Tag: 1944 Page 1 of 4

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, March 21, 1936.

“To-day,” said Jimmie Frise, “is the first day of Spring.”

“I remember one time,” I retorted, “that it snowed on May 17th.”

“In the Spring,” quoted Jimmie, emotionally, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

“But older men,” I said in prose, “think of gardening. Or fishing. Or golf.”

“To us who live in cities and towns,” said Jim, “Spring has really a very small meaning. It means, as you say, golf or planting a few seeds in a pathetic grubby little backyard. Spring wakes a feeble emotion in us city people. We are like people with no ear or sense of music sitting politely through a concert by a great symphony orchestra.”

“I don’t think city people are quite so soulless as you make out,” I objected.

“They are not soulless,” agreed Jim. “They are just underprivileged.”

“We city people,” I declared stoutly, “have finer and subtler sensibilities. We may not have the opportunities to observe the Spring, but we appreciate it more.”

“I wonder,” said Jim.

“Think of us anglers,” I cried. “How we are suffering, right now, counting the weeks to May the first.”

“May,” scoffed Jim. “By May the Spring is over.”

“Over!” I exclaimed.

“Have you no conception,” begged Jim, “of what Spring means to millions of your fellow Canadians? May, if you please! Why, by May the summer has come. All the lambs have been born. Most of the calves have arrived and the colts are on the pastures. The plows are long ago worn bright and dull. The seeds are springing. By what you call Spring, my poor fellow, summer lies o’er all the pleasant land.”

“Tut, tut, Jimmie,” I protested.

“To-day is the first day of Spring,” declared Jim. “And to-day, even though a blizzard should rage, a million farmers are at their doors sniffing the tide of life. The ditches are loud with a singing sound of water. The bright sun grasps the earth in its mighty hands and caresses and hugs it. The earth, the sweet earth, lifts its breast upward, and a fragrance you and I are unable to sense, much less know, rises from it in an incense ancient and eternal.”

“A kind of sour, mouldy smell?” I agreed.

“Haw, haw,” scorned Jimmie. “Sour and mouldy to your poor, fume-ruined city nose. But what makes the birds sing along the fence posts, this very day, is that sweet incense of resurrection. The south walls of the barns are bright with the sun, and the warmth flows inward and all the cattle are bawling to be out. The horses kick their stalls and cry. The mother sheep are hoarse with bleating.”

“I see it,” I confessed.

“In the barn the farmer,” said Jimmie. rapidly, “is laboring with his implements. mending harness, tightening up the bolts of share and counter. In the bright kitchen the wife is scouring pails and scalding out the separator.”

A Kind of Dizziness

“But there’s weather ahead,” I interjected.

“Yet in the shelter of the fences,” said Jim, “the grass is green, and the buds on the dogwood scrub are swollen, dark and sticky. In the woodlot, far at the back, there is a sense of unseen excitement, the branches wave sadly no more, like they do in winter wind, but like young ladies taking setting up exercises, gaily, eagerly, the branches wave…”

“Crows, like black rags, blowing on the wind,” I contributed.

“The lady in the kitchen,” said Jim, “busy with the pails, sees something touch her eye, like a little burning thing, out of the corner of her eyes she sees it. She stops, the pail held motionless, and looks out the window. stealthily, her eyes creeping, into the orchard. And there, a bluebird!”

“Aw, Jim,” I complained.

“So the lady walks over, slightly weak in the legs, and sits down in the rocking-chair with the old cushion on it,” sang Jimmie, “and starts gently to rock, and the smile on her face, the smile of remembering all her Springs and all the babies she has rocked in this same chair, and all the bluebirds and the sound of calves bawling and sheep calling and water in the eaves and men kicking mud from their boots at her door – the smile on her face flows right out that window, a prayer, a gift, a part of the Spring.”

I said nothing.

“Do you ever see that?” demanded Jim, sharply.

“I’m sorry,” I confessed.

“Then,” said Jim, “don’t ever try to pretend you know anything about the Spring just because you fish or play golf or stick seeds from ten-cent packets into your sour city dust plots.”

“I feel something though,” I said weakly. “I feel a kind of dizziness. Or a limpness. Couldn’t that be the Spring?”

“No doubt,” granted Jim, “a certain decayed remnant of the feeling of Spring still lingers in city and town men’s minds. But it is only a shabby tatter. A sort of thing like you see in a poodle dog when it turns round three or four times before lying down in its bed. Spreading a bed in imaginary grass, a faint memory out of the forgotten ages.”

