The farmer’s wife, the hired man and perhaps a grown daughter would be there and there would be a maiden of uncertain age—the farm woman’s sister, who had never married and so just stayed about and worked for her board—and, in a corner, two or three towheaded boys who would presently have to go off to bed.
All the others silent, but father talking and talking. An actor in the house! It was wonderful, like having Charlie Chaplin to dinner with you nowadays!
Father was in his element now. This was pie for him. No hungry sons about, no sick wife, no grocery bills or rent to be paid. This the golden age—timeless; there was no past, no future—the quiet, unsophisticated people in the room were putty to his hands.
Surely there was something magnificent in my father’s utter disregard for the facts of life. In the picture I have of him—that is to say in my fancy—in the picture I have of him during his pilgrimages of that winter I always see his partner in the affair, Aldrich, fast asleep in a chair.
But the farmer and his wife, and the wife’s sister—they are not asleep. The unmarried woman in the house is, let us say, thirty-eight. She is tall and gaunt and has several teeth missing and her name is Tilly. It would be bound to be Tilly.
And when father has been in the house two hours he is calling her “Tilly,” and the farmer he is addressing familiarly as “Ed.”
After the evening meal the farmer has had to go to his stable to look at his stock, to bed the stock down for the night, and father has gone with him. Father runs about the stable holding the lantern. He boasts about the horses and cattle in his father’s stables when he was a boy. Whether that early home of his ever existed anywhere but in his fancy is doubtful.
What a fellow, wanting to be loved, was my father!
And now he is in the farmhouse sitting room and it is late evening and the towheaded children have gone regretfully to bed. There is something in the air of the room, a kind of suspense, a feeling that something is about to happen. Father has so carefully worked that up. He would do it by silences, by sudden breakings out into suppressed laughter, and then by quickly looking sad. I have seen him do the thing, oh, many times. “My dear people—you wait! There is something inside me that is wonderful, and if you will only be patient you will presently see or hear it come forth,” he seemed to be saying.
He is by the fire with his legs spread out and his hands are in his trousers pockets. He stares at the floor. He is smoking a cigar. In some ways he always managed to keep himself supplied with the little comforts of life.