“As I write these lines I recall a conversation I had with Irvin Cobb on the hurricane deck of a Fifth Avenue ’bus one bleak November afternoon, 1911. We had met at the funeral of Joseph Pulitzer, in whose employ we had served in the past.
“Cobb was in a reflective mood, chilled to the marrow, and not particularly communicative.
“At the junction of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street we were held up by congested traffic. After a little manœuvring on the part of a mounted policeman, the Fifth Avenue tide flowed through and onward again.
“‘It reminds me of a river,’ said Cobb, ‘into which all humanity is drawn. Some of these people think because they are walking up-stream they are getting out of it. But they never escape. The current is at work on them. Some day they will get tired and go down again, and finally pass out to sea. It is the same with real rivers. They do not flow uphill.’
“He lapsed into silence.
“‘What’s on your mind?’ I inquired.
“‘Nothing in particular,’ he said, scanning the banks of the great municipal stream, ‘except that I intend to write a novel some day about a boy born at the headwaters. Gradually he floats down through the tributaries, across the valleys, swings into the main stream, and docks finally at one of the cities on its banks. This particular youth was a great success—in the beginning. Every door was open to him. He had position, brains, and popularity to boot. He married brilliantly. And then The Past, a trivial, unimportant Detail, lifted its head and barked at him. He was too sensitive to bark back. Thereupon it bit him and he collapsed.’
“Again Cobb ceased talking. For some reason—indefinable—I respected his silence. Two blocks further down he took up the thread of his story again:
“‘—and one evening, just about sundown, a river hand, sitting on a stringpiece of a dock, saw a derby hat bobbing in the muddy Mississippi, floating unsteadily but surely into the Gulf of Mexico.’
“As is his habit, Cobb tugged at his lower lip.