SO there was father, sitting comfortably in the warm farmhouse living room—he and Aldrich having been well fed at the table of a prosperous farmer—and having before him what he most loved, an attentive and absorbed audience. By this time the farmer’s wife would be deeply moved by the fate of that son of the South that father had represented himself as being; and as for Tilly—while, in the fanciful picture he is making, he stands in the cold and wet outside the door of that southern mansion, Heaven knows what is going on in poor Tilly’s heart. It is however bleeding with sympathy, one may be sure of that.
So there is father and, in the meantime, what of his own actual flesh-and-blood family, the family he had left behind in an Ohio village when he set forth on his career as an actor?
It is not suffering too much. One need not waste too much sympathy on his family. Although he was never what we called in our Ohio country, “a good provider,” he had his points and as one of his sons I at least would be loath to trade him for a more provident shrewd and thoughtful father.
It must however have been a fairly hard winter, for mother at least and in connection with that winter and others that followed I have often since had an amusing thought. In later years, when my own name had a little got up in the world as a teller of tales I was often accused of having got my impulse, as a story-teller, from the Russians. The statement is a plausible one. It is, in a way, based upon reason.
When I had grown to be a man, and when my stories began to be published in the pages of the more reckless magazines, such as The Little Review, the old Masses and later in The Seven Arts and The Dial, and when I was so often accused of being under the Russian influence, I began to read the Russians, to find out if the statement, so often made concerning me and my work, could be true.
This I found, that in Russian novels the characters are always eating cabbage soup and I have no doubt Russian writers eat it too.
This was a revelation to me. Many of the Russian tales are concerned with the lives of peasants and a Boston critic once said I had brought the American peasant into literature; and it is likely that Russian writers, like all the other writers who have ever lived and have not pandered to the popular demand for sentimental romances were fortunate if they could live as well as a peasant. “What the critics say is no doubt true,” I told myself; for, like so many of the Russian writers, I was raised largely on cabbage soup.
Let me explain.
The little Ohio farming community, where I lived as a lad had in it, at that time, no factories, and the merchants artisans lawyers and other townspeople were all either owners of land which they rented out to tenant farmers, or they sold goods or their services to farmers. The soil on the farms about the town was a light sandy loam that would raise small fruits, corn, wheat, oats or potatoes, but that did particularly well when planted to cabbages.
As a result the raising of cabbages became a sort of specialty with us in our country; and there are now, I believe, in my native place, some three or four prosperous factories, devoted to the making of what before the war was called “sauerkraut.” Later, to help win the war, it was called: “Liberty Cabbage.”