EPILOGUE

IT seems but yesterday although a year has passed since that afternoon when Edward and I sat talking in a restaurant. I was staying at a small hotel in a side street in the city of New York. It had been an uncertain day with us, such days as come in any relationship. One asks something of a friend and finds him empty-handed or something is asked and a vacant look comes into one’s own eyes. Two men, or a man and woman, were but yesterday very close and now they are far apart.

Edward came to lunch with me and we went to a restaurant in the neighborhood. It was of the cheap hurried highly-sanitary sort, shiny and white. After eating we sat on and on, looking at each other, trying to say to each other something for which we could find no words. In a day or two I would be going away to the South. Each of us felt the need of something from the other, an expression of regard perhaps. We were both engaged in the practice of the same craft—story-tellers both of us. And what fumblers! Each man fumbling often and often in materials not well enough understood—that is to say in the lives and the drama in the lives of the people about whom the tales were told.

We sat looking at each other and as it was now nearly three o’clock in the afternoon we were the only people in the restaurant. Then a third man came in and sat as far away from us as possible. For some timethe women waiters in the place had been looking at Edward and myself somewhat belligerently. It may have been they were employed only for the noon rush and now wanted to go home. A somewhat large woman with her arms crossed stood glaring at us.

As for the third man in the place, the fellow who had just come in, he had been in prison for some crime he had committed and had but recently been let out. I do not mean to suggest that he came to Edward and myself and told his story. Indeed he was afraid of us and when he saw us loitering there went to sit as far away as possible. He watched us furtively with frightened eyes. Then he ordered some food and after eating hurriedly went away leaving the flavor of himself behind. He had been trying to get a job but on all sides had been defeated by his own timidity. Now like ourselves he wanted some place to rest, to sit with a friend, to talk, and by an odd chance I, and Edward as well, knew the fellow’s thoughts while he was in the room. The devil!—he was tired and discouraged and had thought he would go into the restaurant, eat slowly, gather himself together. Perhaps Edward and myself—and the waitress with her arms crossed who wanted to get our tip and cut out to some movie show—perhaps all of us had chilled the heart of the man from prison. “Well, things are so and so. One’s own heart has been chilled. You are going away to the South, eh? Well, good-by; I must be getting along.”

I was walking in the streets of the city that evening of November.There was snow on the roofs of buildings, but it had all been scraped off the roadways. There is a thing happens to American men. It is pitiful. One walks along, going slowly along in the streets, and when one looks sharply at one’s fellows something dreadful comes into the mind. There is a thing happens to the backs of the necks of American men. There is this sense of something drying, getting old without having ripened. The skin does something. One becomes conscious of the back of one’s own neck and is worried. “Might not all our lives ripen like fruit—drop at the end, full-skinned and rich with color, from the tree of life, eh?” When one is in the country one looks at a tree. “Can a tree be a dead dried-up thing while it is still young? Can a tree be a neurotic?” one asks.

I had worked myself into a state of mind, as so often happens with me, and so I went out of the streets, out of the presence of all the American people hurrying along; the warmly dressed, unnecessarily weary, hurrying, hustling, half-frightened city people.

In my room I sat reading a book of the tales of Balzac. Then I had got up to prepare for dinner when there came a knock at the door and in answer to my call a man entered.

He was a fellow of perhaps forty-five, a short strongly-built broad-shouldered man with graying hair. There was in his face something of the rugged simplicity of a European peasant. One felt he might live a long time, do hard work and keep to the end the vigor of that body of his.

For some time I had been expecting the man to come to see me and was curious concerning him. He was an American writer like Edward andmyself and two or three weeks before he had gone to Edward pleading.... Well, he had wanted to see and talk with me. Another fellow with a soul, eh?

And now there the man stood, with his queer old boyish face. He stood in the doorway, smiling anxiously. “Were you going out? Will I be disturbing you?” I had been standing before a glass adjusting a necktie.

“Come on in,” I said, perhaps a little pompously. Before sensitive people I am likely to become a bit bovine. I do not wag my tail like a dog. What I do is to moo like a cow. “Come into the warm stall and eat hay with me,” I seem to myself to be saying at such times. I would really like to be a jolly friendly sort of a cuss ... you will understand.... “It’s always fair weather, when good fellows get together” ... that is the sort of thing I mean.

