The mill workers, in their own company-owned place, always so oddly separated from all of these.
They were in a place of estates, off a main road, all the land for a mile up and down the road having been bought up by a few families... big houses with plenty of land, little clumps of forest. Their own mill village would have been off to the right. As they were on high ground they could see its lights in the distance.
They had come to this place of big estates and Kit thought that Agnes, although by lecturing the others she had got something off her chest, was still a little high. She went striding ahead of the others and there was something fierce and determined in her figure. She did not speak to the others. They had come to one of the big houses, built in that separated place, and there was a dance going on inside. There were others, beside themselves, out for a night of it.
Agnes stopped in the road and they all stopped. She was the dominant one. They passed the entrance to a particular estate, the house a huge one, brightly lighted... sounds of music coming from the house... shining automobiles parked along a driveway... wide green lawn with occasional trees....
There was a hedge built around the estate and Agnes stopped in the road.
There was excitement in her voice, in her manner. “Come on, all of you,” she said and bolted through the hedge. The others followed. They were puzzled.
They had got into a place near some stables where, no doubt, fine saddle horses were also kept. Kit thought she heard the sound of horses moving restlessly in stalls in the stables. There was a new building, being constructed of brick. Piles of brick were lying about. For a moment they stood in silence near the stables and then Agnes, making a motion to the others, went on toward the house, the others following.
They went along a green lawn. Kit said there were flowering bushes. They were now all excited and followed Agnes with thumping hearts. What an adventure, to be in such a place! What was Agnes up to?
She led them along, their figures stooping, running forward, keeping behind the bushes, until they had got near the house. There was a little open place, with more flowering bushes, and they could look directly in.
Inside there was a dance going on. They were all young people in there, Kit explained. No doubt they were the sons and daughters of the rich and the well-to-do, of the “nice” people of the Southern town, sons and daughters of mill owners, of holders of stock in the mills. There were a half dozen mill villages near that particular Southern town....
The young people were revelling in the big country house, the sons and daughters of the owners of mill villages and mills, sons of corporation lawyers, young college men and women, home for the summer, sons and daughters of bankers. There were beautiful young women and tall young men in evening clothes. Whoever was giving the party and, for all Kit knew, it might have been the wife of the president of the mill for which the three mill workers in the party outside labored, had got in an orchestra.
Kit herself did not know how long she stood there, in the open place by the bushes, so near the house. She said that Agnes had disappeared and that presently all became conscious of her absence. They were puzzled. They were frightened. They stood looking at each other, wanting to escape, to run for it, realizing, all of them, the enormity of the fact of being there. In another moment they would all have bolted but Agnes suddenly and silently reappeared. She had crept back to where the building was being erected and had a brick in her hand. If she had been excited, a little high, earlier, she was more so now. “Wait,” she said, commanding the others.
She was high. She was on edge and suddenly, inside the house, the dance came to an end. She had taken a stand a little in front of the others.
There was a moment of waiting, an intense moment to all of the little party outside. The dance had ended and the orchestra, brought in for the occasion... they had been half concealed behind palms and great bouquets of flowers in a corner of the big room... the men of the orchestra, also in evening clothes, stood up and stretched. The people of the party outside could hear the sound of the voices inside. Young women laughed, they chattered. There was the sound of the voices of young men.
“It is a swell party.”
“How about coming with me for a little walk outside?”
“It is a swell night.”
Oh, fortunate ones!
And now the people were moving out of the big room. In a moment more couples would be coming out to walk on the lawn. There would be flirtations, young men and women walking across a well-kept lawn in the soft darkness. It was evident that Agnes was very high. What was she up to? She was dancing about in a kind of ecstasy. There was a large plate-glass window that separated those outside from the revellers. Agnes swung wide one of her great arms and the brick went smashing through the window. There was an intense moment. Kit and her friends could see the startled faces of a group of people near an outer door and then they all ran. They were led by Agnes who kept exclaiming, “Hot dog! Hot dog!” as she ran. “Did you see their faces? Did you see their faces?”
They got to the hedge and through it to the road. It was dark out there. They could see over the hedge. On the opposite side of the road — a low fence to be got over — there was an open field and just beyond a small clump of trees. There were other fields beyond the trees. They stood in the road waiting, all but Agnes wanting to continue the flight at once. She, however, still dominated them. “No. Wait,” she said, and they all stood looking toward the house.
There was a furore at the house. Men were running about. They ran to the parked cars and got flashlights. They called back and forth. The excitement in the house and on the green lawn and under the trees before the house went on and on. All in the party, except Agnes, were nervous and jumpy and then, to increase their alarm, two young men with flashlights in their hands came through the hedge and stood in the road. They were some two hundred yards away and Frank was sick with nervousness. He began pleading in a whisper. “Come. Come. We’ll be caught. We’ll be arrested. They’ll send us to prison,” he pleaded.
The men in the road were coming toward them. They were throwing the light from the flashlights along the road and into the hedge. They were young men in evening clothes. They might have been young college men, home for the summer, young football players. Agnes leaned over and began whispering rapidly to Bud. “We’ll be over there. We’ll wait over there.” She was pointing to the trees, just seen, across the fields. They all knew there were fields beyond. They had come that way.
