PAGE 4
That Home-Town Feeling
by
“Home?” repeated the blonde lady. “Home?” The sagging lines about her flaccid chin took on a new look of firmness and resolve. The light of determination glowed in her eyes.
“I’ll beat you to it,” she said. “I’m going home, too. I’ll be there to-morrow. I’m dead sick of this. Who cares whether I live or die? It’s just one darned round of grease paint, and sky blue tights, and new boarding houses and humping over to the theater every night, going on, and humping back to the room again. I want to wash up some supper dishes with egg on ’em, and set some yeast for bread, and pop a dishpan full of corn, and put a shawl over my head and run over to Millie Krause’s to get her kimono sleeve pattern. I’m sour on this dirt and noise. I want to spend the rest of my life in a place so that when I die they’ll put a column in the paper, with a verse at the top, and all the neighbors’ll come in and help bake up. Here–why, here I’d just be two lines on the want ad page, with fifty cents extra for `Kewaskum paper please copy.'”
The man held out his hand. “Good-bye,” he said, “and please excuse me if I say God bless you. I’ve never really wanted to say it before, so it’s quite extraordinary. My name’s Guy Peel.”
The white glove, with its too-conspicuous black stitching, disappeared within his palm.
“Mine’s Mercedes Meron, late of the Morning Glory Burlesquers, but from now on Sadie Hayes, of Kewaskum, Wisconsin. Good-bye and–well–God bless you, too. Say, I hope you don’t think I’m in the habit of talking to strange gents like this.”
“I am quite sure you are not,” said Guy Peel, very gravely, and bowed slightly before he went south on Clark Street, and she went north.
Dear Reader, will you take my hand while I assist you to make a one year’s leap. Whoop-la! There you are.
A man and a woman approached Tony’s news stand. You are quite right. But her willow plume was purple this time. A purple willow plume would make Mario Doro look sophisticated. The man was sandy-haired, raw-boned, with a loping gait, very blue eyes, very white teeth, and an objectionably apparent Adam’s apple. He came from the north, and she from the south.
In story books, and on the stage, when two people meet unexpectedly after a long separation they always stop short, bring one hand up to their breast, and say: “You!” Sometimes, especially in the case where the heroine chances on the villain, they say, simultaneously: “You! Here!” I have seen people reunited under surprising circumstances, but they never said, “You!” They said something quite unmelodramatic, and commonplace, such as: “Well, look who’s here!” or, “My land! If it ain’t Ed! How’s Ed?”
So it was that the Purple Willow Plume and the Adam’s Apple stopped, shook hands, and viewed one another while the Plume said, “I kind of thought I’d bump into you. Felt it in my bones.” And the Adam’s Apple said:
“Then you’re not living in Kewaskum–er–Wisconsin?”
“Not any,” responded she, briskly. “How do you happen to be straying away from the tapestries, and the yew trees and the ghost, and the pink roses, and the garden gloves, and the silver tea-service with the coat-of-arms on it?”
A slow, grim smile overspread the features of the man. “You tell yours first,” he said.
“Well,” began she, “in the first place, my name’s Mercedes Meron, of the Morning Glory Burlesquers, formerly Sadie Hayes of Kewaskum, Wisconsin. I went home next day, like I said I would. Say, Mr. Peel (you said Peel, didn’t you? Guy P
eel. Nice, neat name), to this day, when I eat lobster late at night, and have dreams, it’s always about that visit home.”
“How long did you stay?”
“I’m coming to that. Or maybe you can figure it out yourself when I tell you I’ve been back eleven months. I wired the folks I was coming, and then I came before they had a chance to answer. When the train reached Kewaskum I stepped off into the arms of a dowd in a home-made-made-over-year-before-last suit, and a hat that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and I held her off, and looked–looked at the wrinkles, and the sallow complexion, and the coat with the sleeves in wrong, and the mashed hat (I told you Lil used to be the village peach, didn’t I?) and I says: