CHAPTER XA LITTLE AMERICAN TOWN
Factoryville, as we found this morning, was one of these very small places which, to one weary of metropolitan life, occasionally prove entertaining through an extreme simplicity and a sense of rest and peace. It was, as I saw sitting in my dressing gown in our convenient wooden swing, a mere collection of white cottages with large lawns or country yard spaces and flowers in profusion and a few stores. Dr. A. B. Fitch, Druggist (I could see this sign on the window before which he stood), was over the way sweeping off the sidewalk in front of his store. I knew it was Dr. A. B. Fitch by his solemn proprietary air, his alpaca coat, his serious growth of thick grey whiskers. He was hatless and serene. I could almost hear him saying: “Now, Annie, you tell your mother that this medicine is to be taken one teaspoonful every three hours, do you hear?”
Farther down the street H. B. Wendel, hardware dealer, was setting out a small red and green lawnmower and some zinc cans capable of holding anything from rain water to garbage. This was his inducement to people to come and buy. Although it was still very early, citizens were making their way down the street, a working man or two, going to some distant factory not in Factoryville, a woman in a gingham poke bonnet standing at a corner of her small white home examining her flowers, a small barefooted boy kicking the damp dust of the road with his toes. It reminded me of the time when, as a youth in a similar town, I used to get up early and see my mother browsing over early, dew-laden blossoms. I was for staying in Factoryville for some time.
But Franklin, energetic soul, would have none of it. He had lived in a small town or on a farm for the greater part of his life and, unlike me, had never really deserted the country. Inside the room, on the balcony of which I was already swinging and idly musing, he was industriously shaving—a task I was reserving for some city barber. Presently he came out and sat down.
“Isn’t it wonderful—the country!” I said. “This town! See old Dr. Fitch over there, and that grocery man putting out his goods.”
“Yes!” replied Franklin. “Carmel is very much like this. There’s no particular life there. A little small-town trading. Of course, Indianapolis has come so near now that they can all go down there by trolley, and that makes a difference.”
Forthwith he launched into amusing tales of Carmelite character—bits too idle or too profane to be narrated here. One only I remember—that of some yokels who were compelled to find a new hangout because the old building they frequented was torn down. When Franklin encountered them in the new place he said quite innocently: “This place hasn’t as much atmosphere as the old one.” “Oh, yes, it has,” rejoined the rural. “When you open the back windows.”
Speed was shaving too by now, inside, and, hearing me sing the delights of rural life (windows and doors were open), he put in:
“Yes, that’s all well enough, but after you’d lived here awhile you mightn’t like it so much. Gee! people in the country aren’t any different from people anywhere else.”
Speed had a peculiarly pained and even frightened look on his face at times, like a cloud passing over a landscape or something that made me want to put my hand on his shoulder and say, “There, there.” I wondered sometimes whether he had often been hungry or thrown out of a job or put upon in some unkind way. He could seem momentarily so pathetic.
“I know, I know,” I said gaily, “but there are thecows and the trees and the little flower gardens and the farmers mowing hay and——”
“Huh!” was all he deigned to reply, as he shaved. Franklin, in his large tolerance of vagaries and mush, did not condescend to comment. I did not even win a smile. He was looking at the drugstore and the hardware store and an old man in a shapeless, baggy suit hobbling along on a cane.
“I like the country myself,” he said finally, “except I wouldn’t want to have to farm for a living.”
I could not help thinking of all the days we (I am referring to a part of our family) had lived in these small towns and how as a boy I used to wish and wish for so many things. The long trains going through! The people who went to Chicago, or Evansville, or Terre Haute, or Indianapolis! A place like Brazil, Indiana, a mere shabby coal town of three or four thousand population, seemed something wonderful. All the world was outside and I, sitting on our porch—front or back—or on the grass or under a tree, all alone, used to wonder and wonder. When would I go out into the world? Where would I go? What would I do? What see? And then sometimes the thought of my father and mother not being near any more—my mother being dead, perhaps—and my sisters and brothers scattered far and wide, and—I confess a little sadly even now—a lump would swell in my throat and I would be ready to cry.
A sentimentalist?
Indeed!
