NOTE VI
WELL, there was my father, there was myself. If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me. I would tell if I could get at the heart of it—as the fellow who went off to Vinland with Fredis told—and for just the reasons that made him tell. And like that fellow, after he returned to Greenland, I would have to walk alone in the woods or in city streets thinking, trying to think, trying to get all in accord, seeking always just that illuminating touch the Norse story-teller had found when he thought up the bit about Fredis—that about her getting into bed and touching the back of her sleeping husband with the cold feet. The foxy devil! Do I not know what happened after that? First he thought of the two in the warm bed—the determined woman and the startled weak man—with a little jump of delight and then he went back over his story and put that in about her having got up in the first place without putting on shoes and stockings and the cold wet dew on the grass and the log against the wall of the house on which they sat. Now he had got going just right and he knew he had got going just right. What a splendid feeling! It was like a dance. How neatly everything fitted in! Words came—ah—just the right words.
How many times, in these modern days when I have seen how story-tellers and painters have got themselves so often all balled-up with the question of style I have wondered whether the story-tellers among the old Norse and those most marvelous story-tellers of the older Testaments, whether they also did not have their periods of escaping out into words because they had grown weary of seeking after the heart of their stories.
I dare say they stole when they could without being detected as I have so often done. Well, there was the heart of the tale itself. That had first to be got at and then one had to find the words wherewith to clothe it. One got a bit feverish at times and used feverish words, made his telling too turgid or too wordy. One was like a runner who has a long race to run but who is feverishly forcing the pace. How many times I have sat writing, hoping I had got at the heart of the tale I was trying to put down on the paper when inside myself I knew I had not. I have tried to bluff myself. Often I have gone to others, hoping they would say words that would quiet the voices within. “You have not got it and you know you have not got it. Tear all up. Well, then, be a fool and go on trying to bluff yourself. Perhaps you can get some critic to say you have got what you know well enough you have not got, the very heart, the very music of your tale.”