None of my jelly roll.
An’ I ain’t go’na give you
None of my jelly roll.
Saturday evening in the factory at Old Harbor. Sponge Martin putting his brushes away and Bruce imitating his every movement. “Leave the brushes so and they’ll be fine and fit on Monday morning.”
Sponge singing as he puts things away, clears up. An orderly little cuss — Sponge. He’s got the workman’s instinct. Likes things so and so, tools in order.
“Messy men make me sick. I hate ’em.”
The surly man who worked next to Sponge was in a great hurry to get out at the door. He had been ready to leave for ten minutes.
No cleaning up brushes, putting things in order for him. Every two minutes he looked at his watch. His hurry amused Sponge.
“Wants to get home and see if his old woman is still there — alone. He wants to go home and don’t want to go. If he loses her he’s afraid he’ll never get another woman. Women are so damned hard to get. They haint hardly any left. Only about ten million of ’em around loose — without any man — specially in New England, I’ve heard,” Sponge said, winking as the surly workman hurried away without saying good-night to his two fellows.
Bruce had a suspicion that Sponge had made up the story about the workman and his wife to amuse himself, to amuse Bruce.
He and Sponge went out at the door together. “Why don’t you come on down for Sunday dinner?” Sponge said. He invited Bruce every Saturday night, and Bruce had already accepted several times.
Now he walked beside Sponge up a climbing street toward his hotel, a small working-man’s hotel, on a street half-way up the Old Harbor hill, a hill that climbed abruptly up almost from the river’s edge. At the river’s edge, on a shelf of land just above the high-water line, there was only room for a line of railroad tracks and for the row of factory buildings between the tracks and the river’s edge. Across the tracks and a narrow road by the factory doors, streets climbed up the side of the hill and other streets ran parallel with the tracks around the hill. The business section of the town was almost half-way up the hillside.
The long red-brick buildings of the wheel company, then a dusty road, the railroad tracks and after that clusters of streets of working-men’s houses, small frame affairs close together, then two streets of stores, and above the beginning of what Sponge called “the swell part of town.”
The hotel where Bruce lived was in a street of working-men’s houses, just above the business streets, “half swell and half low-life,” Sponge said.
Time was — when Bruce, then John Stockton, was a lad and lived for a time at the same hotel — that it was in the “swellest” part of town. The land running on up the hill was pretty much country then, with trees covering the hill. Before automobiles came, it was too much work getting up the hill and besides Old Harbor hadn’t many swells. That was when his father had got the job as principal in the high school at Old Harbor and just before the little family went to live in Indianapolis.
Bruce, then in knee-pants, with his father and mother, had lived in two adjoining rooms — small ones on the second floor of the three-storied frame hotel. It wasn’t the best hotel in town, even then, nor was it what it had now become — half a laborers’ rooming-house.
The hotel was still owned by the same woman, a widow, who had owned it when Bruce was a boy. Then she was a young widow with two children, a boy and a girl — the boy two or three years the older. He had disappeared from the scene when Bruce came back there to live — had gone to Chicago where he had a job as copy-writer in an advertising agency. Bruce had grinned when he heard of that. “Lordy, a kind of circle of life. You start somewhere, come back to where you started. It doesn’t much matter what your intentions are. Round and round you go. Now you see it and now you don’t.” His Dad and that kid both working at the same job in Chicago, crossing each other’s tracks, both in earnest about their jobs, too. When he heard what the son of the house was doing in Chicago, there popped into Bruce’s mind a story one of the boys in the newspaper office had told him. It was a story about certain people, Iowa people, Illinois people, Ohio people. The Chicago newspaper man had seen a lot of people when he went for a trip with a friend in a car. “They are in business or they own a farm and suddenly they begin to feel they aren’t getting anywhere. Then they sell the little farm or the store and buy a Ford. They start traveling, men, women and kids. Out they go to California and get tired of that. They move on down to Texas and then to Florida. The car rattles and bangs like a milk-wagon but they keep on the go. Finally they get back to where they started and then begin the whole show all over again. The country is getting all filled up with such caravans, thousands of them. When such an outfit goes broke they settle down wherever they happen to be, become farm-hands or factory-hands. There’s a lot of them. It’s the American passion for being on the go, a little going to seed, I guess.”
The son of the widow who owned the hotel had gone off to Chicago and had got a job and married, but the daughter hadn’t had any such luck. She hadn’t found herself a man. Now the mother was getting old and the daughter was slipping into her place. The hotel had changed because the town had changed. When Bruce was a kid, living there in knee-pants with his father and mother, several half-important people — like his father, the principal in the high school, a young unmarried doctor and two young lawyers — lived there Traveling men who wanted to save a little money did not go to the more expensive hotel on the chief business street, but were satisfied with the neat little place on the hillside above. In the evening, when Bruce was a child, such men used to sit in chairs before the hotel talking, explaining to each other their presence in the less expensive place. “I like it. It’s quieter up here,” one of them said. They were trying to make a little money on their travelers’ expense accounts and seemed half ashamed of the fact.
