VI
I was sliding across the room now, thinking of the man whose wife had run away with his friend. I was thinking of him and of something else at the same time. I wanted to save my Balzac if I could. Already the football-story man had torn a page of the book. Were he to get excited again he might tear out more pages. When he had first come into my room I had been discourteous, standing and staring at him, and now I did not want to speak of the book, to warn him. I wanted to pick it up casually when he wasn’t looking. “I’ll walk across the room with it and put it out of his reach,” I thought but just as I was about to put out my hand he put out his hand and took it again.
And now as he fingered the book nervously his mind jumped off in a new direction. He told me that during the Summer before he had got hold of a book of verses by an American poet, Carl Sandburg.
“There’s a fellow,” he cried, waving my Balzac about. “He feels common things as I would like to be able to feel them and sometimes as I work in my garden I think of him. As I walk about in my town or go swimming or fishing in the Summer afternoons I think of him.” He quoted:
“Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet.”
It was pretty evident the man’s mind was jerking about, flying from place to place. Now he had forgotten the man who on Summer days came to lean over his fence and was speaking of other people of his New England town.
On Summer mornings he sometimes went to loiter about on the main street of the town of his adoption, and there were things always going on that caught his fancy, as flies are caught in molasses.
Life bestirred itself in the bright sunlight in the streets. First there was a surface life and then another and more subtle life going on below the surface and the football-story writer felt both very keenly—he was one made to feel all life keenly—but all the time he kept trying to think only of the outside of things. That would be better for him, he thought. A story writer who had written football stories for ten or fifteen years might very well get himself into a bad way by letting his fancy play too much over the life immediately about him. It was just possible—well you see it might turn out that he would come in the end to hate a football game more than anything else in the world—he might come to hate a football game as that furtive fellow I had seen in the restaurant that afternoon no doubt hated a prison. There were his wife and child and his automobile to be thought about. He did not drive the automobile much himself—in fact driving it made him nervous—but his wife and the daughter from Vassar loved driving it.
And so there he was in the town—on the main street of the town. It was, let us say, a bright early Fall morning and the sun was shining and the air filled with the tang of the sea. Why did he find it so difficult to speak with anyone regarding the half-formed thoughts and feelings inside himself? He had always found it difficult to speak of such things, he explained, and that was the reason he had come to see me. I was a fellow writer and no doubt I also was often caught in the same trap. “I thought I would speak to you about it. I thought maybe you and I could talk it over,” he said.
He went, on such a morning as I have described, into the town’s main street and for a time stood about before the postoffice. Then he went to stand before the door of a cigar store.