Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “I’ve often wondered,” he said sometimes. He spoke of her to some acquaintance he had made, never naming her. She became in such talks a mysterious woman, connected with his father, far off somewhere. He was a little more frank with Kit... after he was quite sure he was in love, telling her, as all men do tell the woman, his story of his childhood. “Gee, I tell you I was a lonely kid, girl.” The appeal to the mother in the woman.

  In other conversations, with friends, he made or tried to make it all more mysterious. It might be a smartly dressed hotel clerk with whom he played pool or billiards, or the man at the wrestling arena. Gordon had money in that.

  Or one of the two or three sporting sons of rich men with whom he sometimes went about. “So, as I was telling you, there was this woman. My own mother was dead. Dad got this woman to take care of me. D’you know, I’ve often wondered. We lived in this house and he came there sometimes. He’d spend the night there. I’d be sleeping upstairs and they’d be downstairs.

  “I tell you she was like stone. D’you know I think, if my Dad had told her to go kill some one, she’d have gone and done it like a trained bird dog goes to get a quail you’ve shot.

  “She raised me all right but I don’t know her. God, I wonder sometimes if she and Dad.... After all, she’s a woman and my Dad’s a man. I’ll say he is.”

  Gordon always talked a little too freely. After all, he’d gone to school in the town where he lived later. His first wife had been gabby. That was the reason he’d have to get his Dad’s O. K. before he could go through with a marriage with Kit.

  If he could only get Kit without marriage. He couldn’t. God knew he’d tried hard enough. After all, she also had something of Kate’s quality. You can’t force things with that kind. “If I could get her I’d feel I’d done something. It’s a man’s job, okay.” He was quite sure and not at all sure about Kit. Gordon was twenty-four and Kit Brandon was eighteen.

  Was Gordon Halsey something Kit wanted? Could she get, through him, something she wanted? The reader should bear in mind that Kit Brandon was and is a real person, a living American woman. How much of her real story can be told? You, sitting and reading this book, have also a story, a history. How much of that could be told? How much do we writers dare let ourselves go in the making of portraits? How close can we keep to truth? How much do we dare try to be true historians?

  The association of the historian, chances of association, somewhat limited.

  And then, too, another danger, always the danger of the historian’s imagination also thrusting in. Who has not asked himself the question... “Do I know my own wife, my brother, father, son, friend?” Moments of intense loneliness, known to all people.

  Illuminating moments come. We see another, for perhaps only a flashing moment, see and understand all, a whole life in the moment.

  There was no doubt that Kit, since we left her, working in the cotton mill, had changed. These factory girls, living with others in little mill-town houses, the houses often crowded, people living thus crowded together, married and single people who take rooms with the married, the quarrels, love-makings, heard through thin partitions of rooms, life boiling, simmering, becoming hot... “I love you”... becoming cold and dry... “I hate you”... “Why have you betrayed me into such a life as this?”... weariness of older workers, dry barrenness that comes with too much and too long weariness, carried into houses, into bedrooms...

  Experiences in the mill, things seen, heard, felt. A feeling of restlessness had come over Kit and she had suddenly left the mill town and had gone to the other town of the Upper South where she got the place in a shoe factory.

  Before she did that there were the talks with several girls. They may have felt in her the adventurer. There were walks with women other than Agnes. There was the flashy little blonde, Sarah, the gold-digger, with an upturned nose. She talked with Kit, the two walking home together from the mill on a spring morning.

  They went along the same road in which she had walked with Agnes when the pavement was hidden under deep snow. The little pert one, Sarah, suddenly grew serious. These half-children sometimes learn things fast.

  The sun had just come up over in the east, across fields, a little summer mist across its face, making it big, a glowing red. On a distant road a young farm man walked along a dirt road behind his team, going to some field for the spring plowing. All of life isn’t in the mills, in the little crowded houses in company-owned mill towns. Oh, the hunger sometimes, in girls, in young men workers... feeling bound, imprisoned... for the big outside world, hungering for it as young girls and boys, in American country towns, particularly before the coming of the automobile, went instinctively in troops on summer evenings to railroad stations to see trains come and go. Sense of bigness, hugeness, in every thought of their country, America.

