Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Occasionally, as though making a concession to his patrons, the oculist spent an evening among them. Once after reciting one of the sonnets of Shakespeare he put a hand on the bar and rocking gently back and forth sang in a drink-broken voice a ballad beginning “The harp that once through Tara’s halls the soul of music shed.” After the song he put his head down upon the bar and wept while the miners looked on touched with sympathy.

  On the summer afternoon when Beaut McGregor listened, the oculist was engaged in a violent quarrel with another man, drunk like himself. The second man was a slender dandified fellow of middle age who sold shoes for a Philadelphia jobbing-house. He sat in a chair tilted against the hotel and tried to read aloud from a book. When he was fairly launched in a long paragraph the oculist interrupted. Staggering up and down the narrow board walk before the hotel the old drunkard raved and swore. He seemed beside himself with wrath.

  “I am sick of such slobbering philosophy,” he declared. “Even the reading of it makes you drool at the mouth. You do not say the words sharply, and they can’t be said sharply. I’m a strong man myself.”

  Spreading his legs wide apart and blowing up his cheeks, the oculist beat upon his breast. With a wave of his hand he dismissed the man in the chair.

  “You but slobber and make a foul noise,” he declared. “I know your kind. I spit upon you. The Congress at Washington is full of such fellows as is also the House of Commons in England. In France they were once in charge. They ran things in France until the coming of a man such as myself. They were lost in the shadow of the great Napoleon.”

  The oculist as though dismissing the dandified man from his mind turned to address Beaut. He talked in French and the man in the chair fell into a troubled sleep. “I am like Napoleon,” the drunkard declared, breaking again into English. Tears began to show in his eyes. “I take the money of these miners and I give them nothing. The spectacles I sell to their wives for five dollars cost me but fifteen cents. I ride over these brutes as Napoleon rode over Europe. There would be order and purpose in me were I not a fool. I am like Napoleon in that I have utter contempt for men.”

  Again and again the words of the drunkard came back into the mind of the McGregor boy influencing his thoughts. Grasping nothing of the philosophy back of the man’s words his imagination was yet touched by the drunkard’s tale of the great Frenchman, babbled into his ears, and it in some way seemed to give point to his hatred of the disorganised ineffectiveness of the life about him.

  After Nance McGregor opened the bakery another strike came to disturb the prosperity of the business. Again the miners walked idly through the streets. Into the bakery they came to get bread and told Nance to write the debt down against them. Beaut McGregor was disturbed. He saw his father’s money being spent for flour which when baked into loaves went out of the shop under the arms of the miners who shuffled as they walked. One night a man whose name appeared on their books followed by a long record of charged loaves came reeling past the bakery. McGregor went to his mother and protested. “They have money to get drunk,” he said, “let them pay for their loaves.”

  Nance McGregor went on trusting the miners. She thought of the women and children in the houses on the hill and when she heard of the plans of the mining company to evict the miners from their houses she shuddered. “I was the wife of a miner and I will stick to them,” she thought.

  One day the mine manager came into the bakery. He leaned over the showcase and talked to Nance. The son went and stood by his mother’s side to listen. “It has got to be stopped,” the manager was saying. “I will not see you ruin yourself for these cattle. I want you to close this place till the strike is over. If you won’t close it I will. The building belongs to us. They did not appreciate what your husband did and why should you ruin yourself for them?”

  The woman looked at him and answered in a low tone full of resolution. “They thought he was crazy and he was,” she said; “but what made him so — the rotten timbers in the mine that broke and crushed him. You and not they are responsible for my man and what he was.”

  Beaut McGregor interrupted. “Well I think he is right,” he declared, leaning over the counter beside his mother and looking into her face. “The miners don’t want better things for their families, they want more money to get drunk. We will close the doors here. We will put no more money into bread to go into their gullets. They hated father and he hated them and now I hate them also.”

  Beaut walked around the end of the counter and went with the mine manager to the door. He locked it and put the key into his pocket. Then he walked to the rear of the bake shop where his mother sat on a box weeping. “It is time a man took charge here,” he said.

