Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 30

  The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature, undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the town.

  “There wasn’t any use wasting words when I found he didn’t care for me or for the baby and wouldn’t support us, so I left him,” she said in a level, businesslike way.

  When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was seven dollars a week.

  “And so,” she said, “I began going on the street. I knew no one and there was nothing else to do. I couldn’t do that in the town where the boy lived, so I came away. I’ve gone from city to city, working mostly for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the streets. I’m not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of them care about me. I don’t like to have them touch me with their hands. I can’t drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn’t have married. Not that I minded my husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found there wasn’t anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn’t the strength, and when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about myself — any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.

  “It hasn’t been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me I walk along the street praying that I won’t shudder and draw away when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won’t get any money.

  “And then they talk and lie about themselves. I’ve had them try to work off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That’s the hard part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these others lying to me.”

  She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and sat looking into the fire.

  “My mother,” she began again, “didn’t always wear a clean dress. She couldn’t. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I’m losing it all. All evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn’t clean. Most of the time I don’t care. Being clean doesn’t go with what I am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don’t go on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I don’t seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets.”

  The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices. The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.

  As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.

  “I wouldn’t mind about you,” she said, looking at him frankly.

  Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. “It’s been a good evening,” he said, “we’ll go through with it as it stands.”

  “Thanks for that,” she said, “and there is something else I want to tell you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don’t want to go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders.”

  As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night.

  “Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man, and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt and destroy?”

  CHAPTER VI

  ONE MORNING, AT the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia, looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.

  He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind.

  In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.

  Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again the quiet elegance of the surroundings.

  “Hello, Moneymaker,” said Jackson, heartily. “Heard you had gone to a nunnery.”

  Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson’s eyes open with astonishment.

  “You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man’s spending month after month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this,” he observed.

  Jackson laughed and lig
hted a cigarette.

  “How little you know me,” he said. “I would live my life in the open but that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go back to Morrison and Prince and money making?”

  Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him. How satisfied and happy he looked.

  “I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely,” he said.

  “They are a rotten crew,” Jackson assured him, “and I am taking a night train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over.”

  On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.

  “I am going to sail from Seattle,” he said, “and go everywhere and hunt everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there until I die.”

  “I will go with you,” said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit and continued westward with his new acquaintance.

  For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous, big-hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and that Sam was a fool to go.

  After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that world.

  Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her. For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the years.

  In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town, where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing songs.

  One of the girls sat on Sam’s lap and put an arm about his neck.

  “Give me some money, rich man,” she said.

  Sam looked at her closely.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.

  “I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes,” she said frankly, “but if Tim saw me here he would kill me.”

  Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a taxicab drove back to his hotel.

  After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a return to business which he did not execute, and month after month continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry and talkative, calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain. In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains, sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the passing country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed’s hotel in the Illinois town.

  From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings, Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for hours by little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor’s head.

  BOOK IV

  CHAPTER I

  ONE AFTERNOON IN early September Sam got on a westward-bound train intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he thought he would do something for them.

  “I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my money,” he thought. “Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear.”

  At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.

  In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.

  “I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the river,” he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. “Take us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it costs.”

  It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.

  “Sing louder,” he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his companions.

  A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck before the shouting crowd.

  “Now dance!” he growled, “or I will throw you into the river.”

  The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came to him and he raised his hand for silence.

  “I want to see a woman who is a mother,” he shouted. “I want to see a woman who has borne children.”

  A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes spr
ang from the group gathered about the dancer.

  “I have borne children — three of them,” she said, laughing up into his face. “I can bear more of them.”

  Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on the deck. The crowd laughed.

  “Belle is after his roll,” whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a tall woman with blue eyes.

  As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs, went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.

  “My children are there. They are getting supper now,” she said.

  She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam’s companion kept time with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood looking up the river.

  “Turn back,” he said, “I am tired of this crew.”

  On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.

  “We will go to my house,” she said quietly, “just you and me. I will show you the kids.”

  Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam her story.

  She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.