One day, as I walked out of my house absorbed in one of the characters that I was writing about, someone stopped me. I looked up. A pale, thin, hungry-eyed young man asked timidly: “May I speak to you for a minute?” Then he told me that he had written a book, and that the publishers had turned it down, so he had printed it himself. “And I want your opinion,” he pleaded, “because none of the critics would listen to me.”
“I’m too busy,” I said irritably. “If you had to print the book yourself it means it’s no good.”
“I thought you, who once had such a hard struggle, would remember—would understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand except that you killed yourself with the public.” And I walked off.
I tried to resume the trend of my thoughts, but I could not think. The pale face, the hungry eyes, followed me accusingly in the street. “You who once struggled would understand” rang in my ears. And suddenly I realized how brutal I had been.
“But it’s the merciless truth,” I defended. Nobody could help him till he finds himself. Nobody helped me till I had found myself.
“No, I’m all wrong,” another voice cried. “Robert Reeves helped me. I could never have helped myself all alone. You can only help yourself half the way. The other half is some Hand of God in the shape of a human contact.”
Something hurt so deep in me I couldn’t work that day. I couldn’t sleep that night. The pale face and the hungry eyes kept staring at me through the darkness. I, who judged the Alfred Notts and the John Blairs—I saw myself condemned as one of them. I had let myself get so absorbed with the thoughts in my head that I ceased to have a heart for the people about me.
What would I not have given to see that young man and tell him how I suffered for my inhuman busy-business, which had shut my eyes to the hungry hands reaching up to me. But I never saw him again. And yet that man whom I had turned away like a beggar had brought me the life of a new awakening. He had made me aware that I could never contribute my deepest to America if I lost the friendly understanding of humanity that Robert Reeves had given me, if I lost the one precious thing that makes life real—the love for people, even if they are lost, wandering, crazy people.