Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  It was an absorbingly interesting experiment for Kit, her first of the kind, trying to figure him out, be nice enough to him to get the ride to that town in his car... she might even work him to let her drive.

  “Life’s a game.”

  “Work them to get what you want.”

  He was thinking... “I don’t know about her.” She might be like his sister. There was that book in her hand. “I’ve got a car outside here.” He had really seen her through the window of the room, had looked in from the outside and seen her sitting there. “Gosh, there’s something nice all right.” He even told her all of this when he had got her into the car. “I was just driving past the station and thought I would run in to set my watch by the station clock. All of that, my coming in and tapping on the window, that about a Miss Overton... it was all a bluff.”

  “Well, you smarty,” Kit said trying to be girlish, even a bit kittenish. He was a queer combination of caution and frankness.

  For example, lying to her about his name. She didn’t quite know how she knew that but she did and she also lied. He might be thinking that he would get her and that later it might lead to some kind of trouble.

  They had got outside the town of shoes and were on a big highway, in an open car, very nice, very light and swift. Almost at once she had got him to let her drive. They were on the great North Carolina highway that runs down southwesterly from Charlotte to Greenville in South Carolina and beyond. Oh, North Carolina, the proud state, the bold state!

  No longer the old North Carolina. “Old North State” of the Southern Confederacy, later poor state. “Valley of Humiliation between the two Mountains of Conceit”... South Carolina and Virginia... better forget all that. That’s all in the past.

  The big highway Kit was on with her catch, her hands presently at the wheel of the car, was something to excite. You could ride all day on that highway, coming to town after town, many of the towns but a few miles apart, big towns and little towns, factory chimneys, mill chimneys never out of sight. Much of the big highway was cement hard and smooth, on such a summer Sunday the road full of cars... where else in all the world but in America could you see such a sight, cars by the hundreds, by the thousands, many of the cars very beautiful, the swift ride, the soft hurling through space, when you have got it into you, have the feel of it, in your own body, in your hands.

  The purring thing down in front, under the hood of the car... oh, American workmen, American inventors, you have done something here, oh mechanical age, this is your finest accomplishment.

  This power, this swiftness sometimes in the hands of young girls, like Kit, in the hands of fat women of forty. Look a little out for them if they have not begun to drive when they are young... old men, come down out of horse-and-buggy days, old gray-haired women.

  The long gleaming, moving, sometimes swift moving procession, Kit in it, a part of it. “Say, you are pretty handy with a car, aren’t you?” her catch said once. She had just shaved a car that had come into the highway out of a side road, that had come without warning. She had whizzed past, throwing the juice to her at just the right moment, her catch sitting tense, his eyes closed. There was a heavy-handed farmer driving. “Gosh, I thought he had you. That guy ought to stay at the plow.” Her catch was still puzzled. “Say, tell me, you ain’t a highbrow, are you?” She didn’t answer but smiled. He was thinking of the book she was holding when he found her. She would have to mail it back to that library place. His sister had been caught reading it by his father. His sister was a highbrow all right. He had heard there was some hot stuff in it.

  When he was in college... he had been out a year... there were some of the fellows... they went in for such highbrow stuff. “I like this western stuff myself,” he said. When he read a book he wanted action, something doing all the time. He had got it into his head that she was a school teacher. “Are you?”

  “I might be,” she said. Well, it was possible, a school teacher also might be had. He decided to wait until night. “You wouldn’t mind having dinner with me, would you, we’d go to the hotel?” She wondered if that was the way Sarah’s lawyer began with Sarah. She said she would go. “Then we can take a ride in the evening,” he said, thinking that in the darkness with her he could perhaps get his nerve up, perhaps kiss her, get his arms about her. “You’ve got to work them up, get them going a little.” How transparent he was. They went to the hotel and Kit had her bag checked. He suggested that. “Do any of your people live in this town?” he asked her, but she was noncommittal. “It might be,” she said. She let him buy her dinner in the dining-room of a big hotel, many well-dressed people also dining. Kit being as cagy as she could, watching others not to give herself away, letting him talk... men and especially young men and young old men love to talk of themselves...

