travel broadens the
mind – useful to talk about …
when you get back home
Adapted from the short story, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, by Sinclair Lewis as printed in the collection, I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories, (Dell, New York, 1962).
I’m a Stranger Here Myself
Travel broadens the mind. It also quickens the sympathies and bestows on one a ready fund of knowledge. And it is useful to talk about when you get back home.
The Johnsons have now been broadened and quickened. The signature “J. Johnson & Wife,” followed by “Northernapolis, G. C.,” appears in hotel registers from Florida to Maine. “G. C.,” of course, stands for their state, the state with the highest bank-deposits and moral standards of any in the Union—the grand old state of God’s Country. Let me tell you, sir, whenever you meet a man from God’s country, he’s willing to tell you so. And does.
J. Johnson & Wife had raised their children and their mortgage, and had bought a small car and a large fireless cooker, when the catastrophe happened. Mrs. Johnson was defeated for the presidency of the Wednesday and Chautauqua Reading Circle by a designing woman who had talked herself into office on the strength of having spent a winter at Pasadena, California, observing the West. Mrs. Johnson went home with her hat-brim low and her lips tight together, and announced to Mr. Johnson that they would travel, and be broadened and quickened.
Mr. Johnson meekly observed that it would be nice to explore the Florida Everglades, and to study business conditions in New York. So, in December, they left their eldest son in charge of the business, and started on an eight-months’ tour of the Picturesque Resorts of Our Own Land. In fact, they were going to have an itinerary. Mrs. Johnson’s second cousin, Bessie, had suggested the itinerary. Cousin Bessie had spent two weeks in Florida. She said it was all nonsense to go to places like Palm Beach and St. Augustine—just because rich snobs from New York went there was no reason why independent folks from God’s Country, that did their own thinking, should waste their good money. So, with Cousin Bessie’s help, Mrs. Johnson made out the following schedule of the beauty-spots of Florida:
Jacksonville, East Palatka, South Daytona, North Tampa, West Miami, Sulphur Water, Jigger Mounds, Diamond Back Ridge, Flatwoods, New Iowa, New Dublin, New Cincinnati, and New New York.
It takes a lot of high-minded heroism to stick faithfully to an itinerary, what with having to catch trains at midnight and all, but with the negligible assistance of Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Johnson stuck to it, though they often had to do two towns in one day. And oh! the rewards in culture! It is true they didn’t have time to stop and look for orange-groves or Seminoles or millionaires, but they often felt as though they could smell the odor of oranges wafted to them on the gay breezes, though that may perhaps have been due to fellow-tourists eating oranges and peanuts. Certainly they saw plenty of palms, and at Jacksonville, in the Boston Museum of Curiosities, Including the Biggest Fish Ever Killed, in Fierce Marine Battle, by Capt. Pedro O’Toole, the Johnsons beheld a real live alligator.
After the trials and weariness of their explorations, Mrs. Johnson permitted them to settle down for a six-weeks’ rest at the Pennsylvania House, in New Chicago, the City Beautiful of the Southland.
New Chicago may not be as old as St. Augustine and these towns that make such claims about antiquity, and heaven only knows if Ponce de Leon really did find any Fountain of Youth at all, and New Chicago may not be filled with a lot of millionaires chasing around in these wheel-chairs and drinking brandy and horse’s necks, but New Chicago is neighborly, that’s what it is, neighborly. And homey. It was founded by Northern capital, just for tourists. If a gentleman wishes to wear comfy old clothes, he doesn’t find some snob in white pants looking askance at him. And New Chicago is so beautiful, and all modern conveniences—none of these rattletrap houses that you find in some Southern cities. It has forty miles of pavement, and nineteen churches, and is in general as spick and span as Detroit or Minneapolis. Why, when you go along the streets, with the cozy boarding-houses, and the well-built private houses of frame, or of ornamental brick with fancy porches and bay-windows and colored glass over the front door, and these nice new two-story concrete bungalows, you can scarcely tell you aren’t in a suburb of New York or Chicago, it’s all so wide-awake and nicely fixed up and full of Northern hustle. And there’s very little danger of being thrown into contact with these lazy, shiftless, native Florida crackers, just fishermen and farmers and common, uninteresting people that have never heard about economics or osteopathy or New Thought or any modern movements. Not but what New Chicago is very Southern and resorty, you understand, with its palms and poinsettias and all sorts of exotic plants and beauty in general.