“I like to read poetry in the Spring,” I declared.

“A sort of sulphur and molasses¹,” decreed Jim. “A Spring tonic.”

“I get a kind of religious feeling,” I insisted, “when I hear the first robin, at sundown, on a rooftop.”

“You would be practically dead if you didn’t feel that,” pronounced Jimmie. At certain times of the year Jimmie gets a terrible homesickness for the country where he was born and raised. Right now is one of those times. Another is when the great winds of autumn blow, with immense sounds, and the trees wheel and lash in the gales that do not rest at night, but cough and thunder in our chimneys. At such a time, Jimmie is restless and fey, and he buys things at stores and carries them home, hams and bags of potatoes, whole sacks of biscuits for his dogs, as if he were storing up against some strange and hopeless winter. But in the Spring he can’t work; he stands hours at his high windows, far in the tipmost top of The Star building, staring with face thrust forward at the dim fringes of the great gray city spread like an old carpet beneath. There he stood, trying to see the fields, the dark meadows, the green veils of winter wheat, beyond the vasty doormat…

“We could go for a walk?” I suggested.

The wind of Spring was blowing.

“We could go home,” muttered Jim, “and spend the afternoon putting away our winter coats in large pillow slips and stuff our goloshes and scarves and wool-lined gloves into boxes, for there is no use trying to work with that wind blowing.”

Which seemed to me a curious thought, since we were tight and sound behind strong windows, where no wind can even moan.

Blowing in a Window

But down we went and walked to the car park, and men clutched their worn winter hats and girls leaned back against the gale, one arm stretched down to control their festive skirts. Dust and old papers. and all manner of unmentionable and unthinkable things blew in the breeze off the pavement, and we puckered our eyes and breathed carefully through our noses.

Out along the Lake Shore we drove, seeing the lake, all yellow with the silt of dying rivers, heaving and bucking in a kind of joy and slight anger.

Up through High Park we turned, merely to see the trees dancing, to see the brown hillsides facing the sun, to look, with a quiet triumph, at the cowering islands of fouled snow in the shadows.

Re-entering the residential streets again, we were in time to behold a comedy. A young man, just as we were about to pass him, had his fedora blown off. I sailed up against the wall of a large apartment house. It bumped along the wall, falling slightly, and came to an open window. It fell unsteadily on to the window sill and, to our joy and excitement, hovered there a moment and then, like a homing creature, right inside the window.

“Ho, ho,” laughed Jim and I, slowing the car and looking back at the young man. He was standing speechless and amazed, staring up at the window.

“Wait,” I cried; “let’s see what happens.”

But nothing happened. The young man stood awkwardly staring up at the window, but nobody came. He looked abashed all around him, as if for witness to the incredible incident and perhaps for suggestions. Then he started slowly to walk on.

“The silly fellow,” I said. “Back up, Jim. He isn’t even going to inquire.”

We backed, and encountered the young chap, all flushed looking, after he was well past the apartment house entrance.

“That was a funny one,” I hailed him. “Never saw that before.”

“It sure was funny,” agreed the young man shyly. He was one of those slow-speaking shy youths, with a strained expression in their eyes when you talk to them.

“Well,” I said, “aren’t you going to go in and ask for your hat?”

“No,” he said.

“A hat costs five bucks,” I pointed out. “And if I saw right it was a new hat.”

“Yes, just got it three weeks ago,” admitted the young man, anxiously beginning to move on.

“But hold on,” I laughed. “Don’t be shy. Look here, all you have to do is go in and ask for the janitor and point out to him which window.”

“I always leave my hat go,” said the young man, “when it blows in any window.”

He meant it. He was one of those drawling young men almost paralyzed with bashfulness. His face was apoplectic. His eyes were suddenly bloodshot with shyness. He tried to withdraw from the magnetic fastening of my gaze.

“My dear boy,” I said, opening the car door and stepping out, “don’t be absurd. If you lose your hat you go and get it. Come. I’ll go in with you. We’ll call the janitor.”

“This,” said Jim, getting out of the car, “too, ought to be good.”

So we entered the apartment house entrance and on the list of tenants I found the bell of the janitor and rang it summarily. We waited, smiling. The young man was now a fixed purple in color and he was perspiring in large loose beads. Speech had entirely deserted him. He had the expression in his eyes you see in the eyes of a young bull which has a ring in its nose for the first time and is being led about by it.

