“Hell no. Shoot.”
Billy Moore used to sit making calculations. He was jealous. He knew the deal Alonzo had with the Griver-Wharton people. It was fifty-fifty.
“Let’s see. Fifteen per cent on three hundred thousand for that ten days on that one account—that’s forty-five thousand, and a half of that . . . He was schoolboyish about it, like some high-school kid figuring up how much Babe Ruth gets for every hour he is actually at work. The three hundred thousand was just an oversight. There was the regular flow, several accounts, and all good, the flow going on for three or four years.
“Well, say two hundred and fifty thousand a year, for Alonzo, while the bloody mess lasted over there.” Billy didn’t have any sons. He didn’t lose anyone in the war.
* * *
Alonzo kept on pulling it, whenever he made a speech, for a long time.
“I can see my boy, standing over there now. We were pals.” The businessmen all turned to look. When they turned their faces back to Alonzo, he was just putting his handkerchief away. What the businessmen liked about Alonzo was that he was so sincere. Alonzo said so, a little hesitatingly, to Billy. He had been during the summer on a visit to France, where his son was buried.
“How about some new stuff, Billy?” he said.
“What do you mean?” Billy inquired. He had just been on one of his bad ones, and his wife had been riding him pretty hard. Alonzo was shy about bringing the matter up, but he had become a big man in advertising, and he did love to make speeches.
“You know, I have been over there, where the boy is buried. I didn’t let them bring his body home. ‘Let it lie where it fell,’ I wrote to our congressman.”
“You mean?” Billy said. He was getting it. “Yes, I guess we ought to revamp the speech.”
“Do you know, Billy,” Alonzo said, “you made me feel that boy’s death, what it meant to me, as I never would have felt it but for you.”
“Yes?”
“Just the same, we should give it a new turn.” Billy stood in Alonzo’s office lost in deep thought.
“Do you know, Billy, what about—well now, something about the boy’s grave, over there, at the edge of a battlefield, say at night?”
“Jesus, that’s a thought!” Billy said. He stood there hating Alonzo. Sometimes he had the whimsical notion that he didn’t hate him at all. He stood in the room beside Alonzo’s big mahogany desk, muttering to himself, and Alonzo got up and came near to listen.
“Now you see—something about the French countryside at night—a summer night. It is pathetic and terrible—the ground all torn up, limbs of trees shot away,” Billy was saying.
“Yes, yes,” Alonzo said.
“Something strange takes possession of your soul.”
“Since the American Legion has got into politics, the war itself isn’t so good any more,” Alonzo said. “You couldn’t get production for a war play now if you wrote one, Billy.”
“Still, there is always something. People like the idea of ghosts. How would this be? . . . You see, you got to a little French town, at the edge of the battlefield, late at night. You found a little French hotel, but you couldn’t sleep. A voice seemed to be calling you. The town was very quiet, but in fancy you could hear guns roaring. You got up and dressed, crept out of the house.”
“Yes, yes,” Alonzo said again.
“You got out where the ghostly trees were. There was that dim light. You saw it now here, now there. There was a voice that seemed to want to speak to you. It was saying, ‘Tell them. Tell them.’”
“Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes.”
Billy was having a swell idea, a hunch, and what good advertising-copy man doesn’t know what that means? The really snappy ideas don’t come every day. Alonzo yes-yessing him as the idea grew. The wife may have been riding Billy extra hard after the drunk he had been on. Suddenly he plunked Alonzo Funkhouser, vice-president of Griver-Wharton, right on the jaw, just as he was opening his mouth to get off another “yes, yes.” Billy never had any idea he could hit so hard. He knocked Alonzo over a chair and his head hit a corner of his desk. Afterward he bled like a stuck pig.
“I guess I caught him off his balance,” Billy always afterward explained.
Everyone came running, stenographers, other copy men, contact men, other officials of the company, and of course Billy got fired. The president of the company, George B. Wharton, fired him on the spot, but later they took him back. Billy’s wife came down to see Mr. Wharton, and Alonzo Funkhouser insisted.
