The fingers of the man on the bed were playing with the pages of the book. One got the notion that the fingers wanted to begin tearing pages from the book.
I had been trying to reassure him. “Do stay, I have nothing to do,” I had said and he smiled at my words as a child might smile. “I am such an egotist,” he explained. “You see, I want to talk of myself. I write stories, you see, but they aren’t any good. Really they aren’t any good at all but they do bring me in money. I’m in a tight hole, I tell you. I own an automobile and I live on a certain scale that is fixed—that’s what I mean—that’s what’s the trouble with me. I am no longer young, as you’ll see if you look at my hair. It’s getting gray. I’m married and now I have a daughter in college. She goes to Vassar. Her name is Elsie. Things are fixed with me. I live on a certain scale—that’s what I mean—that’s what’s the trouble with me.”
It was apparent the man had something of importance to himself he wanted to say and that he did not know how to begin.
I tried to help. My friend Edward had told me a little of his story. (For the sake of convenience and really to better conceal his identity we will call him Arthur Hobson—although that is not his name.) Although he was born in America he is of Italian descent and there is in his nature, no doubt, something of the Italian spirit of violence, strangely mingled, as it so often is in the Latins, with gentleness and subtlety.
However, he was like myself in one thing. He was an American and was trying to understand himself—not as an Italian but as an American.
And so there was this Hobson—born in America of an Italian father—a father who had changed his name after coming to America and had prospered here. He, the father, had come to America to make money and had been successful. Then he had sent his son to an American college, wanting to make a real American of him.
The son had been ambitious to become a well-known football player and to have, during his college days, the joy of seeing his name and picture in the newspapers. As it turned out however, he could not become one of the great players and to the end of his college career remained what is called a substitute—getting into but one or two comparatively unimportant games to win his college letter.
He did not have it in him to be a great football player and so, in a world created in his fancy, he did what he could not do in life. He wrote a story concerning a man who, like himself, was of Italian descent and who also remained through most of his college career a substitute on a football team—but in the story the man did have, just at the end of his days in college, an opportunity of which he took brilliant advantage.
There was this Hobson in his room writing on an afternoon of the late Fall. It was the birth of a Story-teller. He moved restlessly about the room, sat a long time writing and then got up and moved about again.
In the story he wrote that day in his room long ago he did what he could not do in the flesh. The hero of his story was a rather small square-shouldered man like himself and there was an important game on, the most important of the year. All the other players were Anglo-Saxons and they could not win the game. They held their opponents even but could make no progress toward scoring.