“I got back into bed,” he said, “and taking my own life into my hand tried to decide whether I wanted to hold on to it or not. All that night I held it like that, my own life I mean,” he said.
There was some notion, he was evidently trying to explain, concerning other lives being things outside his own, things not to be touched, not to be fooled with. How much of that could have been in his mind that night of his youth, long ago, and how much came later I do not know and one takes it for granted he did not know either.
He seemed however to have had the notion that for some hours that night, after his father’s wife came upstairs and the two elder people got into bed and the house was silent, that there came certain hours when his own life belonged to him to hold or to drop as easily as one spreads out the fingers of a hand lying on a table in a saloon in Wells Street, Chicago.
“I had a fancy not to do it,” he said, “not to spread out my fingers, not to open my hand. You see, I couldn’t feel any very definite purpose in life, but there was something. There was a feeling I had as I stood naked in the cold washing my body. Perhaps I just wanted to have that feeling of washing myself again sometime. You know what I mean—I was really cleansing myself, there in the moonlight, that night.
“And so I got back into bed and kept my fingers closed, like this, like a cup. I held my own life in my hand and when I felt like opening my fingers and letting my life slip away I remembered myself washing myself in the moonlight.
“And so I didn’t open out my fingers. I kept my fingers closed like this, like a cup,” he said, again slowly drawing his fingers together.
PART TWO
For a good many years Tom wrote advertisements in an office in Chicago where I was also employed. He had grown middle-aged and was unmarried and in the evenings and on Sundays sat in his apartment reading or playing rather badly on a piano. Outside business hours he had few associates and although his youth and young manhood had been a time of hardship, he continually, in fancy, lived in the past.
He and I had been intimate, in a loose detached sort of way, for a good many years. Although I was a much younger man we often got half-drunk together.
Little fluttering tag-like ends of his personal history were always leaking out of him and, of all the men and women I have known, he gave me the most material for stories. His own talks, things remembered or imagined, were never quite completely told. They were fragments caught up, tossed in the air as by a wind and then abruptly dropped.
All during the late afternoon we had been standing together at a bar and drinking. We had talked of our work and as Tom grew more drunken he played with the notion of the importance of advertising writing. At that time his more mature point of view puzzled me a little. “I’ll tell you what, that lot of advertisements on which you are now at work is very important. Do put all your best self into your work. It is very important that the American house-wife buy Star laundry soap, rather than Arrow laundry soap. And there is something else—the daughter of the man who owns the soap factory, that is at present indirectly employing you, is a very pretty girl. I saw her once. She is nineteen now but soon she will be out of college and, if her father makes a great deal of money it will profoundly affect her life. The very man she is to marry may be decided by the success or failure of the advertisements you are now writing. In an obscure way you are fighting her battles. Like a knight of old you have tipped your lance, or shall I say typewriter, in her service. Today as I walked past your desk and saw you sitting there, scratching your head, and trying to think whether to say, “buy Star Laundry Soap—it’s best,” or whether to be a bit slangy and say, “Buy Star—You win!”—well, I say, my heart went out to you and to this fair young girl you have never seen, may never see. I tell you what, I was touched.” He hiccoughed and leaning forward tapped me affectionately on the shoulder. “I tell you what, young fellow,” he added smiling, “I thought of the middle ages and of the men, women and children who once set out toward the Holy Land in the service of the Virgin. They didn’t get as well paid as you do. I tell you what, we advertising men are too well paid. There would be more dignity in our profession if we went barefooted and walked about dressed in old ragged cloaks and carrying staffs. We might, with a good deal more dignity, carry beggar’s bowls, in our hands, eh!”
He was laughing heartily now, but suddenly stopped laughing. There was always an element of sadness in Tom’s mirth.
We walked out of the saloon, he going forward a little unsteadily for, even when he was quite sober, he was not too steady on his legs. Life did not express itself very definitely in his body and he rolled awkwardly about, his heavy body at times threatening to knock some passerby off the sidewalk.
For a time we stood at a corner, at La Salle and Lake Streets in Chicago, and about us surged the home-going crowds while over our heads rattled the elevated trains. Bits of newspaper and clouds of dust were picked up by a wind and blown in our faces and the dust got into our eyes. We laughed together, a little nervously.
At any rate for us the evening had just begun. We would walk and later dine together. He plunged again into the saloon out of which we had just come, and in a moment returned with a bottle of whiskey in his pocket.
“It is horrible stuff, this whiskey, eh, but after all this is a horrible town. One couldn’t drink wine here. Wine belongs to a sunny, laughing people and clime,” he said. He had a notion that drunkenness was necessary to men in such a modern industrial city as the one in which we lived. “You wait,” he said, “you’ll see what will happen. One of these days the reformers will manage to take whiskey away from us, and what then? We’ll sag down, you see. We’ll become like old women, who have had too many children. We’ll all sag spiritually and then you’ll see what’ll happen. Without whiskey no people can stand up against all this ugliness. It can’t be done, I say. We’ll become empty and bag-like—we will—all of us. We’ll be like old women who were never loved but who have had too many children.” We had walked through many streets and had come to a bridge over a river. It was growing dark now and we stood for a time in the dusk and in the uncertain light the structures, built to the very edge of the stream, great warehouses and factories, began to take on strange shapes. The river ran through a canyon formed by the buildings, a few boats passed up and down, and over other bridges, in the distance, street cars passed. They were like moving clusters of stars against the dark purple of the sky.
