“Eating out of his hand, hell! Mark whistles and Bill comes running, like that, like a little dog.”
Meaningless vicious sentences, opinions thrown out by tired brains. One of the men grew sullenly angry. “Don’t look at me like that, I tell you. I’ll stand a good deal from a friend but not any such looks. I’m a fellow who loses his temper. Sometimes I bust someone on the jaw.”
The bartender was taking the situation in hand. He tried to change the subject. “Who’s going to lick that Fitzsimmons? How long they going to let that Australian strut around in this country? Ain’t they no guy can take him?” he asked, with pumped up enthusiasm.
I sat with my head in my hands. “Men jangling with men! Men and women in houses and apartments jangling! Tired people going home to Chicago’s West Side, going home from the factories! Children crying fretfully!”
Tom tapped me on the shoulder, and then tapped with his empty glass on the table. He laughed.
“Ladybug, ladybug, why do you roam?
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,”
he recited. When the whiskey had come he leaned forward and made one of the odd and truthful observations on life that were always coming out of him at unexpected moments. “I want you to notice something,” he began; “You have seen a lot of bartenders—well, if you’ll notice, there is a striking similarity in appearance between bartenders, great generals, diplomats, presidents and all such people. I just happened to think why it is. It’s because they are all up to the same game. They have to spend their lives handling weary dissatisfied people and they learn the trick of giving things just a little twist, out of one dull meaningless channel into another. That is their game and practising it makes them all look alike.”
I smiled sympathetically. Now that I come to write of my friend I find it somewhat difficult not to misrepresent him on the sentimental side. I forget times when I was with him and he was unspeakably dull, when he also talked often for hours of meaningless things. It was all foolishness, this trying to be anything but a dull business man, he sometimes said, and declared that both he and I were fools. Better for us both that we become more alert, more foxy, as he put it. But for the fact that we were both fools we would both join the Chicago Athletic Club, play golf, ride about in automobiles, pick up flashy young girls and take them out to road-houses to dinner, go home later and make up cock and bull stories to quiet our wives, go to church on Sunday, talk continuously of money making, woman and golf, and in general enjoy our lives. At times he half convinced me he thought the fellows he described led gay and cheerful lives.
And there were times, too, when he, as a physical being, seemed to fairly disintegrate before my eyes. His great bulk grew a little loose and flabby, he talked and talked, saying nothing.