There isn’t any liquor or dancing to tempt the men-folks, and there is an educational Chautauqua every January, with the very best entertainers, and finally New Chicago has, by actual measurement, more lineal miles of rocking chairs and nice women gossiping and knitting than Ormond and Daytona put together.
At first Mr. Johnson made signs of objecting to the fact that nobody at New Chicago seemed to go fishing. But the hotel and Board of Trade literature convinced him that there was the best fishing in the South within easy reach, and so he settled down and got a good deal of pleasure out of planning to go fishing some day; in fact, went so far as to buy some hooks at the drug store. He found some men from God’s Country who were in the same line of business as himself, and they used to gather in the park and pitch quoits and talk about business conditions back home and have a perfectly hilarious time swapping jokes about Ford cars, and Mike and Pat, and Jakey and Ikey.
Mrs. Johnson also made many acquaintances, such nice, chatty, comfy people, who just took her in and told her about their grandchildren, and made her feel welcome right away.
You see, the minute you arrive at New Chicago, you go and register your name and address at the Board of Trade Building, and all the people from your state look you up immediately, and you have Wisconsin picnics, or Ohio card-parties, or New Hampshire parades, or Middle-West I.O.O.F. suppers. Almost every evening there is some jolly little state gathering in the parlor of one of the hotels, with recitations and songs—Gospel and humorous—and speeches about the state, if there are any lawyers present. Everybody has to do a stunt. Mrs. Johnson made such an impression at the God’s Country Rustic Skule Party, when she got up and blushed and said, “I didn’t know I was going to be called on for a piece, and I hadn’t thought of anything to say, and after hearing all the nice speeches I guess I’ll just say ‘ditto’!” Mr. Johnson told her afterward that her stunt made the hit of the evening.
New Chicago was no less desirable from a standpoint of economy. For thirty-two dollars a week the Johnsons had three meals a day, nice, wholesome homey meals, with no French sauces and fancy fixin’s, and a dainty room such as would, to quote the hotel prospectus, “Appeal to the finest lady of the land, or most hardened tourist, with handsome Michigan Chippendale bureau, two chairs in each room, and bed to lull you to happy dreams, after day spent in the jolly sports of New Chicago, strictly under new management, new linen of fine quality to appeal to heart of most fastidious, bathroom on each floor, ice water cheerfully brought by neat and obliging attendants.”
If you were one of these nervous, strenuous folks who felt that you had to have a lot of young people, why, there were several nice young people in town, though it is true that there was quite a large proportion of older people who had reached the point where they were able to get away from business in the winter-time. Still there were some girls who played the piano, and knew pencil and paper games, and they were the life of the knitting circle with their gay young chatter, especially Miss Nellie Slavens, the well-known Iowa professional reader, who scarcely looked a day over thirty, and was a college graduate, the South Dakota Dairy College. Then there was the clerk of Ocean Villa, right next door, such a sociable young man from Trenton, always in demand for parties, and looked so well in his West Palm Beach suit.
And if you wanted sports there were athletic exercises a-plenty, though there wasn’t this crowd that show off their silk bathing-suits on the beach, and pay twenty-five dollars for an aeroplane ride, as they do at Palm Beach. Any bright day you could see eight or ten people in bathing at Rocky Shore. Almost every boarding house had a croquet ground, and three of them had tennis courts. The Mayberry sisters, Kittie and Jane, nice sensible girls of thirty or so, were often to be seen playing. And you could always get up a crowd and charter Dominick Segui’s launch, when the engine was in repair, and have a trip down to the shell mound. So, you see, there was any amount of rational sport, and no need for anyone to go to these sporty places.