“I wouldn’t bother,” he said in a weak voice.

“You Home Wreckers!”

The janitor did not answer. I rang again. I stepped down a flight of marble steps and looked along a corridor. I called. I whistled.

“Oh, janitor,” I yodelled.

“Leave it go,” said the young man.

“Not at all,” I assured him heartily. And stepping out the entrance for a moment I fixed in my mind the location of the open window through which the hat had blown, and then walked up one flight, beckoning Jim and the young gentleman to follow me.

“I spotted the apartment,” said I. “It’s either the third or the fourth apartment along I should say.”

“Leave it go,” repeated the young man.

Apartments are so hushed. At least from the corridors they are hushed. A faint radio. A muffled step.

But from the third apartment, as we came abreast there rang loud and challenging voices. A man’s voice. And a lady’s voice.

“H’m,” said I, “a little Spring song going on in here.”

“Leave it go,” pleaded the young man, but Jimmie was holding his arm in a friendly and encouraging embrace.

I rapped smartly. And smartly a man appeared.

An angry-faced, glare-eyed man whose teeth were bared in the very midst of a snarl.

“Pardon me,” I said, “but is there a hat…”

“Hat,” shouted the angry man, leaning out the door and seeing the shy young man with Jimmie. “So you came back for your hat, huh?”

“This young man’s hat,” I began, pleasantly.

The gentleman in the doorway squared himself off and began making small circles with his clenched fists in front of his chest.

“You come back for your hat,” he yelled, “but you bring your gang with you.”

“My dear sir,” I said soothingly, “can a gentleman help it if the Spring breezes-“

“Ah,” screamed the gentleman, crouching, and spitting on his hands.

A woman’s voice from within said reproachfully:

“Joe-werge! I was resting. I didn’t even see the hat.”

“Hah.” said the gentleman. “I come home unexpectedly. I find your hat square in the middle of the chesterfield. So what?”

“Sir,” I said calmly, “his hat blew in. This is the first day of Spring. The equinoctial gales. The wind.”

“What a story, what a story,” the poor gentleman sobbed, for now, in addition to crouching down and circling his fists menacingly in the doorway, he had suddenly been stricken with the injustice of it all. “I know my own strength, or I’d beat the whey out of all three of you. You sneaks. You home wreckers.”

“Leave it go,” said the shy young man, backing away from Jimmie.

“May we have the hat?” I demanded firmly, but preparing to retreat.

With a final heartbreak, the gentleman wheeled, dashed furiously into the room, thudded furiously back and, making a drop kick, he booted the hat savagely into the corridor and slammed the door. I picked the hat up, bulged it back to shape, put a nice tidy dent in it and following the youth, handed it him.

“What a mess,” strangled this young man, as I went down the stairs beside him.

“At least, I got your hat,” I pointed out, a little huffed at his ingratitude.

“Imagine a stranger’s hat blowing into a happy home,” moaned the young fellow.

“It is the Spring.” I said. “March gales.”

The young man jammed his hat on and fled down the street.

“In the Spring,” quoted Jimmie, as we got into the car, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

“And,” I added, “suspicion.”

---

Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on April 1, 1944 as “Spring Song“.

1. Old wives’ tales indicated that sulphur & molasses, drank by children in early spring, provided a needed thickening of the blood, thinned down by winter. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, September 18, 1937.

“Old home week,” cried Jimmie Frise, shaking open a large pink poster that had come in his mail.

“Where?” I asked.

“My old home town,” said Jim, tenderly, holding the poster up so we could look at the huge type. “Reunion. Monster street parade. Trotting races. Fall fair. Eighty- seven classes of agricultural and livestock exhibits.”

“Including quilting, pastry and preserves,” I muttered.

“Streets lavishly decorated,” read Jimmie. “Illuminations at night, including firework displays.”

“Dust,” I said, “dry burnt grass and a strong smell of hogs.”

“Revisit your old home town,” quoted Jim, loudly, “and meet your childhood friends again.”

“New friends are best,” I stated. “They are more suited to your present tastes.”

“Ah,” said Jimmie, “you weren’t born in a little town. You will never know what you missed.”

“I missed the long walk into the city,” I informed him. “I got to know my way around the city real young.”

“Mmmmmmm,” said Jim, tenderly. “Every once in a while, I get so darn homesick for the little town. It gives me a lump in my throat. The warmth of it. The simplicity and naturalness of it. Sometimes, when I look at a mob of people in the city, I think they are crazy. Living like bugs. All jittery with meaningless motion, hurrying, excited, full of purpose going nowhere.”