That is what I want and I can’t achieve it, nor can I achieve a kind of quiet dignity that I often envy in others.

I stood with my hands fingering my tie and looked at the man in the doorway. I had thrown the book I had been reading on a small table by the bed. “The devil!—he is one of our everlastingly distraught Americans. He is too much like myself.” I was tired and wanted to talk of my craft to some man who was sure of himself. Queer disconnected ideas are always popping into one’s mind. Perhaps they are not so disconnected. At that moment—as I stood looking at the man in the doorway—the figure of another man came sharply to my mind. The man was a carpenter who for a time lived next door to my father’s house whenI was a boy in an Ohio town. He was a workman of the old sort, one who would build a house out of timber just as it is cut into boards by a sawmill. He could make the door frames and the window frames, knew how to cut cunningly all the various joints necessary to building a house tightly in a wet cold country.

And on Summer evenings the carpenter used to come sometimes and stand by the door of our house and talk with mother as she was doing an ironing. He had a flair for mother, I fancy, and was always coming when father was not at home but he never came into the house. He stood at the door speaking of his work. He always talked of his work. If he had a flair for mother and she had one for him it was kept hidden away but one fancied that, when we children were not about, mother spoke to him of us. Our own father was not one with whom one spoke of children. Children existed but vaguely for him.

As for the carpenter, what I remembered of him on the evening in the hotel in the city of New York was just a kind of quiet assurance in his figure remembered from boyhood. The old workman had spoken to mother of young workmen in his employ. “They aren’t learning their trade properly,” he said. “Everything is cut in the factories now and the young fellows get no chance. They can stand looking at a tree and they do not know what can be done with it ... while I ... well, I hope it don’t sound like bragging too much ... I know my trade.”

III

You see what a confusion! Something was happening to me that is alwayshappening. Try as much as I may I cannot become a man of culture. At my door stood a man waiting to be admitted and there stood I—thinking of a carpenter in a town of my boyhood. I was making the man at the door feel embarrassed by my silent scrutiny of him and that I did not want. He was in a nervous distraught condition and I was making him every moment more distraught. His fingers played with his hat nervously.

And then he broke the silence by plunging into an apology. “I’ve been very anxious to see you. There are things I have been wanting to ask you about. There is something important to me perhaps you can tell me. Well, you see, I thought—sometime when you are not very busy, when you are unoccupied.... I dare say you are a very busy man. To tell the truth now I did not hope to find you unoccupied when I came in thus, at this hour. You may be going out to dine. You are fixing your tie. It’s a nice tie.... I like it. What I thought was that I could perhaps be so fortunate as to make an appointment with you. Oh, I know well enough you must be a busy man.”

The deuce! I did not like all this fussiness. I wanted to shout at the man standing at my door and say ... “to the devil with you!” You see, I wanted to be more rude than I had already been—leaving him standing there in that way. He was nervous and distraught and already he had made me nervous and distraught.

“Do come in. Sit there on the edge of the bed. It’s the most comfortable place. You see I have but one chair,” I said, making a motion with my hand. As a matter of fact there were other chairs in the room but they were covered with clothing. I had taken off one suit andput on another.

We began at once to talk, or rather he talked, sitting on the edge of the bed and facing me. How nervous he was! His fingers twitched.

“Well now, I really did not expect I would find you unoccupied when I came in here at this hour. I am living, for the time being in this very hotel—on the floor below. What I thought was that I would try to make an appointment with you. ‘We’ll have a talk’—that’s what I thought.”

I stood looking at him and then, like a flash, the figure of the man seen that afternoon in the restaurant came into my mind—the furtive fellow who had been a thief, had been sent to prison and who, after he was freed, did not know what to do with himself.

What I mean is that my mind again did a thing it is always doing. It leaped away from the man sitting before me, confused him with the figures of other men. After I had left Edward I had walked about thinking my own thoughts. Shall I be able to explain what happened at that moment? In one instant I was thinking of the man now sitting before me and who had wanted to pay me this visit, of the ex-thief seen in the restaurant, of myself and my friend Edward, and of the old workman who used to come and stand at the kitchen door to talk with mother when I was a boy.

Thoughts went through my mind like voices talking.

“Something within a man is betrayed. There is but the shell of a man walking about. What a man wants is to be able to justify himself to himself. What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, todo something well—to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it—to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?”

