Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “I’ll tell him whatever comes into my head to tell, whatever I think he would like to know. If he wants me, he can take me to-day. I don’t want to wait. We’ll begin.”

  Was she sure of him? “I’ll try to do a good job for him. I think I know what he wants.”

  She could hear her father’s voice, talking to the Negro yard man on the front porch. She felt resentment and at the same time pity.

  “If I could say something to him before I leave. I can’t.” He would be upset when he heard the news of her sudden marriage... if Tom Riddle still wanted to marry her. “He will want it. He will. He will.”

  She thought again of young Oliver and of what she had done to him, trying him out as she had, to see if he, rather than Tom Riddle, was what she wanted. A little vicious thought came. From her bedroom window she could see into the cow pasture where her father had come seeking her that night, when she was a young girl. The pasture went down to a creek and there were bushes growing along the creek. That boy that time had got away into the bushes. It would have been an odd thing if, on the night before, she had taken young Oliver in there, into the pasture. “If the night had been fair, I might have done that,” she thought. She smiled, a little revengefully, softly. “He will be all right for some woman. In the end it will not hurt him, what I have done. He may have got educated — a little. Anyway, I did it.”

  It was queer and baffling, trying to find out what was education, what was good and what was bad. She remembered suddenly a thing that had happened in the town when she was a young girl.

  She was on the street with her father. There was a Negro being tried. He had been accused of raping a white woman. The white woman, as it turned out later, was no good. She came into town and accused the Negro. Afterwards he was cleared. He had been with some man at work on a road at the very hour when she said it happened.

  That hadn’t been known at first. There was excitement and talk of a lynching. Ethel’s father was excited. A group of armed deputy sheriffs were standing near the county jail.

  There was another group of men in the street, in front of a drug store. Tom Riddle was there. A man spoke to him. The man was a merchant of the town. “Are you going to do it, Tom Riddle, are you going to take that man’s case? Are you going to defend him?”

  “Yes, and clear him too.”

  “Well... You... You The man was excited.

  “He wasn’t guilty,” Tom Riddle said. “If he was guilty, I would still take his case. I would still defend him.

  “As for you...” Ethel remembered the look on Tom Riddle’s face. He had stepped out in front of the man, the merchant. The little group of men standing about, became silent. Had she loved Tom Riddle at that moment? What was love?

  “As for you, what I know about you,” Tom Riddle said to that man, “if I ever get you into court.”

  That was all. It had been nice, one man standing out against a group of men, daring them.

  When Ethel had completed her packing, she stepped out of her room. All was quiet in the house. Suddenly her heart beat heavily. “So I am leaving this house.

  “If Tom Riddle doesn’t want me, when he knows all about me, if he doesn’t want me...”

  At first she did not see Blanche, who had come downstairs and was in one of the rooms on the ground floor. Blanche stepped forth. She wasn’t dressed. She was in a suit of soiled pajamas. She stepped across the little hallway to Ethel.

  “You look swell,” she said. “I hope it will be a good day for you.”

  She stood aside as Ethel went out of the house and down the two or three steps from the porch to the walk leading to the gate. Blanche stood just inside the house, looking, and Judge Long, who was still reading his morning paper, put it down and also looked.

  “Good morning,” he said, and “Good morning,” Ethel replied.

  She could feel Blanche looking at her. She would go into Ethel’s room. She would see Ethel’s bags and her trunks. She would understand but would say nothing to the judge, her husband. She would creep back upstairs and get into bed. She would lie in her bed, looking out at a window and smoking cigarettes.

  *

  TOM RIDDLE was nervous and excited. “She was with that boy last night. They were together there in the library. It was dark in there.” He grew a little angry with himself. “Well, I’m not accusing her. Who am I to accuse her?

  “If she wants me, I guess she’ll tell me. I don’t believe she can want him, that boy, not for keeps.”