  Nance McGregor and her son sat in the bakery and looked at each other. Miners came along the street, tried the door and went away grumbling. Word ran from lip to lip up the hillside. “The mine manager has closed Nance McGregor’s shop,” said the women leaning over back fences. Children sprawling on the floors of the houses put up their heads and howled. Their lives were a succession of new terrors. When a day passed that a new terror did not shake them they went to bed happy. When the miner and his woman stood by the door talking in low tones they cried, expecting to be put to bed hungry. When guarded talk did not go on by the door the miner came home drunk and beat the mother and the children lay in beds along the wall trembling with fright.

  Late that night a party of miners came to the door of the bakery and beat upon it with their fists. “Open up here!” they shouted. Beaut came out of the rooms above the bakery and stood in the empty shop. His mother sat in a chair in her room and trembled. He went to the door and unlocking it stepped out. The miners stood in groups on the wooden sidewalk and in the mud of the road. Among them stood the old crone who had walked beside the horses and shouted at the soldiers. A miner with a black beard came and stood before the boy. Waving his hand at the crowd he said, “We have come to open the bakery. Some of us have no ovens in our stoves. You give us the key and we will open the place. We will break in the door if you don’t want to do that. The company can’t blame you if we do it by force. You can keep account of what we take. Then when the strike is settled we will pay you.”

  A flame shot into the eyes of the boy. He walked down the steps and stood among the miners. Thrusting his hands into his pockets he peered into their faces. When he spoke his voice resounded through the street, “You jeered at my father, Cracked McGregor, when he went into the mine for you. You laughed at him because he saved his money and did not spend it buying you drinks. Now you come here to get bread his money bought and you do not pay. Then you get drunk and go reeling past this very door. Now let me tell you something.” He thrust his hands into the air and shouted. “The mine manager did not close this place. I closed it. You jeered at Cracked McGregor, a better man than any of you. You have had fun with me — laughing at me. Now I jeer at you.” He ran up the steps and unlocking the door stood in the doorway. “Pay the money you owe this bakery and there will be bread for sale here,” he called, and went in and locked the door.

  The miners walked off up the street. The boy stood within the bakery, his hands trembling. “I’ve told them something,” he thought, “I’ve shown them they can’t make a fool of me.” He went up the stairway to the rooms above. By the window his mother sat, her head in her hands, looking down into the street. He sat in a chair and thought of the situation. “They will be back here and smash the place like they tore up that garden,” he said.

  The next evening Beaut sat in the darkness on the steps before the bakery. In his hands he held a hammer. A dull hatred of the town and of the miners burned in his brain. “I will make it hot for some of them if they come here,” he thought. He hoped they would come. As he looked at the hammer in his hand a phrase from the lips of the drunken old oculist babbling of Napoleon came into his mind. He began to think that he also must be like the figure of which the drunkard had talked. He remembered a story the oculist had told of a f
ight in the streets of a European city and muttered and waved the hammer about. Upstairs his mother sat by the window with her head in her hands. From the saloon down the street a light gleamed out on the wet sidewalk. The tall pale woman who had gone with him to the eminence overlooking the valley came down the stairway from above the undertaker’s shop. She ran along the sidewalk. On her head she wore a shawl and as she ran she clutched it with her hand. The other hand she held against her side.

  When the women reached the boy who sat in silence before the bakery she put her hands on his shoulders and plead with him. “Come away,” she said. “Get your mother and come to our place. They’re going to smash you up here. You’ll get hurt.”

  Beaut arose and pushed her away. Her coming had given him new courage. His heart jumped at the thought of her interest in him and he wished that the miners might come so that he could fight them before her. “I wish I could live among people as decent as she,” he thought.

  A train stopped at the station down the street. There came the sound of tramping of men and quick sharp commands. A stream of men poured out of the saloon onto the sidewalk. Down the street came a file of soldiers with guns swung across their shoulders. Again Beaut was thrilled by the sight of trained orderly men moving along shoulder to shoulder. In the presence of these men the disorganized miners seemed pitifully weak and insignificant. The girl pulled the shawl about her head and ran up the street to disappear into the stairway. The boy unlocked the door and went upstairs and to bed.

