Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 20

Sam went to the ‘phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans for the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had been standing outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the mouthpiece of the ‘phone.

  “Sam! Sam!” she cried. “Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of what I have said!”

  Over the ‘phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making some detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.

  Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the fire until his train time, talking like lovers.

  To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.

  “Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it,” she had wired.

  While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.

  “Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and only half a fool.”

  Sam was irritated. “It is deliberate pettiness and weakness,” he thought, when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding his immediate return. “The situation calls for drastic action and perhaps one good stinging reproof will stop it for all time.”

  Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention to the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and not upon her impulses.

  Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and he said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had come into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said and when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and mailed it at a passing station.

  Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came back to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire asking her not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he would hurry through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.

  When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and read the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her growing worse daily and became alarmed for her health.

  And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open air. He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and went to bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a stormy passage between them.

  There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near insanity. With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would take up some minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had quoted from some book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk of it until his head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of his hands to keep control of himself. After such a day he would steal off by himself and, walking rapidly, would try through pure physical fatigue to force his mind to give up the remembrance of the persistent, complaining voice. At times he would give way to fits of anger and strew impotent oaths along the silent street, or, in another mood, would mumble and talk to himself, praying for strength and courage to keep his own head during the ordeal through which he thought they were passing together. And when he returned from such a walk and from such a struggle with himself it often occurred that he would find her waiting in the arm chair before the fire in her room, her mind clear and her little face wet with the tears of her repentance.

  And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged that Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they drove there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring pains gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness had hold of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new life Sue was transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes glistened.

  “I am going to do it,” she cried; “my black fear is gone. I shall give you a child — a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It will be beautiful.”

  When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of physical sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his helplessness.

  At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.

  “Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you.”

  At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced up and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge moments when a man’s brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans for the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life, halt, and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little clock on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop also and wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and vital seemed now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the silent white-clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the presence of this greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up and down peering at the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting at the stem of his empty pipe.

  And then through the swinging door came Grover.

  “We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide.”

  Sam sprang past him toward the door.

  “You bungler,” he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet corridor. “You do not know what this means. Let me go.”

  Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men stood facing each other.

  “You stay here,” said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; “I will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now answer me — do you want to take the chance?”

  “No! No!” Sam shouted. “No! I want her — Sue — alive and well, back through that door.”

  A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the doctor’s face.

  “Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will — —”

  Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor Grover’s office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.

  “Do not worry,” he said. “She will be all right. Grover will take care of her. Nothing can happen to little Sue.”

  The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue, wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the tears ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the woman’s tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.

  “My mother is dead,” he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. “I wish that you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me.”

  When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door of the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice, thin and weak, talking to Grover.

  “Unfit — Sue
McPherson unfit,” said the voice, and Sam thought it was filled with an infinite weariness.

  He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned her eyes to him smiling bravely.

  “The next time we’ll make it,” she said.

  The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again he shook his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and reassuring.

  After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused to see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in some way responsible for her physical inability to bear living children, and when she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and listless but grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life she so wanted to feel in her arms.

  During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam’s nerves, but having learned to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far as in him lay to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she sometimes said; and the third time, it was agreed between them that if they were again unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other things.

  “If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through with each other for good,” she said one day in one of the fits of cold anger that were a part of child bearing with her.

  That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death that ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a child by a fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the prisoners at Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries to a little pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that he too was creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death. In a conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had been decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand on the part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case unless permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be performed.

  “Take the chances that need be taken,” Sam had said to Grover after the conference; “she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child.”

  In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he stood motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression that they were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside. When, from a distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he shook with fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns clad in white passed.

  “Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section,” said one of them; “he is getting out of date. Hope he doesn’t bungle it.”

  In Sam’s ears rang the remembrance of Sue’s voice, the Sue who that first time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the determined smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white face looking up from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through the door.

  “I am afraid, Dr. Grover — I am afraid I am unfit,” he had heard her say as the door closed.

  And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his life. On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked to the swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating room where Grover was at work upon Sue.

  The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw its rays directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal operating table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set in shining glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense, expectant atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women, faceless, hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through the white masks that covered their faces.

  Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild, half-seeing eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time to time little shining instruments from a swinging table close at his hand. The nurse standing beside him looked up toward the light and began calmly threading a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at the side of the room lay the last of Sue’s tremendous efforts toward new life, the last of their dreams of the great family.

  Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall, aroused him and he struggled to his feet.

  Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.

  “Damn it, man, get out of here.”

  Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and down a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had no doubt of Sue’s death.

  “She is gone,” he muttered, hurrying bareheaded along the deserted streets.

  Through street after street he ran. Twice he came out upon the shores of the lake, and, then turning, went back into the heart of the city through streets bathed in the warm moonlight. Once he turned quickly at a corner and stepping into a vacant lot stood behind a high board fence as a policeman strolled along the street. Into his head came the idea that he had killed Sue and that the blue-clad figure walking with heavy tread on the stone pavement was seeking him to take him back to where she lay white and lifeless. Again he stopped, before a little frame drugstore on a corner, and sitting down on the steps before it cursed God openly and defiantly like an angry boy defying his father. Some instinct led him to look at the sky through the tangle of telegraph wires overhead.

  “Go on and do what you dare!” he cried. “I will not follow you now. I shall never try to find you after this.”

  Presently he began laughing at himself for the instinct that had led him to look at the sky and to shout out his defiance and, getting up, wandered on. In his wanderings he came to a railroad track where a freight train groaned and rattled over a crossing. When he came up to it he jumped upon an empty coal car, falling as he climbed, and cutting his face upon the sharp pieces of coal that lay scattered about the bottom of the car.

  The train ground along slowly, stopping occasionally, the engine shrieking hysterically.

  After a time he got out of the car and dropped to the ground. On all sides of him were marshes, the long rank marsh grasses rolling and tossing in the moonlight. When the train had passed he followed it, walking stumblingly along. As he walked, following the blinking lights at the end of the train, he thought of the scene in the hospital and of Sue lying dead for that — that ping livid and shapeless on the table under the lights.

  Where the solid ground ran up to the tracks Sam sat down under a tree. Peace came over him. “This is the end of things,” he thought, and was like a tired child comforted by its mother. He thought of the sweet-faced nurse who had walked with him that other time in the corridor of the hospital and who had wept because of his fears, and then of the night when he had felt the throat of his father between his fingers in the squalid little kitchen. He ran his hands along the ground. “Good old ground,” he said. A sentence came into his mind followed by the figure of John Telfer striding, stick in hand, along a dusty road. “Here is spring come and time to plant out flowers in the grass,” he said aloud. His face felt swollen and sore from the fall in the freight car and he lay down on the ground under a tree and slept.

  When he woke it was morning and grey clouds were drifting across the sky. Within sight, down a road, a trolley car went past into the city. Before him, in the midst of the marsh, lay a low lake, and a raised walk, with boats tied to the posts on which it stood, ran down to the water. He went down the walk, bathed his bruised face in the water
, and boarding a car went back into the city.

  In the morning air a new thought took possession of him. The wind ran along a dusty road beside the car track, picking up little handfuls of dust and playfully throwing them about. He had a strained, eager feeling like some one listening for a faint call out of the distance.

  “To be sure,” he thought, “I know what it is, it is my wedding day. I am to marry Sue Rainey to-day.”

  At the house he found Grover and Colonel Tom standing in the breakfast room. Grover looked at his swollen, distorted face. His voice trembled.

  “Poor devil!” he said. “You have had a night!”

  Sam laughed and slapped Colonel Tom on the shoulder.

  “We will have to begin getting ready,” he said. “The wedding is at ten. Sue will be getting anxious.”

  Grover and Colonel Tom took him by the arm and began leading him up the stairs, Colonel Tom weeping like a woman.

  “Silly old fool,” thought Sam.

  When, two weeks later, he again opened his eyes to consciousness Sue sat beside his bed in a reclining chair, her little thin white hand in his.

  “Get the baby!” he cried, believing anything possible. “I want to see the baby!”

  She laid her head down on the pillow.

  “It was gone when you saw it,” she said, and put an arm about his neck.

  When the nurse came back she found them, their heads together upon the pillow, crying weakly like two tired children.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE BLOW GIVEN the plan of life so carefully thought out and so eagerly accepted by the young McPhersons threw them back upon themselves. For several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves very seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the thought that they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged upon a worthy and ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed in admiration of their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous, disciplined, new life they were to give the world by the combined efficiency of their two bodies and minds they were, at a word and a shake of the head from Doctor Grover, compelled to remake the outline of their future together.