And now came the last ten minutes of play and the team began to weaken a little and that heartened the other side. “Hold ’em! ... hold ’em! ... hold ’em!” shouted the crowd. At last, at the very last, the young Italian boy was given his chance. “Let the Wop go in! We are going to lose anyway. Let the Wop go in!”
Who has not read such stories? There are infinite variations of the theme. There he was, the little dark-skinned Italian-American and who ever thought he could do anything special! Such games as football are for the nations of the North. “Well, it will have to be done. One of the halfbacks has injured himself. Go in there, you Wop!”
So in he goes and the story football game, the most important one of the year for his school, is won. It is almost lost but he saves the day. Aha, the other side has the ball and fumbles, just as they are nearing the goal line. Forward springs the little alert dark figure. Now he has the ball and has darted away. He stumbles and almost falls but ... see ... he has made a little twisting movement with his body just as that big fellow, the fullback of the opposing team, is about to pounce upon him. “See him run!” When he stumbles something happens to his leg. His ankle is sprained but still he runs like a streak. Now every step brings pain but he runs on and on. The game is won for the old school. “The little Wop did it! Hurrah! Hurrah!”
The devil and all! These Italian fellows have a cruel streak in them, even in their dreams. The young Italian-American writer, writing his first story, had left his hero with a slight limp that went with him all through life and had justified it by the notion that the limp was in some way a badge of honor, a kind of proof of his thorough-going Americanism.
Anyway, he wrote the story and sent it to one of our American magazines and it was paid for and published. He did, after all, achieve a kind of distinction during his days in college. In an American college a football star is something but an author is something, too. “Look, there goes Hobson. He’s an author! He had a story in the National Whiz and got three hundred and fifty dollars for it. A smart fellow, I tell you! He’ll make his way in the world. All the fraternities are after the fellow.”
And so there was Hobson and his father was proud of him and his college was proud of him and his future was assured. He wrote another football story and another and another. Things began to come his way and by the time he left college he was engaged to be married to one of the most popular girls of his class. She wasn’t very enthusiastic about his people but one did not need to live in the same city with them. An author can live where he pleases. The young couple came from the Middle-West and went to live in New England, in a town facing the sea. It was a good place for him. In New England there are many colleges and Hobson could go to football games all Fall and get new ideas for stories without traveling too far.
The Italian-American has become what he is, an American artist. He has a daughter in college now and owns an automobile. He is a success. He writes football stories.
V
He sat in my room in the hotel in New York, fingering the book he had picked up from the table. The deuce! Did he want to tear the leaves? The fellow who came into the restaurant where Edward and I sat was in my mind perhaps—that is to say, the man who had been in prison. I kept thinking of the story writer as a man trying to tear away the bars of a prison. “Before he leaves this room my treasured book will be destroyed,” a corner of my brain was whispering to me.
He wanted to talk about writing. That was his purpose. As with Edward and myself, there was now something between Hobson and myself that wanted saying. We were both story-tellers, fumbling about in materials we too often did not understand.