Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Not all of the men who went to the lynching had a part in it. It had happened while Ethel was a student in Chicago. Afterwards it turned out that the girl, who said she had been raped, was abnormal. She was of low mentality. A good many men, whites and blacks, had already been with her.

  They took the Negro from the sheriff and his deputies and strung him up to a tree, riddled his body with bullets. Then they burned his body. “They seemed unable to let it alone,” Tom said. He laughed, a cynical laugh. Many of the best people went.

  They stood to one side, looking on, seeing the Negro man... he was a huge black.... “He would go two hundred and fifty pounds,” Tom said, laughing. He spoke as though the Negro man were a hog butchered by the crowd, as a kind of holiday performance... respectable men going down to see it done, standing at the edge of the crowd. Life in Langdon was what it was.

  “They look down on me. Let them.”

  He could put men or women on the witness stand in court, torture them mentally. It was a game. He liked it. He could twist what they had said, lead them into saying things they didn’t mean.

  The law was a game. All of life was a game.

  He had got his house. He had made money. He liked to go to New York several times a year.

  He wanted a woman who would decorate his life. He wanted Ethel as he might have wanted a fine horse.

  “Why not? Life is like that.”

  Was it a proposal for a kind of whoredom, a kind of high-class whoredom? Ethel was puzzled.

  She had resisted. She had left the house that night because she could not bear being either with her father or with Blanche. Blanche also had a kind of talent. She had noted everything about Ethel, what clothes she wore, the mood she was in. Now her father had become afraid of his daughter, of what she might do. He took it out in silence, sitting at table in the Long house, saying nothing. He knew about her going to ride with Tom Riddle and walking through the streets with young Red.

  Red Oliver had become a mill hand and Tom Riddle was a shady lawyer.

  She was endangering his own position in the town, his own dignity.

  And there was Blanche, amused, really pleased because her husband was displeased. It had got to that with Blanche. She lived by the discomfiture of others.

  Ethel had left the house in disgust. It was a hot cloudy evening. On that evening her body was tired and she had to make an effort to walk with her accustomed dignity, to keep her feet from dragging. She went through Main Street toward the library, just off Main Street. Black clouds were drifting across an evening sky.

  There were people gathered in Main Street. On that evening Ethel saw Tom Shaw, the little man who was president of the cotton mill where Red Oliver worked. He was being driven hurriedly through Main Street. There was a train going North. Very likely he was off to New York. A Negro man drove the big car. Ethel thought of something Tom Riddle had said. “There goes the Prince,” Tom had said. “Hello, there goes the Prince of Langdon.” In the new South Tom Shaw was the sort of man who had become the prince, the leader.

  There was a woman, a young woman, going through Main Street. Once she had been Ethel’s friend. They had gone to high school together. She had married a young merchant. Now she was hurrying homeward, pushing a baby carriage. She was round and plump.

  She and Ethel had been friends. Now they were acquaintances. They smiled and bowed coldly to each other.

  Ethel hurried along the street. In Main Street, near the court house, she was joined by Red Oliver.

  “May I walk with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to the library?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence. Thoughts. The young man was hot, like the night. “He’s too young, too young. I don’t want him.”

  She saw Tom Riddle standing with other men before a store.

  He had seen her with the boy. The boy had seen him standing there. Thoughts in them. Red Oliver was embarrassed by her silence. He was hurt, afraid. He wanted a woman. He thought he wanted her.

  Ethel’s thoughts. One night in Chicago. A man... once in her rooming-house in Chicago... just an ordinary man... a big strong fellow... he had quarreled with his wife... he was living there. “Am I common? Am I just dirt?”

  It was on just such a hot rainy night. He had a room on the same floor of the house on lower Michigan Avenue. He had been after Ethel. Red Oliver was after her now.

  He got her. It happened suddenly, unexpectedly.

  And Tom Riddle.

  She was alone on that floor of the house that night in Chicago and he... that other man... just a man, a male, nothing more... and he was there.