  What he was going to do in life. His father had a factory, he was going in and try to work to be a sales manager. He had forgotten that he had already told her his father was a doctor. “Then I’m going to get me a swell little wife.” He described the woman he thought would make him happy as his wife, making her as much like Kit as possible. “Anyway I’m not going to marry for money.” It might be that he had noticed that her bag was a cheap one, her clothes certainly not expensive. When she had dined she excused herself for a moment, the suggestion being that she had to go to the toilet, and going out of the dining-room, got her bag and hurried out of the hotel. She would have to try to find a cheap boarding house. She had a queer uncomfortable feeling. If she had been playing a game it was too easy. She felt like a hunter of big game who had been out shooting at rabbits.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TOM HALSEY, THE man old enough to be Kit Brandon’s father, was destined to be the big figure in her life. She did not know that. She was brought to Tom by his son, Gordon Halsey, who was the man child Tom had once brought to the mountain woman Kate, wife of the inspired mountain preacher, the man child Tom had laid to Kate’s breasts.

  Scattering and shattering thus a meeting of God’s children, hushing the cries and groans of mountain men and women touched by the finger of God, creating thus a so-human situation that did in a way knock rather galleywest the power over people of the preacher. “By God, before I’d let any man get away with a thing like that with my woman.”

  “Say, if he’s so big with God as he claims, why’d God let that happen to him?”

  Tom getting more than that, an almost slavish follower in the woman Kate... male triumph over the female.

  Kit’s first meeting with Tom was at Kate’s house. Kate had grown middle-aged and the babe she had nursed was now a man, at least in years. He was a young sport, a woman-getter he hoped, a rich man’s son. He wanted to think he was truly all of these.

  He had not been sent to Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, had never been a football hero, although he might have been and done something of the sort except that Tom hadn’t got his real start early enough. Young Gordon was physically big. He might have been splendid football material and, as for Kit when she met Gordon, she was certainly not the rather naïve mountain girl who had taken the first mill job. Mill girls also educate each other. They do it also in shoe factories, overall factories, five-and-ten-cent stores, in Macys and Wanamakers, why not?

  A mountain girl, ex-mill girl, getting keen. Get always a little keener. Why should the daughters of mill owners, storekeepers, daughters of professional men, novel writers, etc., etc., have anything on you, cotton-mill girls, overallfactory girls, shoe-factory girls, big department-store girls... when it comes to handling men? You’ve got to learn it, haven’t you, girls? They sure try to get away with it with you too, don’t they?

  Sharpen your wits. Life’s a game. Women know. Working women, particularly the ones that have the looks, the ones that have what it takes, have opportunities. They should learn to know a lot.

  At least girls, to be on to a guy like young Gordon Halsey... not so smart after all... son of a rich man, wanting to be both a very very respectable one and at the
same time more or less the tough one... in with the best people but also thought to be, well, cheek-by-jowl with the so-mysterious underworld... men of crime, men of mystery, hard guys... like Cal. Coolidge going out West and putting on a cowboy uniform... young man half balanced so between two or more than two worlds... belonging really to no world... say like a lot of us modern novelists and story tellers too... wanting to be both poet and rich man.

  But let it pass.

  Gordon Halsey, living as he did in one of the states of the Upper South, would perhaps already have begun to think, and when occasion arose speak of himself as of an old Southern family, best blood of the Old South. He would have got that far out beyond his father. Poor lad. Look! He doesn’t get away with it. Society, American society in his time, having taken to arms oil thieves, timber robbers, water-power highwaymen, had gagged at taking Al Capones, Legs Diamonds, Waxey Gordons. Not that Tom Halsey cared too much. He did care. As Tom had grown richer he had also changed but more of that later. The fact surely did hurt the son.

