“Some people just insist on being shy,” said the sister. “They are so temperamental.”
She showed me to my room, and then went off to help get us something to eat.
Alone, I examined my surroundings, unpacked my things, opened a double handful of mail, and then came down and sat with the mother and sister at supper. It being late, bacon and eggs were our portion, and some cake—a typical late provision for anyone in America.
I wish I might accurately portray, in all its simplicity, and placidity, the atmosphere I found here. This house was so still—and the town. Mrs. Booth, Franklin’s mother, seemed so essentially the middle West, even Indiana mother, with convictions and yet a genial tolerance of much. Making the best of a difficult world was written all over the place. There was a little boy here, adopted from somewhere because his parents were dead, who seemed inordinately fond of Franklin, as indeed Franklin seemed of him. I had had stories of this boy all the way out, and how through him Franklin was gaining (or regaining, perhaps, I had better say) a knowledge of the ethics and governing rules of boy-land. It was amusing to see them together now, the boy with sharp, bird-like eyes devouring every detail of his older friend’s appearance and character—Franklin amused, fatherly, meditative, trying to make the most and best of all the opportunities of life. We sat in the “front room,” or “parlor,” and listened to the Victrola rendering pieces by Bert Williams and James Whitcomb Riley and Tchaikowsky and Weber and Fields and Beethoven—the usual medley of the sublime and the ridiculous found in so many musical collections. Franklin had told me that of late—only in the last two or three years—his father had begun to imagine that there might or must be in music something which would explain the world’s, to him, curious interest in it! Hitherto, on his farm, where there had been none, he had scoffed at it!
The next morning I arose early, as I thought—eight o’clock—and going out on the front porch encountered an old, grizzled man, who looked very much like the last portraits of the late General Sherman, and who seemed very much what he was, or had been—a soldier, and then latterly a farmer. Now he was all gnarled and bent. His face was grizzled with a short, stubby grey beard. The eyes were rather small and brown and looked canny. He got up with difficulty, a cane assisting him, and offered me a withered hand. I felt sympathy for all age.
“Well, ya got here, did ya?” he inquired shortly. There was a choppy brevity about his voice which I liked. He seemed very self sufficient, genial and shrewd, for all his years. “We expected ya last night. I couldn’t wait up, though. I did stay up till eight. That’s pretty late for me—usually go to bed at seven. Have a nice trip?”
We sat down and I told him. His eyes went over me like a swift feeling hand.
“Well, you’re just the man I want to talk to,” he said, with a kind of crude eagerness. “You from New York State?”
“Yes.”
“Franklin tells me that Governor Whitman has got in bad, refusing to pardon that fellow Becker. He says he thinks it will hurt him politically. What do you think?”