What I am trying to convey to you, the reader, is a sense of the man in the bedroom, and myself looking at each other and thinking each his own thoughts and that these thoughts were a compound of our own and other people’s thoughts too. In the restaurant Edward and myself, while wanting to do so very much, had yet been unable to come close to each other. The man from prison, wanting us also, had been frightened by our presence and now here was this new man, a writer like myself and Edward, trying to thrust himself into the circle of my consciousness.

We continued looking at each other. The man was a popular American short story writer. He wrote each year ten, twelve, fifteen magazine stories which sold for from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars each.

Was he tired of writing his stories? What did he want of me? I began to grow more and more belligerent in my attitude toward him. It is, with me, a common effect of feeling my own limitations. When I feel inadequate I look about at once for someone with whom I may become irritated.

The book I had been reading a half hour before, the book of “The Tales of Balzac,” lay on a table near where the man sat and his fingers now reached out and took hold of it. It was bound in soft brown leather.One who loves me and who knew of my love for the book had taken it from my room in a house in Chicago and had carried it off to an old workman who had put it in this new suit of soft brown leather.

The fingers of the man on the bed were playing with the pages of the book. One got the notion that the fingers wanted to begin tearing pages from the book.

I had been trying to reassure him. “Do stay, I have nothing to do,” I had said and he smiled at my words as a child might smile. “I am such an egotist,” he explained. “You see, I want to talk of myself. I write stories, you see, but they aren’t any good. Really they aren’t any good at all but they do bring me in money. I’m in a tight hole, I tell you. I own an automobile and I live on a certain scale that is fixed—that’s what I mean—that’s what’s the trouble with me. I am no longer young, as you’ll see if you look at my hair. It’s getting gray. I’m married and now I have a daughter in college. She goes to Vassar. Her name is Elsie. Things are fixed with me. I live on a certain scale—that’s what I mean—that’s what’s the trouble with me.”

It was apparent the man had something of importance to himself he wanted to say and that he did not know how to begin.

I tried to help. My friend Edward had told me a little of his story. (For the sake of convenience and really to better conceal his identity we will call him Arthur Hobson—although that is not his name.) Although he was born in America he is of Italian descent and there is in his nature, no doubt, something of the Italian spirit of violence, strangely mingled, as it so often is in the Latins, with gentlenessand subtlety.

However, he was like myself in one thing. He was an American and was trying to understand himself—not as an Italian but as an American.

And so there was this Hobson—born in America of an Italian father—a father who had changed his name after coming to America and had prospered here. He, the father, had come to America to make money and had been successful. Then he had sent his son to an American college, wanting to make a real American of him.

The son had been ambitious to become a well-known football player and to have, during his college days, the joy of seeing his name and picture in the newspapers. As it turned out however, he could not become one of the great players and to the end of his college career remained what is called a substitute—getting into but one or two comparatively unimportant games to win his college letter.

He did not have it in him to be a great football player and so, in a world created in his fancy, he did what he could not do in life. He wrote a story concerning a man who, like himself, was of Italian descent and who also remained through most of his college career a substitute on a football team—but in the story the man did have, just at the end of his days in college, an opportunity of which he took brilliant advantage.

There was this Hobson in his room writing on an afternoon of the late Fall. It was the birth of a Story-teller. He moved restlessly about the room, sat a long time writing and then got up and moved about again.

In the story he wrote that day in his room long ago he did what he could not do in the flesh. The hero of his story was a rather small square-shouldered man like himself and there was an important game on, the most important of the year. All the other players were Anglo-Saxons and they could not win the game. They held their opponents even but could make no progress toward scoring.

And now came the last ten minutes of play and the team began to weaken a little and that heartened the other side. “Hold ’em! ... hold ’em! ... hold ’em!” shouted the crowd. At last, at the very last, the young Italian boy was given his chance. “Let the Wop go in! We are going to lose anyway. Let the Wop go in!”

Who has not read such stories? There are infinite variations of the theme. There he was, the little dark-skinned Italian-American and who ever thought he could do anything special! Such games as football are for the nations of the North. “Well, it will have to be done. One of the halfbacks has injured himself. Go in there, you Wop!”

