Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

by Irvin S. Cobb

In this side street the Judge was able to make a better headway; the rutted sidewalk was almost untraveled and the small wholesale houses which mainly lined it, were untenanted and dark. Two-thirds of a block along, he came to a somewhat larger building where an open entry way framed the foot of a flight of stairs mounting up into a well of pitchy gloom. Looking up the stairs was like looking up to a sooty chimney, except that a chimney would have shown a dim opening at the top and this vista was walled in blankness and ended in blankness. Judge Priest turned in here and began climbing upward, feeling the way for his feet, cautiously.

Once upon a time, a good many years before this, Kamleiter's Hall had been in the centre of things municipal. Nearly all the lodges and societies had it then for their common meeting place; but when the new and imposing Fraternity Building was put up, with its elevator, and its six stories and its electric lights, and all, the Masons and the Odd Fellows and the rest moved their belongings up there. Gideon K. Irons Camp alone remained faithful. The members of the Camp had held their first meeting in Kamleiter's Hall back in the days when they were just organizing and Kamleiter's was just built. They had used its assembly room when there were two hundred and more members in good standing, and with the feeble persistency of old men who will cling to the shells of past things, after the pith of the substance is gone, they still used it.

So the Judge should have known those steps by the feel of them under his shoe soles, he had been climbing up and down them so long. Yet it seemed to him they had never before been so steep and so many and so hard to climb, certainly they had never been so dark. Before he reached the top he was helping himself along with the aid of a hand pressed against the plastered wall and he stopped twice to rest his legs and get his breath. He was panting hard when he came to the final landing on the third floor. He fumbled at a door until his fingers found the knob and turned it. He stood a moment, getting his bearings in the blackness. He scratched a match and by its flare located the rows of iron gas jets set in the wall, and he went from one to another, turning them on and touching the match flame to their stubbed rubber tips.

It was a long bare room papered in a mournful gray paper, that was paneled off with stripings of a dirty white. There were yellow, wooden chairs ranged in rows and all facing a small platform that had desks and chairs on it, and an old fashioned piano. On the wall, framed uniformly in square black wooden frames and draped over by strips of faded red and white bunting, were many enlarged photographs and crayon portraits of men either elderly or downright aged. Everything spoke of age and hard usage. There were places where gussets of the wall paper had pulled away from the paste and hung now in loose triangles like slatted jib sails.

In corners, up against the ceiling, cobwebs hung down in separate tendrils or else were netted up together in little gray hammocks to catch the dust. The place had been baking under a low roof all day and the air was curdled with smells of varnish and glue drawn from the chairs and the mould from old oil cloth, with a lingering savor of coal oil from somewhere below. The back end of the hall was in a gloom, and it only lifted its mask part-way even after the Judge had completed his round and lit all the jets and was reaching for his pocket handkerchief. Maybe it was the poor light with its flickery shadows and maybe it was the effect of the heat, but standing there mopping his forehead, the old Judge looked older than common. His plump figure seemed to have lost some of its rotundness and under his eyes the flesh was pouchy and sagged. Or at least, that was the impression which Ed Gafford got. Ed Gafford was the odd jobs man of Kamleiter's Hall and he came now, and was profuse with apologies for his tardiness.

“You'll have to excuse me, Judge Priest,” he began, “for bein' a little late about gettin' down here to light up and open up. You see, this bein' the Eighth of August and it so hot and ever'thing, I sort of jumped at the conclusion that maybe there wouldn't be none of your gentlemen show up here tonight.”

“Oh, I reckin there'll be quite a lot of the boys comin' along pretty soon, son,” said Judge Priest. “It's a regular monthly meetin', you know, and besides there's a vacancy to be filled—we've got a color bearer to elect tonight. I should say there ought to be a purty fair crowd, considerin'. You better make a light on them stairs,—they're as black as a pocket.”

“Right away, Judge,” said Gafford, and departed.

Left alone, the Judge sat down in the place of the presiding officer on the little platform. Laboriously he crossed one fat leg on the other, and looked out over the rows of empty wooden chairs, peopling them with the images of the men who wouldn't sit in them ever again. The toll of the last few months had been a heavy one. The old Judge cast it up in his mind: There was old Colonel Horace Farrell, now, the Nestor of the county bar to whom the women and men of his own State had never been just plain women and men, but always noble womanhood and chivalric manhood, and who thought in rounded periods and even upon his last sick bed had dealt in well measured phrases and sonorous metaphor in his farewell to his assembled children and grandchildren. The Colonel had excelled at memorial services and monument unveilings. He would be missed—there was no doubt about that.

Old Professor Lycurgus Reese was gone too; who was principal of the graded school for forty-odd years and was succeeded a mercifully short six months before his death by an abnormally intellectual and gifted young graduate of a normal college from somewhere up in Indiana, a man who never slurred his consonant r's nor dropped his final g's, a man who spoke of things as stimulating and forceful, and who had ideas about Boy Scout movements and Native Studies for the Young and all manner of new things, a remarkable man, truly, yet some had thought old Professor Reese might have been retained a little longer anyhow.