In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought, great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.
In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became distended, and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.
All of his companions did not suffer equally. Webster seemed made for the life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts sought and to which Sam submitted. One day Sam and Crofts caught him in an effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining deal and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New York to become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators and philanthropists.
Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet continue living with them year after year. There was a kind of rough squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal he would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes. After Sam left Chicago he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the vaudeville stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort to capture control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached by the actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.
And Sam was a man sick. Day after day he went on drinking more and more heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less and less thought of himself. One day he received a long letter from John Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him for his neglect of her.
“She was ill for a year and without an income,” wrote Telfer. Sam noticed that the man’s hand had begun to tremble. “She lied to me and told me you had sent her money, but now that she is dead I find that though she wrote you she got no answer. Her old aunt told me.”
Sam put the letter into his pocket and going into one of his clubs began drinking with a crowd of men he found idling there. He had paid little attention to his correspondence for months. No doubt the letter from Mary had been received by his secretary and thrown aside with the letters of thousands of other women, begging letters, amorous letters, letters directed at him because of his wealth and the prominence given his exploits by the newspapers.
After wiring an explanation and mailing a check the size of which filled John Telfer with admiration, Sam with a half dozen fellow roisterers spent the late afternoon and evening going from saloon to saloon through the south side. When he got to his apartments late that night, his head was reeling and his mind filled with distorted memories of drinking men and women and of himself standing on a table in some obscure drinking place and calling upon the shouting, laughing hangers-on of his crowd of rich money spenders to think and to work and to seek Truth.
He went to sleep in his chair, his mind filled with the dancing faces of dead women, Mary Underwood and Janet and Sue, tear-stained faces calling to him. When he awoke and shaved he went out into the street and to another down-town club.
“I wonder if Sue is dead, too,” he muttered, remembering his dream.
At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to come at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated. When he got there he found a wire from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and despondency over the loss of his old business standing and reputation, Colonel Tom had shot himself in a New York hotel.
Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and fighting to get his head clear.
“The old coward. The damned old coward,” he muttered; “any one could have done that.”
When Lewis came into Sam’s office he found his chief sitting at his desk fingering the telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.
“Well, do not blame yourself for that,” he said, with quick understanding.
“I don’t,” Sam muttered; “I do not blame myself for anything. I am a result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am going to begin again when I get things thought out.”
Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour he sat there reviewing his life. When he came to the day that he had humiliated Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had written on the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted. “The best men spend their lives seeking truth.”
Suddenly he came to a decision and, calling Lewis, began laying out a plan of action. His head cleared and the ring came back into his voice. To Lewis he gave an option on his entire holdings of Edwards Consolidated stocks and bonds and to him also he entrusted the clearing up of deal after deal in which he was interested. Then, calling a broker, he began throwing a mass of stock on the market. When Lewis told him that Crofts was ‘phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with the help of another banker supporting the market and taking Sam’s stocks as fast as offered, he laughed and giving Lewis instructions regarding the disposal of his monies walked out of the office, again a free man and again seeking the answer to his problem.
He made no attempt to answer Sue’s wire. He was restless to get at something he had in his mind. He went to his apartments and packed a bag and from there disappeared saying goodbye to no one. In his mind was no definite idea of where he was going or what he was going to do. He knew only that he would follow the message his hand had written. He would try to spend his life seeking truth.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
ONE DAY WHEN the youth Sam McPherson was new in the city he went on a Sunday afternoon to a down-town theatre to hear a sermon. The sermon was delivered by a small dark-skinned Boston man, and seemed to the young McPherson scholarly and well thought out.
“The greatest man is he whose deeds affect the greatest number of lives,” the speaker had said, and the thought had stuck in Sam’s mind. Now walking along the street carrying his travelling bag, he remembered the sermon and the thought and shook his head in doubt.
“What I have done here in this city must have affected thousands of lives,” he mused, and felt a quickening of his blood at just letting go of his thoughts as he had not dared do since that day when, by breaking his word to Sue, he had started on his career as a business giant.
He began to think of the quest on which he had started and had keen satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.
