I had ended my novel on that note and a good many of my friends had told me they did not know what I was talking about. Was it because, to most Americans, the desire for something, for even little colored stones to hold in the hand now and then to glisten and shine outside the muddle of life, was it because to most Americans that desire had not become as yet conscious?
Perhaps it had not but that was not my story. At least in me it had become conscious, if not as yet well directed or very intelligent. It had made me a restless man all my life, had set me wandering from place to place, had driven me from the towns to the cities and from one city to another.
In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I did it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly. I had found out that trying to do my job was fun and that doing it well and finely was a task for the most part beyond me.
Often enough I sat thinking of my wasted years, making excuses for myself, but in my happier moments and when I was not at work on my job I was happiest when I was in the mood into which I had fallen on the day when I sat before the cathedral—that is to say, when I sat rolling over and over the little colored stones I had managed to gather up. The man with the two women had just dropped another into my hands. How full my hands were! How many flashes of beauty had come to me out of American life.
It was up to me to carve the stones, to make them more beautiful if I could but often enough my hands trembled. I wasn’t young any more, but I had sought teachers and had found a few. One of them was with me at that moment sitting on the bench before the cathedral and pretending to read a book about it. He grew tired of the pretense and taking out a package of cigarettes offered me one, but then found he hadn’t any match. To such confirmed smokers as my friend and myself the French notion of making a government monopoly of matches is a pest. It is like so much that is European nowadays. It is like the penuriousness of an old age of which at least there is none in America. “The devil!” said my friend. “Let’s go for a walk.”
We did walk, down through the lovely old town, the town made lovely not by the men who live there now but by men of another age, long since fast asleep. If we were neither of us so young in years any more, there was a way in which we were both young enough. We were young with that America of which we both at that moment felt ourselves very much a part, and of which, for many other reasons aside from the French monopoly in matches, we were glad in our hearts to be a part.
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
IT seems but yesterday although a year has passed since that afternoon when Edward and I sat talking in a restaurant. I was staying at a small hotel in a side street in the city of New York. It had been an uncertain day with us, such days as come in any relationship. One asks something of a friend and finds him empty-handed or something is asked and a vacant look comes into one’s own eyes. Two men, or a man and woman, were but yesterday very close and now they are far apart.
Edward came to lunch with me and we went to a restaurant in the neighborhood. It was of the cheap hurried highly-sanitary sort, shiny and white. After eating we sat on and on, looking at each other, trying to say to each other something for which we could find no words. In a day or two I would be going away to the South. Each of us felt the need of something from the other, an expression of regard perhaps. We were both engaged in the practice of the same craft—story-tellers both of us. And what fumblers! Each man fumbling often and often in materials not well enough understood—that is to say in the lives and the drama in the lives of the people about whom the tales were told.