Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “I’d like to show one of them.

  “But hell, why should I bother?”

  Ethel wasn’t thinking of her father when she thought these thoughts. Her father was a good man. She herself wasn’t good. She wasn’t moral. She was thinking of the whole present-day Southern white man’s attitude, of the way puritanism had, after the Civil War, moved south. “The Bible belt,” Henry Mencken called it in his Mercury. It involved all sorts of ugliness, poor whites, Negroes, upper-class whites, gone a little crazy trying to hang onto something lost.

  Industrialism in its ugliest form coming in... all that mixed up in people with religion... pretensions, stupidity... just the same it was physically a gorgeous land.

  The whites and the blacks in an almost impossible relation to each other... men and women lying to themselves.

  All of this in a warm sweet land. Ethel wasn’t particularly, not consciously, aware of nature in the South... the red sand clay roads, the piney woods, the Georgia peach orchards in bloom in the spring. She knew clearly that it might have been the sweetest land in all America, and wasn’t. The rarest opportunity white men had missed in all their missing fire in America... the South... how gorgeous it might have been!

  Ethel was a modern. That old talk of a high fine Southern civilization... making gentlemen, making ladies... she didn’t want to be a lady herself... “That old stuff doesn’t go any more,” she told herself sometimes, thinking of her father’s standards of life, standards he would have so liked to press down upon her. Perhaps he thought he had pressed them down. Ethel smiled. She had the notion, rather firmly fixed in her mind, that, for a woman like herself, no longer young... she was twenty-nine... that she had better try to cultivate, if she could, a certain style in life. It was better even to be somewhat rigid. “Don’t give yourself too cheaply, whatever you do,” she had grown fond of telling herself. There had been in her, formerly, at times... the mood might at any time come back.. she was, after all, only twenty-nine, a rather ripe age for an alive woman... she knew well enough that she was far from out of danger... formerly there had been in her, at times, a rather wild and mad passion to give.

  Herself... recklessly to give.

  What difference did it make who it was?

  The act of giving would itself be something. There is a fence over which you would like to get. What matter what is beyond? Getting over is something.

  To live recklessly.

  “Wait a minute,” Ethel said to herself. She smiled saying it. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t tried that, that reckless giving. It hadn’t worked.

  Still she might try again. “If only he would be nice.” She felt that, in the future, what she thought of as niceness would be very, very important to her.

  It wouldn’t, the next time, be giving at all. It would be surrender. That or nothing.

  “To what? To a man?” Ethel asked herself. “I presume a woman has to cling to something, to a belief that there is something for her, to be got through a man,” she thought. Ethel was twenty-nine. You get into the thirties and then the forties.

  Women who do not give themselves utterly dry up. They get dry-lipped, dry inside.

  If they give they get sufficiently punished.

  “But perhaps we want punishment.”

  “Beat me. Beat me. Make me nice. Make me beautiful, for a moment, anyway.

  “Make me blossom. Make me flower.”

  Ethel had got interested again that summer. It was rather nice. There were two men, one much younger than herself, one much older. What woman wouldn’t be pleased having two men wanting her... or for that matter three, or a dozen? She was glad. Life in Langdon, but for the two men wanting her, would be, after all, pretty dull. It was rather too bad that the younger of the two men in whom she had suddenly got interested and who had got interested in her was such a young one, much younger than herself, really immature, but there was no doubt she was interested in him. He stirred her. She wanted him close. “I’d like to...”

  Thoughts drift. Thoughts excite. Thoughts are dangerous and nice. Sometimes thoughts are like hands touching, where you want to be touched.

  “Touch me, thoughts. Come close. Come close.”

  Thoughts drift. Thoughts excite. Thoughts of women in a man.

  “Do we want actuality?

  “If we could decide that we could decide everything.”

  It may be an age gone blind and mad with actualities — machinery, science. Women like Ethel Long of Langdon, Georgia, who read books and think, or try to think, who dream sometimes of a new freedom, separate from man’s freedom.

  Man having failed in America, women now trying something. Were they really?

  Ethel wasn’t, after all, just a product of Langdon, Georgia. She had been to a Northern college, had associated with American intellectuals. She had Southern memories clinging to her.

  Sense of brown women and girls about when she was a child and when she was growing up through young girlhood into womanhood.

  Southern white women, growing up, always conscious, in some subtle way of brown women about... women big of hips, unmoral, broad-breasted women, peasants, brown bodies...

  They having in them something for men, too, for both brown and white men...

  Persistent denial of fact...

  Brown women in fields, working in fields... brown women in towns, as servants... in houses... brown women walking in streets with heavy baskets balanced on their heads... hips swaying.

  The hot South...

  Denial. Denial.

  “A white woman may be a fool, forever reading or thinking.” She can’t help it.

  “Why, I haven’t done so much of either,” Ethel said to herself.

