Thoughts
The golden of the new moon hung above the market house, and the night was cool, springlike, and perfect.
Five or six men were sitting in front of the Hutchins House, and they had gradually shifted their chairs until they were almost in a group.
They were men from different parts of the country, some of them from cities thousands of miles away. They had been in the dice box of chance and thrown in a temporary cluster into the hospitable gates of the city.
They smoked and talked, and that feeling of which men who meet in the world far from their own homes, was strong upon them.
They told all their funny stories and compared experiences, and then a little silence fell upon them, and while the hanging of blue smoke grew thicker, their thoughts began to wander back—as the cows stray homeward at eventide—to other scenes and faces.
“ ‘And o’er them many a flaming range of vapor the crescent bark:
And through many a rosy change
The twilight melted into dark,’ ”
quoted the New York drummer. “Heigho! I wish I was at home tonight.”
“Same here,” said the little man from St. Louis. “I can just see the kids now tumbling round on the floor and cutting up larks before Laura puts them to bed. There’s one blessing, though, I’ll be home on Thanksgiving.”
“I had a letter from home today,” said the white-bearded Philadelphian, “and it made me homesick. I would give a foot of that slushy pavement on Spruce Street for all these balmy airs and mockingbird solos in the South. I’m going to strike a bee line for the Quaker City in time for that fat turkey, I don’t care what my house says.”
“Yust hear dot band playing,” said the fat gentleman. “I can almost I vos back in Cincinnati ‘neber die Rhein’ mit dot schplendid little beautiful girl from de hat factory. I dink it is dese lovely nights vot makes us of home, sweet home, gedinken.”
“Now you’re shoutin’,” said the Chicago hardware drummer. “I wish I was in French Pete’s restaurant on State Street with a big bottle of beer and some chitterlings and lemon pie. I’m feelin’ kinder sentimental myself tonight.”
“The worst part of it is,” said the man with the gold nose glasses and green necktie, “that our dear ones are separated from us by many long and dreary miles, and we little know what obstacles in the shape of storm and flood and wreck lie in our way. If we could but annihilate time and space for a brief interval there are many of us who would the forms of those we love to our hearts tonight. I, too, am a husband and father.”
“That breeze,” said the man from New York, “feels exactly like the ones that used to blow over the old farm in Montgomery County, and that ‘orchard and meadow, and deep tangled wildwood,’ etc., keep bobbing up in my memory tonight.”
“How many of us,” said the man with gold glasses, “realize the many pitfalls that Fate digs in our path? What a slight thing may sever the cord that binds us to life! There today, tomorrow gone forever from the world!”
“Too true,” said the Philadelphia man, wiping his spectacles.
“And leave those we love behind,” continued the other. “The of a lifetime, the love of the strongest hearts, ended in the twinkling of an eye. One loses the clasp of hands that would detain and drifts away into the sad, unknowable, other existence, leaving aching hearts to mourn forever. Life seems all a tragedy.”
“Banged if you ain’t rung the bell first shot,” said the Chicago drummer. “Our affections get busted up something worse’n killing hogs.”
The others frowned upon the Chicago drummer, for the man with gold glasses was about to speak again.
“We say,” he went on, “that love will live forever, and yet when we are gone others step into our places and the wounds our loss had made are healed. And yet there is an added pang to death that those of us that are wise can avoid, the sting of death and the victory of the grave can be lessened. When we know that our hours are numbered, and when we lie with ebbing breath and there comes
‘Unto dying ears the earliest pipe
Of half awakened birds;
And unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square,’
there is sweet relief in knowing that those we leave behind us are shielded from want.
“Gentlemen, we are all far from home and you know the risks of travel. I am representing one of the best accident insurance companies on earth, and I want to write every one of you. I offer you the finest death, partial disablement, loss of finger or toe, nervous shock, sick benefit policy known to—”
But the man with gold spectacles was talking to five empty chairs, and the moon slipped down below the roof of the market house with a sardonic smile.