In a little while we were called to breakfast in a lovely, homely diningroom such as country hotels sometimes boast—a diningroom of an indescribable artlessness and crudity. It was so haphazard, so slung together of old yellow factory made furniture, chromos, lithographs, flychasers, five jar castors, ironstone “china,” and heaven only knows what else, that it was delightful. It was clean, yes; and sweet withal—very—just like so many of our honest, frank, kindly psalm singing Methodists and Baptists are. The father and mother wereeating their breakfast here, at one table. The little fair haired hired girl—with no more qualification as a waitress than a Thibetan Llama—was waiting on table. The traveling men, one or two of them at every breakfast no doubt, were eating their fried ham and eggs or their fried steak, and their fried potatoes, and drinking unbelievable coffee or tea.
Dear, crude, asinine, illusioned Americans! How I love them! And the great fields from the Atlantic to the Pacific holding them all, and their dreams! How they rise, how they hurry, how they run under the sun! Here they are building a viaduct, there a great road, yonder plowing fields or sowing grain, their faces lit with eternal, futile hope of happiness. You can see them religiously tending store, religiously running a small-town country hotel, religiously mowing the grass, religiously driving shrewd bargains or thinking that much praying will carry them to heaven—the dear things!—and then among them are the bad men, the loafers, the people who chew tobacco and swear and go to the cities Saturday nights and “cut up” and don’t save their money!
Dear, dear, darling Yankee land—"my country tis"—when I think of you and all your ills and all your dreams and all your courage and your faith—I could cry over you, wringing my hands.
But you, you great men of brains—you plotters of treason, of taxes which are not honest, of burdens too heavy to be borne, beware! These be simple souls, my countrymen singing simple songs in childish ignorance and peace, dreaming sweet dreams of life and love and hope. Don’t awake them! Let them not once suspect, let them not faintly glimpse the great tricks and subterfuges by which they are led and harlequined and cheated; let them not know that their faith is nothing, their hope nothing, their love nothing—or you may see the bonfires of wrath alight—in the “evening dews and damp,” the camps of the hungry—the lifting aloft of the fatal stripes—red for blood and white for spiritand blue for dreams of man; the white drawn faces of earnest seeking souls carrying the symbols of their desire, the guns and mortars and shells of their dreams!
Remember Valley Forge! Remember Germantown; remember the Wilderness; remember Lookout Mountain! These will not be disappointed. Their faith is too deep—their hope too high. They will burn and slay, but the fires of their dreams will bring other dreams to make this old illusion seem true.
It can hardly be said that America has developed a culinary art, because so many phases of our cooking are not, as yet, common to all parts of the country. In the southeast south you have fried chicken and gravy, cornpone, corn pudding, biscuit, and Virginia ham, southern style; in the southwest south you have broilers, chicken tamales, chile con carne, and all the nuances acquired from a proximity to Mexico. In New England one encounters the baked bean, thecoldbiscuit, pie for breakfast, and codfish cakes. In the great hotels and best restaurants of the large cities, especially in the east, the French cuisine dominates. In the smaller cities of the east and west, where no French chef would deign to waste his days, German, Italian and Greek—to say nothing of Jewish—and purely American restaurants (the dairy kitchen, for example) now contest with each other for patronage. We have never developed a single, dominating system of our own. The American “grill” or its companion in dullness, the American “rathskeller,” boast a mixture of everything and are not really anything. In all cities large and small may be found these horrible concoctions which in their superficial treatment are supposed to be Flemish or Elizabethan or old German combined with the worse imaginings of the socalled mission school of furniture. Here German pancakes, knackwurst and cheesecake come cheek by jowl with American biscuit, English muffins, French rolls, Hungarian goulash, chicken à la Maryland, steaks, chops, and ham and eggs. It’s serviceable, and yet it’s offensive.The atmosphere is deadly—the idea atrocious. By comparison with a French inn or a German family restaurant such as one finds in Frankfort or Berlin, or even an English chophouse, it is unbelievably bad. Yet it seems to suit the present day spirit of America.
All restaurant forms are being tried out—French, Greek, Italian, Turkish, English, Spanish, German—to say nothing of teahouses of all lands. In the long run, possibly some one school will become dominant or a compromise among them all. By that time American cooking will have become a complex of all the others. I sincerely trust that in the internecine struggle fried chicken, gravy, fresh hot biscuit, blackberry pie and fried mush do not wholly disappear. I am fond of French cooking and have a profound respect for the German art—but there! Supposing that never anywhere, any more, was there to be any fried mush or blackberry pie!!!