Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  III

  WHEN HE AWOKE an hour later he was at first frightened. He looked about the room wondering if he had been ill.

  Then his eyes began an inventory of the furniture of the room. He did not like anything there. Had he lived for twenty years of his life among such things? They were no doubt all right. He knew little of such things. Few men did. A thought came. How few men in America ever really thought of the houses they lived in, of the clothes they wore. Men were willing to go through a long life without any effort to decorate their bodies, to make lovely and full of meaning the dwellings in which they lived. His own clothes were hanging on a chair where he had thrown them when he came into the room. In a moment he would get up and put them on. Thousands of times, since he had come to manhood, he had gone through the performance of clothing his body without thought. The clothes had been bought casually at some store. Who had made them? What thought had been given to the making of them or to the wearing of them either? He looked at his body lying on the bed. The clothes would enclose his body, wrap it about.

  A thought came into his mind, rang across the spaces of his mind like a bell heard across fields: “Nothing either animate or inanimate can be beautiful that is not loved.”

  Getting off the bed he dressed quickly and hurrying out of the room ran down a flight of stairs to the floor below. At the foot of the stairs he stopped. He felt suddenly old and weary and thought perhaps he had better not try to go back to the factory that afternoon. There was no need of his presence there. Everything was going all right. Natalie would attend to anything that came up.

  “A fine business if I, a respectable business man with a wife and a grown daughter, get myself involved in an affair with Natalie Swartz, the daughter of a man who when he was alive ran a low saloon and of that terrible old Irish woman who is the scandal of the town and who when she is drunk talks and yells so that the neighbors threaten to have her arrested and are only held back because they have sympathy for the daughters.

  “The fact is that a man may work and work to make a decent place for himself and then by a foolish act all may be destroyed. I’ll have to watch myself a little. I’ve been working too steadily. Perhaps I’d better take a vacation. I don’t want to get into a mess,” he thought. How glad he was that, although he had been in a state all day long, he had said nothing to anyone that would betray his condition.

  He stood with his hand on the railing of the stairs. At any rate he had been doing a lot of thinking for the last two or three hours. “I haven’t been wasting my time.”

  A notion came. After he married and when he had found out his wife was frightened and driven within herself by every outburst of passion and that as a result there was not much joy in making love to her he had formed a habit of going off on secret expeditions. It had been easy enough to get away. He told his wife he was going on a business trip. Then he went somewhere, to the city of Chicago usually. He did not go to one of the big hotels, but to some obscure place on a side street.

  Night came and he set out to find himself a woman. Always he went through the same kind of rather silly performance. He was not given to drinking, but he now took several drinks. One might go at once to some house where women were to be had, but he really wanted something else. He spent hours wandering in the streets.

  There was a dream. One vainly hoped to find, wandering about somewhere, a woman who by some miracle would love with freedom and abandon. Along through the streets one went usually in dark badly lighted places where there were factories and warehouses and poor little dwellings. One wanted a golden woman to step up out of the filth of the place in which one walked. It was insane and silly and one knew these things, but one persisted insanely. Amazing conversations were imagined. Out from the shadow of one of the dark buildings the woman was to step. She was also lonely, ‘hungry, defeated. One went boldly up to her and began at once a conversation filled with strange and beautiful words. Love came flooding their two bodies.

  Well perhaps that was exaggerated a little. No doubt one was never quite fool enough to expect anything so wonderful as all that. At any rate what one did was to wander about in the dark streets thus for hours and in the end take up with some prostitute. The two hurried silently off into a little room. Uh. There was always the feeling, “Perhaps other men have been in here with her already to-night.” There was a halting attempt at conversation. Could they get to know each other, this woman and this man? The woman had a businesslike air. The night was not over and her work was done at night. Too much time must not be wasted. From her point of view a great deal of time had to be wasted in any event. Often one walked half the night without making any money at all.

  After such an adventure John Webster came home the next day feeling very mean and unclean. Still he did work better at the office and at night for a long time he slept better. For one thing he kept his mind on affairs and did not give way to dreams and to vague thoughts. When one was running a factory that was an advantage.

  Now he stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking perhaps he had better go off on such an adventure again. If he stayed at home and sat all day and every day in the presence of Natalie Swartz there was no telling what would happen. One might as well face facts. After his experience of that morning, his looking into her eyes, in just the same way he had, the life of the two people in the office would be changed. A new thing would have come into the very air they breathed together. It would be better if he did not go back to the office, but went off at once and took a train to Chicago or Milwaukee. As for his wife — he had got that notion into his head of a kind of death of the flesh. He closed his eyes and leaned against the stair railing. His mind became a blank.

