IV
The Allegory Breaks Down. My Friend
Humankindness with the Green Galluses
I hoped for a farm-hand’s house. Only in that sort will they give free lodging so near town. And, friends, I found it, there on the edge of the second cornfield. The welcome was unhesitating.
I looked at my host aghast. To satisfy my sense of the formal, he should have had the dignity to make him Father Adam, and lord of Paradise. How could one round out a day that began loftily with Death, and continued gloriously with some one mighty like the Devil, with this inglorious type now before me? He wrecked my allegory. There is no climax in Stupidity.
Just as the colorless, one-room house had stove, chimney, cupboard, adequate roof, floor, and walls, so the owner had the simplified, anatomical, and phrenological make-up of a man. He had a luke-warm hand-clasp. He smoked a Pittsburg stogy. He had thick vague features and a shock of drab hair. The nearest to a symbol about him was his new green galluses. I suppose they indicated I was out in the fields again.
If his name was not Stupidity, it was Awkwardness. He kept a sick geranium in an old tomato can in the window. He had not cut off the bent-back cover of the can. Just after he gave me a seat he scratched his hand, as he was watering the flower, and swore softly.
Yet one must not abuse his host. I hasten to acknowledge his generous hospitality. If it be not indelicate to mention it, he boiled much water, and properly diluted it with cold, that the traveller might bathe. The bath was accomplished out of doors beneath the shades of evening.
Later he was making preparations for supper, with dull eyes that looked nowhere. He made sure I fitted my chair. He put an old comfort over it. It was well. The chair was not naturally comfortable; it was partly a box.
After much fumbling about, he brought some baked potatoes from the oven. The plate was so hot he dropped it, but so thick it would not break.
He picked up the potatoes, as good as ever, and broke some open for me, spreading them with tolerable butter, and handing them across the table. Then I started to eat.
“Wait a minute,” he said. He bowed his head, closed his dull eyes, and uttered these words: “The Lord make us truly thankful for what we are about to receive. Amen.”