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Vol. 105

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OR a good many years Tom wrote advertisements in an office in Chicago where I was also employed. He was of middle age and unmarried, and in the evenings and on Sundays sat in his apartment playing a piano.

He and I have been intimate in a loose, detached sort of way for a good many years. When I was a young fellow, we sometimes got 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 has given me the most material for stories. His own tales, 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 in a saloon and drinking together. We had talked of our work. As he 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 ad

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vertisements on which you are now at work is very important. Do put all of your best self into your work. is very important that the American housewife 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. 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. To-day as I walked past your desk and saw you sitting there scratching your head, 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 hiccuped, and, leaning forward, tapped me affectionately on the shoulder. "I tell you what," he added, smiling, "I thought of the Middle Ages and of the men, women,

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and children who once set out toward the Holy Land in the service of the Virgin. They did n't get as well paid as you do. I tell you, 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 cloaks and carrying staffs. We might with a good deal more dignity carry beggar's bowls in our hands."

He was laughing heartily now, but stopped suddenly. There was always There was always to be found an element of sadness in Tom's mirth.

We walked out of the saloon, he going forward a little unsteadily. Even when he was quite sober he was not too steady on his legs. Life did Life did not express itself very definitely in his body. He rolled awkwardly about, his body at times threatening to knock some passer-by off the sidewalk.

For a time we stood at a street corner at La Salle and Lake streets in Chicago. About us surged the homegoing crowds, and 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. The dust got into our eyes. We laughed together a little nervously.

We

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 whisky in his. pocket.

"It 's horrible stuff, but, after all, this is a horrible town," he said. He had a notion that drunkenness was necessary to men in a modern industrial age. "You wait," he said; "you will see what 'll happen. One of these days they'll take whisky 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 will happen. Without whisky no people can stand up against all this ugliness. It can't be done. We'll become empty and bag-like. We will, all of us, 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. 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 cañon 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 whisky bottle and occasionally offered me a drink, but often he forgot me and drank alone. 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." He grew a little angry. "Well, why did you drop me down here? Mothers should drop their children in places where men have learned to live. Here there is only a desert of buildings."

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. 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 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. He walked awkwardly along, talking of some affair at the office. There was a long rambling story. He had been at Detroit with the president of the company. The two men had visited an advertiser, and there was a long dull account of what had been said.

Or again he told a story of some experience as a newspaper man before he got into advertising. He had been on the copy desk in some Chicago newspaper, the "Tribune" I think. One noted a little peculiarity of his mind. It traveled sometimes in circles. There were certain oft told tales. 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 watch-out, 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 news

paper 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, shouting:

"I tell you, that 's him, that 's Murdock sitting there! Don't be a lot of damn' fools! I tell you that 's Murdock sitting there!"

And now one of the editors has walked listlessly across the room and is speaking to the little man with the blue eyes. 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 stayed in my friend's mind. At recurring times, perhaps once every six months, he told the story, using always the same words. 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. All the police of the city and all the reporters for the other newspapers were looking for him, and there he sat talking, nervously telling his story. There was n't much of 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 walked about the office proudly.

"I've done it! proved myself the

I've done it! I've I've done it! I've greatest newspaper man in the city." The older men were laughing.

"The fool! It 's fool's luck. If he had n'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 always made the same comment.

"It's a good yarn, eh? Well, it's the truth. I was there. Some one ought to write it up for one of the magazines."

I looked at him, watched him closely, as he told the story. As I grew older and kept hearing the story and certain others he also told regularly without knowing he had told them before, an idea came to me. "He is a storyteller who has had no audience," I thought. "He is a stream damned up. He is full of stories that whirl and circle about within him. Well, he is not a stream damned 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 by, 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 came whirling back again to where one

stood on a piece of high ground, watching.

What interested me most 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 in his mind it had to be told about every so often, but the unformed fragments were satisfied to peek out at one and then retire, never to reappear.

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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. My awkward friend was thrown to the ground and rolled over and over in the road. The motorman, conductor, and several of the passengers 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 incognito, as it were. Let us suppose I am a great prince or a foreign dignitary. If I told who I was, cheers would break forth. I do not care for that. that. With me, you see, it is different than with yourself. I have had too much of that sort of thing. I am sick of it. If it happens that in the process of my study of the customs of your country I chose to fall off a street car, that is my own affair. I did not fall on any one."

We walked away, leaving the conductor, motorman, and passengers somewhat mystified.

As for the fall, it had shaken something out of my friend, after all. 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 came 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. When he was a child his mother died, and after a few years his father married again. He had been the only child of the first marriage, but his stepmother had four children, all much younger than himself.

His father was a farmer, living on rented land near a small town in the extreme southeastern corner of Ohio and near the Ohio River. In his youth the father had been ambitious to become a minister of the Methodist Church, but, being without education, could not gratify his ambition. After his second marriage an enmity that seemed always to have existed between himself and his son became more and more pronounced.

On the part of the son, my friend, the enmity was never expressed in words. Perhaps his dislike of his father took the form of contempt that he had made so bad a second marriage.

My friend's father, a man of fortyfive, with something a little wild in his eyes, sat at the head of the table and before eating began praying intermittently. "O God, bestow on us Thy gifts," he was always saying.

The son had a notion what his father wanted. "He wants God to make him a Methodist minister," he thought bitterly. He 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 stepmother, who was afraid of him. Their eyes met, and the woman's hands began to tremble.

"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