  Ethel had never understood that in herself. She was tired. She had dined that evening in a noisy hot cafeteria, as she thought, among noisy ugly people. Were they ugly or was she? For the time she was disgusted with herself, disgusted with her life in the city.

  She had gone to her room and had not locked her door. That man had seen her go in there. He was sitting in his own room with the door open. He was big and strong.

  She had gone to her room and had thrown herself on the bed. There were such moments came to her. She did not care what happened. She wanted something to happen. He came boldly in. There had been a short struggle, not at all like the struggle with the advertising man Fred Wells.

  She surrendered... let it happen. Afterwards he wanted to do something for her, take her to a theatre, take her to dine. She could not bear seeing him. It had stopped like that, abruptly as it had begun. “I was such a fool to think anything could be got at in that way, as though I were just an animal, nothing else, as though I wanted just that.”

  Ethel went to the library and, unlocking the door, went in. She left Red Oliver at the door. “Good night. Thank you,” she said. She put up two windows, hoping to get a breath of air and lighted a desk lamp over her desk. She sat there, over the desk, leaning over, her head in her hands.

  It went on a long time, thoughts traveling through her. Night came, a hot dark night. She was nervous, as she had been that night in Chicago, on just such another hot tired night, when she had taken that man she did not know... it was strange she hadn’t got into trouble... got a child... am I just a whore?... how many women were as she was, blown about in life as she was... did a woman need a man, some sort of anchor? There was Tom Riddle.

  She thought of life in her father’s house. Now her father was upset and uncomfortable about her. There was Blanche. Blanche felt actual enmity toward her husband. There was no frankness. Blanche and her father had both shot and both missed. “If I take a chance with Tom,” Ethel thought.

  Blanche had taken a certain attitude toward herself. She wanted to give Ethel money for clothes. She dropped little hints about that, knowing Ethel’s love of clothes. Perhaps she merely let herself go as she did, neglecting her own clothes, often not even bothering to be clean, to punish her husband. She would have wormed money out of her husband and would have given it to Ethel. She wanted to.

  She wanted to touch Ethel with her hands, the hands with dirty fingernails. She approached. “You are lovely, dear, in that dress.” She smiled, a funny cat-like little smile. She made the house unhealthy. It was an unhealthy house.

  “What would I do to Tom’s house?”

  Ethel was tired thinking. “You think and you think and then you do something. Very likely you make a fool of yourself.” It had grown dark in the street outside the library. There was an occasional flash of lightning, lighting up the room in which Ethel sat, the light from the little desk lamp shining on her head, making her hair red, making it shine. There came occasional peals of thunder.

  *

  YOUNG Red Oliver had been watching and waiting. He had walked restlessly about. He had wanted to follow Ethel into the library. Once, early in the evening, he opened the street door softly and looked in. He had seen Ethel Long sitting in there, her head in her arm, by her desk.

  He had become frightened, had gone away, but he had come back.
>
  He had been thinking of her for days and for many nights. After all, he was a boy, a nice boy. He was strong and clean. “If I had seen him when I was myself young, if we had been of the same age.” Ethel had thought sometimes.

  At night, sometimes, when she could not sleep. She had not slept well since she had come back to the Long house. There was something about such a house. Something gets into the air of the house. It is in the walls, in the wall-paper on the walls, in the furniture, in the carpets on the floor. It is in the bed clothes, on which you are lying.

  It hurts. It makes everything gigantic.

  It is hatred, alive, watching, eager. It is a living thing. It is alive.

  “Love,” Ethel thought. Would she ever find that?

  Sometimes, when she was alone in her room at night, when she could not sleep... she thought of young Red Oliver then. “Do I want him like that, just to have him, perhaps to quiet myself, as I had that man in Chicago?” She was there in her room, lying awake, pitching restlessly about.