  The horses were huge, heavy and all white. They looked like elephants, off there in that light. The young farm man went swinging along. He was singing, his voice just heard across the fields. He looked seven feet tall.

  What unspoken thoughts in the two girls. After spring came the hot summer and the hot weary nights, so long, so long, in the mill, the little houses in the daytime when night mill hands tried to sleep, so hot, so hot. Kit had been through one summer of it.

  This other seemingly so nice, so inviting, the out-of-doors, the wide world. The little pert one, Sarah... she was always starting something with some man, say with a room foreman. It was whispered in the mill that the room foreman, in the room where she and Kit both worked, had already had her... she suddenly now, walking with Kit, growing serious. “D’you know I like you.” Kit not answering, she smiled. Kit had reserve, didn’t throw herself about.

  “I’ll tell you what, let’s not go home this morning.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  The little blonde explained. She had some money. As it developed... she afterwards told Kit... she had got it from a man. She was made for that, born to it... to get it from a man. She was liking Kit... women always did instinctively like Kit... and was wanting to help her, put out a hand to her.

  A man had picked Sarah up in the street, on the Saturday night before, had got her into his car. He was a rich man’s son and was married and she had got from him ten dollars. It wasn’t so much. She felt she had given the money’s worth. “I don’t care if you know. You aren’t the kind that talks.”

  She wanted Kit to go into town with her, have breakfast somewhere in town. “Come on. We’ll go to the hotel, to the Jefferson Davis.” The Jefferson Davis was the swell hotel of the town. “What, in these clothes?”

  “Yes. We can go down into the ladies’ room.” After all the girls and women in that mill were mostly well enough dressed. The management insisted on that. Although it was not openly said, you could be discharged for slovenliness in dress. “We don’t want our employees looking shabby. It gives a wrong impression.” The two girls were in the spinning room and there was no occasion, except in the dead hot nights of midsummer, to soil clothes. The dirtier work in the mill was in the cotton cleansing room where the dirt and filth were taken out of the baled cotton as it came from fields and gins and only Negroes worked in there. It was called “digger’s work,” a place shut off from the other rooms, the air filled always with clouds of lint and dust. Kit’s companion went along beside Kit, talking rapidly, even a little hysterically. Kit had suddenly decided to go with her. They turned about and went in the direction of the town. “All right,” Kit said, breaking into sudden laughter. She felt suddenly free and even gay, the weariness from the long night of labor quite gone out of her body. How pretty Sarah was! There was something she had, a great mass of shining yellow hair, very silky, and big blue eyes. She had, like Kit, an alive slender young body. There were freckles on her cheeks and across her little nose. She was a kind of Billy Burke of the mill, a Billy Burke at twenty, in her first loveliness. Her face suddenly got a little drawn and as the two walked, getting to the outer part of town, passing houses of th
e town people, the houses for the most part very quiet, the people still asleep... there was a Negro man scrubbing the porch before one of the houses... “I tell you what, Kit...”

  Sarah started to say something and then stopped and then again began talking rapidly. Although she was still very young this wasn’t the first mill at which Sarah had worked, the first town in which she had lived.

  She had wanted to travel, to see the world and she had been daring. Kit felt that. “I’m not going to stay here long either,” she was already telling herself. Sarah had come to the town and the mill some months before, hitch-hiking from another town.

  She had seen things, done things. “I don’t care if you know,” she said. Already, although she was so young, she had been with a half dozen men. “You don’t have to get that way, have a kid and all that. You have to know things.” She was wanting to educate Kit, give her knowledge.

  “After all, why is it, why is it?” The words were like a little cry out of Sarah. They were going along in quiet morning streets. “Say, kid, you think of it. Gee, God, it’s tough, having to be a mill girl.

  “You look at what happens to us.” All a girl had to do was to look around, she explained. There were the working women, many of them married, the mothers of children. They had been honest girls, honest working girls, and had perhaps married... some honest-enough working man, some fellow in the mills. “Say, now, a loom-fixer,” Sarah said. “Gee, God... she has a kid by him and then, as soon as she can stand on her feet, back she goes, into the mill.” Sarah became profane. “You know what it does to a woman, having a kid like that and then going back to work too soon... on your feet all day or all night?