From time to time he sucked at the whiskey bottle and occasionally offered me a drink but often he forgot me and drank alone. When he had taken the bottle from his lips he held it before him and spoke to it softly, “Little mother,” he said, “I am always at your breast, eh? You cannot wean me, can you?”
He grew a little angry. “Well, then why did you drop me down here? Mothers should drop their children in places where men have learned a little to live. Here there is only a desert of buildings.”
He took another drink from the bottle and then held it for a moment against his cheek before passing it to me. “There is something feminine about a whiskey bottle,” he declared. “As long as it contains liquor one hates to part with it and passing it to a friend is a little like inviting a friend to go in to your wife. They do that, I’m told, in some of the Oriental countries—a rather delicate custom. Perhaps they are more civilized than ourselves, and then, you know, perhaps, it’s just possible, they have found out that the women sometimes like it too, eh?”
I tried to laugh but did not succeed very well. Now that I am writing of my friend, I find I am not making a very good likeness of him after all. It may be that I overdo the note of sadness I get into my account of him. There was always that element present but it was tempered in him, as I seem to be unable to temper it in my account of him.
For one thing he was not very clever and I seem to be making him out a rather clever fellow. On many evenings I have spent with him he was silent and positively dull and for hours walked awkwardly along, talking of some affair at the offic
e. There was a long rambling story. He had been at Detroit with the president of the company and the two men had visited an advertiser. There was a long dull account of what had been said—of “he saids,” and, “I saids.”
Or again he told a story of some experience of his own, as a newspaper man, before he got into advertising. He had been on the copy desk in some Chicago newspaper, the Tribune, perhaps. One grew accustomed to a little peculiarity of his mind. It traveled sometimes in circles and there were certain oft-told tales always bobbing up. A man had come into the newspaper office, a cub reporter with an important piece of news, a great scoop in fact. No one would believe the reporter’s story. He was just a kid. There was a murderer, for whom the whole town was on the watchout, and the cub reporter had picked him up and had brought him into the office.
There he sat, the dangerous murderer. The cub reporter had found him in a saloon and going up to him had said, “You might as well give yourself up. They will get you anyway and it will go better with you if you come in voluntarily.”
And so the dangerous murderer had decided to come and the cub reporter had escorted him, not to the police station but to the newspaper office. It was a great scoop. In a moment now the forms would close, the newspaper would go to press. The dead line was growing close and the cub reporter ran about the room from one man to another. He kept pointing at the murderer, a mild-looking little man with blue eyes, sitting on a bench, waiting. The cub reporter was almost insane. He danced up and down and shouting “I tell you that’s Murdock, sitting there. Don’t be a lot of damn fools. I tell you that’s Murdock, sitting there.”
Now one of the editors has walked listlessly across the room and is speaking to the little man with blue eyes, and suddenly the whole tone of the newspaper office has changed. “My God! It’s the truth! Stop everything! Clear the front page! My God! It is Murdock! What a near thing! We almost let it go! My God! It’s Murdock!”
The incident in the newspaper office had stayed in my friend’s mind. It swam about in his mind as in a pool. At recurring times, perhaps once every six months, he told the story, using always the same words and the tenseness of that moment in the newspaper office was reproduced in him over and over. He grew excited. Now the men in the office were all gathering about the little blue-eyed Murdock. He had killed his wife, her lover and three children. Then he had run into the street and quite wantonly shot two men, innocently passing the house. He sat talking quietly and all the police of the city, and all the reporters for the other newspapers, were looking for him. There he sat talking, nervously telling his story. There wasn’t much to the story. “I did it. I just did it. I guess I was off my nut,” he kept saying.
“Well, the story will have to be stretched out.” The cub reporter who has brought him in walks about the office proudly. “I’ve done it! I’ve done it! I’ve proven myself the greatest newspaper man in the city.” The older men are laughing. “The fool! It’s fool’s luck. If he hadn’t been a fool he would never have done it. Why he walked right up. ‘Are you Murdock?’ He had gone about all over town, into saloons, asking men, ‘Are you Murdock?’ God is good to fools and drunkards!”
My friend told the story to me ten, twelve, fifteen times, and did not know it had grown to be an old story. When he had reproduced the scene in the newspaper office he made always the same comment. “It’s a good yarn, eh. Well it’s the truth. I was there. Someone ought to write it up for one of the magazines.”
