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 else
at 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 main
street 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 maybe
you 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 the
stock, 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 his
presence. 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 of
keeping 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._”