“I will begin all over and come up to Truth through work,” he told himself. “I will leave the money hunger behind me, and if it returns I will come back here to Chicago and see my fortune piled up and the men rushing about the banks and the stock exchange and the court they pay to such fools and brutes as I have been, and that will cure me.”
Into the Illinois Central Station he went, a strange spectacle. A smile came to his lips as he sat on a bench along the wall between an immigrant from Russia and a small plump farmer’s wife who held a banana in her hand and gave bites of it to a rosy-cheeked babe lying in her arms. He, an American multimillionaire, a man in the midst of his money-making, one who had realised the American dream, to have sickened at the feast and to have wandered out of a fashionable club with a bag in his hand and a roll of bills in his pocket and to have come on this strange quest — to seek Truth, to seek God. A few years of the fast greedy living in the city, that had seemed so splendid to the Iowa boy and to the men and women who
had lived in his town, and then a woman had died lonely and in want in that Iowa town, and half across the continent a fat blustering old man had shot himself in a New York hotel, and here he sat.
Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer’s wife, he walked across the room to the ticket window and standing there watched the people with definite destinations in mind come up, lay down money, and taking their tickets go briskly away. He had no fear of being known. Although his name and his picture had been upon the front pages of Chicago newspapers for years, he felt so great a change within himself from just the resolution he had taken that he had no doubt of passing unnoticed.
A thought struck him. Looking up and down the long room filled with its strangely assorted clusters of men and women a sense of the great toiling masses of people, the labourers, the small merchants, the skilled mechanics, came over him.
“These are the Americans,” he began telling himself, “these people with children beside them and with hard daily work to be done, and many of them with stunted or imperfectly developed bodies, not Crofts, not Morrison and I, but these others who toil without hope of luxury and wealth, who make up the armies in times of war and raise up boys and girls to do the work of the world in their turn.”
He fell into the line moving toward the ticket window behind a sturdy-looking old man who carried a box of carpenter tools in one hand and a bag in the other, and bought a ticket to the same Illinois town to which the old man was bound.
In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet talk — the old man talking of his family. He had a son, married and living in the Illinois town to which he was going, of whom he began boasting. The son, he said, had gone to that town and had prospered there, owning a hotel which his wife managed while he worked as a builder.
“Ed,” he said, “keeps fifty or sixty men going all summer. He has sent for me to come and take charge of a gang. He knows well enough I will get the work out of them.”
From Ed the old man drifted into talk of himself and his life, telling bare facts with directness and simplicity and making no effort to disguise a slight turn of vanity in his success.
“I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are all doing well,” he said.
He told of each in detail. One, who had taken to books, was a mechanical engineer in a manufacturing town in New England. The mother of his children had died the year before and of his three daughters two had married mechanics. The third, Sam gathered, had not done well and from something the old man said he thought she had perhaps gone the wrong way there in Chicago.
To the old man Sam talked of God and of a man’s effort to get truth out of life.
“I have thought of it a lot,” he said.
The old man was interested. He looked at Sam and then out at the car window and began talking of his own beliefs, the substance of which Sam could not get.
“God is a spirit and lives in the growing corn,” said the old man, pointing out the window at the passing fields.
He began talking of churches and of ministers, against whom he was filled with bitterness.
“They are dodgers. They do not get at things. They are damned dodgers, pretending to be good,” he declared.
Sam talked of himself, saying that he was alone in the world and had money. He said that he wanted work in the open air, not for the money it would bring him, but because his paunch was large and his hand trembled in the morning.
“I’ve been drinking,” he said, “and I want to work hard day after day so that my muscles may become firm and sleep come to me at night.”
The old man thought that his son could find Sam a place.
“He’s a driver — Ed is,” he said, laughing, “and he won’t pay you much. Ed don’t let go of money. He’s a tight one.”
Night had come when they reached the town where Ed lived, and the three men walked over a bridge, beneath which roared a waterfall, toward the long poorly-lighted main street of the town and Ed’s hotel. Ed, a young, broad-shouldered man, with a dry cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, led the way. He had engaged Sam standing in the darkness on the station platform, accepting his story without comment.
“I’ll let you carry timbers and drive nails,” he said, “that will harden you up.”
On the way over the bridge he talked of the town.
“It’s a live place,” he said, “we are getting people in here.”