In short, the Johnsons found every day at New Chicago just one round of innocent pleasures. After a good, wholesome, hearty breakfast of oatmeal, steak, eggs, buckwheats, sausage, and coffee—none of these grits and cornbread that they have the nerve to offer you for breakfast some places in the South—the Johnsons read the Northernapolis Herald, which they got from a live, hustling newsdealer from Minneapolis, and had so much enjoyment out of learning about the deaths and sicknesses and all back home, though it did hurt Mrs. Johnson to see how the new president of the Wednesday Reading Circle was letting it run down. Then they went over to the drug store, run by a live, hustling Toledo man, and Mr. Johnson bought three Flor de Wheeling cigars, while Mrs. Johnson had a chocolate ice-cream soda and some souvenir post-cards. Then for the rest of the day they were free to walk, or talk, or just sit and be comfy on the porch of their hotel. And there was always such an interesting group of broad-gauged, conservative, liberal, wide-awake, homey, well-traveled folks on the porch to talk to.
For you who may not have been broadened and quickened, or had opportunities for elevating and informative talk, I will give an example of such a conversation as might have been heard on the porch of the Pennsylvania House at any time between seven-thirty a.m. and nine-thirty p.m., and I assure you it isn’t a bit above the average run in New Chicago:
“Well, I see there’s some new God’s Country people come to town, Mr. Johnson—Willis M. Beaver and wife, from Monroe County. Staying at the Château Nebraska.”
“Well, well! Why, I’ve met his brother at the state convention of Order of Peaweevils. Funny, him being here, way off in the Sunny South, and me knowing his brother. World’s pretty small, after all. But still, it certainly is a liberal education to travel.”
“Oh, Mrs. Johnson, don’t you want to come to our basket-weaving club? We make baskets out of these long pine needles, with raffia—”
Before Mrs. Johnson can answer her husband says, quick as a flash, with that ready wit of his, “Say, uh, Mrs. Bezuzus, I’m glad those pine needles are good for something anyway!”
“Ha, ha!” asserts Mr. Smith. “You said something there! Why, I’d rather have a West Virginia oak in my yard than all the pines and palms in Florida. Same with these early strawberries they talk so much about, not but what it’s nice to write home to the folks that you’re having strawberries this time of year, but I swear, we wouldn’t feed ’em to hogs, up where I come from.”
“You hit it right, Brother Smith.” It is Dr. Bjones of Kansas speaking, and after Mrs. Bezuzus has suitably commented on the manners, garments, and social standing of some passing newlyweds, Dr. Bjones goes on in his forcible scientific manner: “Same with these Southern fish, not but what I like fresh sea-food and crabs, but I tell you these bass and whitings can’t hold a candle to the fresh-water pickerel you get up North. Then these Floridians talk so much about how poisonous their darned old rattlesnakes are. Why, we got rattlers in Kansas that are just as bad any day!”
“But what gets me is the natives, Doc. Shiftless. What this country needs is some Northern hustle.”
“That’s so, Brother Snuck. Shiftless. And besides that—”
“Oh, Mrs. Smith, I want to show you the sweater I’m knitting.”
“—besides being shiftless, look at how they sting us. Simply make all the money they can out of us tourists. Oranges two for a nickel! Why, I can buy jus’ good oranges at home for that!”
“And the land! They can talk all they want to about rocky hill soil, but I wouldn’t give one of my Berkshire Hill holdings for all the land south of Baltimore. I can sell you—”
“Pretty warm today.”
“Yes, I was writing to Jessie, guess she wished she was down here. She wrote me it was snowing and ten below—”
Mrs. Johnson was always afire for accurate botanical information, and of the scientific Dr. Bjones she inquired, “What are these palmettoes good for?”
