionet, have been at swords' points, each with a faction behind him. Cooney says it's a shame that a good band must limp along with a cornetist who always takes three strikes to hit a high note, and Ed Smith says Cooney wants to be leader and will not be satisfied until he can play the solo and bass parts at once on his clarionet. I can see Ed Smith now, after the band has run aground in practice, taking his horn down and glaring around at Cooney.
"What you gobstick players need is a time-table," says he, "instead of notes. Come in on the A about eight-fifteen. If you can do that well, we'll try to struggle along."
"Don't get forte," Cooney replies cheerfully. "If you'd try to follow both those cornets instead of rambling along by yourself, you'd split, sure."