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 time
the 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.”