In the sullen swell
Ten fathoms deep on the road to hell—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
PICTURING the INDIVIDUAL
One of my earliest recollections of my friend and business associate for very many, very short and very happy years, is a conversation in the old Chicago Press Club rooms on South Clark Street, near Madison, in the early 90’s, about three o’clock one morning, when the time for confidences arrives—if ever it does. What his especial business in Chicago was at that particular moment makes no particular difference. He might have been rehearsing “The Ogallallas,” or mayhap he was on duty as Kentucky commissioner to the World’s Fair. As a matter of mere fact he was there and we had spent an evening and part of a morning together and were bent on extending the session to daybreak. Sunrise on Madison Street always was a wonderful sight. The dingy buildings on that busy old thoroughfare, awakening to day-life, then appeared as newly painted in the mellow of the early morning.
My companion knew something was coming. Our chairs were close together—side by side—and we were looking each in the other’s face. He had his hand back of his ear. “Allison,” I said—and I suppose that after a night in his company I was so impregnated with his strong personality that I had my hand back of my ear too, and spoke in a low, slightly drawling nasal, like his—“Allison,” I repeated, “don’t you miss a great deal by being deaf?” Now, it is said with tender regret, but a deep and sincere regard for truth, that my friend makes a virtue of a slight deafness. He uses it to avoid arguments, assignments, conventions, parlor parties—and bores—and deftly evades a whole lot of “duty” conversations as well. Of course I know all this now, but in those days I thought his lack of complete hearing an infirmity calling for a sort of sympathy on my part. Anyway it was three o’clock in the morning, and…!