CHAPTER XVII

CHICKEN AND WAFFLES AND THE TOON O' BATH

We found an official of the Elmira Automobile Club, a small, stoop-shouldered, bald, eye-sockety person who greeted us with a genial rub of his hands and a hearty smirk as though we were just _the_ persons, among all others, whom he was most pleased to see.

“Come right in, gentlemen,” he called, as Franklin and I appeared in the doorway. “What can I do for you? Looking for maps or a route or something?”

“Tell me,” I inquired, anxious to make my point at once, “are there any good roads due west of here which would take us straight into Ohio, without going north to Buffalo?”

He scratched his head.

“No, I don’t think there are,” he replied; “most of the good roads are north of here, around Rochester, where the main line of traffic is. Now there is a good road—or a part of one”—and then he commenced a long rambling account of some road that was about to be built—but as yet—etc., etc. I saw my idea of a somewhat different trip going glimmering.

“But here,” he went on, picking up one of those maps which various hotels and towns combine to get up to attract automobile trade, “what’s the matter with the Onondaga trail from here on? That takes you up through Corning, Bath, Avoca, Dansville, Geneseo, and Avon, and up there you strike the main road through Batavia right into Buffalo. That’s a fine road, good hard macadam nearly all the way, and when you get to Avon you strike one of the best hotels anywhere. When you get up there you just roll your car right into the grounds—walk into the restaurant and ask ’em to give you some of their chicken and waffles. You’ll just be about ready for it when you get there and you’ll thank me for telling you.”

I fancied I could see the cloven hoof of the Avon hotel keeper mystically present in that speech. However, far to the left on another branch of the same trail I saw my beloved Warsaw, New York.

“What’s the matter with the road up through here?” I asked, putting my finger on it.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, “there it is mostly dirt and there are no good dirt roads as you know, if you’ve autoed much. A man called up here this morning and wanted to know if there were any good dirt roads out of here to Utica and I said to him, 'My dear sir, there aren’t any good dirt roads anywhere. There ain’t any such thing.'”

I seemed to see the Avon hotel keeper smiling and beckoning once more—a chicken in one hand, a plate of waffles in the other—but he didn’t appeal to me at all. These hotel routes and these Americans who are so quick to capitalize everything—motor routes, scenery, water falls, everything! “Curses, curses, curses,” I said to myself softly, “why must everything be turned into business?” Besides, many portions of the roads over which we had come in New Jersey and Pennsylvania were dirt and they were excellent. I smiled serenely, determined to make the best of whatever happened and however much I might want to go to Warsaw, New York.

But our friend seemed determined to send us via Avon and Batavia. He went on telling us how anxious he had been to convince the man who had telephoned that there were no good dirt roads, but I was happy to note that apparently he had not been successful. The man probably knew something about state and dirt roads, as we had found them, and refused to take his direction. I was pleased to think that whatever Franklin might be concluding, because of his advice, we still had some distance yet to travel before we would have to decide not to go to Warsaw—all of seventyfive or a hundred miles anyhow. For, extending that distance our proposed route was directly toward Warsaw, and that cheered me a bit.

[Illustration:

BEYOND ELMIRA Early morning ]

And now beyond Elmira for a distance of one hundred and twenty miles or more, all the way into Warsaw, we had one of the most delightful days of any—a perfectly heavenly day, the weather so fine, the sky so blue, and not a tinge of anything save harvesting weather anywhere. As we rolled along the sound of the reaper was heard in the land—great mechanical combinations of engines and threshers and grain separators and straw stack builders—a great flume or trough reaching high in the air and carrying out the grainless straw and chaff, blowing it on a single mound. It was really wonderful to see America’s daily bread being garnered mile after mile, and mile after mile.

And the marvelous herds of cattle, mostly Holstein, which yield the milk supply for the trains that pour nightly and daily towards that vast plexus of cities called New York, with its eight million people.

In this Pennsylvania-New York valley alone, which seemed to stretch unbroken from Wilkes-Barré to western New York, from the Chesapeake really to the falls of the Geneseo, there were indeed cattle on a thousand hills.