So in he goes and the story football game, the most important one of the year for his school, is won. It is almost lost but he saves the day. Aha, the other side has the ball and fumbles, just as they are nearing the goal line. Forward springs the little alert dark figure. Now he has the ball and has darted away. He stumbles and almost falls but ... see ... he has made a little twisting movement with his bodyjust as that big fellow, the fullback of the opposing team, is about to pounce upon him. “See him run!” When he stumbles something happens to his leg. His ankle is sprained but still he runs like a streak. Now every step brings pain but he runs on and on. The game is won for the old school. “The little Wop did it! Hurrah! Hurrah!”

The devil and all! These Italian fellows have a cruel streak in them, even in their dreams. The young Italian-American writer, writing his first story, had left his hero with a slight limp that went with him all through life and had justified it by the notion that the limp was in some way a badge of honor, a kind of proof of his thorough-going Americanism.

Anyway, he wrote the story and sent it to one of our American magazines and it was paid for and published. He did, after all, achieve a kind of distinction during his days in college. In an American college a football star is something but an author is something, too. “Look, there goes Hobson. He’s an author! He had a story in theNational Whizand got three hundred and fifty dollars for it. A smart fellow, I tell you! He’ll make his way in the world. All the fraternities are after the fellow.”

And so there was Hobson and his father was proud of him and his college was proud of him and his future was assured. He wrote another football story and another and another. Things began to come his way and by the time he left college he was engaged to be married to one of the most popular girls of his class. She wasn’t very enthusiastic about his people but one did not need to live in the same city with them. An author can live where he pleases. The young couple came from theMiddle-West and went to live in New England, in a town facing the sea. It was a good place for him. In New England there are many colleges and Hobson could go to football games all Fall and get new ideas for stories without traveling too far.

The Italian-American has become what he is, an American artist. He has a daughter in college now and owns an automobile. He is a success. He writes football stories.

He sat in my room in the hotel in New York, fingering the book he had picked up from the table. The deuce! Did he want to tear the leaves? The fellow who came into the restaurant where Edward and I sat was in my mind perhaps—that is to say, the man who had been in prison. I kept thinking of the story writer as a man trying to tear away the bars of a prison. “Before he leaves this room my treasured book will be destroyed,” a corner of my brain was whispering to me.

He wanted to talk about writing. That was his purpose. As with Edward and myself, there was now something between Hobson and myself that wanted saying. We were both story-tellers, fumbling about in materials we too often did not understand.

“You see now,” he urged upon me, leaning forward and now actually tearing a page of my book, “You see now, I write of youth ... youth out in the sun and wind, eh? I am supposed to represent young America, healthy young America. You wouldn’t believe how many times people havespoken to me saying that my stories are always clean and healthy and the editors of magazines are always saying it too. ‘Keep on the track,’ they say. ‘Don’t fly off the handle! We want lots of just such clean healthy stuff.’”

He had grown too nervous to sit still and getting up began to walk back and forth in the narrow space before the bed, still clinging to my book. He tried to give me a picture of his life.

He lived he said, during most of the year, in a Connecticut village by the sea and for a large part of the year did not try to write at all. The writing of football stories was a special thing. One had always to get hold of the subject from a new angle and so, in the Fall, one went to many games and took notes. Little things happened on the field that could be built up and elaborated. Above all, one must get punch into the stories. There must be a little unexpected turn of events. “You understand. You are a writer yourself.”

My visitor’s mind slipped off into a new channel and he told me the story of his life in the New England town during the long months of the Spring, Summer and early Fall when, as I understood the matter, he did no writing.

Well, he played golf, he went to swim in the sea, he ran his automobile. In the New England town he owned a large white frame house where he lived with his wife, with his daughter when she was at home from school, and with two or three servants. He told me of his life there, of his working through the Summer months in a garden, of his going sometimes in the afternoons for long walks about the town and out along the country roads. He grew quieter and putting my book backon the table sat down again on the edge of the bed.

“It’s odd,” he said. “You see, I have lived in that one town now for a good many years. There are people there I would like to know better. I would like really to know them, I mean. Men and women go along the road past my place. There is a man of about my own age whose wife has left him. He lives alone in a little house and cooks his own food. Sometimes he also goes for a walk and comes past my place and we are supposed to be friends. Something of the kind is in the wind. He stops sometimes by my garden and stands looking over and we talk but do not say much to each other. The devil, that’s the way it goes you see—there he is by the fence and there am I with a hoe in my hand. I walk to where he stands and also lean on the fence. We speak of the vegetables growing in my garden. Would you believe it we never speak of anything but the vegetables or the flowers perhaps? It’s a fact. There he stands. Did I tell you his wife has left him? He wants to speak of that—I’m sure of it. To tell the truth when he set out from his own house he was quite determined to come up to my place and tell me all about everything, how he feels, why his wife has left him and all about it. The man who went away with his wife was his best friend. It’s quite a story, you see. Everyone in our town knows about it but they do not know how the man himself feels as he sits up there in his house all alone.”

