That is what I want and I can’t achieve it, nor can I achieve a kind of quiet dignity that I often envy in others.

I stood with my hands fingering my tie and looked at the man in the doorway. I had thrown the book I had been reading on a small table by the bed. “The devil!—he is one of our everlastingly distraught Americans. He is too much like myself.” I was tired and wanted to talk of my craft to some man who was sure of himself. Queer disconnected ideas are always popping into one’s mind. Perhaps they are not so disconnected. At that moment—as I stood looking at the man in the doorway—the figure of another man came sharply to my mind. The man was a carpenter who for a time lived next door to my father’s house when I was a boy in an Ohio town. He was a workman of the old sort, one who would build a house out of timber just as it is cut into boards by a sawmill. He could make the door frames and the window frames, knew how to cut cunningly all the various joints necessary to building a house tightly in a wet cold country.

And on Summer evenings the carpenter used to come sometimes and stand by the door of our house and talk with mother as she was doing an ironing. He had a flair for mother, I fancy, and was always coming when father was not at home but he never came into the house. He stood at the door speaking of his work. He always talked of his work. If he had a flair for mother and she had one for him it was kept hidden away but one fancied that, when we children were not about, mother spoke to him of us. Our own father was not one with whom one spoke of children. Children existed but vaguely for him.

As for the carpenter, what I remembered of him on the evening in the hotel in the city of New York was just a kind of quiet assurance in his figure remembered from boyhood. The old workman had spoken to mother of young workmen in his employ. “They aren’t learning their trade properly,” he said. “Everything is cut in the factories now and the young fellows get no chance. They can stand looking at a tree and they do not know what can be done with it ... while I ... well, I hope it don’t sound like bragging too much ... I know my trade.”

III

You see what a confusion! Something was happening to me that is always happening. Try as much as I may I cannot become a man of culture. At my door stood a man waiting to be admitted and there stood I—thinking of a carpenter in a town of my boyhood. I was making the man at the door feel embarrassed by my silent scrutiny of him and that I did not want. He was in a nervous distraught condition and I was making him every moment more distraught. His fingers played with his hat nervously.

And then he broke the silence by plunging into an apology. “I’ve been very anxious to see you. There are things I have been wanting to ask you about. There is something important to me perhaps you can tell me. Well, you see, I thought—sometime when you are not very busy, when you are unoccupied.... I dare say you are a very busy man. To tell the truth now I did not hope to find you unoccupied when I came in thus, at this hour. You may be going out to dine. You are fixing your tie. It’s a nice tie.... I like it. What I thought was that I could perhaps be so fortunate as to make an appointment with you. Oh, I know well enough you must be a busy man.”

The deuce! I did not like all this fussiness. I wanted to shout at the man standing at my door and say ... “to the devil with you!” You see, I wanted to be more rude than I had already been—leaving him standing there in that way. He was nervous and distraught and already he had made me nervous and distraught.

“Do come in. Sit there on the edge of the bed. It’s the most comfortable place. You see I have but one chair,” I said, making a motion with my hand. As a matter of fact there were other chairs in the room but they were covered with clothing. I had taken off one suit and put on another.

We began at once to talk, or rather he talked, sitting on the edge of the bed and facing me. How nervous he was! His fingers twitched.