“Well, you know, I’m kind of a stranger in Florida, too, but I believe the natives eat the nuts from them.”
“Oh, can anybody tell me what connections I make for Ciudad Dinero?”
“Why, you take the 9:16, Mrs. Bezuzus, and change at Lemon Grove—”
“No, you change at Avocado and take the jitney—”
“Is there a good hotel at Ciudad?”
“Well, I’ve heard the Blubb House is a first-class place; three-dollar-a-day house. Oh, how did you like the Royal Miasma at—”
“Oh, I suppose it’s awful famous, and it’s very dressy, everybody changed their clothes for supper, but I prefer Cape Cod Court, not an expensive place, you understand, but so homey—”
“Yes, but for table give me Dr. Gunk’s Health Cottage, and the beds there—”
“Well, we started in on the West Coast and went to St. Petersburg and Tampa and Fort Myers, and then back to Ocala and Silver Springs, and took the Ocklawaha trip and all, and we stopped a day at Palatka—”
“Oh, Mrs. Bjones, how do you do that stitch?”
Often the crowd on the porch ceased these lighter divertissements and spoke seriously of real highbrow topics, like Bryan and Villa and defense and T. R. and self-starters and Billy Sunday and Harold Bell Wright. The Johnsons certainly had come to the right shop for being broadened and quickened, and Mrs. Johnson often told her husband that she would take back to the Wednesday Reading Circle such a fund of ready information and ideas as a Certain Person couldn’t have gotten in California if she’d stayed there a hundred years!
So went the Johnsons’ hours of gaieties many-colored and tropical, and when the long, happy day was over, New Chicago afforded them a succulent supper or a dainty repast, and then ho! for the movies, and no city has better movies than New Chicago, scenes from the whole wide world spread before you there on the screen, scenes from Paris and Pekin and Peoria, made by the best Los Angeles companies. At least once a week the Johnsons were able to see their favorite film hero, Effingham Fish, in a convulsing comedy.
How wondrous ’tis to travel in unfamiliar climes!
Spring was on its way, and at last the Johnsons were ready to bid farewell to New Chicago, the land of mystery and languor, adventure and dolce far niente.
Their trunk was packed. Mr. Johnson’s slippers had been run to earth, or at least to dust, under their bed, and his razor-strop had been recovered from behind the bureau, when Mrs. Johnson suddenly exclaimed. “Oh! Why, we haven’t studied the flora and fauna of Florida yet, and I don’t know but what we ought to, for club-papers.”
“Well, you haven’t got all the time in the world left for it,” said Mr. Johnson, who had a pretty wit.
“Well, we’re all packed, and we have three hours before the train goes.”
She dragged him out and they hired a surrey driven by a bright, hustling Northern negro—not one of these ignorant Southern darkies—and they galloped out to Dr. Bible’s orange-grove, admission ten cents, one of the show-places in the suburbs of New Chicago.
There it was, trees and fruit and—and everything; a sight to broaden and quicken one.
The Johnsons solemnly gazed at it. “Yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, “that’s an orange-grove! Just think! And grapefruit. . . . It’s very pretty. . . . I wonder if they sell post-card views of it.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Johnson, “that’s an orange-grove. Well, well! . . . Well, I guess we better drive on.”
They next studied the shell mound. There’s something very elevating about the sight of such a relic of long-past ages—shows how past ages lived, you know—gives you a broader sympathy with history and all that. There she was, all in layers, millions of shells, just where the Indians had thrown them. Ages and ages ago. The Johnsons must have gazed at the mound for five or ten minutes. Mr. Johnson was so interested that he asked the driver, “Do they ever find tommyhawks in these mounds?”
“Don’t know, sir,” said the driver thoughtfully. “I’m a stranger in New Chicago.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Johnson, “I shouldn’t wonder if they found relics there. Very, very ancient, I should say. When you think of how filling just one oyster-fry is, and then all these shells— Well, mama, I guess that’s about all we wanted to see, isn’t it?”