“That’s what he has made up his mind to talk to me about but he can’t do it, you see. All he does is to stand by my fence and speak ofgrowing vegetables. ‘Your lettuce is doing very well. The weeds do grow like the deuce, don’t they though? That’s a nice bed of flowers you have over there near the house.’”

The writer of the football stories threw up his hands in disgust. It was evident he also felt something I had often felt. One learns to write a little and then comes this temptation to do tricks with words. The people who should catch us at our tricks are of no avail. Bill Hart, the two-gun man of the movies, who goes creeping through forests, riding pell-mell down hillsides, shooting his guns bang-bang, would be arrested and put out of the way if he did that at Billings, Montana, but do you suppose the people of Billings laugh at his pranks? Not at all. Eagerly they go to see him. Cowboys from distant towns ride to where they may see his pictures. For the cowboy also the past has become a flaming thing. Forgotten are the long dull days of following foolish cows across an empty desert place. Aha, the cowboy also wants to believe. Do you not suppose Bill Hart also wants to believe?

The deuce of it all is that, wanting to believe the lie, one shuts out the truth, too. The man by the fence, looking at the New England garden, could not become brother to the writer of football stories.

“They tell themselves so many little lies, my beloved.”

I was sliding across the room now, thinking of the man whose wife had run away with his friend. I was thinking of him and of something elseat the same time. I wanted to save my Balzac if I could. Already the football-story man had torn a page of the book. Were he to get excited again he might tear out more pages. When he had first come into my room I had been discourteous, standing and staring at him, and now I did not want to speak of the book, to warn him. I wanted to pick it up casually when he wasn’t looking. “I’ll walk across the room with it and put it out of his reach,” I thought but just as I was about to put out my hand he put out his hand and took it again.

And now as he fingered the book nervously his mind jumped off in a new direction. He told me that during the Summer before he had got hold of a book of verses by an American poet, Carl Sandburg.

“There’s a fellow,” he cried, waving my Balzac about. “He feels common things as I would like to be able to feel them and sometimes as I work in my garden I think of him. As I walk about in my town or go swimming or fishing in the Summer afternoons I think of him.” He quoted:

“Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet.”

It was pretty evident the man’s mind was jerking about, flying from place to place. Now he had forgotten the man who on Summer days came to lean over his fence and was speaking of other people of his New England town.

On Summer mornings he sometimes went to loiter about on the mainstreet of the town of his adoption, and there were things always going on that caught his fancy, as flies are caught in molasses.

Life bestirred itself in the bright sunlight in the streets. First there was a surface life and then another and more subtle life going on below the surface and the football-story writer felt both very keenly—he was one made to feel all life keenly—but all the time he kept trying to think only of the outside of things. That would be better for him, he thought. A story writer who had written football stories for ten or fifteen years might very well get himself into a bad way by letting his fancy play too much over the life immediately about him. It was just possible—well you see it might turn out that he would come in the end to hate a football game more than anything else in the world—he might come to hate a football game as that furtive fellow I had seen in the restaurant that afternoon no doubt hated a prison. There were his wife and child and his automobile to be thought about. He did not drive the automobile much himself—in fact driving it made him nervous—but his wife and the daughter from Vassar loved driving it.

And so there he was in the town—on the main street of the town. It was, let us say, a bright early Fall morning and the sun was shining and the air filled with the tang of the sea. Why did he find it so difficult to speak with anyone regarding the half-formed thoughts and feelings inside himself? He had always found it difficult to speak of such things, he explained, and that was the reason he had come to see me. I was a fellow writer and no doubt I also was often caught in the same trap. “I thought I would speak to you about it. I thought maybeyou and I could talk it over,” he said.

He went, on such a morning as I have described, into the town’s main street and for a time stood about before the postoffice. Then he went to stand before the door of a cigar store.

A favorite trick of his was to get his shoes shined.