“Look at that!” he exclaimed, chewing at the cigar and pointing to the waterfall that foamed and roared almost under the bridge. “There’s a lot of power there and where there’s power there will be a city.”
At Ed’s hotel some twenty men sat about a long low office. They were, for the most part, middle-aged working men and sat in silence reading and smoking pipes. At a table pushed against the wall a bald-headed young man with a scar on his cheek played solitaire with a greasy pack of cards, and in front of him and sitting in a chair tilted against the wall a sullen-faced boy idly watched the game. When the three men came into the office the boy dropped his chair to the floor and stared at Ed who stared back at him. It was as though a contest of some sort went on between them. A tall neatly-dressed woman, with a brisk manner and pale, inexpressive, hard blue eyes, stood back of a little combined desk and cigar case at the end of the room, and as the three walked toward her she looked from Ed to the sullen-faced boy and then again at Ed. Sam concluded she was a woman bent on having her own way. She had that air.
“This is my wife,” said Ed, introducing Sam with a wave of his hand and passing around the end of the desk to stand by her side.
Ed’s wife twirled the hotel register about facing Sam, nodded her head, and then, leaning over the desk, bestowed a quick kiss upon the leathery cheek of the old carpenter.
Sam and the old man found a place in chairs along the wall and sat down among the silent men. The old man pointed to the boy in the chair beside the card players.
“Their son,” he whispered cautiously.
The boy looked at his mother, who in turn looked steadily at him, and got up from his chair. Back of the desk Ed talked in low tones to his wife. The boy, stopping before Sam and the old man and still looking toward the woman, put out his hand which the old man took. Then, without speaking, he went past the desk and through a doorway, and began noisily climbing a flight of stairs, followed by his mother. As they climbed they berated each other, their voices rising to a high pitch and echoing through the upper part of the house.
Ed, coming across to them, talked to Sam about the assignment of a room, and the men began looking at the stranger; noting his fine clothes, their eyes filled with curiosity.
“Selling something?” asked a large red-haired young man, rolling a quid of tobacco in his mouth.
“No,” replied Sam shortly, “going to work for Ed.”
The silent men in chairs along the wall dropped their newspapers and stared, and the bald-headed young man at the table sat with open mouth, a card held suspended in the air. Sam had become, for the moment, a centre of interest and the men stirred in their chairs and began to whisper and point to him.
A large, watery-eyed man, with florid cheeks, clad in a long overcoat with spots down the front, came in at the door and passed through the room bowing and smiling to the men. Taking Ed by the arm he disappeared into a little barroom, where Sam could hear him talking in low tones.
After a little while the florid-faced man came and put his head through the barroom door into the office.
“Come on, boys,” he said, smiling and nodding right and left, “the drinks are on me.”
The men got up and filed into the bar, the old man and Sam remaining seated in their chairs. They began talking in undertones.
“I’ll start ’em thinking — these men,” said the old man.
From his pocket he took a pamphlet and gave it to Sam. It was a crudely written attack upon rich men and corporations.
“Some brains in the fellow who wrote that,” said th
e old carpenter, rubbing his hands together and smiling.
Sam did not think so. He sat reading it and listening to the loud, boisterous voices of the men in the barroom. The florid-faced man was explaining the details of a proposed town bond issue. Sam gathered that the water power in the river was to be developed.
“We want to make this a live town,” said the voice of Ed, earnestly.
The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began whispering to Sam.
“I’ll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme,” he said.
He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.
“If there is Ed will be in on it,” he added. “You can’t lose Ed. He’s a slick one.”
He took the pamphlet from Sam’s hand and put it in his pocket.
“I’m a socialist,” he explained, “but don’t say anything. Ed’s against ’em.”
The men filed back into the room, each with a freshly-lighted cigar in his mouth, and the florid-faced man followed them and went out at the office door.
“Well, so long, boys,” he shouted heartily.
Ed went silently up the stairs to join the mother and boy, whose voices could still be heard raised in outbursts of wrath from above as the men took their former chairs along the wall.
“Well, Bill’s sure all right,” said the red-haired young man, evidently expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.
A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the room leaned against the cigar case.
“Did you ever hear this one?” he asked, looking about.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 24
