THE ALLEGORY BREAKS DOWN. MY FRIEND HUMANKINDNESS WITH THE GREEN
GALLUSES
I hoped for a farm-hand’s house. Only in that sort will they give free
lodging so near town. And, friends, I found it, there on the edge of
the second cornfield. The welcome was unhesitating.
I looked at my host aghast. To satisfy my sense of the formal, he
should have had the dignity to make him Father Adam, and lord of
Paradise. How could one round out a day that began loftily with Death,
and continued gloriously with some one mighty like the Devil, with this
inglorious type now before me? He wrecked my allegory. There is no
climax in Stupidity.
Just as the colorless, one-room house had stove, chimney, cupboard,
adequate roof, floor, and walls, so the owner had the simplified,
anatomical, and phrenological make-up of a man. He had a luke-warm
hand-clasp. He smoked a Pittsburg stogy. He had thick vague features
and a shock of drab hair. The nearest to a symbol about him was his new
green galluses. I suppose they indicated I was out in the fields again.
If his name was not Stupidity, it was Awkwardness. He kept a sick
geranium in an old tomato can in the window. He had not cut off the
bent-back cover of the can. Just after he gave me a seat he scratched
his hand, as he was watering the flower, and swore softly.
Yet one must not abuse his host. I hasten to acknowledge his generous
hospitality. If it be not indelicate to mention it, he boiled much
water, and properly diluted it with cold, that the traveller might
bathe. The bath was accomplished out of doors beneath the shades of
evening.
Later he was making preparations for supper, with dull eyes that looked
nowhere. He made sure I fitted my chair. He put an old comfort over it.
It was well. The chair was not naturally comfortable; it was partly a
box.
After much fumbling about, he brought some baked potatoes from the
oven. The plate was so hot he dropped it, but so thick it would not
break.
He picked up the potatoes, as good as ever, and broke some open for
me, spreading them with tolerable butter, and handing them across the
table. Then I started to eat.
“Wait a minute,” he said. He bowed his head, closed his dull eyes, and
uttered these words: “The Lord make us truly thankful for what we are
about to receive. Amen.”
I have been reproved by some of the judicious for putting so much food
in these narratives. Nevertheless the first warm potato tasted like
peacocks’ tongues, the next like venison, and the next like ambrosia,
and the next like a good warm potato with butter on it. One might as
well leave Juliet out of Verona as food like this out of a road-story.
As we ate we hinted to each other of our many ups and downs. He mumbled
along, telling his tale. He did not care whether he heard mine or not.
He had been born nearby. In early manhood he had been taken with the
oil fever. It happened in this wise:--He had cut his foot splitting
kindling. Meditating ambition as he slowly recovered, he resolved
to go to town. He sold his small farm and wasted his substance in
speculation. At the same time his young wife and only child died
of typhoid fever. He was a laborer awhile in the two cities to the
northeast. Then he came back here to plough corn.
He had been saving for two years, had made money enough to go back
“pretty soon” and enter what he considered a sure-thing scheme, that I
gathered had a close relation to the oil business. He said that he had
learned from experience to sift the good from the bad in that realm of
commerce.
He put brakes on the slow freight train of his narrative. “I was about
to explain, when you ast to come in, that I don’t afford dessert to my
meals often.”
“If you will excuse me,” I said, emptying my pockets, “these figs,
these dates, these oranges, these animal crackers were given me by
Death, and the Devil. Eat hearty.”
“Death and the Devil. What kind are they?”
“They’re not a bad sort. Death gave me honey for dinner, and the Devil
did no worse than drive me a little out of my way.”
He smiled vaguely. He thought it was a joke, and was too interested in
the food itself to ask any more questions.
The balmy smokeless wind from the south was whistling, whistling past
the window, and through the field. How much one can understand by
mere whispers! The wind cried, “Life, life, life!” Some of the young
corn was brushing the walls of the cottage, and armies on armies of
young corn were bivouacing further down the road, lifting their sacred
tassels toward the stars.
There was no change in the expression of the countenance of my host,
eating, talking, or sitting still in the presence of the night. I may
have had too poor an estimate of his powers, but I preached no sermon
that evening.
But, like many a primitive man I have met, he preached me a sermon. He
had no bed. He gave the traveller a place to sleep in one corner and
himself slept in the opposite corner. The floor was smooth and clean
and white, and the many scraps of rag-carpet and the clean comfort over
me were a part of the sermon. Another part was in his question before
he slept: “Does the air from that open window bother you?”