Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “I tell you he’s a good boy. At the store they’re simply crazy about him. So many people come in the store... they won’t have no one but my boy wait on them.” At night, when she was in bed, Kit heard the mother and son talking together in Italian. What an odd thing, the people, so near, talking in words she couldn’t understand. It was new knowledge to her, that there were people, in strange places, strange countries over the world, talking in words you couldn’t understand.

  So much new knowledge to get. The son had sleek shiny black hair and black eyes. His skin was very dark. Soon he would be fat, a fat Italian man. It was easy enough to hold him at a distance, even to confuse him.

  You had to learn the trick. Hold yourself back, learn to keep a kind of reserve. It was for Kit a time of slow awakening... “soon I’ll be a woman.”...

  “A good many women are married even at the age I have now come to.” Kit’s point of view on men... it is certainly an important matter to any young woman of seventeen or eighteen... was, in an odd way, outside self, important and not important. Talk of it always, persistently, among the young women at the factory... in that place she made no close friends with any of the other girls, her mood for the time to be alone... she went now and then to the movies and there always the man and woman thing... long lingering kisses. “Your arms about me, darling. Oh, darling, how I have longed for you.” In that place she began something. Unlike a good many poor white mountain girls, brought up in such families as her own, she knew how to read and write. “I had better find out more about that.” She heard from à girl in her room at the factory, a thin big-nosed girl who wore glasses, about a thing called the public library and went there one Saturday afternoon.

  But how were you to know what books you wanted? There were so many. There were open shelves and she watched others, went as they did, in among books.

  A woman spoke to her, an older woman with white hair and a curiously gentle face. Kit thought at first she had something to do with the place but was mistaken. She was just an older woman sensing Kit’s confusion. “May I help you?”

  “Yes.” Confusion in Kit too, then a sudden impulse to be downright with that one. It was the woman to woman thing again, the instinct in other women to like Kit, in an odd way to respect her. “I’ll tell you. I’m a factory girl. I’ve never been in a place like this before. I know nothing of books.” The woman smiled, but nicely, Kit thought. “Odd, my fight in life is going to be with men, not with other women.” That thought not definite in Kit and yet the understanding of it in her almost from the beginning. “Do you want a love story?”

  “No.” The woman smiled.

  “Oh, so not that?” she said. “Well, let’s look about. Will it be something about people, or perhaps history?”

  She was going along the rows of books and suddenly stopped. Kit followed. Could it be that any one was familiar with so many books?

  History?

  Kit had but a vague idea of what the word meant. How many words also to know about. Words also opened out new vistas in life. There was a sudden longing that morning to be more like the woman who was being kind to her. She had a quality, firm but gentle. “She’s never worked in any factory,” Kit thought. The woman revolutionist, Agnes, who had been Kit’s friend and who was always talking about the rich and the poor.... “The rich are pretty much all skunks.... They have to be wiped out, done away with.” Such notions had never made a deep impression on Kit. There might even be a certain advantage to the unbalance. There could be such a thing as intelligent luxury, soft fine fabrics out of which to make clothes, life on a certain high plane of mind and body.

  All of this to be sure, dim, oh, very dim, in Kit. The woman took a book from the shelf. “It’s a book by Theodore Dreiser. He may be our great novelist.” The title of the book was Sister Carrie.

  The woman helped Kit about the making out of her application for taking the book out. The application had to be signed by a property holder of the town and she signed it. Her name was Holbrook. She did not work in the library. There was a pile of books on a counter and the woman went to an outer door and called a Negro who came and got them. She was some swell.

  “Are you going anywhere I could take you?” she asked Kit.

  “No. I am just going home.”

  “Well, come on. Let me take you. I’ll enjoy doing it.”

  It was an old story, the rich woman, some woman the wife of the man who owned such a factory as the one Kit worked in. Kit’s chance acquaintance was not like that but her associates were mostly like that. Such women can’t avoid seeing young working women, many of them comely, even beautiful women. Such a woman may be childless. Mrs. Holbrook had a woman acquaintance who had no children and who kept fourteen Angora cats. She fed them on pâté de foi gras.

  Talk among such women, at card parties... chatter, chatter, chatter, at garden parties, at teas... the servant class, the working class... the rich constantly doing more than the workers to build up the idea of the much-talked-of thing, class consciousness.

  So comfortable to feel yourself a little removed... whence cometh all this D. A. R. talk, First Families of Virginia, Best Blood of the South?... above, high up, a superior class.

  But alas and alas, for even the most wealthy, in secret moments, a kind of niceness, reality of outlook, persisting in spite of ugliness, alas even envy.

  Things to give you a jolt. “Why is it that artists... we who after all have money to buy the books, the paintings... why do painters, the most real and talented ones... why do they, when they paint women, always seem to prefer to paint working women? Poets singing of them. There is a writer whose book I have been reading. He writes of the beauty of the hands of a washwoman.

  “Why have I, alas, these fat pudgy hands and these thick ankles? It is strange that even royalty, kings and their wives and daughters, the members of nobility... they are so often such commonplace even ugly-looking people. Oh dear, oh dear.

