Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  He was ashamed of what he had done. He saw dimly, far into the future. Shame shook him. He saw, looking far into the future, what he had started. He saw Langdon, Georgia, Tom Shaw, the mill owner of Langdon, Georgia... he saw wars being fought in His name, commercialized churches, churches, like industry, controlled by money, churches turning away from the lowly, turning their backs on labor. He saw hatred and dullness spring up over the world.

  “Because of me. I have given mankind this absurd dream of Heaven, turning their eyes away from earth.”

  The Christ had gone back to be again a simple unknown shepherd in the barren hills. He had been a good shepherd. The flocks were run down because there was no good ram and he went to find a ram. To shoot, to flood new life into the old sheep mothers. What an amazingly strong sweet human story it had been. “If my own fancy could but go wide and free like that,” Ethel thought. Once, when she had newly come home to her father’s house, after two or three years away, and had been rereading the book, Ethel had begun suddenly to speak of it to her father. She had some notion of getting close to him. She had wanted to tell him the story. She tried.

  She wouldn’t soon forget the experience. Of a sudden he had got the idea. “And the writer says He didn’t die on the cross.”

  “Yes. It seems there is an old story of that sort in the East, told in the East. The writer, George Moore, an Irishman, took it and built upon it.”

  “He didn’t die and was not born again?”

  “No, not in the flesh. He was not born again.”

  Ethel’s father had got up from his chair. It was evening and the father and daughter were sitting together on the porch of the house. He had gone white. “Ethel.” His voice was sharp.

  “Do not ever speak of it again,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Why? My God,” he said. “There is no hope. If the Christ did not rise again in the flesh there is no hope.”

  He meant... of course he had not thought out what he meant... this life of mine, I have lived here on this earth, here in this town, is such a strange, sweet healing thing that I cannot bear the thought of its going out, completely and finally, as a candle is blown out.

  What staggering egotism and all the more amazing because Ethel’s father was not really an egotistical man at all. He was really a humble man, too humble.

  And so Red Oliver had had a Sunday. Ethel read what he had written, while he stayed in the toilet in the library. She read it hurriedly. He had merely walked out of town some miles, going out along the railroad that followed the river. Afterwards he had written about it, addressing some purely fanciful woman because he had no woman. He had wanted to tell some woman.

  He had felt what she felt on Sunday in Langdon. “I couldn’t stand the town,” he wrote. “It is better on week days when the people are sincere.”

  So he was also a rebel.

  “When they lie to each other and cheat each other it is better.”

  He had spoken of the big man of the town, of Tom Shaw, the mill owner. “Mother went to her church and I felt I ought to offer to go with her but I couldn’t,” he wrote. He had waited in bed until she had left the house and then had cut out alone. He had seen Tom Shaw and his wife going to the Presbyterian church in their big car. It was the church to which Ethel’s father belonged, in which he taught the Sunday-school class. “They say Tom Shaw has got rich on the labor of the poor here. It is better to see him scheming to get richer. It is better to see him telling himself lies as to what he does for people than to see him thus, going to church.”

  At least Ethel’s father would never have questioned the new gods of the American scene, of the new industrialized Southern American scene, like that. He wouldn’t have dared it, even to himself.

  The young man had gone out of town along the railroad track and had turned from the track, some miles out of town and had got into a pine forest. He wrote words about the forest and about the red Georgia land seen beyond the pine forest through trees. It was a simple little chapter of a man, a young man alone with nature on Sunday when all the rest of his town was in church. Ethel had been to church. She wished she had been with Red.

  However, if she had been with him... Something stirred within her thinking of it. She put down the leaves out of the cheap pencil tablet on which he had written and returned to her desk. Red came out of the toilet. He had been in there for five minutes. If she had been with him in the pine forest, if the unknown woman to whom he had written, the woman who didn’t evidently exist in reality, if it had been she herself. She might make it herself. “I might be very, very nice.”

  Then there might not have been any writing about it. There wasn’t any doubt but that he had given, in the scrawled words on the tablet, a kind of real feeling of the place he had been in.

  If she had been there with him, lying beside him on the pine needles in the pine forest he might have been touching her with his hands. A little quiver ran through her body thinking of it. “I wonder if I want him?” she asked herself that day. “It seems a little absurd,” she told herself. He was back at the table in the writing-room, writing again. He occasionally looked up, in her direction, but her eyes avoided looking at him while he looked. She had her woman’s way of managing that. “I am not ready to say anything to you yet. Why, you have been coming in here less than a week.”

  If she had been with him and had got him, as she already felt she could get him if she decided to try, he wouldn’t have been thinking of the trees and the sky and the red fields beyond the trees nor yet of Tom Shaw, the cotton-mill millionaire going to church in his big car, telling himself that he was going there to worship the poor and lowly Christ.

  “He would have been thinking of me,” Ethel thought. The thought pleased and at the same time, perhaps because he was so much younger than she was, amused her too.

  After he had come home that summer Red got a temporary job in a local store. He didn’t stay at that long. “I don’t want to be a clerk,” he told himself. He went back to the mill and, although they did not need men, they took him on again.