“You see,” he exclaimed, eagerly leaning forward on the bed and fingering my Balzac, “you see there is a small fish stand right near the shoe-shining stand and across the street there is a grocery where they set baskets of fruit out on the sidewalk. There are baskets of apples, baskets of peaches, baskets of pears, a bunch of yellow bananas hanging up. The fellow who runs the grocery is a Greek and the man who shines my shoes is an Italian. Lord, he’s a Wop like myself.

“As for the man who sells fish, he’s a Yank.

“How nice the fish look in the morning sun!”

The story-teller’s hand caressed the back of my book and there was something sensual in the touch of his fingers as he tried to describe something to me, a sense he had got of an inner life growing up between the men of such oddly assorted nationalities selling their merchandise on the streets of a New England town.

Before coming to that he spoke at length of the fish lying amid cracked ice in a little box-like stand the fish merchant had built. One might have fancied my visitor also dreamed of some day becoming a fish merchant. The fish, he explained, were brought in from the sea in the evening by fishermen and the fish merchant came at daybreak to arrange his stock and all morning whenever he sold a fish he re-arranged thestock, bringing more fish from a deep box at the back of his little coop. Sometimes he stood back of his sales counter but when there were no customers about he came out and walked up and down the sidewalk and looked with pride at the fish lying amid the pieces of cracked ice.

The Italian shoe-shiner and the Greek grocer stood on the sidewalk laughing at their neighbor. He was never satisfied with the display made by his wares but was always at work changing it, trying to improve it.

On the shoe-shining stand sat the writer of football stories and when another customer did not come to take his place at once he lingered a moment. There was a soft smile on his lips.

Sometimes when the story writer was there, sitting quietly on the shoe-shining stand, something happened at the fish-stand of which he tried to tell me. The fat old Yankee fish merchant did something—he allowed himself to be humiliated in a way that made the Greek and the Italian furious—although they never said anything about the matter.

“It is like this,” the story writer began, smiling shyly at me. “You see now—well, you see the fish merchant has a daughter. She is his daughter but the American, the Yank, does not have a daughter in the same way as a Greek or an Italian. I am an American myself but I have enough memory of life in my father’s house to know that.”

“In the house of an Italian or a Greek the father is king. He says—‘do this or that,’ and this or that is done. There may be grumbling behind the door. All right, let it pass! There is no grumbling in hispresence. I’m talking now of the lower classes, the peasants. That’s the kind of blood I have in my veins. Oh, I admit there is a kind of brutality in it all but there is kindness and good sense in it, too. Well, the father goes out of his house to his work in the morning and for the woman in the house there is work too. She has her kids to look after. And the father—he works hard all day, he makes the living for all, he buys the food and clothes.

“Does he want to come home and hear talk of the rights of women and children, all that sort of bosh? Does he want to find an American or an English feminist perhaps, enshrined in his house?”

“Ha!” The story writer jumped off the bed and began again walking restlessly back and forth.

“The devil!” he cried. “I am neither the one thing nor the other. And I also am bullied by my wife—not openly but in secret. It is all done in the name of keeping up appearances. Oh, it is all done very quietly and gently. I should have been an artist but I have become, you see, a man of business. It is my business to write football stories, eh! Among my people, the Italians, there have been artists. If they have money—very well and if they have no money—very well. Let us suppose one of them living poorly, eating his crust of bread. Aha! With his hands he does what he pleases. With his hands he works in stone—he works in colors, eh! Within himself he feels certain things and then with his hands he makes what he feels. He goes about laughing, puts his hat on the side of his head. Does he worry about running an automobile? ‘Go to the devil,’ he says. Does he lie awake nights thinking of how to maintain a large house and a daughter in college? The devil! Is there talk ofkeeping up appearances for the sake of the woman? For an artist, you see,—well, what he has to say to his fellows is in his work. If he is an Italian his woman is a woman or out she goes. My Italians know how to be men.”

“Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet.”

VII

The story writer again sat down on the edge of the bed. There was something feverish in his eyes. Again he smiled softly but his fingers continued to play nervously with the pages of my book and now he tore several of the pages. Again he spoke of the three men of his New England town.

The fish-seller, it seemed, was not like the Yank of the comic papers. He was fat and in the comic papers a Yank is long and thin.

“He is short and fat,” my visitor said, “and he smokes a corncob pipe. What hands he has! His hands are like fish. They are covered with fish scales and the backs are white like the bellies of fish.”