The daughter of the house was then a pretty little thing with long yellow curls. On spring and fall evenings she was always playing about the front of the hotel. The traveling men petted and fussed with her and she liked it. One by one they took her to sit in their laps and gave her pennies or sticks of candy. “How long had that lasted?” Bruce wondered. At what age had she become self-conscious, a woman? Perhaps she had slid off one thing and into another without knowing. One evening she had been sitting on the knees of a young man and suddenly she had a feeling. She didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t proper for her to do that sort of thing any more. Down she jumped and walked away with a certain dignified air that made the traveling men and others sitting about laugh. The young traveling man tried to get her to come back and sit on his lap again but she wouldn’t and then she went into the hotel and up to her room feeling — Lord knows what.
Did that happen when Bruce was a child there? He, his father and mother used to go sit in the chairs before the door of the hotel sometimes on spring and fall evenings. His father’s position in the high school gave him a certain dignity in the eyes of the others.
And what about Bruce’s mother, Martha Stockton. It was odd what a distinct, and at the same time indistinct figure she had been to him since he had grown to manhood. He had all sorts of dreams about her, thoughts about her. Now sometimes, in the life of his fancy, she was young and handsome, and sometimes she was old and tired of life. Had she become merely a figure his fancy played with? A mother, after her death, or after you no longer live near her, is something the male fancy can play with, dream of, make a part of the movement of the grotesque dance of life. Idealize her. Why not? She is gone. She will not come near to break the thread of the dream. The dream is as true as the reality. Who knows the difference? Who knows anything?
Mother, dear mother, come home to me now
The clock in the steeple strikes ten.
Silver threads among the gold.
Sometimes Bruce wondered if the same thing had happened to his father’s conception of the dead woman that had happened to his own. When he and his father lunched together i
n Chicago he had sometimes wanted to ask the older man questions but dared not. It might have been done perhaps if there hadn’t been that feeling between Bernice and his father’s new wife. Why had they taken such a dislike to each other? It would have been worth while to have been able to say to the older man: “What about it, eh, Dad? Which do you most like having near you — the living body of the younger woman or the half real, half manufactured dream of the one who died?” A mother’s figure, held in solution — in a floating, changing liquid thing — the fancy.
The flashy young Jew in the newspaper office could sure sling great mother stuff— “gold-star mothers sending sons off to war — the mother of a young murderer in court — in black — put in there by the son’s attorney — a fox, that fellow — good jury stuff.” When Bruce was a child he, with his mother and father, lived on the same floor of the hotel at Old Harbor where he later got a room. Then there was the room for his father and mother and the smaller one for himself. The bathroom was on the same floor several doors away. Perhaps the place looked then much as it did now, but to Bruce it seemed infinitely more shabby. On the day when he came back to Old Harbor and went to the hotel, and when he was shown to a room, he trembled, thinking the woman who led the way upstairs for him was about to lead him to the same room. At first, when he was left alone in the room, he thought it might be the same one he had occupied as a child. His mind went, “click, click,” like an old clock in an empty house. “Oh, Lord! Ring around the rosy, eh?” Gradually things cleared. He decided it wasn’t the same room. He wouldn’t have it be the same.
“Better not. I might wake up some night, crying for mother, wanting her soft arms about me, my head on her soft breasts. Mother-complex — something of that sort. I’m supposed to be trying to cut loose from memories. Get some new breath into my nostrils if I can. The dance of life! Don’t stop. Don’t go back. Dance the dance out to the end. Listen, do you hear the music?”
The woman who had shown him to the room was undoubtedly the child of the curls. That he knew by her name. She had grown a little stout, but wore neat clothes. Her hair was already a little gray. Was she, inside herself, still a child? Did he want to be a child again? Was that what had drawn him back to Old Harbor? “Well, hardly,” he had said to himself, stoutly. “I’m on another lay just now.”
But, about that woman, the hotel woman’s daughter — herself now a hotel woman?
Why hadn’t she got her a man? Perhaps she hadn’t wanted one. It might be that she had seen too much of men. He, himself, as a child, had never played with the two hotel children because the little girl had made him feel shy when he met her alone in the halls and because, as the boy was two or three years older, he felt shy with him too.
In the morning, when he was a child in knee-trousers, living in the hotel with his father and mother, he went off to school walking usually with his father, and in the afternoon, when school was out, came home alone. His father stayed at the schoolhouse until later, correcting papers or something of that sort.
In the late afternoon and when the weather was fine Bruce and his mother went for a walk. What had she been doing all day? There was no food to cook. They dined in the hotel dining-room among the traveling men and the farmers and town people who came there to eat. A few business men also came. Supper then was twenty-five cents. A procession of strange people always passing in and out of a boy’s fancy. Plenty of things for the fancy to feed on then. Bruce had been a rather silent boy. His mother was that type too. Bruce’s father did the talking for the family.
What did his mother do all day? She did a lot of sewing. Also she made lace. Later, when Bruce married Bernice, his grandmother, with whom he had lived after his mother died, sent her a lot of lace the mother had made. It was rather delicate stuff, turned a little yellow with age. Bernice was glad to get it. She wrote a note to the grandmother saying how sweet it was of her to send it.