  He was nervous and excited as he always was when he thought of Ethel, and went early to his office. He closed his office door and walked up and down. He smoked cigarettes.

  Many times that summer, as he stood at his office window, hidden from the street below, Tom had watched Ethel, going to the library. He got excited, seeing her. He became a boy in his eagerness.

  On that morning he saw her. She was crossing the street. She was lost from sight. He stood near a window.

  There was the sound of feet on the stairs that led up to his office. Could it be Ethel? Had she made up her mind? Was she coming to him?

  “Keep still.... Don’t be a fool,” he said to himself. There was the sound of feet on the stairs. They stopped. They came forward again. An outer door to his office opened. Tom Riddle braced himself. He stood there trembling while the door into his inner office opened, and there was Ethel, a little pale, with a queer determined look in her eyes.

  Tom Riddle had grown calm. “A woman who is about to give herself to a man does not come to him like this,” he thought. “But why has she come up here?”

  “You have come up here?”

  “Yes.”

  There were the two people facing each other. People do not arrange a marriage in that way, in a lawyer’s office, in the morning... the woman coming to the man.

  “Can it be like this?” Ethel was asking herself.

  “Can it be like this?” Tom Riddle asked himself.

  “Not even a kiss. I’ve never touched her.”

  The man and woman stood there, facing each other. There were the sounds of a town coming up from the street, a town getting into its daily, rather meaningless, activities. The office was above a store. It was a simple office with one large room, a large flat-topped desk and law books in cases against the walls. There was a bare floor.

  There was a sound from below. A clerk in a store dropped a box on the floor.

  “Well,” Ethel said. She said it with an effort. “You told me last night — You said you were ready... any time. You said it was Ο. K. with you.”

  She was finding it hard, hard. “I’m going to be a damn fool,” she thought. She wanted to cry.

  “I’d have to tell you a lot of things—”

  “I bet he won’t have me,” she thought.

  “Wait,” she said hurriedly, “I’m not what you think I am. I have to tell you. I must. I must.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, stepping toward her and taking her hand. “Hell,” he said, “Let it go. What’s the use talking?”

  He stood and looked at her. “Dare I, dare I try it, dare I try taking her into my arms?”

  Anyway, she knew she liked him, standing there, hesitant and uncertain, like that. “He’s going to marry me, all right,” she thought. She didn’t, at the moment, think beyond that.

  BOOK FOUR. BEYOND DESIRE

  1

  IT WAS NOVEMBER of 1930.

  Red Oliver stirred uneasily in sleep. He awoke and then slept again. There is a land between sleeping and waking — a land filled with grotesque shapes — and he was in that land. Things change swiftly and strangely there. It is a land of peace — and then of terrors. Trees in that land become enlarged. They become shapeless and elongated. They come out of the ground and float away into the air. Desires come into the body of the sleeper.

  Now you are yourself, but you are not yourself. You are outside yourself. You see yourself running along a beach... faster, faster, faster. The land into which you have got has become terr
ible. There is a black wave coming up out of a black sea to engulf you.

  And now, as suddenly, all is again peaceful. You are in a meadow, lying under a tree, in warm sunlight. Cattle are grazing near by. The air is filled with a warm rich milky smell. There is a woman, beautifully gowned, walking toward you.

  She is in purple velvet. She is tall.

  It was Ethel Long, of Langdon, Georgia, walking toward Red Oliver. Ethel Long had become suddenly gracious. She was in a mood of soft womanhood and was in love with Red.

  But no... it was not Ethel. It was a strange woman, like Ethel Long physically, but at the same time unlike.

  It was Ethel Long, beaten by life, defeated by life. See

  .. she had lost some of her upright proud beauty and had become humble. This woman would be glad for love — any love that came to her. Her eyes were saying that now. It was Ethel Long, no longer fighting against life, not even wanting to be victorious in life.

  Look... even her gown has changed as she walks across the sunlit field toward Red. Dreams. Does a man in dreams always know he is in dreams?