  After the strike Nance McGregor who owned nothing but unpaid accounts was unable to open the bakery. A small man with a white moustache, who chewed tobacco, came from the mill and took the unused flour and shipped it away. The boy and his mother continued living above the bakery store room. Again she went in the morning to wash the windows and scrub the floors in the offices of the mine and her red-haired son stood upon the street or sat in the pool room and talked to the black-haired boy. “Next week I’ll be going to the city and will begin making something of myself,” he said. When the time came to go he waited and idled in the streets. Once when a miner jeered at him for his idleness he knocked him into the gutter. The miners who hated him for his speech on the steps, admired him for his strength and brute courage.

  CHAPTER IV

  IN A CELLAR-LIKE house driven like a stake into the hillside above Coal Creek lived Kate Hartnet with her son Mike. Her man had died with the others during the fire in the mine. Her son like Beaut McGregor did not work in the mine. He hurried through Main Street or went half running among the trees on the hills. Miners seeing him hurrying along with white intense face shook their heads. “He’s cracked,” they said. “He’ll hurt some one yet.”

  Beaut saw Mike hurrying about the streets. Once encountering him in the pine woods above the town he walked with him and tried to get him to talk. In his pockets Mike carried books and pamphlets. He set traps in the woods and brought home rabbits and squirrels. He got together collections of birds’ eggs which he sold to women in the trains that stopped at Coal Creek and when he caught birds he stuffed them, put beads in their eyesockets and sold them also. He proclaimed himself an anarchist and like Cracked McGregor muttered to himself as he hurried along.

  One day Beaut came upon Mike Hartnet reading a book as he sat on a log overlooking the town. A shock ran through McGregor when he looked over the shoulder of the man and saw what book he read. “It is strange,” he thought, “that this fellow should stick to the same book that fat old Weeks makes his living by.”

  Beaut sat on the log beside Hartnet and watched him. The reading man looked up and nodded nervously then slid along the log to the farther end. Beaut laughed. He looked down at the town and then at the frightened nervous book-reading man on the log. An inspiration came to him.

  “If you had the power, Mike, what would you do to Coal Creek?” he asked.

  The nervous man jumped and tears came into his eyes. He stood before the log and spread out his hands. “I would go among men like Christ,” he cried, pitching his voice forward like one addressing an audience. “Poor and humble, I would go teaching them of love.” Spreading out his hands like one pronouncing a benediction he shouted, “Oh men of Coal Creek, I would teach you love and the destruction of evil.”

  Beaut jumped up from the log and strode before the trembling figure. He was strangely moved. Grasping the man he thrust him back upon the log. His own voice rolled down the hillside in a great roaring laugh. “Men of Coal Creek,” he shouted, mimicking the earnestness of Hartnet, “listen to the voice of McGregor. I hate you. I hate you because you jeered at my father and at me and because you cheated my mother, Nance McGregor. I hate you because you are weak and disorganised like cattle. I would like to come among you teaching the power of force. I would like to slay you one by one, not with weapons but with my naked fists. If they have made you work like rats buried in a hole they are right. It is man’s right to do what he can. Get up and fight. Fight and I’ll get on the other side and you can fight me. I’ll help drive you back into your holes.”

  Beaut ceased speaking and jumping over the logs ran down the road. Among the first of the miner’s houses he stopped and laughed awkwardly. “I am cracked also,” he thought, “shouting at emptiness on a hillside.” He went on in a reflective mood, wondering what power had taken hold of him. “I would like a fight — a fight against odds,” he thought. “I will stir things up when I am a lawyer in the city.”

  Mike Hartnet came running down the road at the heels of McGregor. “Don’t tell,” he plead trembling. “Don’t tell about me in the town. They will laugh and call names after me. I want to be let alone.”