  He, the son, would have tried to put it over on Kit Brandon. He had found her working in a five-and-ten-cent store. For some reason, certainly not understandable to him, she got him hard. “What, am I really going to fall for her, just a little shop girl?” Look out, boy, it has happened before.

  It wasn’t because she was so warm, a hot baby. There is another sort of challenge.

  “Say, there’s one not so easy to get, to knock off. If I could get her I’d prove myself, even to myself, a real ladies’ man, eh?”

  The cooler, more self-possessed ones also tempt.

  Gordon having made a campaign for Kit, having chanced into the store where she had got a job... she feeling her way in a perplexing enough world, having already, since leaving home, been cotton-mill worker, shoe-factory worker and now five-and-ten-cent-store girl... Gordon having chanced into the store one day, having got his first look at her, the first once-over, in there...

  Big, yellow, high-powered, sport-model car parked in the street outside...

  Other girls in the store checking on the car and on the young man in rather flashy, broad-checked homespun clothes — English tailored... like a big league baseball player or say like Jack Reed, American-Russian Revolutionary hero, when Jack was a young man in America before the World War, big, loose, free-swinging shoulders like that... the similarity would have stopped dead right there... splendid young body, this one, without the Jack Reed flair for glowing sincerity...

  He walking down one of the aisles of the store... Woolworth’s...

  Who do you think built the Woolworth Building, Woolworth Tower in New York? Say, the Empire State has put it in the shade, eh?...

  And now look, so soon Rockefeller Center hanging Empire State on the ropes. Those boys, Al Smith, Young Rockefeller, Woolworth, etc., do step fast, don’t they?

  Kit in the stationery department in the Woolworth store. “Go to counter number eleven, please.” Kit even getting literary. There were a few books, reprints at bargain prices, detective stories for tired clerks who work for tired business men, mystery stories, stories of quick passionate love.

  Gordon Halsey strolling. As it turned out he forgot what he came in the store to get. It may have been pants buttons. The girls in the store were staring. They whispered, one to another, confusing Gordon with stories that had already by that time begun to be whispered about the father... his secret power, his individual daring. “Look, Mabel, look. That’s him. That’s Halsey, the big liquor man. Gee, I bet he’s rich. Look at them clothes. Look out there in the street at that car he’s driving.

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh! Gosh, Mabel, ain’t he handsome?” Young Gordon Halsey... big bumblebee buzzing, about to alight on some slender-stalked flower. Buzzz. Buzzz. Buzzz. Look out, swaying, slender-stemmed blossoms in the Woolworth garden. Kit was the prettiest. She had that it, or seemed to Gordon to have it. He had forgotten what he came in for. He bought a book... picture on the paper jacket outside... young man, in appearance something, vaguely, like himself... like figures in advertisements of men’s wear houses in the back pages of The New Yorker, Esquire, etc. The man in a flashy car had stopped to pick up a girl in the street. There was a swell-looking rich man’s house in the background, the girl, walking along, a little remotely like Kit. Title of the book: Hitch-hiking to Dreamland. He held it up before her, smiling. “How much?” Was the guy blind? There was a big placard saying how much. He bought also some picture post-cards, taking his time to select them. He got an eyeful.

  He began his campaign. He came again and again and again. Other girls in the store noticed. She had him going. He’d got Kit’s name from another girl and she came to Kit with advice. “It’s a chance, all right, but make him step, kid.”

  “Kid, you got him hooked.”

  “Don’t stand for no nonsense, kid.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  He’d be trying of course to put it over on her, make her come across, say just for a buggy ride in that big yellow car. “You know how they are. They’re all alike.”

  It went on for a month, two months, three months and he had begun to get desperate. At last he came to a decision. “My God, I’m in love. I’m sunk.” The trouble was that he couldn’t marry, didn’t dare marry again, without consulting his father. He had already tried marriage once, and the marriage had turned out a mess. He had got a gabber, one who talked too much...