  The younger man, in whom she had suddenly got interested, was named Oliver and he had come back to Langdon from the North, where he also had been in college. He did not come at the beginning of the vacation time, but rather late, in late July. The local paper said he had been out West with a school friend and now he had come home. He had begun coming into the Langdon public library, where Ethel worked. She was the librarian of the new public library in Langdon. It had been opened during the past winter.

  She thought about young Red Oliver. Without a doubt she was, from the moment she first saw him, when he returned to Langdon that summer, she was excited by him. The excitement took a new turn for her. She had never before felt like that toward a man. ‘Ί guess I’m beginning to grow motherly,” she thought. It had become a habit with her to analyze her own thoughts and emotions. She liked it. It made her feel mature. “It is a hard time in life for such a young man as that,” she thought. At least young Red Oliver did not seem like the other young men of Langdon. He seemed puzzled. And how physically strong he looked! He had been on a Western farm for some weeks. He was brown and healthy-looking. He had come home to Langdon to spend some time with his mother before going off again to school.

  “It may be I am interested in him because I am myself a little stale,” Ethel thought.

  “I am a little greedy. He is like firm fresh fruit I want to bite into.”

  The young man’s mother was, to Ethel’s mind, a rather queer woman. She knew about Red’s mother. All of the town knew about her. She knew that, when Red had been at home the year before, after his first year in the Northern school and after his father, Doctor Oliver, died, he had worked in the Langdon cotton mills. Ethel’s father had known Red’s father and had even known Red’s grandfather. He spoke of Red’s return to town at table at the Long house. “I see that young Oliver’s home. I hope he’s more like his grandfather than his father or his mother.”

  In the library, when Red came in there, sometimes in the evening, Ethel looked him over. He was already a strong man. How big his shoulders were! He had a rather large head covered with red hair.

  He was obviously a young man who took life rather seriously. Ethel thought she liked that kind.

  “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.” She had got, that summer, very self-conscio
us. She didn’t like the trait in herself, would have liked rather being more simple, even primitive... or pagan.

  “It may be because I am nearing thirty.” She had got it into her head that, for a woman, thirty was the turning point.

  That notion might also have come from her reading. George Moore... or Balzac.

  The notion... “She is ripe now. She is splendid, gorgeous.

  “Pluck her. Bite her. Eat her. Hurt her.”

  That wasn’t exactly the way it was put. That notion was involved in it. It implied American men, able to do it, who dared to try doing it.

  Unscrupulous men. Daring men. Masculine men.

  “It is all this damn reading... women trying to rise, to take hold of life. Culture, eh?”

  The old South, of Ethel’s grandfather and Red Oliver’s grandfather, hadn’t read. They talked about Greece and had Greek books in their houses, but they were safe books. No one read them. Why read when you can ride abroad over fields and command slaves? You are a prince. Why should a prince read?

  The old South was dead, but it certainly hadn’t died a princely death. Once it had a profound, a princely contempt for the Northern shop-keepers, money-changers, factory-owners, but now it was itself all eager for factories, for money, for shop-keeping.

  Hating and imitating. Muddled for sure.

  “Am I any better?” Ethel had to ask herself. Evidently, she thought, thinking of the young man, he has a desire to get hold of life. “God knows, so have I.” After Red Oliver came home and began coming often to the library and after she had got acquainted with him — she herself managed that — she got onto the fact that he sometimes wrote things on bits of paper. He wrote verses he would have been too shy to show her had she asked him. She didn’t ask. The library was open in the evening on three evenings of the week and on such evenings he almost always came in.

  He explained, a little awkwardly, that he wanted to read, but Ethel thought she understood. It was because, like herself, he didn’t feel much a part of the town. In his case it might be, partly at least, on account of his mother.

  “He feels out of it here and so do I,” Ethel thought. She knew about his writing because at night, when he had come to the library and had got a book from a shelf, he sat down at a table and, not looking at the book, began to write. He had brought a writing tablet with him.

  Ethel walked about in the little reading-room of the library. There was a place she could stand, among the shelves of books, and look over his shoulder. He wrote to a friend in the West, a man friend. He tried his hand at verses. They didn’t come off much, Ethel thought. She only saw one or two feeble attempts.

  When he had first come home that summer — after his visit to the Western friend — a fellow who had been in college with him, Red told her — he occasionally talked to her, shyly, eagerly, with the boyish eagerness of a young man with a woman in whose presence he is moved but feels young and inadequate — a fellow who had also played on the college baseball team. Red had been at work during the early part ‘of the summer on a farm in Kansas, belonging to that one’s father.... He came home to Langdon with his neck and arms burned by the sun of fields... that also pleasing Ethel... when he had first come home he didn’t get a job at once. The weather was very hot but it was cooler in the library. There was a little toilet in the building. He went in there. He and Ethel had been alone in the building. She ran and read what he had been Writing.

  It was Monday and he had been wandering about alone ‘on Sunday. He had written a letter. To whom? To no one. “Dear unknown,” he had written, and Ethel read the words and smiled. There was a little tight feeling about her heart. ‘“He wants some one a woman. I presume every man does.”

