W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

W. C. Fields But the quarrel was forgotten ; the mood was genial. Fields' brothers and sisters, like their parents, were eager for details of his career, and he expounded it by the hour, dwelling on his entrances into all the big American cities, to ticker tape and mass cheering, and the strong comradeship that had sprung up between him and European royalty. The implication was strong in his reports that he had the run of Buckingham Palace, and he was heard to remark that some of the bedrooms were "drafty." He spoke affectionately of the King, whom he referred to as "Ed," or "Eddie," and recalled with pleasure their nocturnal ramblings about the London cabarets. Needless to say, his family was spellbound; Dukinfield in particular seemed almost unhinged with astonishment. He went into a mild shock from which he never really recovered. Fields found that Philadelphia revisited was a sunnier place. He retraced the rocky trail of his fugitive youth. The old bunk, where he had lain in muddy anguish, was tumbled in, its walls eroded, its bottom weedy. On the far end of its lot a house was going up. Fields passed the time of day with a workman, remarking that he had "once looked into the lot as a possible residential site." The workman replied, with unconscious appropriateness, that the neighborhood was growing up pretty fast and that it was always smart to get in on the ground floor. Fields agreed, and strolled on toward the smithy. In his later accounts to a friend, he seemed nostalgic about his homecoming. Just as the bloodiest battlefields finally become places of ineffable charm, so did the ugliness fade from the scenes of his youth. Trudging over the trail, warm and friendly in the summertime of his visit, he wondered how it could have seemed so hostile in the years before. The forge was closed; Wheeler had apparently made good on his threat to move to Georgia ; nobody appeared to know for sure. The barn was refurbished, occupied now by a newcomer, a beefy, I JO