The big town - Quick Returns - (1)

This is just a clipping from one of the New York papers; a little kidding piece that they had in about me two years ago. It says:
    HOOSIER CLEANS UP IN WALL STREET. Employees of the brokerage firm of H. L. Krause & Co. are authority for the statement that a wealthy Indiana speculator made one of the biggest killings of the year in the Street yesterday afternoon. No very definite information was obtainable, as the Westerner’s name was known to only one of the firm’s employees, Francis Griffin, and he was unable to recall it last night.
    You’d think I was a millionaire and that I’d made a sucker out of Morgan or something, but it’s only a kid, see? If they’d of printed the true story they wouldn’t of had no room left for that day’s selections at Pimlico, and God knows that would of been fatal.
    But if you want to hear about it, I’ll tell you.
    Well, the war wound up in the fall of 1918. The only member of my family that was killed in it was my wife’s stepfather. He died of grief when it ended with him two hundred thousand dollars ahead. I immediately had a black bandage sewed round my left funny bone, but when they read us the will I felt all right again and tore it off. Our share was seventy-five thousand dollars. This was after we had paid for the inheritance tax and the amusement stamps on a horseless funeral.
    My young sister-in-law, Katie, dragged down another seventy-five thousand dollars and the rest went to the old bird that had been foreman in papa’s factory. This old geezer had been starving to death for twenty years on the wages my stepfather-in-law give him, and the rest of us didn’t make no holler when his name was read off for a small chunk, especially as he didn’t have no teeth to enjoy it with.
    I could of had this old foreman’s share, maybe, if I’d of took advantage of the offer “father” made me just before his daughter and I was married. I was over in Niles, Michigan, where they lived, and he insisted on me seeing his factory, which meant smelling it too. At that time I was knocking out about eighteen hundred dollars per annum selling cigars out of South Bend, and the old man said he would start me in with him at only about a fifty per cent. cut, but we would also have the privilege of living with him and my wife’s kid sister.
    “They’s a lot to be learnt about this business,” he says, “but if you would put your mind on it you might work up to manager. Who knows?”
    “My nose knows,” I said, and that ended it.
    The old man had lost some jack and went into debt a good many years ago, and for a long wile before the war begin about all as he was able to do was support himself and the two gals and pay off a part of what he owed. When the war broke loose and leather went up to hell and gone I and my wife thought he would get prosperous, but before this country went in his business went on about the same as usual.
    “I don’t know how they do it,” he would say. “Other leather men is getting rich on contracts with the Allies, but I can’t land a one.”
    I guess he was trying to sell razor strops to Russia.
    Even after we got into it and he begin to clean up, with the factory running day and night, all as we knew was that he had contracts with the U. S. Government, but he never confided in us what special stuff he was turning out. For all as we knew, it may of been medals for the ground navy.
    Anyway, he must of been hitting a fast clip when the armistice come and ended the war for everybody but Congress! It’s a cinch he wasn’t amongst those arrested for celebrating too loud on the night of November 11. On the contrary they tell me that when the big news hit Niles the old bird had a stroke that he didn’t never recover from, and though my wife and Katie hung round the bedside day after day in the hopes he would tell how much he was going to leave he was keeping his fiscal secrets for Oliver Lodge or somebody, and it wasn’t till we seen the will that we knew we wouldn’t have to work no more, which is pretty fair consolation even for the loss of a stepfather-in-law that ran a perfume mill.
    “Just think,” said my wife, “after all his financial troubles, papa died a rich man!”
    “Yes,” I said to myself, “and a patriot. His only regret was that he just had one year to sell leather to his country.”
    If the old codger had of only been half as fast a salesman as his two daughters this clipping would of been right when it called me a wealthy Hoosier. It wasn’t two weeks after we seen the will when the gals had disposed of the odor factory and the old home in Niles, Michigan. Katie, it seemed, had to come over to South Bend and live with us. That was agreeable to me, as I figured that if two could live on eighteen hundred dollars a year three could struggle along some way on the income off one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
    Only for me, though, Ella and Sister Kate would of shot the whole wad into a checking account so as the bank could enjoy it wile it lasted. I argued and fought and finally persuaded them to keep five thousand apiece for pin money and stick the rest into bonds.
