XXXIII—WELCOME HOME—AND SHUT UP!
There are a few weeks which bid fair to be pretty trying ones in our national life. They will mark the return to the city of thousands and thousands of vacationists after two months or two weeks of feverish recuperation and there is probably no more obnoxious class of citizen, taken end for end, than the returning vacationist.
In the first place, they are all so offensively healthy. They come crashing through the train-shed, all brown and peeling, as if their health were something they had acquired through some particular credit to themselves. If it were possible, some of them would wear their sun-burned noses on their watch-chains, like Phi Beta Kappa keys.
They have got so used to going about all summer in bathing suits and shirts open at the neck that they look like professional wrestlers in stiff collars and seem to be on the point of bursting out at any minute. And they always make a great deal of noise getting off the train.
"Where's Bessie?" they scream, "Ned, where's [pg 169]Bessie?... Have you got the thermos bottles?... Well, here's the old station just as it was when we left it (hysterical laughter).... Wallace, you simply must carry your pail and shovel. Mamma can't carry everything, you know.... Mamma told you that if you wanted to bring your pail and shovel home you would have to carry it yourself, don't you remember Mamma told you that, Wallace?... Wallace, listen!... Edna, have you got Bessie?... Harry's gone after the trunks.... At least, he said that was where he was going.... Look, there's the Dexter Building, looking just the same. Big as life and twice as natural.... I know, Wallace, Mamma's just as hot as you are. But you don't hear Mamma crying do you?... I wonder where Bert is.... He said he'd be down to meet us sure.... Here, give me that cape, Lillian.... You're dragging it all over the ground.... Here's Bert!... Whoo-hoo, Bert!... Here we are!... Spencer, there's Daddy!... Whoo-hoo, Daddy!... Junior, wipe that gum off your shoe this minute.... Where's Bessie?"
And so they go, all the way out into the street and the cab and home, millions of them. It's terrible.
And when they get home things are just about as bad, except there aren't so many people to see them. [pg 170]At the sight of eight Sunday and sixty-two daily papers strewn over the front porch and lawn, there are loud screams of imprecation at Daddy for having forgotten to order them stopped. Daddy insists that he did order them stopped and that it is that damn fool boy.
"I guess you weren't home much during July," says Mamma bitterly, "or you would have noticed that something was wrong." (Daddy didn't join the family until August.)
"There were no papers delivered during July," says Daddy very firmly and quietly, "at least, I didn't see any." (Stepping on one dated July 19.)