In the afternoon, when the lad, who was now a man of thirty-four, got home from school, about four, his mother took him for a walk. At that time several river packets came regularly to Old Harbor and both the woman and her child liked to go down to the levee. What a bustle! What a singing, swearing and shouting! The town, that had been sleeping all day in the heat of the river valley, suddenly awoke. Drays drove pell-mell down the hillside streets, there was a cloud of dust, dogs barked, boys ran and shouted, a whirlwind of energy swept over the town. It seemed a life-and-death matter that the boat not be kept at the landing an unnecessary moment. The boats landed goods and took on and put off passengers near a street of small stores and saloons that stood on the ground now occupied by the Grey Wheel Factory. The stores faced the river and at their back doors ran the railroad that was slowly but surely choking the river life to death. What an unromantic thing the railroad seemed, there in sight of the river and the river life.
Bruce’s mother took her child down the sloping streets to one of the small stores facing the river where she usually bought some trifle, a package of pins or needles or a spool of thread. Then she and the boy sat on a bench before the store and the storekeeper came to the door to speak to her. He was a neat-looking man with a gray mustache. “The boy likes looking at the boats and the river, doesn’t he, Mrs. Stockton?” he said. The man and the woman talked of the heat of the late September day or of the chances for rain. Then a customer appeared and the man disappeared inside the store and did not come out again. The boy knew his mother had bought the trifle in the store because she didn’t like to sit on the bench in front without giving the store a little patronage. Already that part of town was going to pieces. The business of the town was drawing away from the river, had turned its back on the river where all the town life had once centered.
The woman and the boy sat for an hour on the bench. The light began to soften and a cool evening breeze blew up the river valley. How seldom the woman spoke! It was sure Bruce’s mother had not been very social. The wife of the principal of the school could have had a good many women friends in the town but she did not seem to want them. Why?
When a boat was coming in or going out it was very exciting. There was a long broad landing-plank that had been let down on the sloping levee, into which cobblestones had been set, and niggers ran or trotted on and off the boat with loads on their heads or shoulders. They were barefooted and often half naked. On hot days in the late May or early September how their black faces, backs and shoulders shone in the afternoon light! There was the boat, the slowly moving gray waters of the river, the green of the trees over on the Kentucky shore and the woman sitting beside the boy — so near and yet so far away.
Certain things, impressions, pictures, memories had got fixed in the boy’s mind. They stayed there after the woman was dead and he had himself become a man.
The woman. Mystery. Love of women. Scorn of women. What are they like? Are they like trees? How much can woman thrust into the mystery of life, think, feel? Love men. Take women. Drift with the drifting of days. That life goes on does not concern you. It concerns women.
Thoughts of a man dissatisfied with life, as it had presented itself to him confused with what he thought a boy had felt sitting by a river with a woman. Before he got old enough to be at all conscious of her, as a being like himself, she died. Had he, Bruce, in the years after she died and while he was growing to manhood and after he became a grown man, had he manufactured the feeling he had come to have concerning her? That might be. It might be he had done it because Bernice did not seem much of a mystery.
The lover must love. It is his nature. Did men like Sponge Martin, who were workmen and lived and felt down through their fingers — did they get life more clearly?
Bruce walking out at a factory door with Sponge on a Saturday evening. Winter almost gone, spring coming soon now.
Before the factory door at the wheel of an automobile a woman — the wife of Grey, the owner of the factory. Another woman sitting on a bench beside her boy looking at the moving face of a river in the evening light. Dr
ifting thoughts, fancies in a man’s mind. The reality of life clouded at the moment. Seed-sowing hunger, soil-hunger. A group of words caught in the meshes of the mind drifting up into consciousness, forming words on his lips. As Sponge talked, Bruce and the woman in the car, for a moment only, looked into each other’s eyes.
The words in Bruce’s mind at the moment were from the Bible. “And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother’s wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother.”
What a queer jumble of words — ideas. Bruce had been away from Bernice for several months. Was he on the lookout for another woman now? Why the startled look in the eyes of the woman in the automobile? Had he embarrassed her by staring at her? But she had stared at him. There had been a look in her eyes as though she were about to speak to him, a workman in her husband’s factory. He would listen to Sponge.
Bruce walked beside Sponge without looking back. “What a thing that Bible!” It had been one of the few books Bruce never tired of reading. When he was a boy and after his mother died his grandmother always had the book about — reading in the New Testament, but he read the older Testament. Stories — men and women in relation to each other — fields, sheep, grain growing, famine coming into a land, years of plenty coming. Joseph, David, Saul, Samson, the strong man — honey, bees, barns, cattle — men and women going into barns to lie on the threshing-floors. “When he saw her — he thought her to be a harlot because she had covered her face.” That was when he went up unto his sheep-shearers to Timorath, he and his friend Hirah, the Adullamite.
“And he turned unto her by the way and said, Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto you.”
And why had not that young Jew in the newspaper office in Chicago read the book of his fathers? There would not have been such loose word-slinging then.
Sponge on a sawdust pile in the Ohio River Valley beside his old woman — the old woman who was alive like a fox terrier.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 106