  Now the woman in the field was in an old worn calico dress. Her face looked worn. She was a farm woman, a work woman, merely walking across the field to milk a cow.

  There were two small boards laid on the ground under some bushes, and Red Oliver was lying on the boards. His body ached and he was cold. It was November and he was in a field covered with bushes near the town of Birchfield, in North Carolina. He had been trying to sleep in his clothes under a bush on the two boards laid on the ground, and the bed he had made for himself with the two boards, found near by, was uncomfortable. It was late at night and he sat up rubbing his eyes. What was the use of trying to sleep?

  “Why am I here? Where am I? What am I doing here?” Life is unaccountably strange. Why did a man like himself get into such a place? Why was he always letting himself do unaccountable things?

  Red had come out of the half sleep in confusion and so, first of all, when he awoke, he had to gather himself together.

  There was the physical fact of himself — a young man strong enough... a night’s sleep did not matter so much to him. He was in this new place. How had he got there?

  Memories and impressions came floating back. He sat upright. A woman, older than himself, a tall woman, a working woman, a farm woman, rather slender, not unlike Ethel Long of Langdon, Georgia, had brought him to the spot where he had been lying on the two boards and trying to sleep. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. There was a small tree near by and he crept over sandy ground to it. He sat on the ground with his back against a little tree trunk. It was like the boards on which he had tried to sleep. The trunk of the tree was rough. If there had been but one board, a broad smooth one, he might have gone on sleeping. He had got one of his nether cheeks down between the two boards and had got pinched. He half leaned over and rubbed the hurt place.

  He leaned his back against the little tree. The woman with whom he had come to that place had given him a blanket. She had brought it to him from a little tent some distance away and it was worn thin. “I suppose they haven’t much bedding, these people,” he thought. The woman might have brought him her own blanket from the tent. She was tall like Ethel Long, but wasn’t much like her. As a woman she had none of Ethel’s style. Red was glad to be awake. “It will be more comfortable sitting here than trying to sleep on such a bed,” he thought. He was sitting on the ground and the ground was damp and cold. He crept over and got one of the boards. “Anyway, it will make a seat,” he thought. He looked up at the sky. A half moon was out and there were drifting gray clouds.

  Red was in a camp of striking workers in a field near the town of Birchfield, North Carolina. It was a moonlit night in November and rather cold. By what a queer chain of circumstances he had got there.

  He had come to the camp in the dark on the evening before with a woman who had brought him into the place and had left him. They had arrived afoot, tramping afoot over hills — over half mountains really — coming afoot, not by a road but by paths that climbed up over hills and went along edges of fenced fields. They had come several miles thus in the gray of the evening and in the darkness of early night.

  It was for Red Oliver a night when everything about him was unreal. There had been other times like that in his life. Of a sudden he began to remember other unreal times.

  To every man and every boy such times come. There the boy is. He is a boy in a house. The house is suddenly unreal. He is in a room. Everything in the room is unreal. There are, in the room, chairs, a chest of drawers, the bed on which he has been lying. Why do they all seem suddenly strange? Questions asked. “Is this the house in which I have been living? Is this strange room in which I now find myself the room in which I slept last night and the night before?”

  Every one knows such times of strangeness. Do we control our own acts, the tone of our own lives? How absurd to ask! We do not. We are all stupid. Will the day ever come when we will shake off this stupidity?

  To know even a little of inanimate life, too. There is that chair there... that table. The chair is like a woman. Many men have sat in it. They have thrown themselves into it, sat down softly, gently. Men have sat in it thinking and suffering. The chair is old now. There is an aroma of many people hanging over it.

  Thoughts coming swift and strange. The imagination of a man or boy must sleep most of the time. It suddenly goes on a spree.

  Why, for example, should any man ever want to be a poet? What is gained by that?

  It would be best to go through life just being a common man, going along, eating and sleeping. The poet wants to tear things, to tear the veil that separates him from the unknown. He wants to look far out beyond life into dim mysterious places. Why?