The young mountain man, Bud, did not have time to strap on his leather hoofs. He went down on all fours. The young men in the road were advancing. They came in silence.
And now Bud was rushing down upon them. He was on all fours. He shambled along. He also had an idea. There was a low growling guttural sound coming from his lips. It was very uncanny to hear, there in the darkness.
It was something terrible, Kit said. There was a spot of light from one of the flashlights in the road and he shambled across it. There was a cry from the lips of the young men. They bolted and he followed. When they crashed through the hedge he leaped over, still on all fours.
He was down thus on all fours.
He went with amazing rapidity.
He was a huge dog.
He was a bear.
He was a horse.
He went shamble, shamble, growling as he went.
And now the others of the party ran. They got over a low fence and ran quickly across the field to the trees. They waited there and, Kit said, Agnes was nervous. She walked up and down before the others. “He’s all right. He’ll take care of himself,” she muttered.
They stayed in the little grove until, at last, Bud came back to them and went directly to Agnes. Agnes threw her arms about his neck and embraced him. She held him in her arms and danced in the darkness. “Oh, Bud, Bud,” she cried, “oh, my darling.”
“Oh, you darling little son of a bitch,” she cried.
They went on but the adventures of the
night were not over. They had crossed several fields, working their way around toward their own village, but sat down by a creek. Frank had become ill. For a time he couldn’t go on and they stayed there, Frank lying on the grass at the creek’s edge. He had whispered to Kit, asking her to hold his head. There were several outbreaks of coughing. They came, he became quieter, and then they came again. None of the others knew afterwards how long they stayed in the field but at last there was a hemorrhage. Kit was holding Frank’s head and the moon had come up. He was at the creek’s edge and asked Kit to hold his head over the creek. The moon was shining on the waters of the little creek and Kit, so close to him, could see his blood gushing from between his lips and coloring the water of the stream.
CHAPTER FOUR
KIT BRANDON WAS sometimes a good deal moved, something restless within her was stirred, by the speeches of her friend Agnes. The two young women had become close friends although Agnes was several years older than Kit. Agnes felt in Kit something more feminine than in herself while Kit wanted more of Agnes’s boldness. They walked about together, worked together. The consumptive Frank died and winter came and they went to the mill — both being still on the night shift — in the darkness of winter evenings. Like hibernating animals they had both slept through the short winter days.
Staleness of little crowded houses. Kit and Agnes did not room in the same house with the same mill family but their rooms, like the houses, were alike. Another worker slept in Kit’s bed at night. Then the sheets were changed and she crept in. She got out of bed in the afternoon, slipping into her clothes. Already she was beginning to want better clothes and a better room. She ate in the kitchen. There would be the older workers about, older men and women. Sometimes in such a house the man didn’t work. He was too old to get a job when he brought his family down out of the hills. He was known as a “mill Daddy.” His children made his living for him.
It was something new, degenerating, to older mountain men who, in the hills, although poor, had always been kings in their own houses. There is a staleness, a weariness that gets into the blood and bone. It isn’t only factory workers who have it. You see it, feel it, in white-collar workers in cities, sometimes in successful men, the money makers in business. It accounts for golf, for the passion for sports in which you do not participate... vicarious excitement got... crowds of business men, young and old, at baseball games, at football games. “Aha, we won!”
“What do you mean, we?”
Agnes said: “All right. Swell! Some day we’ll get it” — meaning a three, a four, a five-hour day in the mills. She had such moments of optimism. New dream of labor when Kit was a mill girl. Agnes got angry and swore. “Goddam, why shouldn’t they all work!” This came from having been to socialist and communist meetings. She had in mind places like their mill, become public institutions, to serve, classes broken down, “liquidated,” as the Russians might say... every man and woman, at least while he was young, serving a certain number of years in some such institutions, places where cloth was woven, shoes made, clothes made....
Others working on farms, in mills, on railroads... if there were any railroads left. Sometimes Agnes went around in a kind of dream... “Goddam, to mine coal, make steel, make automobiles, make tires for automobiles.” She rubbed her hands together thinking of it. “Some of these goddam swell, big-bellied dames we see”... she meant some of the well-to-do wives of the mill officials who drove to the mill offices to pick up husbands. “Such a dame down in a coal mine for once, eh, kid?” Agnes grinned with joy thinking of it.
“At that, it might not be so bad for them. Look, they’d wear off the big hips, big bellies.
“You got some figure yourself, Kid. I wish I had it.”
The thought of people at last finding each other through a universal participation. She wanted something wiped out. “It might wipe out, once and for all, this idea that there are certain people born different from others, as though God had made them special things”... idea of aristocracy, of birth, etc. Agnes like all of the mill girls felt deeply a kind of contempt in which all the workers were held by the town people. For some reason it didn’t cut quite so deeply for Kit.
“Why should all of our people, when they get a little older than we are, always become so tired?” She felt the weariness in others deeply, having herself a vast energy. By “our people,” she meant her fellow workers. Kit knew that. Agnes declared that the work of the world, given modern fast machines, could be done and no one need get tired.