“And the Italian shoe-shiner is a fat man too. He has a mustache. When he is shining my shoes sometimes—well, sometimes he looks up from his job and laughs and then he calls the fat Yankee fish-seller—what do you think—a mermaid.”

In the life of the Yankee there was something that exasperated my visitor as it did the Greek grocer and the Italian who shined shoesand as he told the story my treasured book, still held in his hand, suffered more and more. I kept going toward him, intending to take the book from his hand (he was quite unconscious of the damage he was doing) but each time as I reached out I lost courage. The name Balzac was stamped in gold on the back and the name seemed to be grinning at me.

My visitor grinned at me too, in an excited nervous way. The seller of fish, the old fat man with the fish scales on his hands, had a daughter who was ashamed of her father and of his occupation in life. The daughter, an only child lived during most of the year in Boston where she was a student at the Boston Conservatory of Music. She was ambitious to become a pianist and had begun to take on the airs of a lady—had a little mincing step and a little mincing voice and wore mincing clothes too, my visitor said.

And in the Summer, like the writer’s daughter, she came home to live in her father’s house and, like the writer himself, sometimes went to walk about.

To the New England town during the Summer months there came a great many city people—from Boston and New York—and the pianist did not want them to know she was the daughter of the seller of fish. Sometimes she came to her father’s booth to get money from him or to speak with him concerning some affair of the family and it was understood between them that—when there were city visitors about—the father would not recognize his daughter as being in any way connected with himself. When they stood talking together and when one of the city visitors came along the street the daughter became a customer intent upon buyingfish. “Are your fish fresh?” she asked, assuming a casual lady-like air.

The Greek, standing at the door of his store across the street and the Italian shoe-shiner were both furious and took the humiliation of their fellow merchant as in some way a reflection on themselves, an assault upon their own dignity, and the story writer having his shoes shined felt the same way. All three men scowled and avoided looking at each other. The shoe-shiner rubbed furiously at the writer’s shoes and the Greek merchant began swearing at a boy employed in his store.

As for the fish merchant, he played his part to perfection. Picking up one of the fish he held it before his daughter’s eyes. “It’s perfectly fresh and a beauty, Madam,” he said. He avoided looking at his fellow merchants and did not speak to them for a long time after his daughter had gone.

But when she had gone and the life that went on between the three men was resumed the fish merchant courted his neighbors. “Don’t blame me. It’s got to be done,” he seemed to be saying. He came out of his little booth and walked up and down arranging and re-arranging his stock and when he glanced at the others there was a pleading look in his eyes. “Well, you don’t understand. You haven’t been in America long enough to understand. You see, it’s like this—” his eyes seemed to say, “—we Americans can’t live for ourselves. We must live and work for our wives, our sons and our daughters. We can’t all of us get up in the world so we must give them their chance.” It was something of the sort he always seemed to be wanting to say.

It was a story. When one wrote football stories one thought out a plot, as a football coach thought out a new formation that would advance the ball.

But life in the streets of the New England village wasn’t like that. No short stories with clever endings—as in the magazines—happened in the streets of the town at all. Life went on and on and little illuminating human things happened. There was drama in the street and in the lives of the people in the street but it sprang directly out of the stuff of life itself. Could one understand that?

The young Italian tried but something got in his way. The fact that he was a successful writer of magazine short stories got in his way. The large white house near the sea, the automobile and the daughter at Vassar—all these things had got in his way.

One had to keep to the point and after a time it had happened that the man could not write his stories in the town. In the Fall he went to many football games, took notes, thought out plots, and then went off to the city, where he rented a room in a small hotel in a side street.

In the room he sat all day writing football stories. He wrote furiously hour after hour and then went to walk in the city streets. One had to keep giving things a new twist—to get new ideas constantly. The deuce, it was like having to write advertisements. One continually advertised a kind of life that did not exist.

In the city streets, as one walked restlessly about, the actuality of life became as a ghost that haunted the house of one’s fancy. A child was crying in a stairway, a fat old woman with great breasts was leaning out at a window, a man came running along a street, dodgedinto an alleyway, crawled over a high board fence, crept through a passageway between two apartment buildings and then continued running and running in another street.