  “It plays hell with your figure if nothing worse.

  “There isn’t any goddam grubby millhand going to get me and don’t you let it happen to you either, Kit.

  “I’m not going to have a lot of kids just to make a lot more slaves for the kind of big-bugs we work for.”

  Kit listened, absorbed in what Sarah was saying. The little blonde was saying things that had already come some-what vaguely into her own mind. She had never put her own thoughts into words. “God damn ’em,” Sarah said, and then she laughed.

  They were passing a big house, set back from the street, a box hedge in front, facing the sidewalk. They could see over the hedge and across a wide lawn to a stately stone house. “I guess one of the big bugs lives in there,” Sarah said. “Let them have the kids, eh,” she added. “But I’m not going to give up having some fun.” She grew serious.

  “I wonder why... I wonder why one girl, or a woman either, is born, say now a big bug, and another isn’t.” The two girls had stopped before the house with the wide green lawn, cut off from them by a hedge over which they could see. “D’you ever get religion?” Sarah asked. How in earnest she was! Kit had got suddenly a glowing liking for her.

  She wasn’t like Kit’s other woman friend in that place, the big woman, Agnes, always dreaming of some kind of a social revolution, a sudden swift change in the whole social structure, justice ruling, something of that kind. Kit had listened to a lot of Agnes’s talk. She had never listened as intently as she now listened to Sarah.

  “D’you ever get religion?” Sarah didn’t wait for an answer. “I did once but I tell you what, I got over it quick. It’s the bunk,” she said. “I guess it’s swell enough for a girl who hasn’t got the real stuff,” she said.

  She was looking at Kit, the two standing before the big house. They stood for a moment thus, looking at each other... it was for Kit one of those moments of revelation, a whole new viewpoint on life presented... like a door jerked open for her... moments of revelation that come sometimes to the young. They went on along the street. “I guess its O. K. for that kind, for the ugly ones, for the ones that haven’t got any looks. If you haven’t got what it takes to get what you want, I guess its O. K. to leave it up to God.

  “You might as well leave it to something. If you’re a girl and haven’t got any looks, you’re sunk anyway.

  “But if you’ve got the goods and you and I have,” she said. She said she had been a good deal of a sucker, the first time or two she had been with men. “I don’t know whether you know what I mean or not.

  “Kit, kid,” she said, “I guess maybe they’d have a harder time shaking the apples off your tree than they did off mine.” She laughed again. As they went along Sarah began telling of the man from whom she got the ten dollars. She said he was all right. “He didn’t try to bunk me,” she said.

  He had thought at first that she might be a quite innocent young girl. “I look like that, don’t I?” Sarah said, throwing up her head and turning to Kit. They both laughed. Kit thought she was swell. Being with Sarah that morning had given her a sudden fine feeling of new freedom, of adventure. “It’s the way my nose turns up and the freckles on my nose,” Sarah said. The man she had been with was a young lawyer, partner in a law firm with his father. His father was successful and the son had married a rich girl.

  But there had been something dry and dead about her. He told Sarah that she was a horse woman, thought of nothing but fine saddle horses, cared for nothing else. “She ought to sleep with a horse,” he said to Sarah.

  He had got fed up on her horseyness and on her. “We’ve got a kid. Well, and that’s all right,” he said to Sarah. He thought, at first, when he had picked her up, that she might be an innocent girl. “Are you?” he had asked; “because, if you are, I’ll drop you right now.

  “If you are not... He had proposed that she drive with him to a town a hundred miles away. He said he had noticed her walking along the street and had followed. Then he went to get his car. He watched his chance to speak to her when he felt it was safe. She had been walking about, looking into store windows and had turned into a side street. “I was really out to pick up a man,” Sarah said. She declared she had done it more than once but with a toss of her head said that she had always been choosy, wouldn’t just take any burn that came along looking for something. She told Kit all about the night with him. She thought he was all right, wanted only a little warm affection. He had given her the ten dollars, apologizing, as he did so. It was about all he had left in his pocket when the hotel bill was paid. They had stayed until late on Sunday morning, having dinner in their room, with a bottle of wine he managed in some way to get. “He was a funny guy all right, but nice,” she said. He had asked her, “So you’re a working girl, eh? You are in the mill, eh?