  She saw young Red Oliver sitting at a table in the library. Sometimes his eyes looked hungrily toward her. She was a woman. She could note what went on in him without letting him see what went on in her. He was trying to read a book.

  He had gone to college in the North and had got ideas in his head. She could tell a good deal by the books he read. He had become a workman in the mill at Langdon; perhaps he was trying to get in with other workmen.

  He might even want to fight their cause, the cause of working people. There were young men like that. They having a dream of a new world, as Ethel herself had had at moments in her life.

  Tom Riddle not having such a dream. He would have laughed at the idea. “It is pure romanticism,” he would have said. “People are not born equal. Some men are meant to be slaves, some masters. If they are not slaves in one way they will be in another.

  “There are slaves to sex, to what they think is thought, to food, to drink.

  “What difference does it make?”

  Red Oliver would not have been like that. He was young and eager. Men had put ideas into his head.

  He wasn’t, however, all mind, all idealism. He wanted a woman, as Tom Riddle did, wanted Ethel; he thought he did. She had got fixed in his mind in that way. She knew it. She could tell it by his eyes, looking at her, by his embarrassments.

  He was innocent, glad and ashamed. He came toward her hesitatingly, confused, wanting to touch her, hold her, kiss her. Blanche came toward her sometimes.

  Red’s coming, his emotions coming toward her, left Ethel feeling rather nice, a little stirred, often a good deal stirred. At night, when she was restless and couldn’t sleep, she, in fancy, saw him as she had seen him playing ball.

  He was running furiously. He had got the ball. His body fell into balance. He was like an animal, like a cat.

  Or he was standing at bat. He stood poised. There was something in him delicately adjusted, delicately timed. “I want that. Am I just greedy, ugly, a greedy woman?” The ball came toward him swiftly. Tom Riddle had explained to Ethel how the ball was made to curve as it approached the batsman.

  Ethel sat up in bed. Something within her ached. “Would it do him harm? I wonder.” She got a book and tried to read. “No, I will not let it happen.”

  There were older women, with boys, Ethel had heard. It was odd, the notion many men had, that women were inherently nice. Some of them at least got ugly, were filled with blind desires.

  The South, Southern men always being romantic about women... never giving them a chance really... getting off patter. Tom Riddle was certainly a relief.

  In the library that night it had happened, suddenly, quickly as it did that time with the strange man in Chicago. It wasn’t like that. Perhaps Red Oliver had been standing for some time just outside the library door.

  The library was in an old house, just off Main Street. It had belonged to some old pre-Civil War slave-owning family, or to a rich merchant. There was a little flight of steps.

  The rain that had been threatening all evening came. It was a fierce summer rain accompanied by a high wind. It threshed against the walls of the library building. There were loud peals of thunder and sharp flashes of lightning.

  It might have been the storm that had affected Ethel that evening. Young Oliver had been waiting for her, just outside the library door. People passing along the street would have seen him standing there. He had thought... “I’ll walk home with her.”

  A young man’s dreams. Red Oliver was a young idealist; he had in him the making of one.

  Men like her father began like that.

  More than once, as she sat that night at her desk, her head in her hands, the young man opened the door softly to look in.

  He stepped in. The rain drove him in. He had not dared to disturb her.

  Afterwards Ethel thought that on that evening she had suddenly become again the young girl — half girl, half tomboy — who had once gone to a tough little boy in a field. When the door opened, admitting young Red Oliver into the large main room of the library, a room that had been made by tearing out walls, there came with him a heavy gust of rain. Already rain was pouring into the room from the two windows Ethel had opened. She looked up and saw him standing there, in the dim light. At first she could not see distinctly, but at that moment there was a flash of lightning.

  She got up and walked toward him. “So,” she thought. “Shall I? Yes, I will.”

  She was living again as she had lived that night when her father had come into the field, when he had suspected her when he had put his hands on her. “He is not here now,” she thought. She thought of Tom Riddle. “He isn’t here. He wants to conquer me, make something of me I am not.” She was in rebellion again now, was doing something, not because it was something she wanted but to defy something.