“It’s because,” I explained, “being a small town boy, you are at heart a stranger among us. We love it.”

“The little towns,” said Jim, lyrically, “are so human. Life is slow and easy. There is a meaning to every hour. Every day has its different shape and form. You can sit back, in a small town, and taste each passing hour of your life. In the city, all hours, all days, are the same. In the small town, they are every one different, with plenty of time to include humor and kindliness and reflection and retrospect. In cities, the time rushes by so fast you have no time to pause and reflect on what has just happened. Something else is happening each new hour.”

“That’s life,” I informed him. “Life is action.”

“In the little town,” said Jim, “you roll time around your tongue and taste it. In the city you gulp time whole.”

“Then why didn’t you stay in your small town?” I demanded.

“Because it got a little tiresome,” said Jim. “But I think I’ll go back for a visit during this old home week.”

“I’ll expect you the following morning,” I scoffed.

“It will be great to see the boyhood chums again,” said Jim. “Some of them are still there. Fatty Pollick. He runs the shoe store. Fatty and I have been in many a scrape together. And Red Rowan.

“The last I heard of Red, he was the village cut-up. I’d just like to have one night with Red. The night of the monster street parade will suit me fine. Dear old Red. He and I were the leaders of a chicken supper club. We used to steal chickens from the neighbors each week and take them to a hide-out down by Turtle Creek and roast them at a bon fire. There were twelve members of the club, and we never were caught.”

“I often wondered about you,” I said. “You have a sort of chicken stealing look.”

“I wonder whatever became of Gum Smith?” mused Jim. “Gum Smith was the best cook of a chicken there ever was. Isn’t it funny the way the friends of your boyhood seem to vanish right off the earth? I knew Gum Smith so well, he was like my brother. We were closer than brothers. All through the formative years of my life, Gum and I were inseparable. And do you know, I don’t believe I have even thought of Gum, not even thought of him, for the past twenty years.”

Jim leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling.

“My, my,” he said, almost embarrassed. “Isn’t that a funny feeling? Gum Smith and Red Rowan and Fatty Pollick. And Joe McConvey and Pete Boyle., Why, where are they? Where have they gone?”

He sat up, startled, as if he had only lost them this minute.

“They must have slipped out the keyhole,” I said sarcastically,

“Don’t you ever recollect your boyhood friends?” demanded Jim, injured. “Have you no emotional remembrances…”

“In cities,” I explained coldly, “there are so many kids, you have a new chum every week. We’re not plagued with any soft and sentimental recollections. Of course I see them. They’re getting old and potty. Their noses are much larger. They’ve got a sort of bloated look. That’s all.”

“Ah,” sighed Jim, “I wish you’d come and see a real small town reunion. You’d see some- thing that would open your eyes. It would give you some understanding of life as it used to be and ought to be. Not this dreadful hive, this swarming mass, this cold, mechanized…”

“I’ll go with you,” I laughed. “Just for the fun of it.”

Which I did. Jimmie went and ordered a new suit, a snappy worsted with pleated back, that made him look young and sporty. He got a special haircut, asking the barber to leave it a little long around the temples, so that he could give it a distinguished swirl with the hair brush. He got brogues and a college stripe tie. He had his car polished and a few spots touched up with paint. He borrowed my good walrus suitcase.

And with as much excitement as if it had been a fishing trip we were going on, we set forth for Jim’s old home town on the afternoon of the gala day which was to end in a monster street parade, with illuminations and fireworks.

I must confess that, as we came within a few miles of our destination, things did begin to look up. There were wayside signs, bright and very well executed, cheering us on our way to the great reunion. There were long bunting streamers and signs suspended across the highway, gay and exciting. And in the traffic coming and going, there was a festive air.

“The best looking girls in Canada,” said Jim, “come from my old town.”

“Come from, is right,” I agreed.

An open roadster loaded with young ladies in fancy dress with pink tissue paper hats on their pretty heads, raced along side of us and heaved into our car a raft of leaflets, on bright colored paper, detailing the program of the old home week. With every mile of our approach, the road became more alive with cars, trucks, wagons, farmers driving buggies, leading vast prize horses with ribbons, steering brightly painted agricultural implements drawn by brand new tractors.

“This isn’t so bad,” I admitted. “Not so bad at all. It’s a sort of pageant. It’s kind of old-fashioned and lovely like shepherd’s hay or a country dance.”