  “And sometimes these working girls... poor things... often so lovely. Why I never did any work with my hands in all my life. It is so confusing.”

  They went out and got into a big luxurious car and drove to where Kit lived in a little street of frame houses down by the shoe factory, the river and the railroad tracks.

  The woman kept talking, evidently trying to put Kit at her ease. She needn’t have bothered. Kit felt quite all right. The momentary confusion that had come when the woman first spoke to her was quite gone.

  “My name is Mrs. Holbrook.”

  “Mine is Kit Brandon.”

  “What a pretty name!”

  And, sitting thus, in the luxurious car, with the rich woman, Kit’s mind drifted away from car and woman and to another woman, one she had known just before she left the cotton-mill town. That one was a gold-digger. She, Sarah, had got her hooks into a lawyer. Some man had already taught Sarah to drive a car and she had got the use of the lawyer’s car and had taught Kit how to drive. It was, as Sarah said, “a pretty swell little runabout.”

  Sarah spoke of her man by his first name. “I’m going to get Joe to buy me one.”

  Sarah had even suggested with a laugh that it would be something pretty hot if she got Joe to get the money from his rich horsey wife to buy a car for herself and told Kit that she and Joe were planning a campaign to get the money. He was to say that he had lost it playing the races. “That would be pretty hot, eh, she so crazy about horses.”

  Joe had given Sarah a key and would leave his car on some side street. Occasionally, when he had to leave town she had the car over the week end. She had taught Kit to drive and Kit had caught on quickly, instinctively.

  “Say, kid, you are going to make one swell driver. You take to it like a fish takes to water.”

  Kit in the big car with the woman she had met in the library, the woman talking, trying to put Kit at her ease. She spoke of books, several of them piled on the car floor at their feet. They had, she said, something to do with a paper she was preparing for a woman
’s club... the woman was half laughing at herself... it was all so silly, a person like herself pretending to be a scholar. She was to prepare a paper on the Civilization of the Ancient Greeks. Kit was not listening.

  The Greeks were, she gathered, a people, perhaps like the Italian woman and her son, people who could say words, speak in a way you couldn’t understand. She was really thinking about the car. If she had been born a man, she would have tried getting a job driving for some such rich woman.

  “Lord, how I’d like getting my hand on that wheel.” Later, not much later, when Gordon Halsey, not being able to get her in any other way, proposed marriage, the thing that really induced her to make up her mind to do it, give it a trial, was that he had such a swell fast car. Odd that now the rich woman, and not Kit, was self-conscious. Kit was even a little aware of that fact.

  It might well have been her mountain ancestry. The mountain people can do it. There is a quality in them, it was in her father, even in that slovenly woman her mother. “Here I am. I am what I am. It would be well for you not to feel superior to me.” It is a quality sometimes very confusing to outsiders, people not of the hills, particularly to those coming from the outside, wanting to help the poor. A mountain man or woman can look at you with an odd impersonal stare. They can look out of their eyes as gypsies look.

  The woman who insisted upon taking Kit quite to her rooming place kept talking. “I can’t help thinking, often, what an injustice.

  “This place down here. How stupid that we have let the railroads and the factories take our river front.” She laughed, self-consciously. “Not that I should say anything. It was my father who first grabbed the river front here.” She pointed. “I dare say you work in the shoe factory. It was my father who established the shoe factory here.

  “And I must say I’d hate to give up anything I’ve got because of his cleverness and greediness.”

  She let Kit out at her place. The Italian woman who was scrubbing the little wooden porch before the house was terribly impressed. She had a mop and a scrub bucket and, after quickly putting them inside the door, stood, lost in wonder, staring.

  “I see you are not among the Greeks. You are among the Romans,” the woman said as Kit alighted, holding her book. The rich woman had got back her self-possession.

  “It is so hard to talk with working girls. I don’t mean they are not nice, as good as we are, perhaps better, but one does not know what to say to them.”

  “Yes, that’s so,” Kit said, answering the woman’s sally. What did the woman mean by Romans? She was still thinking of the car. “God, but I would like to get my hands on it.” She had already picked up from Sarah some of the patter of car drivers, giving cars the feminine gender. “I’ll bet she could step. I’d love to get in her and give her the works.” In her absorption she even forgot to thank the rich woman for her kindness.

  She read the Dreiser book later in her bed at night. In that place she had a daytime job. Reading was at first slow and rather painful work. Even in so simple a story, simply told, there were so many words she didn’t know.

  And then too it was about a woman, of a sort she already had learned to know. It might have been Sarah’s story. Sarah might also come to something like the woman of the book. She wished the story had concerned itself more with the lives of the rich.

  She was sitting in the railroad station in the town of the shoe factory and by chance had the Dreiser book in her hand. There was a bag sitting at her feet. It was a Sunday afternoon and she had grown tired of sitting in her room. Downstairs, in the house of the Italians, the son was at home. It was no good going downstairs in that house. There was that embarrassment, the young man ogling her in that way he had. He wouldn’t dare say anything but he would keep looking with his queer greedy greasy eyes while the mother talked. It was a bright warm day and Kit had come to a sudden decision. She had been lying in bed reading her book and suddenly got up and dressed. She packed a bag she had recently bought. “I’m going to get out of this.

