Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 27

  “One has to keep going,” said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him on the matter.

  When told to keep Sam’s wage until the end of the season he looked relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried and said that he had no money.

  “I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a little time,” he said.

  Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him from the shadows at the back of the barn.

  “Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?” he asked.

  Joe looked indignant.

  “A man wants independence,” he said.

  When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a stream, and tearing up Joe’s note watched the torn pieces of it float away upon the brown water.

  CHAPTER III

  THROUGH THE SUMMER and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days on which something happened or on which something outside himself interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed, staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange experiences.

  At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town in eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a railroad track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September at the end of his first year of wandering and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood by the bar drinking together. As they drank they became more and more friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs and boasting. One of them got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced man with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender and had to work long hours.

  “Drink what you want, boys, and then I’ll tell you what you owe,” he said to the men standing along the bar.

  Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room, and looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had for the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen, Sam said to himself, “I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At least I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this tramping on the road and thinking.”

  The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an obscure place had made its proprietor what is called “well fixed.” It had a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the main street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks was but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men from the freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand about drinking beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at the side door was prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door, took drinks and hurried out again, looking up the alley and running quickly when they found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and when Sam had worked for a few days in the place he once made the mistake of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.

  “Let them ask for it,” said the proprietor gruffly. “Do you want to insult a man?”

  On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks. When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these men and put the bottle before them, saying, “Drink all you want of the stuff.”

  When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment by the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat pockets and looking at the floor.

  “Bar flies,” the proprietor explained laconically.

  The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it into stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into bottles as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles of well known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for one of these brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from beneath the bar, a bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of his own mixture. As Al sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know nothing the bartender’s art and stood all day handing out Al’s poisonous stuff and the foaming glasses of beer the workingmen drank in the evening.

  Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam most. Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over their shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at Sam apologetically.

  “Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold,” they would say, as though repeating a formula.

  At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life’s unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day’s duty, and his curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in at the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked them why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam’s question an impertinence.

  “You fool, don’t you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?” Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.

  CHAPTER IV

  ONE FINE WARM morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and women going through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to overcome a feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening before. He had come into town over a poorly made clay road running through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores of a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges of the town.

  Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of man’s struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in the little park, with the early morning sun shining down through the glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him th
rough the night.

  A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying workers, and stopped to sit beside him.

  “On the road, brother?” he asked.

  Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.

  “Fools and slaves,” he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women passing on the sidewalk. “See them going like beasts to their bondage? What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of dogs.”

  He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.

  “We are all fools and slaves,” said Sam, stoutly.

  Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.

  “There, you talk sense,” he cried. “Welcome to our town, stranger. We have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among them. Come and have breakfast with me.”

  In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of the fact.

  “I refuse to work! I scorn it!” he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in the air.

  Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried because of his connection with the movement.

  “She wants me to be respectable,” he said sadly, and added, “What’s the use trying to explain to a woman? I can’t get her to see the difference between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I’ve given up trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police.”

  He talked of a strike going on among some girl employés of a Jewish shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to the scene of the strike.

  The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting oaths over his shoulder.

  Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and down with them before the grocery store.

  “What are you doing to win?” he asked when they had told him of their grievances.

  “We do what we can!” said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and spokesman among the strikers. “We walk up and down here and try to get a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns, when they go in and come out.”

  Frank, the University man, spoke up. “We are putting up stickers everywhere,” he said. “I myself have put up hundreds of them.”

  He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles about town. The thing was vilely written. “Down with the dirty scabs” was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.

  Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude brutality of the text printed on the slip.

  “Do you call women workers names like that?” he asked.

  “They have taken our work from us,” the Jewish girl answered simply and began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the low wage had meant to them and to their families. “To me it does not so much matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can support me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here with which to feed their families.”

  Sam’s mind began working on the problem.

  “Here,” he declared, “is something definite to do, a battle in which I will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women.”

  He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of honour unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to Bill and Ed.

  “I failed with my money,” he thought, “now I will try to help these girls with my energy.”

  Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.

  “I will help you get your places back,” he said.

  Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as they came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and turned in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar still in his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets running forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one of whom, a young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted something over her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the Hebrew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled and lighted his pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls running through his mind.

  During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a saloon in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to men of the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three girls patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless walking seemed to him a useless waste of energy.

  “They should be doing something more definite,” he thought.

  After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked along the street talking of the strike.

  “You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names,” he said. “I do not like that ‘dirty scab’ sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot help you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here in this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to the men who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street and you already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the girls who have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes martyrs of them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this morning?”

  The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.

  “Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker.”

  They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track and a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at the curb before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept houses Sam said, “Men have bought these things for their women.”

  A shadow fell across the girl’s face.

  “I suppose all of us want what these women have,” she answered. “We do not really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know the world. What a woman really wants is a man,” she added shortly.

  Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind. He had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by mail order houses.

  “We will have a mail order strike here,” he said and went on to lay before her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and some others of the striking girls, should go about town getting the names and the mail addresses of the girl strikebreakers.

  “Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which these girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the same houses,” he suggested. “Then you get the striking girls and women together and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day after day to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding houses, and to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with them. We won’t call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten
in this fight means to the women in your union, tell it simply and truthfully as you told it to me this morning.”

  “It will cost such a lot,” said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.

  Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.

  “I will pay,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked, looking at him sharply.

  “Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work,” he replied, and then went on hurriedly, “It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for granted. You won’t be sorry.”

  Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month’s rent in advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had been brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold, black type ran the words, “The Girl Strikers.”

  That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses of the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.

  One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning and evening.

  “I will have other help for you there,” he said. “Before you go home to-night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am having printed for you.”

  Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get additional names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important ones from girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the morning to help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl he told to take charge of the girls at work in the room — on the morrow to become also an office — and to superintend getting the names.

  Frank rose at the back of the room.

  “Who are you anyway?” he asked.