The two women — Kit was fast becoming a woman; men who saw her felt her as woman — used to meet at a certain corner in the mill village. They went together to their work, walking out of the mill village and along a paved road to the mill gate. There was a high wire fence around the mill yard and a man, an old crippled one — injured sometime in the mill — was there to check them in. In their mill they had identification buttons, to be worn on the coat, buttons the size of a silver dollar. They were such buttons as states sometimes issue to hunters and fishermen. “Look. We are like sheep numbered,” Agnes said angrily. She swore and spat on the ground and Kit turned her head aside and smiled. They were in the paved road, going down to the mill gate, and Agnes took the button from her coat and made a gesture as though to hurl it away into the darkness.
“God, I’d like to, I’d like to.”
Her anger brought a smile to Kit’s lips.
They were an odd enough pair, going along thus. Kit had kept her eyes open as she had lived along in the mill village. Unconsciously perhaps, in those first months away from home, she was already reaching out for something, feeling for it constantly, trying for it. She herself did not know what it was. It was a thing — call it a kind of style in life. She was wanting unconsciously to become a stylist in living.
To get it into her body. Already she was noting things, checking on things that would have meant little or nothing to Agnes. “All right, sister. You’ve got your dream. I’ve got another.”
There were the Saturday nights when they went into town. As they worked nights they had also the Saturday afternoons. They had the Sundays.
A few times Kit went to church and Agnes tried to stop her. “Don’t be a fish,” she said; “don’t believe anything these guys tell you.” Most of the mill people went to little Baptist and Methodist churches near the mill village.
“Trust God. Look to Jesus for salvation,” Agnes quoted. “Ah, cut it out. What the hell,” she said. There had been strikes in other mills she had worked in and she told Kit that wherever there was a strike or trouble in a mill the preachers always stood by the mill owners. “Why not?” she said, and explained that the salaries, or at least a large part of the salaries, of such preachers were paid by the mill owners. She scolded, but Kit, without saying anything about it, sometimes dressed as best she could and on Sunday morning marched off, not to one of the little churches near the mill but down into the town. She walked about until she came to what looked to her like the biggest and most expensive church and went in. At first she went a little timidly. “I wonder if they’ll throw me out?” They didn’t and she got bolder. In such places she could see what young women wore who had money to buy clothes. She was getting points — not at all hearing the words of the preachers in the churches — noting how some of the rich or well-to-do young women of a North Carolina town dressed, walked, held their heads.
Something to practise in secret when she was alone in her room.
Or she was in the main street of the town on a Saturday afternoon with Agnes, the broad-shouldered, big-hipped, big-legged one. “There’s one”... she did not say the words aloud to Agnes.... “There’s one... that one just getting out of the big car parked there in front of the store.” She noted the shining beauty of the car. That one held her head and her slender young body in just a certain way. “That’s nice.” Kit herself tried to walk so, hold her own head and body so. There was this passion in Kit, sleeping in her, it had been born in her — herself not knowing. I
t wasn’t just the young woman who had got out of the car, Kit watching, absorbed, Agnes not noticing — it was also the car itself. Something perhaps always very American in Kit Brandon. “I’d like... I’d like, some day, to own such a car, to drive it.” She had no feeling of anger toward the young woman who had got out of the car. “There might, some day, be a way.” Her dream was far far away from the somewhat grandiose one that was in Agnes’s head.
There was a particular Saturday evening when the two went into town... snow in the state of the upper South.
It might have been a town of northern Ohio, or of Minnesota. Pretty far away from the South, as the North commonly thinks of it... cotton fields, Negroes with banjoes at cabin doors. Agnes had an idea. “We’ll have a drink when we get to town. I know a place.”
She liked to go to places... some such place as could be found in any industrial town during the prohibition era... little warm inside room, usually in a house quite near the main street section. If there were no men present, to sit with some other women with feet up on a table... smoke and drink... be mannish.
“Never mind about woman’s dignity or this business of trying to keep yourself up to it... we’re working women... this foolishness, trying to be dainty and feminine... it takes too much money to try to keep that up... it isn’t my line.”
Most of the other women in the cotton mill were shocked by Agnes. The proletariat, so called, are the great protectors of sex morals, of respectability. The middle class takes care of money morals. Agnes would have gone big with the daughters of some of the rich women of the town, if they had known her, had there been any way for them to know her. She would have been more in their line in that period, after the World War.
A few companions, to listen as she talked. She was always burning with ideas, her mind always busy. She saw constantly a vision of a new world, emerging or about to emerge, as she might have said, out of an old agricultural South. She had been born Southern, was one of the few people, born South, who never thought anything, said anything, about being of the best blood of the South. Ideas she had got from reading and from listening to radical speeches in little halls, a few other venturesome workers gathered in the halls with her. There were a few men and women, young ones, burning with enthusiasm, who got down from the North into such Southern industrial towns. The A. F. of L. leaders couldn’t and didn’t look with much enthusiasm on such workers. The wages were too insignificant, not enough in it, for the A. F. of L. leaders. Agnes felt that she had got a lot out of such speakers. There were, however, reservations in her mind.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 183
