Or again he told a story of some experience of his own, as a newspaper man, before he got into advertising. He had been on the copy desk in some Chicago newspaper, the Tribune, perhaps. One grew accustomed to a little peculiarity of his mind. It traveled sometimes in circles and there were certain oft-told tales always bobbing up. 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 watchout, 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 newspaper 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 and shouting “I tell you that’s Murdock, sitting there. Don’t be a lot of damn fools. I tell you that’s Murdock, sitting there.”
Now one of the editors has walked listlessly across the room and is speaking to the little man with blue eyes, and 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 had stayed in my friend’s mind. It swam about in his mind as in a pool. At recurring times, perhaps once every six months, he told the story, using always the same words and 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 and all the police of the city, and all the reporters for the other newspapers, were looking for him. There he sat talking, nervously telling his story. There wasn’t much to 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 walks about the office proudly. “I’ve done it! I’ve done it! I’ve proven myself the greatest newspaper man in the city.” The older men are laughing. “The fool! It’s fool’s luck. If he hadn’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 made always the same comment. “It’s a good yarn, eh. Well it’s the truth. I was there. Someone ought to write it up for one of the magazines.”
I looked at him, watched him closely as he told the story and as I grew older and kept hearing the murderer’s story and certain others, he also told regularly without knowing he had told them before, an idea came to me. “He is a tale-teller who has had no audience,” I thought. “He is a stream dammed up. He is full of stories that whirl and circle about within him. Well, he is not a stream dammed 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 our house 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, it came whirling back to where one stood on a piece of high ground, watching.
What interested me 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 it had to be told about every so often, but the unformed fragments were satisfied to peep out at one and then retire, never to reappear.