But Jim just swallowed and grinned sheepishly, for there were tears in his eyes and over the next hill, lay home.

The town was aglitter. Its streets festooned with colored electric light bulbs. Hundreds of cars angle-parked filled all the possible parking space and outer rows of cars straight-parked left only a narrow lane done which with loudly roaring horns, trucks, cars and buses struggled in a hopeless heap. And the sidewalks, with bunting and flags flaring above, were jammed with a grinning, wide-eyed multitude, filling the world with a great hum.

“Who would ever have thought,” was all Jimmie said, as we surveyed the scene and Jim took a side street to avoid the central confusion. We found a parking spot.

“We’ll,” said Jim huskily, “we’ll first take a walk in the crowd.”

EVERYBODY FRIENDLY

And back to Main street we strolled, and A entered the milling, smiling, greeting throng. Idling and shouldering and butting our way, past knots and crowds we wandered down the densely packed street, and everybody smiled and nodded at us and we nodded and smiled at everybody. But they did it as much to me as to Jim.

“Everybody very friendly,” I said. “But I don’t see you doing any black slapping.”

“I’ll see them,” said Jim. “I’ll see them in a minute. Never fear.”

And I could see him eyeing hungrily each group and knot as we walked. He would turn and look back at them all narrowly.

“The stores,” he said. “All changed. A lot of new stores. And they altered the fronts on a lot of them. That, for instance, used to be a bakery.”

“It’s an electric refrigerator store now,” I said.

“First,” said Jim, “we’ll call at Fatty Pollick’s shoe store down here. There’s sure to be a gang gathered there.”

And thrusting and shoving through the smiling multitude, we came to the shoe store and went in. All was cool inside, and two young ladies were in attendance.

“Mr. Pollick in?” asked Jim.

“Mr. Pollick?” said the girl, eyebrows lifted. “Mr. Pollick isn’t here any more. He sold out about five years ago.”

“He’s in town, though?” said Jim.

“Noooooo,” said the girl, tucking in her hair, “he went to Montreal, I think, or Vancouver.”

“Could you tell me,” said Jim to the friendly young lady, “where I would likely find Mr. Rowan?”

“Mr. Rowan?” said the girl.

“We used to call him Red Rowan,” smiled Jim. “You’d recollect him by his red hair.”

“I can’t say,” said the girl, embarrassed.

“A tall, red-haired man, Rowan,” persisted Jim. “Why, he was the town cut-up. Surely you have heard of Red Rowan?”

“I’ve only lived here five years,” said the young lady, turning to the other one. “Ella, do you know of a Mr. Rowan in this town?”

“Rowan? Rowan?” said the other young lady. “I seem to have heard the name. Oh, no, it’s the Anderson’s I’m thinking of. No, I can’t say I ever heard of a Rowan here.”

Jim turned and I followed him out.

“Well,” he said, cheerfully, “we’ll just have to join the merry throng until we meet some of them.”

And nodding and smiling we entered the mob again, slowly pushing and meandering up the street, while Jimmie peered and craned and turned to look back at every face as we passed.

“Psst,” he laughed happily. “Look. Gum Smith. As I live.”

Jim was eyeing a tall, well built man dressed very smartly, with a gray fedora, the centre of a lively group that were laughing and shouting together.

Jim and I edged in.

“Hello, Gum!” shouted Jim, slapping him tremendously on the shoulder.

The gentleman turned and looked joyfully at Jim. But his eyes blanked.

“Remember me?” cried Jim, pumping his hand. “Jim Frise?”

“Frise?” said Mr. Smith. “How do you spell it?”

“Frise, Frise,” cried Jim, heartily. “You’re Gum Smith, aren’t you?”

“That’s what they used to call me around here,” admitted the gentleman.

“Well, I’m Jimmie,” laughed Jim. “Jimmie, remember? The chicken supper club? You and me and Red Rowan and all the gang?”

“Red who?” said Mr. Smith, eyeing Jim eagerly but uncertainly.

“Red Rowan?” cried Jim, “and Fatty Pollick? Don’t you remember?”

“I’ve been away so long,” said Mr. Smith. “In the States. You other boys may remember…?”

But the gang Mr. Smith was talking to looked at Jim with pleasant but uncertain gaze. Jim looked from face to face anxiously, but saw nothing in them he could recall, nor any recognizing glance.

“Well, so long,” said Jim, weaving back into the throng. I followed.