“Look here,” he said, “the man’s got a family, and he had been drunk. I insist,” he said. They kept arguing with him, saying that to take Billy back would break down the morale of the employees of the company, but Alonzo stood pat. The others thought he was being foolishly big-hearted, but he was a big man in the company, and he had his way. They sent word to Billy to come on back.
“I guess I caught him a little off balance,” was all Billy had to say about that.
I Get So I Can’t Go On
* * *
THE four advertising men went to dine at a place called Skully’s. “It’s just a hole,” Little Gil said, “but we’ll be quiet.” Frank Blandin wondered what there was to be quiet about. This was in Chicago and Frank went with the others because he just happened to be coming out of the office and met the three men. “Come along,” they said. He hadn’t any plans for dining. It was a cold, sloppy night with a drizzle of rain and he was in a sour mood. “All right,” he said and walked along beside Little Gil, a copywriter like himself, looking at Gil and at the two men ahead. “Jesus,” he thought, “ain’t people up to a lot? . . .
“Civilization,” he thought. Being in a sour mood, he was thinking about the others and himself, how they lived, going along, getting advertising ideas . . . some making drawings, others writing words. Things had to be sold. That was the terribly important thing. If you wrote a book, what good was it unless it was sold? The same with magazines and newspapers, automobile tires, clothes, shoes, hats, food, everything. “Sell it. Sell it. Sell it.”
“Jesus, I’d better be thinking of something else.” Little Gil, the man he was walking with, didn’t say anything. It was like it was sometimes when he went to bed. Frank wasn’t married. He had been, but his wife had got a divorce. That might be the real point of being married . . . someone to lie with at night. You can get into a scrap with her or make love or something. You’ve got someone to blame things on.
If you lie alone you think too much. Perhaps you read a book. An old Jew in the ghetto. How he suffers! You get to thinking about him. You have stopped reading in the middle of a chapter, so you try to carry the story along. Anything to get away from yourself. That’s what books are for, isn’t it? That’s what men write them for. How do you know that isn’t the reason men and women get married? You let yourself dream you are an old Jew in the ghetto, in the Middle Ages, putting out money, “hiring money to men,” as Cal Coolidge would have said. “They hired the money, didn’t they? Make ’em pay up. Make ’em pay the interest. Squeeze ’em. Squeeze ’em. Get even!” Thinking of things like that. Thinking of anything to get to sleep. You wake up and start another day.
They got to Skully’s. Why was it called Skully’s? The man who ran the place was a short squat figure of a man with dark skin and short coarse black hair. He looked greasy but he had a rather handsome wife. She was a big one with soft eyes. The man in the party who had steered them to the place was Bud, a commercial artist. Very likely he thought, “I’d like to paint her.” He had happened to drop into the place and had thought that, and so he had come back, bringing Gil, the copywriter, with him, and the two had talked—that is to say, Bud had talked. “Look, Gil. I’d like to paint her. What a body! What arms! What legs! What shoulders! You’d have to get into it just the feeling of flesh, strong and sweet, very still, waiting and waiting. You get the idea?” Gil wouldn’t have been much interested. “Sure, Bud. It ought to be swell.” He knew Bud would never do it. Bud had
to make advertising designs.
So there the four men were, in the place, sitting at a table at the back, in a corner. The fourth man in the party was named Al and he was a fat man with red cheeks on which blue veins showed. He was well dressed and had a big loose mouth and thin hair. He ate and drank too much, but that night he wasn’t talking. He was a salesman, a contact man they called them now in advertising agencies.
Except for Frank, they were all busy on a new account . . . women’s shoes . . . women’s shoes of fine quality . . . expensive shoes. Bud had pried the account away from some other advertising agency. Frank looked at him. That night Al was placid as a cow, or better yet, a steer, but Frank supposed that when he got after an account he woke up, got up on his toes. He’d have a shot or two and go to it. Talk. Talk. Talk. Women’s shoes of fine quality, made in St. Louis, Missouri. Well, why not? What’s the matter with St. Louis?
“But I dunno. I always thought of St. Louis . . . it’s in my mind that way . . . you know, fat Germans with fat wives. Heat. The muddy Mississippi. Everybody always sweating.”
