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 and
myself 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 when
I 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.”