I looked at him, watched him closely as he told the story and as I grew older and kept hearing the murderer’s story and certain others, he also told regularly without knowing he had told them before, an idea came to me. “He is a tale-teller who has had no audience,” I thought. “He is a stream dammed up. He is full of stories that whirl and circle about within him. Well, he is not a stream dammed up, he is a stream overfull.” As I walked beside him and heard again the story of the cub reporter and the murderer I remembered a creek back of my father’s house in an Ohio town. In the spring the water overflowed a field near our house and the brown muddy water ran round and round in crazy circles. One threw a stick into the water and it was carried far away but, after a time, it came whirling back to where one stood on a piece of high ground, watching.
What interested me was that the untold stories, or rather the uncompleted stories of my friend’s mind, did not seem to run in circles. When a story had attained form it had to be told about every so often, but the unformed fragments were satisfied to peep out at one and then retire, never to reappear.
* * *
It was a spring evening and he and I had gone for a walk in Jackson Park. We went on a street-car and when we were alighting the car started suddenly and my awkward friend was thrown to the ground and rolled over and over in the dusty street. The motorman, the conductor and several of the men passengers alighted and gathered about. No, he was not hurt and would not give his name and address to the anxious conductor. “I’m not hurt. I’m not going to sue the company. Damn it, man, I defy you to make me give my name and address if I do not care to do so.”
He assumed a look of outraged dignity. “Just suppose now that I happen to be some great man, traveling about the country—in foreign parts, incognito, as it were. Let us suppose I am a great prince or a dignitary of some sort. Look how big I am.” He pointed to his huge round paunch. “If I told who I was cheers might break forth. I do not care for that. With me, you see, it is different than with yourselves. I have had too much of that sort of thing already. I’m sick of it. If it happens that, in the process of my study of the customs of your charming country, I chose to fall off a street-car that is my own affair. I did not fall on anyone.”
We walked away leaving the conductor, the motorman and passengers somewhat mystified. “Ah, he’s a nut,” I heard one of the passengers say to another.
As for the fall, it had shaken something out of my friend. When later we were seated on a bench in the park one of the fragments, the little illuminating bits of his personal history, that sometimes came from him and that were his chief charm for me, seemed to have been shaken loose and fell from him as a ripe apple falls from a tree in a wind.
He began talking, a little hesitatingly, as though feeling his way in the darkness along the hallway of a strange house at night. It had happened I had never seen him with a woman and he seldom spoke of women, except with a witty and half scornful gesture, but now he began speaking of an experience with a woman.
The tale concerned an adventure of his young manhood and occurred after his mother had died and after his father married again, in fact after he had left home, not to return.
The enmity, that seemed always to have existed between himself and his father became while he continued living at home, more and more pronounced, but on the part of the son, my friend, it was never expressed in words and his dislike of his father took the form of contempt that he had made so bad a second marriage. The new woman in the house seemed such a poor stick. The house was always dirty and the children, some other man’s children, were always about under foot. When the two men who had been working in the fields came into the house to eat, the food was badly cooked.
The father’s desire to have God make him, in some mysterious way a Methodist minister continued and, as he grew older, the son had difficulty keeping back certain sharp comments upon life in the house, that wanted to be expressed. “What was a Methodist minister after all?” The son was filled with the intolerance of youth. His father was a laborer, a man who had never been to school. Did he think that God could suddenly make him something else and that without effort on his own part, by this interminable praying? If he had really wanted to be a minister why had he not prepared himself? He had chased off and got married and when his first wife died he could hardly wait until she was buried before making another marriage. And what a poor stick of a woman he had got.
The son looked across the table at his step-mother who was afraid of him. Their eyes met and the woman’s hands began to tre
mble. “Do you want anything?” she asked anxiously. “No,” he replied and began eating in silence.
One day in the spring, when he was working in the field with his father, he decided to start out into the world. He and his father were planting corn. They had no corn-planter and the father had marked out the rows with a home-made marker and now he was going along in his bare feet, dropping the grains of corn and the son, with a hoe in his hand, was following. The son drew earth over the corn and then patted the spot with the back of the hoe. That was to make the ground solid above so that the crows would not come down and find the corn before it had time to take root.
All morning the two worked in silence, and then at noon and when they came to the end of a row, they stopped to rest. The father went into a fence corner.
The son was nervous. He sat down and then got up and walked about. He did not want to look into the fence corner, where his father was no doubt kneeling and praying—he was always doing that at odd moments—but presently he did. Dread crept over him. His father was kneeling and praying in silence and the son could see again the bottoms of his two bare feet, sticking out from among low-growing bushes. Tom shuddered. Again he saw the heels and the cushions of the feet, the two ball-like cushions below the toes. They were black but the instep of each foot was white with an odd whiteness—not unlike the whiteness of the belly of a fish.
The reader will understand what was in Tom’s mind—a memory.
Without a word to his father or to his father’s wife, he walked across the fields to the house, packed a few belongings and left, saying good-bye to no one. The woman of the house saw him go but said nothing and after he had disappeared, about a bend in the road, she ran across the fields to her husband, who was still at his prayers, oblivious to what had happened. His wife also saw the bare feet sticking out of the bushes and ran toward them screaming. When her husband arose she began to cry hysterically. “I thought something dreadful had happened, Oh, I thought something dreadful had happened,” she sobbed.