“Jim,” I said, “maybe you’ve got the wrong town.”

He turned into the comparative quiet of a side street and slowed his steps. His head was bowed.

“Maybe you only think you lived here,” I said. “Maybe you are a foundling, brought up in an orphan’s home, and you only heard these names of boyhood. Come clean, Jim. Own up.”

“I did live here,” declared Jim, halting and staring strangely around at the night. “I did live here.”

“You can’t prove it,” I laughed.

“I can prove it,” he cried. “I can name every family that lived in every one of these houses… if… if I can just remember their names.”

“Heh, heh,” I said.

“I can prove it,” Jim shouted. “I did live here. I was born here. I spent the longest, happiest, merriest days of my life right here. Down this street. Every tree and fence and bump in the road, the way it used to be…”

“Ah,” I cheered, “the way it used to be.”

“What a strange feeling,” breathed Jim, staring about at the darkness. “The way it used to be. The way I used to be.”

Night had fallen. Behind us, under its glaring colored lights, the main street glowed and hummed and rang with the tumult of reunion. In a few minutes the monster parade and illuminations would begin.

“The old school,” shouted Jim suddenly. “The old school!”

And he started to run down the dark street. We came to a school. But it was no old school. It was a new school. Yellow brick, with a stone carved door, and a beautiful grill iron fence around it.

We stood in the night, staring.

Along the street came a man in a peak cap.

“Pardon me,” said Jim, “but is this where the little red, school used to be?”

“Yes, sir,” said the stranger heartily. “She’s still around at the back. A sort of annex.”

“Can I see it?” cried Jim. “Do you know how I could get inside? I want to see my old desk. I’ve got initials carved on my old desk.”

“You couldn’t enquire of a better person,” said the stranger. “I’m the caretaker.”

“Great,” shouted Jim, and we hurried around the flower-bordered walk to the rear, where, when he saw the little old building in the gloom, Jim let out a joyous and broken cry. It was only an instant until the caretaker had unlocked the door.

“Second desk from the back, far corner,” hissed Jim, feeling his way down the dim little school room. The janitor started lighting matches for us to see.

“Here it is,” cried Jim, huskily, seizing the little desk in his hands, gripping. In the light of the match, Jim bent over.

“J.F.,” whispered Jim, pointing.

There, sure enough, dim and worn by the years, were the initials, J.F.

“My initials,” cried Jim.

The caretaker spoke up sharply.

“Them aren’t your initials!” he stated.

“What?” cried Jim. “Those are my initials. I cut them myself.”

“Them aren’t your initials,” said the caretaker grimly. “Them’s little Jimmie Frise’s initials.”

Jim slowly straightened, in the light of the dying match. His face was joyous.

“Who are you?” he whispered, peering into the heavy face of the caretaker.

“My name’s Boyle,” he said. “Pete Boyle,” They stared at each other until the match went out.

“Jimmie,” said the caretaker, in the dark. And while I lighted matches, those two staged the craziest, silliest dance up and down the little aisles of that old schoolroom, shouting and stamping and kicking and leaping, and slapping one another and pushing and laughing as if their foolish heads were cracked.

So we went back out to Main street and watched the monster street parade go by and Pete took Jimmie by the arm and found for him all the lads.

---

Editor’s Note: This story was repeated on September 30, 1944 as “Home Town!”

By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, June 22, 1935.

“That chap,” said Jimmie Frise, indicating a young fellow desperately juggling with a jack and a flat tire and a spare, “has been fifteen minutes already, and he looks as if he were going clean crazy.”

“Why,” I asked, as we sat on Jim’s porch, “doesn’t he telephone for a garage man to come and do it? He’s all dressed up.”

“He’s going to a party or something by the look of him,” said Jim. “He has a white carnation in his buttonhole.”

“Maybe,” I said, excited, “he’s on his way to a wedding.”

“Maybe he is,” admitted Jimmie.

“Look at him,” I hissed. “He’s talking to himself. I believe he’s crying.”

“Holy Moses,” said Jimmie, deeply touched. “Suppose we go across and offer him a hand.”

So we both got up and hurried across the street.

The young man, all perspiration, in a brand-new dark suit, with a white carnation and a white tie, was moaning.

“Oh, oh, oh,” he kept moaning. “Oh, oh,” oh.”

“Let’s give you a hand,” said Jimmie kindly.

The young chap looked at us with glazed eyes.

“I’m late already,” he said, his mouth, trembling. “By now I’m 6 minutes late.”

