The woman opened the door curiously, stared over Father’s head at Mother, then back at the little man with his pink, cheery face and whiff of delicate silver hair.
“I—uh—I— Could I cut some wood or something for you?” said Father. “Mrs.—uh—Mrs. Smith and I are tramping across the United States—San Francisco and New Orleans and so on—and—”
“Why, you poor things, you must be terribly cold and tired! Think of it! San Francisco! You tell Mrs. Smith to come right in and warm herself by the fire, and I guess I can find some dinner for both of you.”
Father scuttled out, informed Mother that she had become Mrs. Smith, and before her slightly dazed mind could grasp it all she was in at a kitchen table near the stove, and eating doughnuts, salt pork, beans, apple pie, and vast cups of coffee. Not but that Father himself was also laying in the food with a lustiness that justified his lumberjack’s blue-flannel shirt. From time to time he dutifully mentioned his project of cutting wood, but the woman was more interested in him as a symbol.
In a dim, quite unanalytic way Father perceived that, to this woman, this drab prisoner of kitchen and woodshed, it was wonderful to meet a man and woman who had actually started for—anywhere.
She sighed and with a look of remembering old dreams she declared: “I wish my old man and I could do that. Gawd! I wouldn’t care how cold we got. Just get away for a month! Then I’d be willing to come back here and go on cooking up messes. He goes into town almost every day in winter—he’s there now—but I stay here and just work.”
Father understood that it would have desecrated her vision of the heroic had he played the mouth-organ for pay; perceived that she didn’t even want him to chop wood. Mother and he were, to this woman, a proof that freedom and love and distant skies did actually exist, and that people, just folks, not rich, could go and find them.
When she had warmed Mother’s feet and given them her wistful good wishes, the woman let them go, and the Smiths recently Applebys, went comfortably and plumply two more miles on their way to Japan.
Father’s conscience was troubling him, not because he had taken food from the woman—she had bestowed it with the friendly and unpatronizing graciousness of poor women—but because he had been too cowardly to play the mouth-organ. When Mother had begun to walk wearily and Father had convinced himself that he wouldn’t be afraid to play, next chance he had, they approached a crude road-house, merely a roadside saloon, with carriage-sheds, a beer sign, and one lone rusty iron outdoor table to give an air of al fresco.
“I’m going over there and play,” said Father.