    The next thing they done was run over to Chi and buy all the party dresses that was vacant. Then they come back to South Bend and wished somebody would give a party. But between you and I the people we’d always ran round with was birds that was ready for bed as soon as they got home from the first show, and even though it had been printed in the News-Times that we had fell heir to a lot of jack we didn’t have to hire no extra clerical help to tend to invitations received from the demi-Monday.
    Finally Ella said we would start something ourselves. So she got a lot of invitations printed and sent them to all our friends that could read and hired a cater and a three-piece orchestra and everything, and made me buy a dress suit.
    Well, the big night arrived and everybody come that had somebody to leave their baby with. The hosts wore evening clothes and the rest of the merrymakers prepared for the occasion with a shine or a clean collar. At first the cat had everybody’s tongue, but when we sat down to eat some of the men folks begun to get comical. For instance, they would say to my wife or Katie, “Ain’t you afraid you’ll catch cold?” And they’d say to me, “I didn’t know you was a waiter at the Oliver.” Before the fish course everybody was in a fair way to get the giggles.
    After supper the musicians come and hid behind a geranium and played a jazz. The entire party set out the first dance. The second was a solo between Katie and I, and I had the third with my wife. Then Kate and the Mrs. had one together, wile I tried holds with a lady named Mrs. Eckhart, who seemed to think that somebody had ast her to stand for a time exposure. The men folks had all drifted over behind the plant to watch the drummer, but after the stalemate between Mrs. Eckhart and I I grabbed her husband and took him out in the kitchen and showed him a bottle of bourbon that I’d been saving for myself, in the hopes it would loosen him up. I told him it was my last bottle, but he must of thought I said it was the last bottle in the world. Anyway, when he got through they was international prohibition.
    We went back in the ballroom and sure enough he ast Katie to dance. But he hadn’t no sooner than win one fall when his wife challenged him to take her home and that started the epidemic that emptied the house of everybody but the orchestra and us. The orchestra had been hired to stay till midnight, which was still two hours and a half distance, so I invited both of the gals to dance with me at once, but it seems like they was surfeited with that sport and wanted to cry a little. Well, the musicians had ran out of blues, so I chased them home.
    “Some party!” I said, and the two girls give me a dirty look like it was my fault or something. So we all went to bed and the ladies beat me to it on account of being so near ready.
    Well, they wasn’t no return engagements even hinted at and the only other times all winter when the gals had a chance to dress up was when some secondhand company would come to town with a show and I’d have to buy a box. We couldn’t ask nobody to go with us on account of not having no friends that you could depend on to not come in their stocking feet.
    Finally it was summer and the Mrs. said she wanted to get out of town.
    “We’ve got to be fair to Kate,” she said.
    “We don’t know no young unmarried people in South Bend and it’s no fun for a girl to run round with her sister and brother-in-law. Maybe if we’d go to some resort somewheres we might get acquainted with people that could show her a good time.”
    So I hired us rooms in a hotel down to Wawasee Lake and we stayed there from the last of June till the middle of September. During that time I caught a couple of bass and Kate caught a couple of carp from Fort Wayne. She was getting pretty friendly with one of them when along come a wife that he hadn’t thought was worth mentioning. The other bird was making a fight against the gambling fever, but one night it got the best of him and he dropped forty-five cents in the nickel machine and had to go home and make a new start.
    About a week before we was due to leave I made the remark that it would seem good to be back in South Bend and get some home cooking.
    “Listen!” says my wife. “I been wanting for a long wile to have a serious talk with you and now’s as good a time as any. Here are I and Sis and you with an income of over eight thousand dollars a year and having pretty near as good a time as a bird with habitual boils. What’s more, we can’t never have a good time in South Bend, but have got to move somewheres where we are unknown.”
    “South Bend is certainly all of that,” I said.
    “No, it isn’t,” said the Mrs. “We’re acquainted there with the kind of people that makes it impossible for us to get acquainted with the other kind. Kate could live there twenty years and never meet a decent man. She’s a mighty attractive girl, and if she had a chance they’s nobody she couldn’t marry. But she won’t never have a chance in South Bend. And they’s no use of you saying ‘Let her move,’ because I’m going to keep her under my eye till she’s married and settled down. So in other words, I want us to pack up and leave South Bend for good and all and move somewheres where we’ll get something for our money.”
