Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

Wriggling uneasily Jeff found a pretext for withdrawing himself, the situation having become embarrassing. It wasn't often that the judge gave way to temper. Not that Jeff feared the covert threat of discharge. If anybody quit it wouldn't be Jeff, as Jeff well knew. Usually Jeff had an excuse ready for any accusation of shortcomings on his part; thinking them up was his regular specialty. But this particular moment did not seem a propitious one for offering excuses. Jeff noiselessly evaporated out of sight and hearing.

In silence the master hurried through the meal, eating it with what for him was unusual speed. He was beset with an urge to be out of the big high-ceiled dining room. Looking about it he told himself it wasn't a dining room at all—just a bare barracks, full of emptiness and mighty little else.

After supper he sat on the porch, while the long twilight gloomed into dusk and the dusk into night. He was half-minded to walk downtown in the hope of finding congenial company at Soule's drug store, the favoured loafing place of his dwindling set of cronies. But he changed his mind. Since Mr. Soule, growing infirm, had taken a younger man for a partner, the drug store was changed. Its old-time air of hospitality and comfort had somehow altered.

The judge smoked on, rocking back and forth in his chair. The bull bats, which had been dodging about in the air as long as the daylight lasted, were gone now, and their shy cousin, the whippoorwill, began calling from down in the old Enders orchard at the far end of the street. Two or three times there came to Judge Priest's ears the sound of footsteps clunking along the plank sidewalk on his side of the road, and at that he sat erect, hoping each time the gate hinges would whine a warning of callers dropping in to bear him company. But the unseen pedestrians passed on without turning in. The whippoorwill moved up close to Judge Priest's side fence. A little night wind that had something on its mind began with a mournful whispering sound to swish through the top of the big cedar alongside the porch.

The judge stood it until nearly half-past nine o'clock. Even under the most favourable circumstances a whippoorwill and a remorseful night wind, telling its troubles to an evergreen tree, do not make what one would call exhilarating company. He closed and locked the front door, turned out the single gas light which burned in the hall and went up the stairs. In its main design the house was Colonial—Southern Colonial. But his bedroom was in an ell, above a side porch overlooking the croquet ground, and this ell was adorned with plank curlicues under its gables, and a square, ugly, useless little balcony, like a misplaced wooden moustache, adhered to its most prominent elevation on the side facing the front. The judge frequently said that, as nearly as he could figure it out, the extension belonged to the Rutherford B. Hayes period of American architecture.

Except for him the house was empty. Aunt Dilsey didn't stay on the place at night and Jeff's sleeping quarters were over the stable at the back. As Judge Priest felt his way through the upper hall and made a light in his bedchamber, the house was giving off those little creaking, complaining sounds from its joints that an old tired house always gives off when it is lonely for a fuller measure of human occupancy.

His own room, revealed now in its homely contour and its still homelier furnishings, was neat enough, with Jeff's ideas of neatness, but all about it indubitably betrayed the fact that only male hands cared for it. The tall black-walnut bureau lacked a cover for its top; the mantel was littered with cigar boxes and old law reports; the dead asparagus ferns, banked in the grate, were faded to a musty yellow; and some of the fronds had fallen out across the hearth so that remotely the fireplace suggested the mouth of a big cow choking on an overly large bite of dried hay. In places the matting on the floor was frayed almost through.

Just from the careless skew of the coverlid and the set of the pillows against the white bolster, you would have known at a glance that a man had made up the bed that morning.

Barring one picture the walls were bare. This lone picture hung in a space between the two front windows, right where the occupant of the room, if so minded, might look at it the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. Beyond any doubt a lover of the truly refined in art would have looked at it with a shudder, for it was one of those crayon portraits—a crayon portrait done in the most crayonsome and grewsome style of a self-taught artist working by the day rather than by the piece. Plainly it had been enlarged, as the trade term goes, from a photograph; the enlarger thereof had been lavish with his black leads; that, too, was self-evident. The original photographer had done his worst with the subject; the retoucher had gone him one better.

It was a likeness—you might call it a likeness—of a woman dressed in the abominable style of the late seventies—with heavy bangs down in her eyes, and a tight-fitting basque with enormous sleeves, and long pendent eardrops in her ears. The artist, whoever he was, had striven masterfully to rob the likeness of all expression. There alone his craftsmanship had failed him. For even he had not altogether taken away from the face a certain suggestion of old-fashioned wistfulness and sweetness. In all other regards, though, he had had his reckless way with it. The eyes were black and staring, the lines of the figure stiff and artificial, and the background for the head was a pastel nightmare.