  A door leading into the dining room of the house opened and a woman stepped forth. She was the Webster’s one servant and had been in the house for many years. Now she was past fifty and as she stood before John Webster he looked at her as he hadn’t for a long time. A multitude of thoughts came quickly, like a handful of shot thrown against a window pane.

  The woman standing before him was tall and lean and her face was marked by deep lines. It was an odd thing, the notions men had got into their heads about the beauty of women. Perhaps Natalie Swartz, when she was fifty, would look much like this woman.

  Her name was Katherine and her coming to work for the Websters long ago had brought on a quarrel between John Webster and his wife. There had been a wreck on the railroad near the Webster factory and this woman was traveling in the day coach of the wrecked train with a man much younger than herself, who was killed. A young man of Indianapolis, who worked in a bank, had run away with a woman who was a servant in his father’s house and after he disappeared a large sum of money was missed at the bank. He had been killed in the wreck as he sat with the woman and all trace of him had been lost until someone from Indianapolis, quite by chance, saw and recognized Katherine on the streets of her adopted town. The question asked was, what had become of the money, and Katherine had been accused of knowing and of concealing it.

  Mrs. Webster had wanted to discharge her at once and there had been a quarrel in which the husband had in the end come out victorious. For some reason the whole strength of his being had been put into the matter and one night as he stood in the common bedroom with his wife he had made a pronouncement so strong that he himself was surprised by the words that came from his lips. “If this woman goes out of this house without going voluntarily then I go also,” he had said.

  Now John Webster stood in the hallway of his house looking at the woman who had been the cause of the quarrel long ago. Well, he had seen her going silently about the house almost every day during the long years since that thing happened, but he had not looked at her as he did now. When she grew older Natalie Swartz might look as this woman now looked. If he were to be a fool and run away with Natalie, as that young fellow from Indianapolis had once run away with this woman, and if it fell out there was no railroad wreck he might some day be living with a woman who looked somew
hat as Katherine now looked.

  The thought did not alarm him. It was on the whole rather a sweet thought. “She has lived and sinned and suffered,” he thought. There was about the woman’s person a kind of strong quiet dignity and it was reflected in her physical being. There was no doubt a kind of dignity coming into his own thoughts too. The notion of going off to Chicago or Milwaukee to walk through dirty streets hungering for the golden woman to come to him out of the filth of life was quite gone now.

  The woman Katherine was smiling at him. “I did not eat any lunch because I did not feel like eating but now I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat in the house, anything you might get for me without too much trouble?” he asked.

  She lied cheerfully. She had just prepared lunch for herself in the kitchen but now offered it to him.

  He sat at the table eating the food Katherine had prepared. Outside the house the sun was shining. It was only a little after two o’clock and the afternoon and evening were before him. It was strange how the Bible, the older Testaments, kept asserting themselves in his mind. He had never been much of a Bible reader. There was perhaps a kind of massive splendor to the prose of the book that now fell into step with his own thoughts. In that time, when men lived on the hills and on the plains with their flocks, life lasted in the body of a man or woman a long time. Men were spoken of who had lived for several hundred years. Perhaps there was more than one way to reckon the length of life. In his own case — if he could live every day as fully as he had been living this day, life would be for him lengthened indefinitely.

  Katherine came into the room bringing more food and a pot of tea and he looked up and smiled at her. Another thought came. “It would be an amazingly beautiful thing to have happen in the world if everyone, every living man, woman, and child, should suddenly, by a common impulse, come out of their houses, out of the factories and stores, come, let us say, into a great plain, where everyone could see everyone else, and if they should there and then, all of them, in the light of day, with everyone in the world knowing fully what everyone else in the world was doing, if they should all by one common impulse commit the most unforgivable sin of which they were conscious, what a great cleansing time that would be.”

  His mind made a kind of riot of pictures and he ate the food Katherine had set before him without thought of the physical act of eating. Katherine started to go out of the room and then, noting that he was unaware of her presence, stopped by the door leading into the kitchen and stood looking at him. He had never known that she had been aware of the struggle he had gone through for her many years before. Had he not made that struggle she would not have stayed on in the house. As a matter of fact, on that evening when he had declared that if she were to be made to leave he would leave also, the door to the bedroom upstairs was a little ajar and she was in the hallway downstairs. She had packed her few belongings and had them in a bundle and had intended to steal away somewhere. There was no point to her staying. The man she loved was dead and now she was being hounded by the newspapers and there was a threat that if she did not tell where the money was hidden she would be sent to prison. As for the money — she did not believe the man who had been killed knew any more about it than she did. No doubt there was money stolen and then, because he had run away with her, the crime was put upon her lover. The affair was very simple. The young man worked in the bank and was engaged to be married to a woman of his own class. And then one night he and Katherine were alone in his father’s house and something happened between them.