    “For instance, where?” I ast her.
    “They’s only one place,” she said; “New York City.”
    “I’ve heard of it,” said I, “but I never heard that people who couldn’t enjoy themselves on eight thousand a year in South Bend could go to New York and tear it wide open.”
    “I’m not planning to make no big splurge,” she says. “I just want to be where they’s Life and fun; where we can meet real live people. And as for not living there on eight thousand, think of the families that’s already living there on half of that and less!”
    “And think of the Life and fun they’re having!” I says.
    “But when you talk about eight thousand a year,” said the Mrs., “why do we have to hold ourselves to that? We can sell some of those bonds and spend a little of our principal. It will just be taking money out of one investment and putting it in another.”
    “What other?” I ast her.
    “Kate,” said the wife. “You let me take her to New York and manage her and I’ll get her a husband that’ll think our eight thousand a year fell out of his vest.”
    “Do you mean,” I said, “that you’d let a sister of yours marry for money?”
    “Well,” she says, “I know a sister of hers that wouldn’t mind if she had.”
    So I argued and tried to compromise on somewheres in America, but it was New York or nothing with her. You see, she hadn’t never been here, and all as she knew about it she’d read in books and magazines, and for some reason another when authors starts in on that subject it ain’t very long till they’ve got a weeping jag. Besides, what chance did I have when she kept reminding me that it was her stepfather, not mine, that had croaked and made us all rich?
    When I had give up she called Kate in and told her, and Kate squealed and kissed us both, though God knows I didn’t deserve no remuneration or ask for none.
    Ella had things all planned out. We was to sell our furniture and take a furnished apartment here, but we would stay in some hotel till we found a furnished apartment that was within reason.
    “Our stay in some hotel will be lifelong,” I said.
    The furniture, when we come to sell it, wasn’t worth nothing, and that’s what we got. We didn’t have nothing to ship, as Ella found room for our books in my collar box. I got two lowers and an upper in spite of the Government, and with two taxi drivers and the baggageman thronging the station platform we pulled out of South Bend and set forth to see Life.
    The first four miles of the journey was marked by considerable sniveling on the part of the heiresses.
    “If it’s so painful to leave the Bend let’s go back,” I said.
    “It isn’t leaving the Bend,” said the Mrs., “but it makes a person sad to leave any place.”
    “Then we’re going to have a muggy trip,” said I. “This train stops pretty near everywheres to either discharge passengers or employees.”
    They were still sobbing when we left Mishawaka and I had to pull some of my comical stuff to get their minds off. My wife’s mighty easy to look at when she hasn’t got those watery blues, but I never did see a gal that knocked you for a goal when her nose was in full bloom.
    Katie had brought a flock of magazines and started in on one of them at Elkhart, but it’s pretty tough trying to read with the Northern Indiana mountains to look out at, to say nothing about the birds of prey that kept prowling up and down the aisle in search of a little encouragement or a game of rhum.
    I noticed a couple of them that would of give a lady an answer if she’d approached them in a nice way, but I’ve done some traveling myself and I know what kind of men it is that allows themselves to be drawed into a flirtation on trains. Most of them has made the mistake of getting married some time, but they don’t tell you that. They tell you that you and a gal they use to be stuck on is as much alike as a pair of corsets, and if you ever come to Toledo to give them a ring, and they hand you a telephone number that’s even harder to get than the ones there are; and they ask you your name and address and write it down, and the next time they’re up at the Elks they show it to a couple of the brothers and tell what they’d of done if they’d only been going all the way through.
    “Say, I hate to talk about myself! But say!”
    Well, I didn’t see no sense in letting Katie waste her time on those kind of guys, so every time one of them looked our way I give him the fish eye and the non-stop signal. But this was my first long trip since the Government started to play train, and I didn’t know the new rules in regards to getting fed; otherwise I wouldn’t of never cleaned up in Wall Street.
    In the old days we use to wait till the boy come through and announced that dinner was now being served in the dining car forward; then we’d saunter into the washroom and wash our hands if necessary, and ramble into the diner and set right down and enjoy as big a meal as we could afford. But the Government wants to be economical, so they’ve cut down the number of trains, to say nothing about the victuals; and they’s two or three times as many people traveling, because they can’t throw their money away fast enough at home. So the result is that the wise guys keeps an eye on their watch and when it’s about twenty minutes to dinner time they race to the diner and park against the door and get quick action; and after they’ve eat the first time they go out and stand in the vestibule and wait till it’s their turn again, as one Federal meal don’t do nothing to your appetite only whet it, you might say.