“Well, we might drive back by Mr. Capo’s estate; they tell me he has some fine Florida shrubbery there.”
They passed the Capo estate, but there wasn’t much to see—just trees with kind of white berries, and tall shrubs with stalks curiously like the bamboo fish-poles that boys use, back home. Mrs. Johnson’s eagle glance darted to the one object of interest, and she wanted to know something:
“Stop, driver. John, I wonder what that plant is there, like a little palm, with that thing like a cabbage in the center. I wonder if it isn’t a pineapple plant.”
We, having the unfair position of author, know that it was really a sago palm—not that we wish to boast of our knowledge of floras, and so, if you will pardon our interruption:
“Well,” said Mr. Johnson helpfully.
“I understand they grow farther south. But even so this might be an exotic pineapple, just grown here in gardens.”
“Well, maybe. There’s a couple of people coming. Why don’t you ask them?”
They let the first of the two approaching men pass them—he was only a common, ignorant native. But the second was a fine, keen, hustling fellow on a bicycle, and Mrs. Johnson hailed him: “Can you tell me what that plant is?”
“That, madam—”
The Johnsons listened attentively, alert as ever in acquiring knowledge.
“—that plant? Well, I don’t just exactly know. I’m a stranger here myself.”
The Johnsons had to hurry back for their train, but they interestedly discussed all the flora and fauna on the way, including pines, buzzards, and pickaninnies. “Isn’t it nice,” said Mrs. Johnson, “to plunge right out and explore like this! I just bet that cat, with her winter in California, never stirred out of her own dooryard. Well, Florida certainly has been a novel experience, and improved our minds so much. Driver, is that a mocking-bird, on that skinny dead tree?”
“Yassum, that’s a mocking-bird. . . . Or maybe it’s a robin.”
II
Adding experiences in Georgia and Virginia and the Carolinas to their knowledge of Florida, the Johnsons saw and drank deep of Savannah, Charleston, Asheville, Richmond, and Newport News. They were able to do all five cities in six days, while the Bezuzuses had taken eight for them. In Charleston they saw Calhoun’s grave and learned all about the aristocratic society. They were so pleasantly entertained there, by a very prominent and successful business acquaintance of Mr. Johnson’s, a Mr. Max Rosenfleisch of New York, who had bought a fine old Southern mansion in Charleston and thus, of course, was right in with all the old families socially. Mr. Rosenfleisch said he liked the aristocrats, but was going to change a lot of their old-fashioned social ways, and show them how to have a real swell time, with cabarets and theater parties, instead of these slow dances, and teach them to dine at seven instead of three or four. The Johnsons were quite thrilled at witnessing the start of this social revolution—I tell you, it’s when you travel that you have such unusual adventures. They themselves would actually have met some of the inner social set of Charleston, but Mr. Rosenfleisch was having the den redecorated before giving any more of his smart, exclusive parties, and meantime the Johnsons had to be getting on—to a tourist, time is valuable.
At the beginning of spring, when the narcissi and the excursionists are out, the Johnsons arrived at Washington, where every good citizen should go, to show the lawmakers that we uphold their hands, and to give them our ideas about enlarging the army. The Johnsons found the nicest sightseeing car, with such a bright young man from Denver for barker, and he told how high the Washington Monument was, how much the Patent Office had cost to build, how long it had taken to decorate the Congressional Library in the Spanish Omelet style, how far the guns in the Navy Yard would shoot, where Joe Cannon lived, and numerous other broadening and quickening facts which filled them with pride in being citizens of the greatest country in the world.