  As she stood watching her employer eat the food she had prepared for herself, Katherine thought proudly of an evening long before when she had quite recklessly become the sweetheart of another man. She remembered the fight John Webster had once made for her and thought with contempt of the woman who was her employer’s wife.

  “That such a man should have such a woman,” she thought, recalling the long heavy figure of Mrs. Webster.

  As though aware of her thoughts the man again turned and smiled at her. “I am eating the food she had prepared for herself,” he told himself, and got quickly up from the table. He went out into the hallway and having taken his hat from a rack lighted a cigarette. Then he returned to the dining room door. The woman stood by the table looking at him and he in turn looked at her. There was no embarrassment. “If I should go away with Natalie and she should become like Katherine it would be fine,” he thought. “Well, well, good bye,” he said haltingly and turning walked rapidly out of the house.

  As John Webster walked along the street the sun was shining and as there was a light breeze a few leaves were falling from the maple shade trees with which the streets were lined. Soon there would be frost and the trees would be all afire with color. If one could only be aware, glorious days were ahead. Even in the Wisconsin town one might have glorious days. There was a little pang of hunger, a new kind of hunger, within him as he stopped and stood for a moment looking up and down the residence street on which he had been walking. Two hours before, lying naked on the bed in his own house, he had been having the thoughts concerning clothes and houses. It was a charming thought to play with but brought sadness too. Why was it that so many houses along the street were ugly? Were people unaware? Could anyone be quite completely unaware? Could one wear ugly commonplace clothes, live always in an ugly or commonplace house in a commonplace street of a commonplace town and remain always unaware?

  Now he was thinking of things he decided had better be left out of the thoughts of a business man. However, for this one day, he would give himself over to the thinking of any thought that came into his head. To-morrow things would be different. He would become again what he had always been (with the exception of a few slips, times when he had been rather as he was now), a quiet orderly man going about his business and not given to foolishness. He would run his washing machine business and try to keep his mind on that. In the evenings he would read the newspapers and keep abreast of the events of the day.

  “I don’t go on a bat very often. I deserve a little vacation,” he thought rather sadly.

  Ahead of him in the street, almost two blocks ahead, a man walked. John Webster had met the man once. He was a professor in a small college of the town, and once, two or three years before, there had been an effort made, on the part of the college president, to raise money among local business men to help the school through a financial crisis. A dinner was given and attended by a number of the college faculty and by an organization called the Chamber of Commerce to which John Webster belonged. The man who now walked before him had been at the dinner and he and the washing machine manufacturer had been seated together. He wondered if he might now presume on that brief acquaintanceship to go and talk with the man. He had been thinking rather unusual thoughts to come into a man’s head and perhaps, if he could talk with some other man and in particular with a man whose business in life it was to have thoughts and to understand thought, something might be gained.

  There was a narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the roadway and along this John Webster began to run. He just grabbed his hat in his hand and ran bareheaded for perhaps two hundred yards and then stopped and looked quietly up and down the street.

  It was all right, after all. Apparently no one had seen his strange performance. There were no people sitting on the porches of the houses along the street. He thanked God for that.

  Ahead of him the college professor went soberly along with a book under his arm, unaware that he was followed. When he saw that his absurd performance had escaped notice John Webster laughed. “Well, I went to college myself once. I’ve heard enough college professors talk. I don’t know why I should expect anything from one of that stripe.”

  Perhaps to speak of the things that had been in his mind that day something almost like a new language would be required.

  There was that thought about Natalie being a house kept clean and sweet for living, a house into which one might go gladly and joyfully. Could he, a washing machine m
anufacturer of a Wisconsin town, stop on the street a college professor and say— “I want to know, Mr. College Professor, if your house is clean and sweet for living so that people may come into it and, if it is so, I want you to tell me how you went about it to cleanse your house.”

  The notion was absurd. It made one laugh to even think of any such thing. There would have to be hew figures of speech, a new way of looking at things. For one thing people would have to be more truly aware of themselves than they had ever been before.

  Almost in the centre of town and before a stone building that was some kind of public institution there was a small park with benches and John Webster stopped following the college professor and went and sat on one of them. From where he sat he could see along two of the principal business thoroughfares.

  It wasn’t a thing done by prosperous washing machine manufacturers, this sitting on benches in the park in the middle of the afternoon but he, at the moment, did not much care. To tell the truth the place for such a man as himself, who owned a factory where many men were employed, was at his desk in his own office. In the evening one might stroll about, read the newspapers or go to the theatre but now, at this hour, the thing was to attend to affairs, be on the job.