    Well, anyway, I was playing the old rules and by the time I and the two gals started for the diner we run up against the outskirts of a crowd pretty near as big as the ones that waits outside restaurant windows to watch a pancake turn turtle. About eight o’clock we got to where we could see the wealthy dining car conductor in the distance, but it was only about once every quarter of an hour that he raised a hand, and then he seemed to of had all but one of his fingers shot off.
    I have often heard it said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but every time I ever seen men and women keep waiting for their eats it was always the frail sex that give the first yelp, and personally I’ve often wondered what would of happened in the trenches Over There if ladies had of been occupying them when the rations failed to show up. I guess the bombs bursting round would of sounded like Sweet and Low sang by a quextette of deef mutes.
    Anyway, my two charges was like wild animals, and when the con finally held up two fingers I didn’t have no more chance or desire to stop them than as if they was the Center College Football Club right after opening prayer.
    The pair of them was ushered to a table for four where they already was a couple of guys making the best of it, and it wasn’t more than ten minutes later when one of these birds dipped his bill in the finger bowl and staggered out, but by the time I took his place the other gent and my two gals was talking like barbers.
    The guy was Francis Griffin that’s in the clipping. But when Ella introduced us all as she said was, “This is my husband,” without mentioning his name, which she didn’t know at that time, or mine, which had probably slipped her memory.
    Griffin looked at me like I was a side dish that he hadn’t ordered. Well, I don’t mind snubs except when I get them, so I ast him if he wasn’t from Sioux City--you could tell he was from New York by his blue collar.
    “From Sioux City!” he says. “I should hope not!”
    “I beg your pardon,” I said. “You look just like a photographer I used to know out there.”
    “I’m a New Yorker,” he said, “and I can’t get home too soon.”
    “Not on this train, you can’t,” I said.
    “I missed the Century,” he says.
    “Well,” I says with a polite smile, “the Century’s loss is our gain.”
    “Your wife’s been telling me,” he says, “that you’re moving to the Big Town. Have you ever been there?”
    “Only for a few hours,” I says.
    “Well,” he said, “when you’ve been there a few weeks you’ll wonder why you ever lived anywhere else. When I’m away from old Broadway I always feel like I’m only camping out.”
    Both the gals smiled their appreciation, so I says: “That certainly expresses it. You’d ought to remember that line and give it to Georgie Cohan.”
    “Old Georgie!” he says. “I’d give him anything I got and welcome. But listen! Your wife mentioned something about a good hotel to stop at wile you’re looking for a home. Take my advice and pick out one that’s near the center of things; you’ll more than make up the difference in taxi bills. I lived up in the Hundreds one winter and it averaged me ten dollars a day in cab fares.”
    “You must of had a pleasant home life,” I says.
    “Me!” he said. “I’m an old bachelor.”
    “Old!” says Kate, and her and the Mrs. both giggled.
    “But seriously,” he says, “if I was you I would go right to the Baldwin, where you can get a room for twelve dollars a day for the three of you; and you’re walking distance from the theaters or shops or cafés or anywheres you want to go.”
    “That sounds grand!” said Ella.
    “As far as I’m concerned,” I said, “I’d just as lief be overseas from any of the places you’ve mentioned. What I’m looking for is a home with a couple of beds and a cookstove in the kitchen, and maybe a bath.”
    “But we want to see New York first,” said Katie, “and we can do that better without no household cares.”
    “That’s the idear!” says Griffin. “Eat, drink and be merry; to-morrow we may die.”
    “I guess we won’t drink ourselves to death,” I said, “not if the Big Town’s like where we been living.”
    “Oh, say!” says our new friend. “Do you think little old New York is going to stand for Prohibition? Why, listen! I can take you to thirty places to-morrow night where you can get all you want in any one of them.”
    “Let’s pass up the other twenty-nine,” I says.
    “But that isn’t the idear,” he said. “What makes we New Yorkers sore is to think they should try and wish a law like that on Us. Isn’t this supposed to be a government of the people, for the people and by the people?”