  Beaut shook himself loose from the detaining hand and went on down the hill. When he had passed out of sight of Hartnet he sat down on the ground. For an hour he looked at the town in the valley and thought of himself. He was half proud, half ashamed of the thing that had happened.

  In the blue eyes of McGregor anger flashed quick and sudden. Upon the streets of Coal Creek he walked, swinging along, his great body inspiring fear. His mother grown grave and silent worked in the offices of the mines. Again she had a habit of silence in her own home and looked at her son, half fearing him. All day she worked in the mine offices and in the evening sat silently in a chair on the porch before her house and looked down into Main Street.

  Beaut McGregor did nothing. He sat in the dingy little pool room and talked with the black-haired boy or walked over the hills swinging a stick in his hand and thinking of the city to which he would presently go to start his career. As he walked in the streets women stopped to look at him, thinking of the beauty and strength of his maturing body. The miners passed him in silence hating him and dreading his wrath. Walking among the hills he thought much of himself. “I am capable of anything,” he thought, lifting his head and looking at the towering hills, “I wonder why I stay on here.”

  When he was eighteen Beaut’s mother fell ill. All day she lay on her back in bed in the room above the empty bakery. Beaut shook himself out of his waking stupor and went about seeking work. He had not felt that he was indolent. He had been waiting. Now he bestirred himself. “I’ll not go into the mines,” he said, “nothing shall get me down there.”

  He got work in a livery stable cleaning and feeding the horses. His mother got out of bed and began going again to the mine offices. Having started to work Beaut stayed on, thinking it but a way station to the position he would one day achieve in the city.

  In the stable worked two young boys, sons of coal miners. They drove travelling men from the trains to farming towns in valleys back among the hills and in the evening with Beaut McGregor they sat on a bench before the barn and shouted at people going past the stable up the hill.

  The livery stable in Coal Creek was owned by a hunchback named Weller who lived in the city and went home at night. During the day he sat about the stable talking to red-haired McGregor. “You’re a big beast,” he said laughing. “You talk about going away to th
e city and making something of yourself and still you stay on here doing nothing. You want to quit this talking about being a lawyer and become a prize fighter. Law is a place for brains not muscles.” He walked through the stables leaning his head to one side and looking up at the big fellow who brushed the horses. McGregor watched him and grinned. “I’ll show you,” he said.

  The hunchback was pleased when he strutted before McGregor. He had heard men talk of the strength and the evil temper of his stableman and it pleased him to have so fierce a fellow cleaning the horses. At night in the city he sat under the lamp with his wife and boasted. “I make him step about,” he said.

  In the stable the hunchback kept at the heels of McGregor. “And there’s something else,” he said, putting his hand in his pockets and raising himself on his toes. “You look out for that undertaker’s daughter. She wants you. If she gets you there will be no law study but a place in the mines for you. You let her alone and begin taking care of your mother.”

  Beaut went on cleaning the horses and thinking of what the hunchback had said. He thought there was sense to it. He also was afraid of the tall pale girl. Sometimes when he looked at her a pain shot through him and a combination of fear and desire gripped him. He walked away from it and went free as he went free from the life in the darkness down in the mine. “He has a kind of genius for keeping away from the things he don’t like,” said the liveryman, talking to Uncle Charlie Wheeler in the sun before the door of the post office.

  One afternoon the two boys who worked in the livery stable with McGregor got him drunk. The affair was a rude joke, elaborately planned. The hunchback had stayed in the city for the day and no travelling men got off the trains to be driven over the hills. In the afternoon hay brought over the hill from the fruitful valley was being put into the loft of the barn and between loads McGregor and the two boys sat on the bench by the stable door. The two boys went to the saloon and brought back beer, paying for it from a fund kept for that purpose. The fund was the result of a system worked out by the two drivers. When a passenger gave one of them a coin at the end of a day of driving he put it into the common fund. When the fund had grown to some size the two went to the saloon and stood before the bar drinking until it was spent and then came back to sleep off their stupor on the hay in the barn. After a prosperous week the hunchback occasionally gave them a dollar for the fund.