  “And why not get out of this town?” She had no friends in that place. It would be something, an adventure, a new beginning. She suddenly remembered having heard one of the girls at the factory speak of another North Carolina town a hundred miles away. “It’s a fine place. There’s plenty of work there.”

  When she had said good-bye to the Italian woman, who protested and even threatened to weep... the son wanted to carry her bag... dark sad Italian eyes — a hurt look... “Damn, I have missed my chance”... she turned him away with an abrupt no... he didn’t know how to get past it.

  She went into the railroad station, into the waiting room, to sit, the station was beyond the factory, on the bank of the river.

  On Sunday there were no afternoon trains and the big waiting room was deserted. Any way, she might as well sit there.

  It was for Kit a beginning, a start. She had got, in the railroad station, the young man who took her in his car to the town she had made up her mind to tackle next. Anyway it was saving railroad fare.

  And she was curious. He seemed all right, was perhaps three or four years older than herself. He drove a good car although it probably didn’t belong to him. She had been sitting in the quite empty waiting room of the station when he came in, a young man, such as you might see at a golf club or on a tennis court, dressed in light summer clothes. He had come in and tapped on the window of the ticket office. There was a clouded glass. There was no one there and he had turned to go out when he saw her. She had the Dreiser book in her hand.

  She wasn’t reading, although at once, when he approached her, asking her a question, she saw that he glanced to see what she was reading. Afterward, when they were in the car, he spoke of it.

  “You aren’t a highbrow, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “That book,” he said. He said that when he was in college he had heard some of the fellows speak of it. “I don’t hold it against a fellow or a girl that he reads such books, these serious books, but I don’t go in for them myself.”

  He had even tried to use the book, something he had heard of it... he said he had a sister who was rather a highbrow... he had heard it was about a woman who was rather free with men, not being married to them. “Is that so?”

  “It may be so.”

  His young eyes looking at her. “How do you feel about such things?” She didn’t try to answer that one. She let it go with a smile.

  She had really been sitting in the station, not reading, looking out a window... there was a printed time-table on the wall and she had figured out that there would be a train in the late afternoon, at five.

  There was the figure of little blond Sarah of the cotton mill in her mind. “On such a day as this she would be stepping high.”

  Sarah would have gone to live with that man, the lawyer. It was bound to happen, inevitable. Outside the station window there were just the tracks between the station and the shore of the river. It was nice, far over there, low wooded hills and a clear blue sky. There were a few white houses among the trees, houses just seen, half hidden by trees... perhaps also in Kit thoughts of that Mrs. Holbrook. Some women get so much. Mrs. Holbrook no doubt born to it. Sarah after it.

  “Life’s a game.”

  “If you don’t put it over on them, they’ll put it over on you.”

  There were a few boats on the river, young men with their girls out for a ride. It may be that at the moment the thing predominant in Kit’s mind was just the vague thought of distance. Always the thought of something nice out there, beyond the horizon.

  Mrs. Holbrook beyond the horizon. Was Sarah also? To be a Sarah was also not so easy. Perhaps you needed to have something. Sarah, no doubt, had the feel for it, the not too much minding some one, some other person, close, touching you, taking. “I wonder if I could? I’m sure I want some of the things Sarah is going to get by it even more than she does.” There was, however, something in Sarah’s voice, in her manner, when she spoke of it, “ple
asure,” that must have been it, “in being in the arms of that man.” Sarah had spoken with such enthusiasm of the hotel room, the luxury of the bed, the curtains at the window. “Gee, Kit, if we could have dresses made of stuff like that.”

  “I would have liked that but to have to pay for it that way.”

  “Are you by any chance Miss Overton?” That was the young man in the railroad station, who had got a sudden hunch. “Gee, I’ve got Dad’s car. Now if I had a swell little piece, that would maybe come across.

  “I don’t like to be always buying it. It takes something that should be nice out of it.” He really meant the satisfaction of winning it. “I got it from her with my personality”... a personal triumph. That about Miss Overton was of course a stall, a bluff, a way to cut in. He told her that afterwards when they were in the car. “You know, as soon as I saw you sitting in there, I thought... ‘gosh,’ I thought, ‘I’d like to take her with me some place in my car.’”

  Kit had made it not too difficult although she had thought at once, having decided she would take him on, that it would be no Sarah and her Joe affair. “It may be only because he is too young, too much of a kid.” He has asked, with a rather nice boyish frankness, “Where are you going? You are waiting for a train, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Then his proposal. She had told him where she had planned to go.

  “Have you bought your ticket?” She hadn’t. “Then come on, let me take you.”

  He hadn’t been able to place her, get her number, that was evident. Could she be just a little girl, ready and willing enough to be picked up by a man, any man who happened along. The town was full of young factory girls and at least some of them were like that. There wasn’t any regular house of prostitution, and young fellows of the town, sons of important citizens... they had to do what they could.