Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Below he met his friend’s mother, a woman of fifty. She stood in a doorway that led into a dining room. A servant was putting dinner on the table. The laws of the household were being observed. It was time to dine and in a few minutes the people of the house would dine. “Holy Moses,” he thought, “I wonder if she could come down here now and sit at table with myself and the others, eating food? Can the habits of existence so quickly reassert themselves after so profound a disturbance?”

  He put his bag down on the floor by his feet and looked at the older woman. “I don’t know,” he began, and stood looking at her and stammering. She was confused, as every one in that house must have been confused at that moment, but there was something in her, very kindly, that gave sympathy when it could not understand. She started to speak. “It was all an accident and there is nobody hurt,” she started to say, but he did not wait to listen. Picking up the bag he rushed out of the house.

  What was to be done then? He had hurried across town to his own home and it was dark and silent. His father and mother had gone away. His grandmother, that is to say, his mother’s mother, was very ill in another town and his father and mother had gone there. They might not return for several days. There were two servants employed in the house, but as the house was to be unoccupied they had been permitted to go away. Even the fires were out. He could not stay there, but would have to go to a hotel.

  “I went into the house and put my bag down on the floor by the front door,” he explained, and a shiver ran through his body as he remembered the dreariness of that evening long before. It was to have been an evening of gaiety. The four young people had planned to go to a dance and in anticipation of the figure he would cut with the new girl from another town, he had, in advance, worked himself up to a state of semi-excitement. The devil! — He had counted on finding in her the something — well, what was it? — the something a young fellow is always dreaming of finding in some strange woman who is suddenly to come up to him out of nowhere and bring with her new life which she presents to him freely, asking nothing. “You see, the dream is obviously an impossible one, but one has it in youth,” he explained, smiling. All through the telling of this part of his story he kept smiling. Did his daughter understand? One couldn’t question her understanding too closely. “The woman is to come clad in shining garments and with a calm smile on her face,” he went on, building up his fanciful picture. “With what regal grace she carries herself and yet, you understand, she is not some impossible cold drawn-away thing either. There are many men standing about, all no doubt more deserving than yourself, but it is to you she comes, walking slowly, with her body all alive. She is the unspeakably beautiful Virgin, but there is something very earthy about her too. The truth is that she can be very cold and proud and drawn-away when anyone else but yourself is concerned, but in your presence the coldness all goes out of her.

  “She comes toward you and her hand, that holds before her slender young body a golden tray, trembles a little. On the tray there is a box, small and cunningly wrought, and within it is a jewel, a talisman, that is for you. You are to take the jewel, set in a golden ring, out of the box and put in on your finger. It is nothing. The strange and beautiful woman has but brought it to you as a sign, before all the others, that she lays herself at your feet. When your hand reaches forward and takes the jewel from the box her body begins to tremble and the golden tray falls to the floor making a loud rattling sound. Something terrific happens to all the others who have been witnesses of the scene. Of a sudden all the people present realize that you, whom they had always thought of as just an ordinary fellow, not, to tell the truth, as worthy as themselves, well, you see, they have been made, fairly forced, to realize your true self. Of a sudden there you stand before them all in your true colors, quite revealed at last. There is a kind of radiant splendor comes out of you and fairly lights up the room where you, the woman, and all the others, the men and women of your own town you have always known and who have always thought they knew you, where they all stand looking and gasping with astonishment.

  “It is a moment. The most unbelievable thing happens. There is a clock on the wall and it has been ticking, ticking, running out the span of your life and the lives of all the others. Outside the room, in which this remarkable scene takes place, there is a street with the activities of the street going on. Men and women are perhaps hurrying up and down, trains are coming in and going out of distant railroad stations, and even further away ships are sailing on many wide seas and great winds are disturbing the waters of seas.

  “And suddenly all is stopped. It is a fact. On the wall the clock stops ticking, moving trains become dead and lifeless, people in the streets, who have started to say words to each other, stand now with their mouths open, on the seas winds no longer blow.

  “For all life everywhere there is this hushed moment and, out of it all, the buried thing within you asserts itself. Out of the great stillness you step and take the woman into your arms. In a moment now all life can begin to move and be again, but after this moment all life forever will have been colored by this act of your own, by this marriage. It was for this marriage you and the woman were made.”

  All of which is perhaps going the extreme limit of fancifulness, as John Webster was careful to explain to Jane, and yet, there he was in the upper bedroom with his daughter, brought suddenly close to the daughter he had never known until that moment, and he was trying to speak to her of his feelings at the moment when, in his youth, he had once played the part of a supreme and innocent fool.

  “The house was like a tomb, Jane,” he said, and there was a break in his voice.

  It was evident the old boyhood dream was not yet dead. Even now, in his maturity, some faint perfume of it floated up to him as he sat on the floor at his daughter’s feet. “The fires in the house had been out all day and outdoors it was getting colder,” he began again. “All through the house there was that kind of damp coldness that always makes one think of death. You must remember that I had been thinking, and was still thinking, of what I had done at my friend’s house as the act of an insane fool. Well, you see, our house was heated by stoves and there was a small one in my own room upstairs. I went into the kitchen, where behind the kitchen stove, in a box, kindlings were always kept, cut and ready, and taking out an armful started upstairs.

