We sat looking at each other and as it was now nearly three o’clock in the afternoon we were the only people in the restaurant. Then a third man came in and sat as far away from us as possible. For some time the women waiters in the place had been looking at Edward and myself somewhat belligerently. It may have been they were employed only for the noon rush and now wanted to go home. A somewhat large woman with her arms crossed stood glaring at us.
As for the third man in the place, the fellow who had just come in, he had been in prison for some crime he had committed and had but recently been let out. I do not mean to suggest that he came to Edward and myself and told his story. Indeed he was afraid of us and when he saw us loitering there went to sit as far away as possible. He watched us furtively with frightened eyes. Then he ordered some food and after eating hurriedly went away leaving the flavor of himself behind. He had been trying to get a job but on all sides had been defeated by his own timidity. Now like ourselves he wanted some place to rest, to sit with a friend, to talk, and by an odd chance I, and Edward as well, knew the fellow’s thoughts while he was in the room. The devil!—he was tired and discouraged and had thought he would go into the restaurant, eat slowly, gather himself together. Perhaps Edward and myself—and the waitress with her arms crossed who wanted to get our tip and cut out to some movie show—perhaps all of us had chilled the heart of the man from prison. “Well, things are so and so. One’s own heart has been chilled. You are going away to the South, eh? Well, good-by; I must be getting along.”
II
I was walking in the streets of the city that evening of November. There was snow on the roofs of buildings, but it had all been scraped off the roadways. There is a thing happens to American men. It is pitiful. One walks along, going slowly along in the streets, and when one looks sharply at one’s fellows something dreadful comes into the mind. There is a thing happens to the backs of the necks of American men. There is this sense of something drying, getting old without having ripened. The skin does something. One becomes conscious of the back of one’s own neck and is worried. “Might not all our lives ripen like fruit—drop at the end, full-skinned and rich with color, from the tree of life, eh?” When one is in the country one looks at a tree. “Can a tree be a dead dried-up thing while it is still young? Can a tree be a neurotic?” one asks.
I had worked myself into a state of mind, as so often happens with me, and so I went out of the streets, out of the presence of all the American people hurrying along; the warmly dressed, unnecessarily weary, hurrying, hustling, half-frightened city people.
In my room I sat reading a book of the tales of Balzac. Then I had got up to prepare for dinner when there came a knock at the door and in answer to my call a man entered.
He was a fellow of perhaps forty-five, a short strongly-built broad-shouldered man with graying hair. There was in his face something of the rugged simplicity of a European peasant. One felt he might live a long time, do hard work and keep to the end the vigor of that body of his.
For some time I had been expecting the man to come to see me and was curious concerning him. He was an American writer like Edward and myself and two or three weeks before he had gone to Edward pleading.... Well, he had wanted to see and talk with me. Another fellow with a soul, eh?
And now there the man stood, with his queer old boyish face. He stood in the doorway, smiling anxiously. “Were you going out? Will I be disturbing you?” I had been standing before a glass adjusting a necktie.
“Come on in,” I said, perhaps a little pompously. Before sensitive people I am likely to become a bit bovine. I do not wag my tail like a dog. What I do is to moo like a cow. “Come into the warm stall and eat hay with me,” I seem to myself to be saying at such times. I would really like to be a jolly friendly sort of a cuss ... you will understand.... “It’s always fair weather, when good fellows get together” ... that is the sort of thing I mean.