You see what a confusion! Something was happening to me that is always
happening. 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 and
put 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, to
do 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?”