  What queer ideas men had, that was to say, the nice ones. There were other kinds a-plenty. Ethel knew about them too. The young nice kind had yearnings. They were trying to reach out toward something. Such a one was conscious always of some inner hunger. He hoped some woman could satisfy it. If he didn’t have a woman he tried to create one, in his own fancy.

  Red had tried to do that. “Dear Unknown.” He had told his unknown about his lonely Sunday. Ethel had read rapidly. To get back from the toilet to which he had gone he Would have to pass along a short hallway. She would hear his footsteps. She could make her getaway. It was fun thus to peep into the boy’s life. After all he was only a boy.

  He had written to his unknown about his day, a lonely day; Ethel herself hated the Sundays in the Georgia town. She went to church but hated going. The preacher was stupid, she thought.

  She had thought that all out. “If the people, going to church on Sundays here were really religious,” she had thought. They weren’t. Perhaps her father was. Her father was a Georgia County Judge, and on Sundays he taught a Sunday-school class. On Saturday evenings he was always busy getting his Sunday-school lesson. He went at it like a boy, preparing for an examination in school. Ethel had thought, a hundred times, she had thought, “It gets into the air of the town on Sundays, the fakiness about religion.” There was something heavy and frigid in the air of the Georgia town on Sundays, particularly among the whites. She thought maybe the Negroes were all right. Their religion, the American kind of Protestant religion they had taken over from the whites... perhaps they had made something of it.

  Not the whites. Whatever the South had once been, it had become — such towns as Langdon, Georgia, had become — with the coming of the cotton mills, Yankee towns. There had been a kind of deal made with God. “All right, we’ll give you this one day of the week. We’ll go to church. We’ll put up enough money to keep the churches going.

  “In return for that you give us Heaven when we get through with this life here, this life of running this cotton mill, or this store, or this law office....

  “Or being sheriff or deputy sheriff or being in the real-estate business.

  “You give us Heaven when we get through with all this and we’ll hold up our end.”

  To Ethel Long something seemed to get into the air of the town on Sundays. It hurt a sensitive person. Ethel thought she was sensitive. I don’t see how it turns out that I still am sensitive, but I believe I am,” she thought. A kind of staleness seemed to her to run through the town on Sunday. It got into the walls of buildings. It invaded houses. It hurt Ethel, made her ache.

  She had had an experience with her father. Once, when he was a young man, he had been quite eager-minded. He read books and wanted others to read books. Suddenly he had stopped reading. He seemed to have stopped thinking, didn’t want to think. It was one of the ways in which the South, although the Southerner would never admit it, had fallen in with the North. Not to think, to read newspapers instead, go to church regularly... not being any more truly religious... listen to the radio... join a civic club... boost for growth.

  “Don’t think.... You may begin to think what it really means.”

  In the meantime letting the Southern land go to pot.

  “You Southerners betraying your own Southern fields... the old half-savage strange beauty of the land and the towns going.

  “Don’t think. Don’t you dare think.

  “Be like the Yanks, newspaper readers, radio listeners.

  “Advertise. Don’t think.”

  Ethel’s father insisted on Ethel’s going to church on Sundays. Why, it wasn’t exactly insistence. It was a half pathetic imitation of insistence. “You’d better,” he said, with an air of finality. He was always trying to be final. It was because her position as town librarian was a semi-public position. “What will people say if you don’t?” That was what her father meant.

  “Jesus,” she thought. Nevertheless she went.

  She had brought home a lot of her own books.

  As a younger man, her father might have found an intellectual bond with her. He couldn’t now. A thing had happened to him that, she knew, had happened to many American men, perhaps to most American men. There came a certain time, in the life of the American man, when he stopped dead. F
or some queer reason all intellectuality died in him.

  After that he thought only of making money, or of being respectable or, if he happened to be the lustful sort, of getting women or living luxuriously.

  Innumerable books written in America were of that sort, as were most of the plays and the movies. Nearly all of them stated some problem of life, often an interesting problem. They went about so far with it and then stopped dead. They stated a problem they themselves wouldn’t face, then suddenly they began crawfishing. They got out of it by suddenly becoming cheerful or optimistic about life, something of that sort.

  Ethel’s father was pretty sure about Heaven. At least he wanted to be. He was determined to be. Ethel had brought home with her, among her other books, a book by George Moore, called The Brook Kerith.

  It was a story about the Christ, a moving tender story, she thought. It had touched her.

  The Christ ashamed of what he had done. The Christ gone up in the world and then come down. He began life as a poor shepherd boy and after the terrible time when he proclaimed himself God, when he went about leading men astray, when he cried out, “Follow me. Follow in my footsteps,” after men had put him up on the cross to die...

  In George Moore’s beautiful book he did not die. A rich young man loved him and took him down from the cross, still alive but terribly maimed. The man nursed him, brought him back to life. He crept off, away from people and became a shepherd again.