One had to keep to the point and after a time it had happened that the man could not write his stories in the town. In the Fall he went to many football games, took notes, thought out plots, and then went off to the city, where he rented a room in a small hotel in a side street.
In the room he sat all day writing football stories. He wrote furiously hour after hour and then went to walk in the city streets. One had to keep giving things a new twist—to get new ideas constantly. The deuce, it was like having to write advertisements. One continually advertised a kind of life that did not exist.
In the city streets, as one walked restlessly about, the actuality of life became as a ghost that haunted the house of one’s fancy. A child was crying in a stairway, a fat old woman with great breasts was leaning out at a window, a man came running along a street, dodged into an alleyway, crawled over a high board fence, crept through a passageway between two apartment buildings and then continued running and running in another street.
Such things happened and the man walking and trying to think only of football games stood listening. In the distance he could hear the sounds of the running feet. They sounded quite sharply for a long moment and then were lost in the din of the street cars and motor trucks. Where was the running man going and what had he done? The old Harry! Now the sound of the running feet would go on and on forever in the imaginative life of the writer and at night in the room in the hotel in the city, the room to which he had come to write football stories, he would awaken out of sleep to hear the sound of running feet. There Was terror and drama in the sound. The running man had a white face. There was a look of terror on his face and for a moment a kind of terror would creep over the body of the writer lying in his bed.
That feeling would come and with it would come vague floating dreams, thoughts, impulses—that had nothing to do with the formation of plots for football stories. The fat Yankee fish-seller in the New England town had surrendered his manhood in the presence of other men for the sake of a daughter who wished to pass herself off as a lady and the New England town where he lived was full of people doing strange unaccountable things. The writer was himself always doing strange unaccountable things.
“What’s the matter with me?” he asked sharply, walking up and down before me in the room in the New York hotel and tearing the pages of my book. “Well, you see,” he explained, “when I wrote my first football story it was fun. I was a boy wanting to be a football hero and as I could not become one in fact I became one in fancy. It was a boy’s fancy but now I’m a man and want to grow up. Something inside me wants to grow up.”
“They won’t let me,” he cried, holding his hands out before him. He had dropped my book on the floor. “Look,” he said earnestly, “my hands are the hands of a middle-aged man and the skin on the back of my neck is wrinkled like an old man’s. Must my hands go on forever, painting the fancies of children?”
VIII
The writer of football stories had gone out of my room. He is an American artist. No doubt he is at this moment sitting somewhere in a hotel room, writing football stories. As I now sit writing of him my own mind is filled with fragmentary glimpses of life caught and held from our talk. The little fragments caught in the field of my fancy are like flies caught in molasses—they cannot escape. They will not go out of the house of my fancy and I am wondering, as no doubt you, the reader, will be wondering, what became of the daughter of the seller of fish who wanted to be a lady. Did she become a famous pianist or did she in the end run away with a man from New York City who was spending his vacation in the New England town only to find, after she got to the city with him, that he already had a wife? I am wondering about her—about the man whose wife ran away with his friend and about the running man in the city streets. He stays in my fancy the most sharply of all. What happened to him? He had evidently committed a crime. Did he escape or did he, after he had got out into the adjoining street, run into the arms of a waiting policeman?
Like the writer of football stories, my own fancy is haunted. To-day is just such a day as the one on which he came to see me. It is evening now and he came in the evening. In fancy again I see him, going about on Spring, Summer and early Fall days, on the streets of his New England town. Being an author he is somewhat timid and hesitates about speaking with people he meets. Well, he is lonely. By this time his daughter has no doubt graduated from Vassar. Perhaps she is married to a writer of stories. It may be that she has married a writer of cowboy stories who lives in the New England town and works in a garden.