3
He couldn’t understand; though it was true that as the train carried them nearer and nearer to his own parents, he became more and more uncomfortable.... The situation was different enough; Rose-Ann had felt that their prosperous air secured them against family criticism; Felix felt that same appearance as a reproach to his conscience....
“I’ve felt for years,” he said, “that I was an ungrateful child. I hate to go there to exhibit my prosperity to them. Of course, it isn’t so tremendous a prosperity—but it’s enough to make me feel ashamed. You know how hard it is for me to write to my mother; and I hardly ever can bring myself to write except when I can send her a little money—as if, yes, as if in penance for my desertion of her!”
“Would you like to have her live with us?”
“No—I wouldn’t. I owe her too much, I couldn’t bear to be always reminded of the debt. It’s a debt that’s too huge—I never can pay it, and I try to forget it.”
“The thought that she loves you more than you love her—is that what makes you feel ungrateful?”
“I suppose so. I do love her—”
“Of course you do, Felix!”
“More than I want to, perhaps! I can’t forget her, and I resent that. I want to get away from her.... She petted and spoiled me when I was a child. She wanted to keep me a child always. She kept me in skirts, she kept me wearing long curls—she made a baby of me. My whole life is in a sense trying to get away from that.... You’ll see—she’ll wait on me, ‘hand and foot,’ as they say—try to make me her baby again. She’ll anticipate my wishes, and jump up from the table to get something for me, and follow me about with her eyes—and I’ll get to feeling helpless, and then furious—and then I’ll say something cross to her, and be ashamed of myself.... Oh, well!”
“So you have queer feelings about your parents, too!”
The visit did not justify all these forebodings.... The house was the same as Felix had remembered it, only smaller; the same boxes of moss-roses grew beside the door, and peacocks as of old screamed in the yard; there was a little porch, with a wild-cucumber vine trained up to screen out the light, and on that porch his father and mother sat, the Sunday morning of their arrival, in rocking-chairs, his mother reading a paper through spectacles that sat slightly askew, his father smoking a fat pipe.... They were not so old as he had in several years of absence begun to picture them; his father’s plump little body looked surprisingly sturdy, and there was a youthful humour in his mother’s smile as she sat talking, unaware of her son’s approach....
The first greetings over, Felix’s two aunts appeared from within the house—really old people these, Felix thought, but still wearing their air of aggressive self-dependence. They had looked after their little farm for so many years, without any masculine assistance except from an occasional hired man, that they resented, somewhat Felix thought, his father’s presence there, as a slur on their own capacity for taking care of themselves. They treated him a little scornfully, as if, being a man, he were a rather helpless person, and more of a nuisance than a help. He understood this, and smiled genially and tolerantly at their remarks, he being secure in the knowledge that it took a man to run things and that the real boss of this establishment was himself.... Just before they were seated at Sunday dinner, he led Felix to a cupboard, and smilingly produced a bottle of whiskey. “Have a little something to improve your appetite?” he asked.
Felix poured himself a drink, and his father did the same, carefully raising the tumbler so as to let the light shine through the golden liquid, and smacking his lips after he had poured it down his throat—while Felix’s two aunts stonily ignored this masculine nonsense, and his mother looked on with an air of mild disapproval.
At dinner they talked about the crops; his father was happy in being a farmer again; happy, after years of increasing uselessness in town while his children were growing up, in being master of a situation, the real head of a household; happy, and boyishly active, despite his spells of rheumatism, of which he also discoursed seriously and uncomplainingly. He had had a bad spell this last winter—in fact they had all been bothered with it—but they had found a liniment which seemed to do some good. “Pretty powerful stuff!” he said. “I sometimes wondered which was the worst, that liniment or the rheumatism—but it appeared to do the work!”
With the dessert they came to the fortunes of Felix—briefly alluded to before, but saved to the last for thorough consideration. They wanted to know all about Felix’s job, or rather all about how important a personage he had become. Felix’s shame in his good fortune gradually disappeared as he realized how immensely proud they all were of him—how they hugged his success to their hearts and enjoyed it. It was as though his good fortune were their own!