The Johnsons’ congressman received them with flattering attentions which would have turned heads less level than theirs; he rushed over and shook hands with them the minute they came into his private office, and while just for the moment he couldn’t remember their name, he had it right on the tip of his tongue, and said, “Why, of course, of course,” when Mr. Johnson refreshed his memory. He recalled perfectly having shaken hands with them once at Northernapolis. He was so sorry that he was expecting the Ways and Means Committee to meet in his office, right away, for he did so want to have them stay there and chat with him about the folks back home. As an indication of his pleasure in seeing them, he honored them with a special card which enabled them to hear the epoch-making debates in Congress, from a gallery reserved just for distinguished visitors and friends of congressmen. As they listened to a vigorous oration on the duty on terrapin, Mrs. Johnson said triumphantly: “John, I guess that cat never heard anything like that in her Pasadena that she’s always talking about at the Reading Circle!”
Travelers have to be of heroic mold to endure the dangers and disasters of exploration; and the Johnsons showed the quiet dignity of noblesse oblige during a most disagreeable incident at Washington. . . . Mrs. Johnson wished to find the house in which Commodore Decatur had lived, as an ancestor of hers had been a very near and dear friend of one of the Commodore’s gunswabbers. She asked quite a number of apparently well-informed tourists, but, with a pathetic lack of sound information, they all murmured that they didn’t know, being themselves strangers in Washington. Then she had the original idea of asking the clerk at their hotel.
“Decatur House?” he said. “I know where the Ebbitt House is, and the White House, and Colonel House, but I pass up the Decatur House. Sorry . . . Here, boy, shoot this package up to 427.”
“Why, I mean the historic old mansion of Commodore Decatur.”
“Madam, I can tell you where to get your kodak films developed, and where to find the largest oysters in town, and where to pay your bill, and what time the 5:43 train goes, but that’s all I know. I come from Chicago, and if God is good to me, I’m going back there, where there’s no congressmen, and they keep the tourists inside the Loop.”
“Well, can’t you tell us where we can find out?”
“Madam, you will find a guide-book at the news-stand.”
From the news-stand they overheard the clerk saying to a fellow menial:
“—yes, I know, I oughtn’t to be a grouch, but she wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. And ten minutes ago some other female wanted to know where Lincoln was buried, and just before that an old boy was sore because I couldn’t tell him what is the sum total of all the pensions the Government is paying, and before that somebody wanted to know how much the dome of the Capitol weighs. These tin-can paper-bag tourists drive me wild. I ain’t just an information bureau—I’m a whole bedroom suite, instalment plan.”
Mr. Johnson said to his wife with that quiet force which all his associates in Northernapolis know and admire, “If he means us by ‘tin-can paper-bag tourists,’ I’m going to chastise him, I am, no matter what it costs! In fact, I’ll speak to the manager!”
“Now, John,” his wife urged, “he simply is beneath your contempt.”
“Well, perhaps that’s right.”
The Johnsons decided not to waste a quarter on a guide-book, and strolled out to ask a policeman where the Decatur House was.
Although they found that Washington was like Florida in needing Western hustle, what with the service so slow that they didn’t finish dinner before twelve-thirty, some noons, yet the Johnsons discovered a news-stand where they could buy the Northernapolis Herald, and there was the nicest big drug store run by a live, hustling Milwaukee man, where Mr. Johnson could get his favorite Flor de Wheeling cigars, while Mrs. Johnson had a chocolate ice-cream soda and some post-cards. And a movie-theater featuring Effingham Fish in comedies. So, altogether, in their Washington sojourn they had much homey pleasure as well as broadening insight into how public affairs are conducted. And the nicest souvenirs.
Again they took their staves and wardrobe-scrip and continued their pilgrimage to the ancient and historic spots of our own land. They were able to do Baltimore and Philadelphia thoroughly in two days, and would have finished up Atlantic City in another day, except that they found it was so much cheaper to get rates by the week. Then off for New York.