  It had cost money to get out of that and Tom Halsey had got him out. There had been, on the part of the lady, an attempt at blackmail. “I talk too much, do I? Well, you wait, if’n I don’t get what I want I’m going to talk more. I’ll talk a lot.” Tom Halsey himself had to handle her. It wasn’t that young Gordon was in on Tom’s racket. He wasn’t. Tom didn’t want him in. The young man was, in a sense, Tom Halsey’s Achilles’ heel. He wanted the boy to be outside, go straight, get to be maybe even a gentleman. He wouldn’t have put it that way. “You can have all the money you want, all you need, but when it comes to certain things, like let’s say marriage now, I’m sorry, but, young man, you’ll have to consult me.”

  It isn’t such a nice position to be in, as a man, say in the eyes of your woman. A man wants to be his own man. Tom Halsey, although, since he had got into the liquor business in a big way and since prohibition, had been making a lot of money, — although he already had a lot, he wasn’t a snob. He wouldn’t be demanding for his son the daughter of some rich man, best blood of the Old South, etc., etc. Tom hadn’t had his money quite long enough for that but there were ideas in his head. Kit found out what they were later.

  He’d be wanting, demanding, for Gordon, not a dizzy blonde like that first one his son got when Tom kept his hands off, one who wasn’t even faithful to him, although God knew she had enough money spent on her, on clothes, etc.... it had been because she was careless, had been hot-southing her man too openly that Tom had been able to get the goods on her and shut her up. He had got her to leave the state, go out to Reno, do the necessary out there, enough money to live pretty comfortably for several years... confessions to two or three specific cases of hot-southing her man signed, sealed, and stowed away by Tom.

  He didn’t want any more of that.

  Gordon took Kit to his father. He wrote a letter and was called on the phone. “I feel so and so but will do just what you say, Dad.”

  “All right, boy. Be at such and such a place at such and such a time. Have her with you.” They went to Kate’s place.

  It was some two miles outside of a certain North Carolina industrial town and there was a very neat little white farmhouse with green blinds beside an unpaved dirt road. It was a nice little place and, although after his first marriage Gordon seldom went there, he knew it well. He had spent his boyhood there, seeing his father from time to time, sometimes not seeing him for long periods. While Tom was building up his organization, before he got money enough to be safe from such nonsense he simply had to serve a few jail sentences himself. Once he had to put
in six months on the road. He was in a chain gang although they didn’t call it that. They called it a road gang.

  The little white house was well kept. Kate was a neat housekeeper. There was a high hedge at the front, facing the road, and the lawn was always kept neatly mowed. It was a very innocent-looking place. There were several tall pine trees, close to the house and almost hiding it, and the road was one not much used.

  There was in fact a kind of network of little roads. Behind the house there was a huge apple orchard and several barns, sheds, etc., and beyond... Kate owned a large farm of more than 400 acres... Tom had bought it for her... it stood in her name... she kept, for such legal purposes, the name of that preacher to whom she had been married, not by the law, but, as he said, by God... beyond all this fields, never plowed, kept in grass. She rented some of the fields to a neighbor who got them at a low price by keeping his mouth shut. He was a dairyman and pastured cows in the fields. Beyond there were other fields, and others and others. There were a few small patches of woodland.

  There were farm roads everywhere. You could approach the house from the north, south, east or west. The house had become a kind of office for Tom although he was not often there. It was his pay-off place.

  Kate, now grown middle-aged, was tall and inclined to gauntness. She was a striking-enough-looking figure. There was a kind of stoicism, a firmness. She had become the sort of woman men did not trifle with. Young Gordon had not had a happy childhood. She was such a strange quiet one and although she adored Tom’s son, and had always humored him and even spoiled him, he was afraid of her and, even after he grew up and went to town to live in a hotel and be a man and a sport, he thought of her as rather a woman of stone.