There was too much traffic along the first portion of the road out of Elmira and by now I was beginning to get an idea of the magnitude of the revolution which the automobile had effected. Thirty years ago these roads would have been traveled as elsewhere, if at all, by wagons and buggies, but now on this Saturday morning the ways were crowded with farmers coming to town in automobiles, or as Speed always put it, “in autos and Fords.” Why this useful little machine should be sniffed at is a puzzle to me, for it seemed to look nearly as well and to travel quite as fast as any of the others. The farmers were using it as a family carryall—taking in sacks of wheat or other products to town and bringing home groceries and other needfuls.

In Corning, a town of about ten or twelve thousand population, some twenty miles west of Elmira, we found a city as prosperous as most of the others apparently, and as naïve. It being Saturday, the natives from the surrounding country were beginning to come in, but I did not notice any of that rural flavor which had seemed to characterize them in my youth. On leaving every town where we had loitered too long we made a solemn pact that we would not waste so much time in unimportant towns that were nearly all alike; but whenever one rose into view and we dashed into a principal street lined with stores and crowded with people, it was beyond human nature not to get out and look around a little. There was always the excuse of picture cards for a record of our trip, or meals or a drink of some kind or even popcorn (Franklin’s favorite), or peanuts or candy. Think of it—three grown men getting out to buy candy!

Here in Corning it was that I first noticed that Franklin had a peculiarly sharp nose and eye for ferreting out ideal rural types. Those who have read Hamlin Garland’s “Main Traveled Roads” will understand instantly what I mean—not the crude, obvious, one might almost say burlesque types, but those more difficult and pathetic characters who do their best not to seem to be of the country and yet who are always so obviously of it. I tried my best, as Franklin nudged my arm at different times, to formulate to myself what it is about these interesting individuals—the boy or woman or young man from the country—dressed in those peculiarly new and store-y store clothes that makes them so appealing and so pathetic to me. In “Main Traveled Roads” one gets a sense of it all. Times have changed a little since then and yet here were the same types—the red-cheeked, wide-eyed boy in the new brown suit and twentyfive cent hat looking at people as if all the world and its every gesture were a surprise, and the women walking about streets impossible, one must say, from a social and intellectual point of view, trying to look as if they had something to do and some place to go. I always suspect them of eating their meals in some wagon back of some store—a cold snack brought along for the occasion or asking the privilege of adding a few things out of a basket to the repast provided, say, by a glass of ice-cream soda.

Oh, the lovely roads by which they came, the sylvan nooks where their homes are, the small schoolhouses, the wide spacious fields with crows and blackbirds and bluejays for company, the grey snowy fields in winter, these black filigree trees for a border—and the great cities which haunt the dreams of these boys and girls and finally lure so many of them away.

Beyond Corning came more delightful small towns, “Painted Post,” with a church so singularly plain, a small spire so thin and tall that it was truly beautiful; Campbell, with one of these typical rural streets of homes which make you wish that you might stay for days, visiting country relatives; Savona, a hot country store street where Speed stopped for oil and gas. Anent Savona, which hadn’t a tree to bless itself with, where Franklin and I sat and baked while Speed replenished his stores, Franklin told me the story of why the principal street of Carmel, his home town, was treeless. Once there had been trees there, beautiful ones, but with the arrival of the metropolitan spirit and a desire to catch passing automobile trade it was decided to widen the street somewhat and make it more commercial and therefore more attractive. The idea which first popped into the minds of all who desired metropolitan improvement was that the trees should come down.

“Why?” asked some lover of the trees as things of beauty.

“Well, you don’t see any trees in Main Street, Indianapolis, do you?” replied another triumphantly.

The battle was lost and won right there—Main Street, Indianapolis, was the criterion. “Are we going to be like Indianapolis—or Chicago or New York—or are we not?” I can hear some sturdy rural asking. “If not, let the trees stand.”

What rural would save any tree as against being like New York, I’d like to know. That is why, I suspect, we baked for fifteen minutes in Savona.