Mrs. Johnson was willing to sacrifice, to wear herself to the bone, studying the deeper esthetic, psychological and economic problems of New York, that she might bring home new ideas to the Wednesday Reading Circle. But New York wouldn’t let itself be studied. It was perfectly crazy. Everybody in New York, they found, spent all his time in cafés, tea-rooms, cabarets, or Bohemian restaurants where women smoke. The only homey, comfortable place they found was a nice quiet drug store where Mr. Johnson got his Flor de Wheeling cigars. And the prices—! They were glad to pass on to New Haven, to Hartford, the Berkshires, and Boston—where they saw several headquarters of Washington, and the most interesting graves, Emerson and Hawthorne and all sorts of people, and such nice artistic post-cards. Then to Maine, and, in mid-summer, down to Cape Cod, and Provincetown.
The Johnsons didn’t plan to spend more than one day at Provincetown. They felt that Northernapolis was beginning to need them, and they had really seen everything there was to see in the East and South. But at Provincetown they had such a pleasant surprise that they stayed two whole weeks—they ran into Dr. and Mrs. Bjones of Wichita, with whom they had had the jolly times at New Chicago. With the Bjoneses the Johnsons picnicked on the dunes, and even went swimming once, and sat on the porch of Mrs. Ebenezer’s boarding house, discussing various hotels and the Bjoneses’ interesting itinerary. They didn’t want to be mean, but they couldn’t help crowing a little when they found that they had seen six graves of famous men which the Bjoneses had missed entirely!
The Johnsons didn’t really like Provincetown. Of course the Bjoneses were interesting, and after a time they met some nice comfy people from Indianapolis and Omaha, and Mr. Johnson was able to get his Flor de Wheeling cigars. But Provincetown was filled with fishermen, acting as though they owned the place, and smelling it all up with their dories and schooners and nets and heaven knows what all, dirty, common Portuguese and Yankee fishermen, slopping along the street in nasty old oilskins covered with fish-scales, and not caring if they brushed right up against you. And the old wharves, all smelly. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were the first to be interested in any new phenomenon and once they went right out on a wharf and asked all about the fishing industry and whaling. But still—as Mr. Johnson said with that ready satire which made him so popular a speaker at the dinners of the Northernapolis Chamber of Commerce—they didn’t care to associate with dead fish all their lives, even if they did like Effingham Fish in the movies!
When the Bjoneses left there was nothing more to study, nothing to observe.
Said Mrs. Johnson, “We’ve seen every inch of the South and East, now, and no one can say we haven’t been unprejudiced and open-minded—the way we’ve gone into the flora and fauna, and among industries and all—but I must say we haven’t seen a single place that begins to come up to Northernapolis.”
“You never said a better thing in your life, mama, and what’s more, we’ll start for Northernapolis tomorrow!”
They were due to arrive in Northernapolis at two p.m. Mrs. Johnson was making notes for Wednesday Reading Circle papers about the Fruit of the Tropics, the Negro Problem, Fishing on Cape Cod, and How the Government Is Conducted at Washington.
“Guess that hen won’t talk so much about Pasadena after this,” Mr. Johnson chuckled. “Say, we’ll have time to say ‘howdy’ to the folks and go to the movies tonight, to celebrate our return. And I’ll be able to get a decent cigar again—can’t buy a Flor de Wheeling on a single one of these trains. Well, mama, it’ll be pretty good to get back where we know every inch, and won’t have to ask questions and feel like outsiders, eh?”
Such a surprise as it would be for the children! The Johnsons hadn’t wired them they were coming.
Northernapolis! The fine, big, dirty factories—evidences of Northernapolis’s hustling spirit! The good old-fashioned homey station! The Central House ’bus!
They stood out on Main Street, excitedly hailing a street car. Then—
You see, as a matter of fact this isn’t a satire, but a rather tragic story about two pathetic, good-hearted, friendly yearners, as you should already have perceived—
Then Mr. Johnson dropped his suit-case and stood amazed. A block down from the station was a whole new row of two-story brick stores. “Why,” he exclaimed, “I never read about that row going up!” He was bewildered, lost. He turned to a man who was also waiting for the car and inquired, “What’s those new buildings?”
“Dunno,” said the man. “I’m a stranger here myself.”
No Haiku For You 