“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.