And then came “the toon o' Bath,” as we forever after called it, for a reason which will appear,—a dear, lovely, summery town, with a square so delightful that on sight of it we instantly got out and loitered in the shade for over an hour, in spite of our resolution.

Here in the east, for some reason, this idea of a plain green open square, without any execrable reproduction of an American Civil War soldier perched high aloft on a tall shaft, has remained untainted. Wilkes-Barré, New Milford, Owego and now Bath had one, and in New England and New Jersey I have seen scores. The county offices are as a rule put around it, but not in it, as is the rule farther west.

In the west—everywhere west of Pennsylvania and sometimes east of it—a public square is not complete without a courthouse or at least a soldiers' or sailors' monument—or both—planted in the centre of it, and these almost an exact reproduction of every other courthouse or monument for one thousand miles about. The idea of doing anything original is severely frowned upon. Whatever else you may be in America or elsewhere, apparently you must not be different. Hold fast to the type, and do as your ancestors did! Build all courthouses and monuments as courthouses and monuments should be built—that is, true to tradition. If you don’t believe this, visit any countyseat between New York and Seattle.

[Illustration: FRANKLIN DREAMS OVER A RIVER BEYOND SAVONA]

But this square, in Bath, like some others in New England and that in Owego, was especially pleasing because it had no courthouse and no monuments, merely a bandstand and a great spread of benches placed under wide-armed and sturdy trees. Under their high branches, which spread as a canopy over the walks and benches below, were festooned, on wires, a number of lights for the illumination of the place at night. About it, on the different sides, were residences, churches, a public school, some county offices, and to the east stores, all with a peaceful, rural flavor. Several farmer families were eating their meals from baskets as they sat in wagons, their horses unhitched and fastened behind. On the benches were seated a number of old soldiers idling in the shade. Why old soldiers should be so numerous at this day and date was more than I could understand, and I said so. It was now fiftyfour years since the war began, and here they were, scores of them apparently, all fairly hale and looking scarcely sixtyfive. They must have been at least seventy years each to have been of any service in the great war of the rebellion.

Near here, we discovered, there was an old soldiers' home—a state home—and this being Saturday afternoon, the streets were full of them. They looked to be a crotchety, cantankerous crew. Later on we saw many of them in the road leading out to their institution—drunk. In order to strike up a conversation with some of the old soldiers, we asked three of them sitting on a bench about a drunken woman who was pirouetting before them in a frowzy, grimy gaiety.

“That,” said one, a little, thin-shouldered, clawy type of man with a high, cracked voice, a clownish expression, and a laugh as artificial and mechanical as any laugh could be, a sort of standard, everyday habit laugh, “Oh, that’s the Pete and Duck.” (I give it as it sounded.)

“The Pete and Duck!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, sir, the Pete and Duck”—and then came the high, cackling, staccato laugh. “That’s what they call her round here, the Pete and Duck. I dunno howsoever they come to call her that, but that’s what they call her, the Pete and Duck, and a drunken old —— she is, too,—just an old drunken girl”—and then he went off into a gale of pointless laughter, slapping his knees and opening his mouth very wide.

"That’s all I’ve ever hearn her called. Ain’t that so, Eddie—he, he! ho, ho! ha, ha! Yes—that’s what they allus call ’er—the Pete and Duck. She’s nothin’ but just a poor old drunken fool like many another in this here toon o' Bath—he, he! ho, ho! ha, ha!

“But then she ain’t the only funny thing in Bath neither. There’s a buildin' they’re puttin' up over there,” he continued, “that has front and back but no sides—the only buildin' in the toon o' Bath that ain’t got no sides but just front and back. He, he! ha, ha! ho, ho!”

We looked in the direction of this building, but it was nothing more than an ordinary store building, being erected between two others by the party wall process. It was a bank, apparently, and the front was being put together out of white marble.