After dining, the three men would be going back to the office to spend the evening making designs for advertisements and writing advertisements, Little Gil to get the ideas and write the copy and Bud to make the designs, the drawings. Frank looked across the table at Little Gil. He had his hands lying on the table, soft, rather meaningless little hands, like the hands of a girl child. He was self-conscious. When you looked at him he got nervous.
The men at the table were talking about the new account, what had to be expressed in the newspaper and magazine advertisements, the hook-up with shoe dealers—advertising men’s talk. Bud said to Frank, “What’s wrong with you, Frank? What makes you so quiet?” “Oh, I don’t know,” Frank said. “I’m that way,” he said, and the others laughed, all except Al. They knew all right. They got that way themselves.
Al took a long, silver flask out of his hip pocket. It held a lot and he poured everyone a stiff drink. Frank looked at him and then at Al. “He’s drinking too much,” he thought. “What the hell do I care if he is?” Al called the proprietor’s wife over to the table and asked her, “Have you got any lemons?” She hadn’t any. “Well, can you get us some?”
The proprietor came in from the kitchen. The four men were the only diners in the place that night. The proprietor wore a little greasy white cap and a soiled white apron. The restaurant was on a side street in a wholesale district. Little Gil had said, “We can be quiet there,” but Frank had thought, “What’s to be quiet about?” Al gave the man a quarter and he went out for lemons, so they wouldn’t have to drink straight grain alcohol, unflavored.
The woman, the proprietor’s wife, might have been Italian, or a Greek or a Syrian. She was handsome, all right. . . . She and her husband both spoke brokenly. When the four men had given their orders she went a little away from them, to where there was a counter, near the front, and stood there. Pretty soon she got a chair and sat. From where she sat Frank was the only man of the four she could see, and she sat thus until they left. Her husband waited on the men. They all had the same thing—steak, that turned out to be pretty tough, French-fried potatoes, and peas out of a can. Then they all had some pie and coffee. . . . Anyway, a man’s life goes like that. “I read too many books. I think too much,” Frank thought. What was that line of Shakespeare’s . . . “Perchance to dream . . . Ah, there’s the rub. . . .
“There’s the rub-a-dub-dub
There’s the rub-a-dub-dub. . . .”
Frank decided he’d think about Little Gil, who sat across from him. “I’d better not look at him. It will make him self-conscious,” he thought. Thinking about another man was like reading a book or being with a woman. It took you away from self. That was what you wanted. He began making a picture of Gil’s life, for the rest of the evening.
He’d go back to the office with the other two, Bud and Al. Al wouldn’t work. Why should he work? He was a salesman. Frank smiled. “You got to sell it. What good is it unless you sell it?” he thought. Al would sit around, smoke cigars, read his newspaper. In comes Little Gil. “What about this idea?” He shows it to Al. Well, Al’s got to sell it. Al stretches, takes the cigar out of his mouth. “Pretty good, Gil.” Gil is just making rough suggestions. If Al thinks they’ll do, Bud will make quick drawings and then Gil will write the text. Talk. Al might go out to a show later. He was going to take the one A.M. train for St. Louis.
“You see, this is the idea, Al. . . . Gil would be making layouts, shapely women’s legs. That’s an original idea. Show a woman’s leg.
“Say, in this game the less original you are the better. Get that out of your noodle about being original. Who do you think reads the ads, a lot of highbrows?”
The woman’s foot in the shoe might be resting on purple velvet. There’s a thought. Purple velvet suggests royalty. “Royal American beauties are demanding, etc.” Look, the shoes are like little boats, sailing out on a purple sea.
Little boats on purple seas, going adventuring. Say, little shoes, where are you taking those lovely feet, lovely young women’s legs . . . hips, breasts, shoulders, arms? . . . Whoa! What you got in the package, little woman?
Helen, Thy beauty is to me
Like some Nicean bark of yore. . . .
Funny how a man reads books, walks about, sleeps, eats, remembers snatches of poetry and song . . . all the time wondering, what the hell for, where the hell to. . . .
