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 office. 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.”