  “In the hallway, in the darkness at the foot of the stairs, my leg knocked against a chair and I put the armful of kindlings down on the chair seat. I stood in the darkness trying to think and not thinking. ‘I’m going to be sick perhaps,’ I thought. My self-respect was all gone and perhaps one cannot think at such times.

  “In the kitchen, above the kitchen stove, before which my mother or our servant Adaline was always standing when the house was alive and not dead as it was now, just up there, where one could see it over the women’s heads, there was a small clock and now that clock began making a sound as loud as though some one were beating on sheets of iron with big hammers. In the house next door some one was talking steadily or maybe reading aloud. The wife of the German who lived in the next house had been ill in bed for months and perhaps now he was trying to entertain her by reading some story. The words came steadily, but in a broken way too. What I mean is, that there would be a steady little run of sounds, then it would be broken and then begin again. Sometimes the voice would be raised a little, for emphasis no doubt, and that was like a kind of splash, as when the waves along a beach all, for a long time, run to the same place clearly marked on the wet sand and then there comes one wave that goes far beyond all the others and splashes against the face of a rock.

  “You see perhaps the state I was in. It was, as I have said, very cold in the house and for a long time I stood in one spot, not moving at all and thinking I never wanted to move again. The voices from the distance, from the German’s house next door, were like voices coming from some hidden buried place in myself. There was one voice telling me I was a fool and that, after what had happened, I coul
d never again hold up my head in the world, and another voice telling me I was not a fool at all, but for the time the first voice had all the best of the argument. What I did was to stand there in the cold and try to let the two voices fight it out without putting in my oar, but after a while, it may have been because I was so cold, I began to cry like a kid and that made me so ashamed I went to the front door quickly and got out of the house forgetting to put on my overcoat.

  “Well, I had left my hat in the house too and there I was outside in the cold, bareheaded, and presently as I walked, keeping as much as I could in unfrequented streets, it began to snow.

  “All right,” I said to myself, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to their house and ask her to marry me.”

  “When I got there my friend’s mother was not in sight and the three younger people were sitting in the parlor of the house. I looked in through a window and then, fearing I would lose my courage if I hesitated, went boldly up and knocked on the door. I was glad anyway they had felt that after what had happened they couldn’t go to the dance and when my friend came and opened the door I said nothing, but walked directly into the room where the two girls sat.

  “She was on a couch in a corner, where the light from a lamp on a table in the centre of the room fell on her but faintly, and I went directly to her. My friend had followed me into the room, but now I turned to him and his sister and asked them both to go out of the room. ‘Something has happened here to-night that can’t very well be explained and we must be left alone together for a few minutes,’ I said making a motion with my hand to where she sat on the couch.

  “When they went out I followed to the door and closed it after them.

  “And so there I was in the presence of the woman who was later to be my wife. There was an odd kind of droopiness to her whole person as she sat on the couch. Her body had, in a way you see, slid down from its perch on the couch and now she was lying rather than sitting. What I mean is that her body was draped on the couch. It was like a garment thrown carelessly down there. That had happened since I had come into the room. I stood before it a moment and then got down on my knees. Her face was very pale, but her eyes were looking directly into mine.

  “‘I did something very strange twice this evening,’ I said, turning my face away so that I no longer looked into her eyes. Her eyes frightened and disconcerted me, I suppose. That must have been it. I had a certain speech to make and wanted to go through with it. There were certain words I was about to say, but now I know that at the same moment other words and thoughts, having nothing to do with what I was saying, were going on down within me.

  “For one thing I knew my friend and his sister were at that moment standing just outside the door of the room waiting and listening.

  “What were they thinking? Well, never mind that.

  “What was I thinking myself? What was the woman to whom I was about to propose marriage thinking about?

  “I had come to the house bareheaded, you understand, and no doubt looking a little wild. Perhaps every one in that house thought I had gone suddenly out of my mind and it may be that in fact I had.

  “At any rate I felt very calm and on that evening and for all these years, up to a short time ago, when I became in love with Natalie, I’ve always been a very calm man, or at least thought I was. I have dramatized myself that way. What I suppose is that death is always a very calm thing and I must, in a way, have been committing suicide on that evening.

  “There had been, in the town, a few weeks before this happened, a scandal that had got into the courts and was written about guardedly in our weekly newspaper. It concerned a case of rape. A farmer, who had employed in his household a young girl, had sent his wife off to town to buy supplies and while she was gone had got the girl into the upper part of his house and had raped her, tearing her clothes off and even beating her before he forced her to acquiesce in his desires. Later he had been arrested and brought to town where, at the very time I was kneeling on the floor before the body of my future wife, he was in jail.