  It was better there. Perhaps, at the mill, they thought, “In case of trouble he will be on the right side.” From the window of the library, housed as it was in an old brick building, just where the region of stores ended, Ethel sometimes saw Red at evening going through Main Street. It was a long walk from the mill to the Oliver house. Ethel had already dined. Red wore overalls. He wore heavy workingmen’s shoes. When the mill team was having a ball game she wanted to go. He was, she thought, a queer isolated figure in the town. “Like myself,” she thought. He was a part of the town and yet not a part of it.

  There was something nice about Red’s body. Ethel liked a certain free swing to his body. It remained, even when he was tired, after the day’s work. She liked his eyes. She had got into the habit of standing near the library window when, in the evening, he went home from his day s work. Her eyes appraised the young man walking thus along the hot street of the Southern town. Quite frankly she thought of his body in connection with her own woman’s body. It might be the thing I want. If he were only a bit older.” There was desire in her. Desire invaded her body. She knew that feeling. I haven’t handled that sort of thing very well in the past,” she thought. “Shall I take a chance with him? I can get him if I go after him.” She was a bit ashamed of her own rather calculating mind. “If it came to marriage. That sort of thing. He is so much younger than I am. It doesn’t work out.” It was absurd. He was not more than twenty, a boy, she thought. —

  He was pretty sure, in the end, to find out what she had done to him. “Just the same I could if I tried.” Almost every evening, after his day’s work and when the library was open he came there. When he had begun thinking of her, it was when he had been working again in the factory for a week.. he was only to stay in town some six or eight weeks more before he returned to school... already, although perhaps he was not quite conscious of what had been done to him, he was all afire with thoughts
of her.... “If I tried?” It was evident no woman had got him. Such a young lonely man, Ethel knew, is always to be got by a clever woman. She thought herself fairly clever. “I don’t know what there is in my past record to make me think I’m clever but I do think so, evidently,” she thought, standing thus near the library window as Red Oliver passed, seeing but not seen. “A woman, if she is any good can get any man some other woman has not already marked down.” She was half ashamed of her own thoughts concerning a young boy. She was amused by her own thoughts.

  2

  ETHEL LONG’S EYES were puzzling. They were greenish-blue and hard. Then they were softly blue. She wasn’t particularly sensual. She could be brutally cold. She wanted sometimes to be soft and yielding. When you saw her in a room, tall and slender, well formed, her hair seemed brown. When light shone through, it became red. As a young girl she had been of the awkward torn-boy type, a rather excitable, fiery child. As she grew older she developed a passion for clothes. She would have liked always to wear better clothes than she could afford. Sometimes she wished she had gone in for being a designer of clothes. “I could have made a success of that,” she thought. Most people were a little afraid of her. If she did not want them to come near, she had her own way of holding them off. Some of the men who had been attracted to her, and who had made no progress, thought of her as something of a serpent. “She has serpent’s eyes,” they thought. If the man, attracted to her, was at all sensitive, it was easy for her to upset him. That rather annoyed her, too. “I guess I want a brute of a man, one who will pay no attention to my whims,” she told herself. Often, that summer, after Red Oliver had got into the habit of going, at every opportunity, to the library and had begun thinking of her in relation to himself, he thought, catching her eyes looking at him, that they invited everything.

  He had been in the West, with a young man, a friend, working during the early part of the summer on the farm of the friend’s father in Kansas and, as is usual with young men, there had been a good deal of talk of women. Talk of women had been mixed with talk of what the young men were to do with their lives. Both young men had been touched by modern radicalism. They had got that in college.

  They had been stirred. There was one young professor — he had taken a special fancy to Red — who had talked a good deal. He had lent him books — Marxian books, anarchist books. He was an admirer of the American anarchist, Emma Goldman. “I saw her once,” he said.

  He described a meeting in a small Middle-Western industrial town, the local intelligentsia gathered in a little dark hall.

  Emma Goldman making a speech. Afterwards Ben Reitman, a large loose-looking noisy man, went through the audience selling books. The audience was a little excited, a little frightened by the woman’s bold talk, her bold ideas. There was a dark wooden stairway leading up to the hall and some one carried a brick up there and threw it down.

  It went bumping down the stairs — boom, boom, and the audience in the little hall...

  Men and women in the audience jumping to their feet. There were pale faces, trembling lips. They thought the hall was being blown up. The professor, then a student, had bought one of Emma Goldman’s books which he gave to Red.

  “They call you ‘Red,’ eh? It’s a significant name. Why don’t you be a revolutionist?” he asked. He asked such questions and then laughed.

  “Our colleges have already turned out too many young bond-sellers, too many lawyers and doctors.” When he was told that Red, during the previous summer, had worked as a common laborer in a Southern cotton mill, he was excited. He thought both young men — Red and his friend, Neil Bradley, the young Western farmer — ought to devote themselves to some kind of effort to remake society, be frankly socialists or even communists, and he wanted Red, when he had finished school, to remain a laborer.