“Give us the wrench,” said Jim, taking the tire wrench from the hand of the bewildered youth, who fell back limply against the polished fender of the car.

So while Jim undid the nuts I chatted with the boy.

“Going to a wedding?” I smiled.

“Yes,” he whispered, wiping his face with the back of his hand.

“We’ll have the tire off in a jiffy,” I reassured him. “Where’s the wedding?”

“The church is on St. Clair Ave.,” moaned the young man.

“Ten minutes will do it,” I comforted him. “You won’t miss much.”

“They’ll be waiting,” he gasped. “Waiting.”

“Are you taking part in it?” I inquired.

“Yes,” he said; “I’m getting married.”

“Jim,” I shouted, “make it snappy. This young man is getting married 10 minutes ago.”

The boy looked at his new wrist watch.

“Eight minutes ago,” he corrected. “Oh, oh, oh.”

I ran around to help Jimmie with the nuts, which were sort of varnished on.

“Snappy, Jim,” I begged. Then I went around to keep the boy company.

“Dear, dear,” I said, “why didn’t you telephone a garage man to come and fix this?”

“I thought I could do it quicker,” moaned the boy. “But I seemed to be all thumbs. I – I -I -“

“I understand,” I soothed him. “I’m a married man myself.”

“Besides,” said the boy, “I haven’t a cent of money.”

“No money,” I cried. “And on your way to be married. My dear chap.”

“Oh,” he said, “it’s one of these stylish marriages. Everything organized. My best man has the ring and my wallet, so that I won’t forget anything. He was to pick me up, but we decided at noon that I would drive my car instead and meet him at the church-“

“I see your plight,” I said, looking anxiously back where Jimmie was wrenching for all he was worth. “What a muddle you must have been in, and us sitting there on the porch looking at you.”

“Ah, you never know,” said the young man, with a tragic face, “what trouble people are in, do you?”

“You’ll be all right,” I laughed, slapping his back and starting to dust off his nice dark suit. “Straighten your tie a bit.”

His hands were dirty and they left a smudge on his tie and shirt. I said nothing.

“I can just see them,” the boy groaned. “Waiting. My mother-in-law. Oh, oh, oh.”

“Now, now, don’t get the mother-in-law trouble before you come to it,” I consoled him.

“She arranged everything,” the boy said brokenly. “All this was arranged by her. I don’t mind Margery so much. She’ll be all right. She’ll just wait. But her mother!”

“Let her stew,” I encouraged the boy. “Let the old lady stew.”

“We just wanted to be married at home,” the boy said, trying not to look at his wrist watch, “but her mother made all the arrangements. You’d have thought this was her wedding.”

“They are always like that,” I told the boy. I heard a loud snap, and then Jimmie came round from the back.

“Nut bust,” he gasped. “See? Broke right off.”

“Oh, ho, ho, ho,” wept the young man, banging his fist against the fender.

“Here,” shouted Jim, “we’ll drive you. And listen, tell me what church it is and I’ll telephone from my house to a garage near here, and they’ll fix this up and have it at the church by the time the ceremony is over.”

“Oh, ho, ho,” bellowed the young man, giving us the name of the church on St. Clair.

So Jim rushed into the house and phoned, and then backed his car out, and we shoved the boy into the back with me.

“Thirteen minutes,” the young man said, looking closely at his watch.

“We’ll be there in less than ten minutes,” Jimmie called over his shoulder.

“I was to be in the vestry,” the young fellow said hollowly, “at fifteen minutes to three.”

He pulled a slip of paper from his breast pocket and studied it.

“Yes,” he said. “Be in the vestry at 2.45 p.m. These are the orders. My mother-in-law wrote them for me. She had everything so perfect.”

“Aw, to heck with her,” I cried. “You’re not marrying her.”

“She started arranging this,” the boy said, “last November. She was training the best man in January. At Easter we held a rehearsal in the living-room.”

“Don’t worry, boy,” I said. “Inside of an hour you can tell her to go chase herself.”

“Oh, ho, ho,” went the young man.

“I always say,” said Jim cheerfully from, the front seat, “I always say, pick your wife by your mother-in-law. In seeking a wife a man ought to look at the mothers.”

“Watch these corners,” I said to Jimmie loudly.

“By looking at a girl’s mother,” went on Jim brightly, “a fellow can tell what his girl will be like in due time.”

“Oh, ho, ho,” moaned the young man, burying his face in his hands.