“Yes, sir, the only buildin' in the toon o' Bath that ain’t got no sides, but just front and back,” and he lapsed again into his vacant, idle laughter. Evidently he had been given over to the task of making sport, or trying to, out of the merest trifles for so many years that he had lost all sense of proportion and value. The least thing, where there was so little to be gay over, took on exaggerated lines of the comic. He was full of unconscious burlesque. Suddenly he added with a touch of seriousness, “and they say that the front is goin' to cost seventeen thousand dollars. Jee-hosaphat!” He hung onto the “Jee” with breathless persistence. It was really evident in this case that seventeen thousand dollars represented an immense sum to his mind.

It was pathetic to see him sitting there in his faded, almost ragged clothes, and all these other old lonely soldiers about. I began to feel the undertow of this clanking farce called life. What a boneyard old age seems, anyhow!

There was another old soldier, tall, heavy, oleaginous, with some kind of hip trouble, who explained that he lived in Brooklyn up to the year previous, and had been with Grant before Richmond and in the battle in the Wilderness. These endless, ancient tales seemed a little pale just now beside the heavy storms of battle raging in Europe. And I could not help thinking how utterly indifferent life is to the individual. How trivial, and useless and pointless we become in age! What’s the good of all the clatter and pathos and fuss about war to these ancients? How does patriotism and newspaper bluster and the fighting of other men’s battles avail them, now they are old? Here they were, stranded, wrecked, forgotten. Who cares, really, what becomes of them? Fifty years ago they were fawned upon for the moment as the saviors of their country. And now they hobble about such squares as this, condemned by the smug gentry of small towns, despised for indulging in the one salve to disillusioned minds and meditating on things that are no more. I wanted to leave, and we soon did leave, anxious to feel the soothing waves of change.

Although in Bath the sun seemed suddenly overcast by these reflections in regard to the remorseless tread of time, outside, in the open fields, it was as inspiriting as ever. A few miles out and we came to the banks of a small river which flowed for a number of miles through this region, tumbling thinly over rough boulders, or forming itself into deep, grey-green pools. Gone were the ancient soldiers in blue, the miseries of a hag like “the Pete and Duck.” Just here the hills seemed to recede, and the land was very flat, like a Dutch landscape. We came to a section of the stream where it was sheltered by groves of trees which came to its very edge, and by small thickets of scrub willow. Just below a little way, some girls, one of them in a red jacket, were fishing. A little farther a few Holstein cows were standing in the water, knee deep. It looked so inviting that I began to urge that we all take a swim. A lovely bank coming into view, and an iron bridge above, which was a poem among trees, Franklin was inspired. “That looks rather inviting,” he said.

As usual, Speed had something to do—heaven only knows what—polishing some bolts, probably. But Franklin and I struck out through waving patterns of ox-eye daisies and goldenrod to the drab and pea green willow groves, where, amid rank growths of weeds and whitish pebbles and stones, we presently reached the water’s edge and a little hillock of grass at the foot of a tree. Here on bushes and twigs we hung our clothes and went out into the bright, tumbling waters. The current was very swift, though very shallow—no deeper than just above the knees. By clearing away the stones and lying down on the pebbles and sand underneath, you could have the water race over you at breakneck speed, and feel as though you were being fingered by mystic hands. It was about all we could do, lying thus, to brace ourselves so that the stream would not keep moving us on.

The sky, between the walls of green wood, was especially blue. The great stones about us were all slippery with a thin, green moss, and yet so clean and pretty, and the water gurgled and sipped. Lying on my back I could see robins and bluejays and catbirds in the trees about. I amused myself kicking my feet in the air and throwing stones at the farther bank and watching Franklin’s antics. He had a strong, lean white body, which showed that it had been shaped in hayfields in his youth. His white hair and straight nose made him look somewhat like an ancient Etruscan, stalking about in the waters. We were undisturbed by any sound, and I could have spent the rest of the day lying in this babbling current—it was so warm—listening to the birds, watching the wind shake the leaves, and contemplating the blue sky. It was so warm that when one sat up the wind and sun soon dried the flesh. I was loath to leave.

[Illustration: THE “TOON O’ BATH”]