  “Don’t do it because of any good you think you can do humanity,” he said. “There isn’t any such thing as humanity. There are only all these millions of individuals in a strange unaccountable situation.

  “I tell you to be a radical because being a radical is a little dangerous in America and will grow more dangerous. It is an adventure. Life is too safe here. It is too dull.”

  He found out that Red had a secret yearning to write. “All right,” he said cheerfully, “remain a laborer. That might be the supreme adventure in a great middle-class country, to remain poor, to consciously choose to be a common man, a worker, rather than any kind of a big bug... a buyer or seller.” The young professor, who had made rather a deep impression on the minds of the two young men, was himself almost girlish in appearance. There might have been something girlish in him, but if that was true he concealed it well. He had himself been a poor young man but said he had never been strong enough to be a workman. “I had to be a clerk,” he said, “I tried being a worker. One year I got a job digging in a sewer in a Middle-Western city but I couldn’t stand it.” He had admired Red’s body and sometimes, in expressing his admiration, had embarrassed Red. “It’s a beauty,” he said, touching Red’s back. He meant Red’s body, the unusual depth and breadth of the chest. He himself was small and slender and had sharp bird-like eyes.

  When Red had been on the Western farm, earlier that summer, he and his friend Neil Bradley, also a ball player, sometimes, in the evening, drove into Kansas City. Neil hadn’t got his school teacher yet.

  Then he got one, the school teacher. He wrote Red letters describing his intimacies with her. He had got Red started thinking about women, wanting a woman as he never had before. He looked at Ethel Long. How nicely her head sat on her shoulders! The shoulders were small but they were well formed. Her neck was long and slender and there was a line, flowing down from her small head along her neck and losing itself under her dress, his hand wanted to follow. She was a trifle taller than he was, as he was inclined to stockiness. Red had broad shoulders. They were, from the point of view of manly beauty, too broad. He did not think of himself in connection with the notion of manly beauty although that college professor, the one who had spoken of the beauty of his body, the one who had made a special point of cultivating him and his friend, Neil Bradley... He might have been a trifle on the queer side. Neither Red nor Neil ever spoke of that. He always seemed about to caress Red with his hands. When they were alone together he was always asking Red to come to his office in the college building. He drew near. He had been sitting at his desk in a chair, but got up. His eyes that had been so bird-like, sharp and impersonal, became suddenly, strangely, like women’s eyes, the eyes of a woman in love. It had given Red a queer uncertain feeling sometimes in the man’s presence. Nothing had ever happened. Nothing had ever been said.

  Red had begun haunting the library in Langdon. There were many hot still evenings that summer. Sometimes, after he had come from his job in the mill and had bolted his dinner he hurried away to practice on the ball field with the mill team, but the mill boys, after the day’s work, were tired and could not keep it up long, and so Red, wearing his baseball uniform, came back into town and went to the library. On three evenings a week the library was open until ten, although there were few enough people coming in. Often the librarian sat alone.

  He knew that another man in town, an older man, a lawyer, was after Ethel Long. It worried him, frightened him a little. He thought of the letters Neil Bradley was writing him now. Neil had got in with a woman older than himself, and almost at once an intimacy had begun. “It was something glorious, something to live for,” Neil said. Was there a possibility of another such intimacy for himself with this woman?

  The thought made Red a little frantic. It also frightened him. Although he did not know it then, Ethel’s mother having died and her one sister, older than herself, having married and moved to another Southern town and her father having married a second wife, she, like Red, was not too comfortable at home.

  She wished she did not have to live in Langdon, that she had not come back there. She and her father’s second wife were almost of the same age.

/>   The step-mother in the Long household was pale, a pale blonde. Although Red Oliver did not know it, Ethel Long was also ready for adventure. As the boy sat sometimes in the evening, in the library, a little tired, pretending to read or write, furtively looking at her, furtively dreaming of possessing her, she was looking at him.

  She was weighing the possibilities of an adventure with the young man, little more than a boy to her, against another sort of adventure with a much older and quite different sort of man.

  The step-mother, after her marriage, had wanted to have a child of her own and none had come. She blamed her husband, Ethel’s father.

  She fussed at her husband. Ethel, sometimes at night, lying in her bed, heard her new mother — the thought of her as a mother was absurd — fussing at her father. On some evenings Ethel went into her own room early. There was the man and wife, the woman scolding. She issued orders sharply— “do this... do that.”

  The father was a tall man with black hair, growing gray now. By his first marriage there had been two sons and two daughters, but both of the sons had died, one at home, as a grown man, older than Ethel, and the other, the youngest of his children, as a soldier, an officer in the World War.

  The older of the two sons had been sickly. He was a pale sensitive man who wanted to be a scholar, but who, because of illness, never finished college. He died suddenly of heart failure. The younger son was like Ethel, tall and slender. He had been his father’s pride. The father had a mustache and a little pointed beard that, like his hair, had begun to get gray, but he kept it colored, usually doing the job of coloring it very well. Sometimes he failed or was careless. People met him on the street one day and the mustache was streaked with gray and the next day, when they met him, it had become black and shiny again.