Reaching forward, I poked Jim violently.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “It’s true, isn’t it? A man is a fool that just looks at a girl. As if she was a thing all by herself.”

“Watch your driving, Jim.” I commanded. “Don’t bother talking. I’ll talk.”

“Well, I was only saying,” said Jim, “that men are fools. They get so infatuated with a girl-“

“What speed are we making?” I interrupted.

“Forty,” said Jim. “A man gets so infatuated with a girl he can’t see anything else. I tell you, a girl is only part of a scheme of things, an arrangement, a system.”

“Oh, ho, ho,” put in the young man, leaning back limply, with his eyes shut.

“Jim.” I gritted, “how about a little quiet driving?”

“What I mean to say,” insisted Jim, “is, life is life. A girl is only a biological item. She’s the daughter of her mother. See? Life goes on. That’s what I always say. Life goes on. Birth, marriage, death. And if a young man will just take the precaution to size up the mother-“

I got up and leaned forward I hissed into Jim’s ear.

“Shut up,” I hissed.

So as we did the first few blocks eastward along St. Clair, at forty, we had a little silence, and I took a narrow look at the young man, leaning limply back in his nice suit, with his smudged tie and shirt front. And I saw his mouth was set in a grim line.

“Well,” I cried gaily, “we’ll soon be there.” He opened his eyes slightly and looked at the passing streetscape.

“I see the church,” I announced. “I can see the steeple from here.”

The young man sat up.

“Oh, oh, oh,” he said, clenching his kneecaps with his hands. “If only-“

“See,” I cried. “In the distance you can see the cars lined up in front.”

“Drive right past,” gasped the young man. “Drive right past. Let me think.”

“Aw, don’t be scared of a little excitement,” I laughed. “They’ll be so glad to see you. And it will be all over in a few minutes. Come, come.”

“Drive right past,” repeated the young man in a sort of breathless voice. “I’ll crouch down.”

He started to get down on his knees on the floor of the car.

“Jimmie,” I ordered, “pull in there by the open space at the awning.”

Waiting at the Church

Cars were lined for a block and a crowd of people were standing on the steps and along the awning in front of the church.

“Please, please,” wept the young man, crouching down on the floor.

“Pull around to the side door,” I hissed to Jim, and we swung down the side street. “Drive down a bit and turn around, till we pull ourselves together.”

Jim drove down the street and turned in at sidedrive, while I frantically tried to soothe the young chap and get him to sit up.

“He’s just scared of the old dame,” said Jim. “Get out and run and get his friends, and I’ll watch over him.”

So Jim parked down from the side door of the church a bit and I ran for help. The side door was open and I took off my hat and sneaked in. Everything was hushed, though I could sense a crowd out in the church through a door with red cloth on it.

I tiptoed around, looking in little rooms with folding chairs leaning up against the walls and all deserted. Then I heard steps out in the hall and I dashed out. A minister and two men were anxiously walking toward me.

“The bridegroom,” I said breathlessly.

But they all just jumped at me, as if I were a church burglar, and before I could say Jimmie Frise or anything else they hugged me against their gowns, smelling of moth balls, and dragged me back through the hall and through the red cloth doors, and there they shoved me forward, with about a hundred people sitting in the sunny front pews.

“The bridegroom,” I hissed, trying to back away, “is -“

But the organ started to play and the three men behind me started shoving me.

In a haze I saw everybody stand up and a large woman in a blue and silver dress and a big hat ran at me with arms outstretched and palms toward me.

“No, no,” she shrieked. “No, no.”

Behind her I saw a beautiful girl in a white suit, and people running in all directions around her, helping to hold her up. I fought past the minister and the two other men, and with the large lady in blue and silver following I led them out into the hall, through the vestry door, and pointed down street.

“In that car,” I said weakly.

I could see Jimmie struggling with the young man. We ran down and opened the car door and out came the young man, flushed and tousled, but as soon as he saw the big lady he quieted right down.

“I had a flat tire,” he said sweetly.

But the lady just took his elbow and they walked quickly to the side door of the church, and in a minute we heard the organ start playing loudly again.

“How about going in and seeing it?” asked Jimmie.

“No,” I said, “I saw enough. Let’s go back and sit on your veranda.”

“Was that big lady the mother-in-law?” asked Jim.

“I assume it,” I replied.

“I always say,” said Jimmie, as we started off, “I always say -“

But you know what he always says already.

---

Editor’s Note: This story was repeated on May 20, 1944, as “Trouble Plus”