Such things happened and the man walking and trying to think only of football games stood listening. In the distance he could hear the sounds of the running feet. They sounded quite sharply for a long moment and then were lost in the din of the street cars and motor trucks. Where was the running man going and what had he done? The old Harry! Now the sound of the running feet would go on and on forever in the imaginative life of the writer and at night in the room in the hotel in the city, the room to which he had come to write football stories, he would awaken out of sleep to hear the sound of running feet. There Was terror and drama in the sound. The running man had a white face. There was a look of terror on his face and for a moment a kind of terror would creep over the body of the writer lying in his bed.

That feeling would come and with it would come vague floating dreams, thoughts, impulses—that had nothing to do with the formation of plots for football stories. The fat Yankee fish-seller in the New England town had surrendered his manhood in the presence of other men for the sake of a daughter who wished to pass herself off as a lady and the New England town where he lived was full of people doing strange unaccountable things. The writer was himself always doing strange unaccountable things.

“What’s the matter with me?” he asked sharply, walking up and down before me in the room in the New York hotel and tearing the pages ofmy book. “Well, you see,” he explained, “when I wrote my first football story it was fun. I was a boy wanting to be a football hero and as I could not become one in fact I became one in fancy. It was a boy’s fancy but now I’m a man and want to grow up. Something inside me wants to grow up.”

“They won’t let me,” he cried, holding his hands out before him. He had dropped my book on the floor. “Look,” he said earnestly, “my hands are the hands of a middle-aged man and the skin on the back of my neck is wrinkled like an old man’s. Must my hands go on forever, painting the fancies of children?”

VIII

The writer of football stories had gone out of my room. He is an American artist. No doubt he is at this moment sitting somewhere in a hotel room, writing football stories. As I now sit writing of him my own mind is filled with fragmentary glimpses of life caught and held from our talk. The little fragments caught in the field of my fancy are like flies caught in molasses—they cannot escape. They will not go out of the house of my fancy and I am wondering, as no doubt you, the reader, will be wondering, what became of the daughter of the seller of fish who wanted to be a lady. Did she become a famous pianist or did she in the end run away with a man from New York City who was spending his vacation in the New England town only to find, after she got to the city with him, that he already had a wife? I am wondering about her—about the man whose wife ran away with his friend and about the running man in the city streets. He stays in my fancy the most sharplyof all. What happened to him? He had evidently committed a crime. Did he escape or did he, after he had got out into the adjoining street, run into the arms of a waiting policeman?

Like the writer of football stories, my own fancy is haunted. To-day is just such a day as the one on which he came to see me. It is evening now and he came in the evening. In fancy again I see him, going about on Spring, Summer and early Fall days, on the streets of his New England town. Being an author he is somewhat timid and hesitates about speaking with people he meets. Well, he is lonely. By this time his daughter has no doubt graduated from Vassar. Perhaps she is married to a writer of stories. It may be that she has married a writer of cowboy stories who lives in the New England town and works in a garden.

Perhaps at this very moment the man who has written so many stories of football games is writing another. In fancy I can hear the click of his typewriting machine. He is fighting, it seems, to maintain a certain position in life, a house by the sea, an automobile and he blames that fact on his wife, and on his daughter who wanted to go to Vassar.

He is fighting to maintain his position in life and at the same time there is another fight going on. On that day in the hotel in the city of New York he told me, with tears in his eyes, that he wanted to grow up, to let his fanciful life keep pace with his physical life but that the magazine editors would not let him. He blamed the editors of magazines—he blamed his wife and daughter—as I remember ourconversation, he did not blame himself.

Perhaps he did not dare let his fanciful life mature to keep pace with his physical life. He lives in America, where as yet to mature in one’s fanciful life is thought of as something like a crime.

In any event there he is, haunting my fancy. As the man running in the streets will always stay in his fancy, disturbing him when he wants to be thinking out new plots for football stories, so he will always stay in my fancy—unless, well unless I can unload him into the fanciful lives of you readers.

As the matter stands I see him now as I saw him on that Winter evening long ago. He is standing at the door of my room with the strained look in his eyes and is bewailing the fact that after our talk he will have to go back to his own room and begin writing another football story.

He speaks of that as one might speak of going to prison and then the door of my room closes and he is gone. I hear his footsteps in the hallway.

My own hands are trembling a little. “Perhaps his fate is also my own,” I am telling myself. I hear his human footsteps in the hallway of the hotel and then through my mind go the words of the poet Sandburg he has quoted to me:

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