Our Town

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IN the minds of many of us, Our Town is still the homely ideal of two long centuries, overgrown from year to year with the woodbine and honeysuckle of pleasant traditions. For example, we refuse to realize that Main Street, once broad and striped down the middle with an oblong island of grass and flowers, has been shod with the brutal æs triplex of trolley-tracks, and that a section of new-laid cobblestones joggles passing buggies with modern vivacity. I remember that when they abolished the former man-slaughtering grade-crossing, where the tall white fingers of the gates swung down to the warning of a gong and the nearing locomotive whistle, Christopher Camp, the most paternal of city fathers, opposed the innovation fiercely, writing many letters to the Springfield Republican without avail. He always drove around a quarter of a mile by Market Street, and rattled joyfully over the tracks there. But, just before Mr. Christopher died, the railroad bridged that place too — the old man did not live to avoid it — and the funeral passed under. “ It’s good he ain’t alive,” Mrs. Sally Clark said as we drove to the cemetery.

Our Town owns a past glorious only locally with the memories of Indian wars, and a big man or two in state affairs, who, we proudly feel, “ knew everybody ” at the capital. We had one great preacher - the Congregational Church set up a tablet in his honor last year. Of course we did some things too ourselves, — built a town-hall and a library, started up mills, sold postage-stamps — as every town must. But we have always imagined ourselves somehow golden where the world perhaps sees only dross. We are a gigantic Xarcissus hanging over the stealthy river below the hills. And the flower of our metamorphosis is already reflected — to some of us at least.

The river has a good deal to do with it. In the centre of a level rim of mountains Our Town clusters on a round hill, running down here and there to the broad stream winding in shiny swinging loops through the flat lands. If you go up on the hill, you see, over the fringe of elms, a patchwork of cornfields, sharp green in the sun, row after row of heavy green tobacco leaves, tanning grass, nearly hay now, and the lithe yellow wheat. Once in a while a tree spreading wide for shade. Beyond and sometimes, to your surprise, in the midst of all, the river again, curving patiently towards the South, where it seems to lie in the gap of the mountains like a polished cimeter that has done its work. Although few use the river, except the Lumber Company, which browns its surface in the dog-days with logs, it is there. Our Town considers the river in a brotherly way, as a fishingplace, a swimming-hole, or a boundary between us and the eastern towns. But in the Spring the river comes to us, bubbling rudely over the meadows and scraping white lines on our orchard trees with its flotilla of debris. Then we behold our reflections in the mottled waters, and laugh at the curious distortions.

Where the river ranges little change comes except the gradual shift of beach and sand-bar, but in Our Town itself the alterations increase. One man still cuts hay on Elm Street, where the cars shake the ground constantly, and big automobiles throw up their temporary earthworks of dust in a moment and go. He cuts hay there behind his picket-fence on the big lot back of which the little peaked yellow house stands as if it had shrunk thence in terror. Moreover, he declares it ’s good hay, though Town Proverb saith that the rain always rains when he cuts it. We all have some hay to shelter here, so to speak — something we like to do because it makes us feel, not different, not traditional, not exactly as if we affected old-fashioned ways, but I suspect it arouses the same sentiment which certain musty flowers and creased ribbons arouse in an old lover as he opens his box to gloat once more. One lady cuts her hay — to use that figure — by going for her mail every day in the year. A gentleman, not very old either, plays bridge with the newest and richest folks in Our Town, and then goes to bed by candle, disdaining the electric lights his son has had put in. Royalists under a new regime they are — who have kept a little of their own realm to bow and scrape in.

I do not think we are wrinkled or dried up in our antiquity; the river keeps us from that, for Narcissus would not have pined for himself if he had not been interesting. But we honestly like what we used to be, and temper the inevitable change as fast as it comes with the staid ripeness we feel sure Our Town possesses. We fought trolleys, but found that when the old horse died, these noisy breakersin on our country haunts “ did ” pretty well. When the girls’ school landed in the night, as it were, and grew under our eyes into a college, we stretched our arms conclusively after proving that “ female ” education was pernicious, — and invited the President to tea. So it goes. Naturally, simply, though some thought it was wanton at first. The minister — he was born in Our Town — preached on that one Sunday and showed why.

I did n’t agree with him — logically. But the next night I rode in the newest and fastest motor-car in Our Town, a thing which seemed a sacrilege escaped from a paint-shop when it came. It still seemed a sacrilege as we slewed past the Curtis place under the trees, flared into the silent Main Street, and so out over the river on the covered white bridge; then across the meadows on the other side. But there I became reconciled. The long hummocky ridge of dark mountains lay to the South, under the moon, floating easily in the clouds. The musty fields smelled sweet of the new-cut grass and the up-turned furrow. Sections of white state-road fence dove by, curving into the culverts they guarded. Once in a while, from somewhere in the throat of the beast, came the singularly clear, insistent, at first tremulous call, speaking of road and mist and of the soul of the country whereof Our Town lay glistening on the hill — its heart. It may be foolish, it is illogical —I may have been carried away — but I returned again, jaded and jostled and sleepy, more in love with My Town than before, though I’d been,

Delos was Our Town, and we were back. The automobile slid off somewhere into the darkness, and as its red taillamp melted out, I walked up the boardwalk (that is our hay crop), and watched the moon,—foolishly enough. Presently Our Town slept. The College clock struck ten.