A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago | Page 6

the better auctioneer I was the more money I lost, on account of her being so susceptible to my line of stuff. It sounds funny, but it's a fact. So I told her. I made a clean breast. I told her what a liar I was and how all the stuff I pulled from the auction stand was the bunk and how she was a boob for falling for it. And so on and so on. Say, I sold myself to her as the world's greatest, all around, low down, hideous liar that ever walked in shoe leather. And that's how it started. This divorce today is kind of an anti-climax. We ain't had much to do with each other ever since that confession."
Mr. Ludlow stared sorrowfully into the remains of a glass of juniper juice.
"I'll never marry again," he moaned. "I ain't the kind that makes a good husband. A good husband is a man who is just an ordinary liar. And me? Well, I'm an auctioneer."

FOG PATTERNS
The fog tiptoes into the streets. It walks like a great cat through the air and slowly devours the city.
The office buildings vanish, leaving behind thin pencil lines and smoke blurs. The pavements become isolated, low-roofed corridors. Overhead the electric signs whisper enigmatically and the window lights dissolve.
The fog thickens till the city disappears. High up, where the mists thin into a dark, sulphurous glow, roof bubbles float. The great cat's work is done. It stands balancing itself on the heads of people and arches its back against the vanished buildings.
* * * * *
I walk along thinking about the way the streets look and arranging adjectives in my mind. In the heavy mist people appear detached. They no longer seem to belong to a pursuit in common. Usually the busy part of the city is like the exposed mechanism of some monstrous clock. And people scurry about losing themselves in cogs and springs and levers.
But now the monstrous clock is almost hidden. The stores and offices and factories that form the mechanism of this clock are buried behind the fog. The cat has eaten them up. Hidden within the mist the cogs still turn and the springs unwind. But for the moment they seem non-existent. And the people drifting hurriedly by in the fog seem as if they were not going and coming from stores, offices and factories. As if they were solitaries hunting something in the labyrinths of the fog.
Yes, we are all lost and wandering in the thick mists. We have no destinations. The city is without outlines. And the drift of figures is a meaningless thing. Figures that are going nowhere and coming from nowhere. A swarm of supernumeraries who are not in the play. Who saunter, dash, scurry, hesitate in search of a part in the play.
This is a curious illusion. I stop and listen to music. Overhead a piano is playing and a voice singing. A song-boosting shop above Monroe and State streets. A ballad of the cheap cabarets. Yet, because it is music, it has a mystery in it.
The fog pictures grow charming. There is an idea in them now. People are detached little decorations etched upon a mist. The cat has eaten up the monstrous clock and people have rid themselves of their routine, which was to tumble and scurry among its cogs and levers. They are done with life, with buying and selling and with the perpetual errand. And they have become a swarm of little ornaments. Men and women denuded of the city. Their outlines posture quaintly in the mist. Their little faces say, "The clock is gone. There is nothing any more to make us alive. So we have become our unconnected selves."
* * * * *
Beside me in the fog a man stands next to a tall paper rack. I remember that this is the rack where the out-of-town papers are on sale. The papers are rolled up and thrust like rows of little white dolls in the rack. I wonder that this should be a newspaper stand. It looks like almost anything else in the fog.
A pretty girl emerges from the background of fog. She talks to the man next to the rack.
"Have you a Des Moines newspaper?" she asks.
The man is very businesslike. He fishes out a newspaper and sells it. At the sight of its headlines the girl's eyes light up. It is as if she had met a very close friend. She will walk along feeling comforted now. Chicago is a stranger. Its fog-hidden buildings and streets are strangers and its crowds criss-crossing everywhere are worse than strangers. But now she has Des Moines under her arm. Des Moines is a companion that will make the fog seem less lonely. Later she will sit down in