  Her father... and perhaps Tom Riddle too.

  She walked toward Red Oliver, who stood by the door, a little frightened. “Is there something the matter?” he asked. “Shall I close the windows?” She did not answer. “No,” she said. “Am I going to do this?” she asked herself.

  “It will be like that man who came to my room in Chicago. No, it will not be like that. I will be the one who does it.

  “I want to.”

  She had got quite close to the young man. A queer weakness came into her body. She fought it. She put her hands on Red Oliver’s shoulders and let herself half fall forward. “Please,” she said.

  She was against him.

  “What?”

  “You know,” she said. It was like that. She could feel the life surging up in him. “Here? Now?” He was trembling.

  “Yes.” The words weren’t said.

  “Here? Now?” He understood at last. He could scarcely speak, couldn’t believe. He thought, “I’m lucky. How lucky I am!” His voice was husky. “There isn’t any place. It can’t be here.”

  “Yes.” Again no need of words.

  “Shall I close the windows, put out the light? Some one might see.” The rain was threshing against the walls of the building. The building shook. “Quick,” she said. “I don’t care who sees us,” she said.

  It had been like that, and then afterwards Ethel had driven young Red Oliver away. “You go now,” she said. She was even gentle, wanting to be motherly with him. “It wasn’t his fault.” She half wanted to cry. “I must drive him away or I will...” There was childish gratitude in him. She had looked aside once... while it was happening... there was something in his face... in his eyes... “If I had only earned this”... it had all happened on a table in the library, the table at which he was accustomed to sit, reading his books. He had been there the afternoon before, reading Karl Marx. She had ordered the book especially for him. “I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket if the library board objects,” she had thought. She had looked aside once and there was a man passing in the street, his head thrust forward. He did not look up. “It would be queer,” she thought, “if it was Tom Riddle...


  “Or father.”

  “There is a good deal of Blanche in me,” she thought. “I dare say I could hate well.”

  She wondered if she could ever love well. “I don’t know,” she said to herself as she led Red to the door. She was at once getting tired of him. He was saying something about love, protesting awkwardly, persistently, as though not sure, as though he had been rebuffed. He was queerly ashamed. She was silently confused.

  Already she was sorry for him, for what she had done. “Well, I did it. I wanted to. I did it.” She did not say that aloud. She kissed Red, a cold forbidding little kiss. A story popped into her head, a story some one had told her once.

  It was about a prostitute who saw somewhere, on a public street, a man who had been with her during the night before. The man bowed and spoke pleasantly to her, and she was angry, indignant and said to a companion, “Did you see that? Imagine his speaking to me here. Just because I was with him at night, what right has he to speak to me in the daytime and in the public street?”

  Ethel smiled thinking of the story. “I may be a prostitute myself,” she was thinking. “I am.” Perhaps all women had somewhere, hidden away in themselves, like the marbling in fine meat, a strain of something... (desire for complete abandon?)

  “I want to be alone,” she said. “To-night I want to walk home alone.” He went awkwardly out of the door. He was confused... in some queer way his manhood had been assaulted. She knew that.

  Now he felt baffled, confused, impotent. How could the woman, after what had happened... so suddenly... after much thinking and hoping and dreaming on his part... he had even thought of marriage, of proposing marriage to her... if he could get up courage... what had happened had been her work... the boldness had all been hers... how could she, after that, dismiss him like that?

  The summer storm that had been threatening all afternoon and that had been so violent was passing quickly. It was perplexing to Ethel but, even at that moment, she knew that she was going to marry Tom Riddle.

  If he would have her.

  *

  ETHEL did not know it definitely at that moment, in the moment, after Red had left her, after she had got him out through the door and was alone. There was a sharp little reaction, half shame, half remorse... a little flow of thoughts she didn’t want... they came singly, then in little clusters... thoughts can be lovely little winged things... they can be sharp little stinging things.