  “So that’s all right,” he had said. He had certainly talked in a way that had at first startled and then amused Sarah. “I like these square-shooting guys,” she said. He had declared it was all quite regular, in good form, a man like himself, from a so-called good family, meaning, he said, a rich or a well-to-do family, married and dissatisfied with his wife... “she being a cold fish,” he said. Afraid, he said, to go ahead and break things up, tell her to go to hell or to the horse barns, without the guts to do that.

  “We all do it,” he said. “Gee, it was just killing to hear him,” Sarah exclaimed. He explained that his father was the lawyer for the mill in which Sarah and Kit worked and that he also owned the controlling interest in the newspaper in their town. “That’s so we can control public opinion in case some of you little girls get upstage and want your just rights,” he said. He said all of these things, Sarah explained, while they were lying in bed, lying and talking with a queer look in his eyes and a queer twist to his lips. “But just the same he wasn’t kidding, he meant it,” Sarah declared. She said she had sure liked him fine. “He wasn’t any rough guy either, one of the kind that don’t know how to treat a woman. In the morning we had a swell breakfast in bed. He had it sent up to the room.

  “It was so comfy and nice up there.” A girl, Sarah declared, was a damn fool who wasn’t smart enough to get everything she could out of life.

  There were a few extra dollars in his pocket and he had suggested, if she didn’t mind, that she take a train home. He would drop her at t
he railroad station. The ten dollars was a gift. It wasn’t much, he had said, for the joy she had given him, but there would be more.

  He had asked her, “You’ll be sensible, won’t you, kid, you’ll take the money?” and, “Sure” she had replied. She described the hotel room he had got. It was so big, warm, and light. It had seemed to her luxurious. “I hadn’t given him anything so precious. I liked him. He was nice. He wasn’t rough. Gee, Kit,” she said, “to think of it, I’d be working in the damn mill every night for a week to make what he gave me.”

  She said she was going to see him again and that she might quit the mill. He had suggested something of the kind. Even if he was taking something away from her it wouldn’t be any worse than something they take from you when you worked as she and Kit did in one of their mills.

  The two girls went to the hotel and walked in, Kit’s heart thumping. She had never before been in such a place. What admiration she had for Sarah, who did everything so boldly, asking a Negro boy where the ladies’ room was and if the dining-room was open. “Is it all right for me to park my car out there, at the side door?” she asked the Negro. Kit thought it was a grand bluff. There were two or three cars parked near the side door of the hotel. The colored boy in a bright blue uniform kept bowing and scraping to them. He was, “Yes, Missing,” in great shape, as Sarah afterwards said. The dining-room wasn’t open at such an early hour but there was another room, called a grille. They went in there and breakfasted in state, Sarah carrying it off with a wink. “I guess it’s easy enough, if you’ve got to throw it away anyway, to get something for it,” Sarah said, and Kit understood what she meant. She meant the youth and the beauty they both had. She meant that there was a market for it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHEN KIT WENT with Gordon Halsey to Kate’s house, really to pass inspection by Tom Halsey, the illicit liquor business was in its first full flush of success, as was the oil business when the elder Rockefeller, Mr. John D. himself, got in and the steel business when Andrew Carnegie began. The prohibition law had been passed the year before and the Anti-Saloon League was in its full glory. In old Virginia in the hall of the lower house, and for that matter in the state senate, old stamping ground of Patrick Henry... “Give me liberty or give me death”... of Thomas Jefferson... “The government that governs the least is the best government”... in this place as in many state capitals, men like Virginia’s Bishop Cannon were in control... they were holding the whip... politicians were in terror of them... Women’s Christian Temperance Union in control... money pouring in to the Anti-Saloon League from big industrialists... the saloon gone...