  “I speak of the matter because, as I knelt there, I remember now, a thought crossed my mind connecting me with the man. ‘I am also committing a rape’ something within me said.

  “To the woman, who was there before me, so cold and white, I said something else.

  “‘You understand that, this evening, when I first came to you naked, it was an accident,’ I said. ‘I want you to understand that, but I want you also to understand that when I came to you the second time it was not an accident. I want you to understand everything quite fully and then I want to ask you to marry me, to consent to be my wife.’

  “That was what I said and after I had said it took one of her hands in mine and, without looking at her, knelt there at her feet waiting for her to speak. Perhaps had she spoken then, even in condemnation of me, everything would have been all right.

  “She said nothing. I understand now why she could not, but then I did not understand. I have always, I admit, been impatient. Time passed and I waited. I was like one who has fallen from a great height into the sea and who feels himself going down and down, deeper and deeper. There is a great weight, you understand, pressing upon the man in the sea and he cannot breathe. What I suppose is that in the case of a man, falling thus into the sea, the force of his fall does after a time expend itself and he comes to a stop in his descent, and then suddenly begins again rising to the surface of the sea.

  “And something of the sort happened to me. When I had been kneeling there for some little time, at her feet, I suddenly sprang up. Going to the door I threw it open and there, as I had expected, stood my friend and his sister. I must have appeared to them, at the moment, almost gay, perhaps they afterward thought it an insane gaiety. I cannot say as to that. After that evening I never went back to their house and my former friend and I began avoiding each other’s presence. There was no danger that they would tell anyone what had happened — out of respect to their guest, you understand. The woman was safe as far as their talking was concerned.

  “Anyway I stood before them and smiled. ‘Your guest and I have got into a jam because of a series of absurd accidents that perhaps did not look like accidents and now I have asked her to marry me. She has not made up her mind about that,’ I said, speaking very formally and turning from them and going out of the house and to my father’s house where I quite calmly got my overcoat, my hat and my bag. ‘I’ll have to go to the hotel and stay until father and mother come home,’ I thought. At any rate I knew that the affairs of the evening would not, as I had supposed earlier in the evening, throw me into a time of illness.”

  III

  “I DO NOT mean to say that after that evening I did think more clearly, but after that day and its adventures other days and weeks did come marching along and, as nothing specially happened as a result of what I had done, I couldn’t stay in the half exalted state I was in then.”

  John Webster rolled over on the floor at his daughter’s feet and, squirming about so that he lay on his belly facing her, looked up into her face. He had his elbows on the floor and his chin rested on his two hands. There was something diabolically strange about the way youth had come into his figure and he had quite won his way with his daughter. There he was, you see, wanting nothing specially from her and he was wholeheartedly giving himself to her. For the time even Natalie was forgotten and as for his wife, in the next room lying on the bed and perhaps in her dumb way suffering as he had never suffered, to him at the moment she simply did not exist.

  Well, there was the woman, who was his daughter, before him and he was giving himself to her. It is likely that at the moment he had quite forgotten she was his daughter. He was thinking now of his youth, when he was a young man, much perplexed by life, and was seeing her as a young woman who would inevitably, and as she went along through life, often be as perplexed as he had been. He tried to describe to her his feelings as a young man who had proposed to a woman who had made no answer and in whom nevertheless
there was the perhaps romantic notion that he was in some queer way inevitably and finally attached to that particular woman.

  “You see what I did then, Jane, is something you will perhaps find yourself doing some day and that it may be inevitable every one does.” He reached forward and taking his daughter’s bare foot in his hand drew it to him and kissed it. Then he sat quickly upright holding his knees in his arms. Something like a blush came swiftly over his daughter’s face and then she began to look at him with very serious puzzled eyes. He smiled gaily.

  “And so you see, there I was, living right here in this very town and that girl to whom I had proposed marriage had gone away and I had heard nothing more from her. She only stayed at my friend’s house a day or two after I had managed to make the beginning of her visit such a startling affair.

  “For a long time my father had been scolding at me because I had taken no special interest in the washing machine factory, it was supposed I was after his day to take hold of and run, and so I decided I had better do a thing called ‘settling down.’ That is to say, I made up my mind it would be better for me if I gave myself less to dreams and to the kind of gawky youthfulness that only led to my doing such unaccountable things as that second running into that naked woman’s presence.

  “The truth is, of course, that my father, who in his own youth had come to a day when he had made just such another decision as I was then making, that he, for all his settling down and becoming a hard-working sensible man, hadn’t got very much for it; but I didn’t think of that at the time. Well, he wasn’t such a gay old dog as I remember him now. He had always worked pretty hard, I suppose, and every day he sat for eight or ten hours at his desk and through all the years I had known him he had been subject to attacks of indigestion, during which every one in our house had to go softly about for fear of making his head ache worse than it did. The attacks used to come on about once a month and he would come home, and mother would fix him up on a couch in our front room, and she used to heat flatirons and roll them in towels and put them on his belly, and there he would lie all day groaning, and as you may suppose, making the life of our house a gay, festive affair.