  There is something out there he would like to understand. Words that men use every day can perhaps be given a new meaning, thoughts given a new meaning. He has let himself run out into the unknown. Now he would like to run back, into a familiar everyday world, carrying back with him into that world something, a sound, a word out of the unknown into the familiar. Why?

  Thoughts grouping themselves in the mind of a man or boy. What is this thing called the mind? It gets out-of-hand, playing the deuce with a man or boy.

  Red Oliver, in a strange cold place at night, thought dimly of his own boyhood. When he was a boy he went sometimes with his mother to Sunday school. He thought of that.

  He thought of a story heard there. There was a man called Jesus, in a garden with his followers about him, the followers lying on the ground asleep. Perhaps followers always sleep. The man was suffering in the garden. Soldiers were near by, brutal soldiers who wanted to take him and crucify him. Why?

  ‘What have I done that I should be taken to be crucified? Why am I here?” Fear coming. A man, a Sunday-school teacher, was trying to tell the story of the man’s night in the garden to the children in a Sunday-school class. Why had memories of that come back to Red Oliver sitting with his back against a tree in a field?

  He had come to that place with a woman, a strange woman, met almost casually. They had walked in moonlit places, through upland fields and in and out of dark stretches of forest. The woman Red was with had stopped now and then to speak to him. She had got tired during the walk, not being strong.

  She had talked to Red Oliver a little, but there had been a shyness between them. That, as they came along in the darkness, gradually passed off. It hadn’t passed completely, Red thought. The conversation between them had been, for the most part, concerned with the path. “Look out. There’s a rut there. You will stumble.” She called the root of the tree that protruded into the path a “rut.” She was taking it for granted that she knew about Red Oliver. He was to her a definite thing she knew about. He was a young communist, a leader of labor, going to a town where there was labor trouble and she was herself one of the laborers in trouble.

  Red was ashamed that he had not stopped her along the way, that he hadn’t told her— “I’m
not what you think I am.”

  “Perhaps I would like to be the thing you think I am. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m not.

  “If the thing you think I am is something brave and fine, then I would like to be it.

  “I want that: to be something brave and fine. There is too much ugliness in life and people. I don’t want to be ugly.”

  He hadn’t told her.

  She had thought she knew about him. She had kept asking him, “Are you tired? Are you getting tired?”

  “No.”

  As they had come along, he had pressed close to her. They were going through dark places along the way and she had stopped to breathe. When they had climbed up steep places in the path he had insisted on pushing ahead and had put out a hand to her. There was enough moonlight to see her form dimly below. “She is a good deal like Ethel Long,” he kept thinking. She had seemed most like Ethel when he was following her in the paths, she striding along ahead.

  Then he ran in front of her to help her up a steep place. “They will never get you coming this way,” she said. “They don’t know about this path.” She thought he was a dangerous man, a communist, come into her country to fight for her people. He went ahead and taking her hand pulled her up the steep place. There was a resting place and they both stopped. He stood looking at her. Now she was thin and pale and worn-looking. “Now you aren’t much like Ethel Long,” he thought. The darkness of the woods and fields had helped the shyness between them. They had arrived together at the place where Red was now.

  Red had got into the camp unnoticed. Although it was late at night, he could hear little sounds. A man or a woman stirred somewhere near by or a child whimpered. There was a particular little sound. Some woman among the striking workers he had got in with had a nursing child. The child had stirred uneasily in sleep and the woman had put it to the breast. He could even hear the baby’s lips, sucking and pulling at a woman’s paps. A man, some distance away, crawled out through the door of a small shack made of board and, getting to his feet, stood stretching. He seemed huge in the dim light, a young man, a young worker. Red pressed his body against the trunk of the little tree, not wanting to be seen, and the man went softly away. In the distance there was a somewhat larger shack with a light. The sound of voices came from the little building.