Surely not just to be able to write shoe advertisements. One of the copywriters in Frank’s firm, Griver-Wharton . . . Tower-top Building, Chicago . . . once said to Frank . . . “I get so I can’t go on,” he said.
“So? What do you do?”
“I read Ralph Waldo Emerson. An essay of his, called ‘Self Reliance,’ helps me most.”
“Then you go back at it again, eh?”
“Sure.”
* * *
That Little Gil—copywriter—Frank never had thought much about him. Gee, what a lot of people you see every day, touch elbows. . . . Ha, here we go! Forward, march! Here we go! You never really think about them. How can you? There are so many of them. . . . What happened to Frank that night he dined with Bud, Al and Gil was a matter of no importance. You read a lot of books, don’t you, and never think about them again? Very likely the author has sweat blood, trying to write that book. All right. That’s his funeral. Take it back to the three-cent-a-day. Get me another. It was just a rainy night and Frank didn’t feel like going home to read. He just sat there in the restaurant with the others. He was eating in silence and taking a good look at the woman, the wife of the proprietor of the place, the one Bud had thought he wanted to paint. She was sitting so none of the others could see her and she kept looking at Frank and he returned the compliment. She wasn’t so young, maybe thirty-three or four, with dark soft skin and big dark eyes. Big breasts, big shoulders and strong shapely legs. The way she was sitting in the chair she spread her legs a little, and Frank thought . . . “Gates of Hercules,” he thought,
“When out of Palos came the gold
To storm the gates of Hercules.”
*
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night. . . .
There was a creeping smile, back somewhere, in Frank, and in the woman. Frank let his thoughts drift. He thought about Bud. Bud didn’t want to be a commercial artist. He remembered what someone in the office had said that day . . . “Bud’s drinking too much. He’s slipping. He isn’t half the man he was a year ago. His drawings haven’t any zip to them any more.” The knockers! Bud had a flair for Frank. He thought Frank was wise, onto people, sophisticated. “That’s the way to be,” Bud said to himself, “don’t expect anything. Trust no one.” I am master of my fate. I am captain of my soul. “Rats,” Frank thought. Still he thought Bud was O.K.
What was that line he had thought out, Bud talking to Gil. Oh, yes. “Look, Gil. What arms! What legs! What shoulders! Flesh, strong and sweet, very s
till, waiting and waiting.” That is what Bud would have said to Gil.
I suppose that’s the way it starts between a man and a woman, any man and any woman. What was it William James said about religion? . . . Music at the back of the mind—that’s it. You don’t always follow it up . . . not one time in ten. How can you? What’s all this got to do with anything?
The point is that Frank found out that Gil was a fairy. How? How does a man find such things out—suddenly like that? You are sitting and don’t know it and then you are sitting, and you do know.
You don’t want to know. It hurts . . . not you, but him. That man’s cork’s out. What about pity? The poor guy.
* * *
Nothing happened that night when the four advertising men dined. They had steaks and French-frieds and peas that came out of a can. No, we haven’t any other vegetable. Forty cents each. Al paid. He left another forty cents for the big woman who came to get the dishes and she took it smiling. Frank didn’t talk. “A fellow ought to take a thing like this,” he thought, “like reading a book.” Title of book, “Rainy Night in Chicago” . . . “a mystery story.” Nights in Chicago were just as mysterious and strange as, say, nights in Egypt, on the Nile—why not? Or Stanley in Africa . . . Stanley in darkest African jungles . . . rain, fever, sores on the legs, animals in the dense forests at night. . . .
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night. . . .
The point was that Frank’s eyes looked up suddenly from that embrace—you might call it that—with the eyes of that big dark-skinned woman and met the eyes of Little Gil. Her eyes had been saying it as a woman’s eyes do say it to a man who has taken her fancy. Gee, wouldn’t it be swell living in the world, if people could be honest? You, being a man, don’t ever get one woman. . . . “There, that settles it—that’s off my mind” . . . and a woman, a real woman, don’t ever get that from any one man.
But Frank, looking around suddenly, had got it also from Little Gil’s eyes.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 84