Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Oh, pride, oh, cock-sureness! “The saloon must never come back.” Now it will become fashionable, a real mark of distinction, to have a stock of liquor in the home. “We, the rich and the well-to-do, can have it now. These others, of the lower classes, the workers, they cannot get it. It costs too much. You’ll see they will be better workers now.”

  “Not that I think there is anything wrong with liquor, in the hands of the right people.”

  But wait, little one, it won’t be long. Soon the workers will have it too. There will be stuff made that can sell even at fifteen cents a drink.

  The old corner saloons in the cities, saloons in small towns over the country... tough places, eh? Well, there was something to be said. Is it, after all, completely a woman’s world? The coal miner, coming to the surface of Mother Earth on a Saturday evening. At last a shave, perhaps even a bath, in a washtub in a shed back of his miner’s cabin. God knows kids enough sprawling and puking on the floor inside the cabin. “Here’s my week’s wage. I am holding out a dollar, a dollar and a half, two dollars. Yes, I’m going down to Jim’s.

  “Yes, I know but God-damit, you look here, old woman, I work too. You talk about working your hands off here at home, over our kids. Yeah, I know.

  “But what the hell, woman, even if I get a little spiffed, this one night a week, something warm down inside me for once?... All right, just as you say, then. Sure. Maybe I come home a little unsteady on my legs, singing as I make my way up the hill in the mud.

  “What the hell, song on my lips for once anyway. My head muddled, eh? Well, sure. What of it? If I had much of a head would I be what I am? You knew when you took me on as your man I didn’t ever represent myself as any Einstein to you, did I, woman?

  “Ah, shut up a minute, will you, old girl? There’s the money on the table, all I’ve earned all week... yes, risking my life every minute of the week and here’s a dollar-fifty in my hand. Into my pocket and presently into Jim’s till it goes. Sure I used to be content to stay at home with you, when you were young, hadn’t all these kids, when you were a damn sight prettier and, when it comes to that, a damn sight more stuck on me, too.

  “Anyway here goes... an evening... some warm friendly talk with other men like me, other workers, other slaves, their chains kicked off for a few hours. What the hell if later I come back up the hill here, probably in the rain, with Frank and Harry and Will? All right, maybe a fight... maybe just the three of us, arms about each other’s shoulders, singing maybe... big feeling of real friendship for once anyway. ‘Harry, old pal, I know you’re one that will stick by a friend come rain, come snow. Put her there, Harry.’ That feeling. It’s good, woman, even if it’s all nonsense, even if it’s only, as you say, Jim’s booze talking in us.

  “Damn it, woman, maybe there’s something about men you and no other woman rightly understands and never will.

  “Nor the W. C. T. U., nor the politicians, nor the ones who have the money and can do as they damn please anyway. Why should they know? How can they know?

  “Well, so-long, old woman. Get sore again if you think it will do you any good.”

  And there are the Farmers too, hard-working little farmers of the West and Middle West. Down South they closed up the saloons early in the movement... afraid the Negro would get himself a drink, maybe get ugly, asserting that he’s as good as any man because he does a man’s work... all that nonsense. “There’ll always be a way for us whites to get what we want.”

  Kansas went out early, too. They drank Peruna out there. D’you ever try it?

  French workers, German workers, over in old Europe, sitting with wives and children in little cafés or beer gardens, wife and kids getting in on what fun there is for a working man. Perhaps a little music. You and the old woman and the kids, anyway the older ones, sitting at tables, maybe outdoors under trees, thumping on tables with beer mugs.

  Little farmers over herewith bad years behind them. God knows with discouraging enough outlook ahead. In Jim’s, or Joe’s, or Pete’s, with others, of a Saturday night. Some of the factory boys in there too.

  “Say if we small farmers and farm hands could ever learn to get together with the factory boys, there’d be something crack up in this country, eh? Boy, we’d make the politicians hump, eh?

  “But hell, when it comes to the politicians, maybe they’re all right. I guess they only try to do what they think they can get away with, same as all of us. If we got together, had now say this socialism or this communism, we’d still have the politicians.

  “But boy, we could crack the whip at their heels, eh what?”

  Kit went to Kate’s with Gordon, in Gordon’s big yellow sport-model car. They went to Kate’s little white farmhouse, of so many approaches, the house half hidden behind the trees in front, apple orchard with old trees, long untrimmed, shaggy nice old trees filled in the fall with many little gnarled apples, big red barns. From the rear of the house, as from almost any point in that North Carolina country, you could see in the distance low wooded hills and in the far distance there was a big paved road that came up out of a valley and went twisting up over a hill. It was a cement road and after a rain, when the sun came out, how it glistened.

  “I want to go fast, fast, over any road, into the distance, into the beyond. Do I not love my country? It is vast. How am I ever to know it a little if I do not go fast, fast?

  “Fast. Fast.

  “It is so vast.”

  Gordon and Kit went into Kate’s by a side door and came at once into a fairly large room that had been arranged as a sort of restaurant or tea room.

  But, after all, men in the illicit liquor trade did not sit in tea rooms. There were a few small tables with chairs, such as might have been seen in the back rooms of saloons before prohibition, tables at which sat farmers and workers playing cards, heavy fists thumping on tables. There was one picture, a campaign portrait of Chief Justice Hughes, on the wall... a left-over from the Wilson-Hughes presidential campaign... and a large couch against a blank wall. It was evident that the room had been made by taking out a partition between two rooms. It occupied a space that had been, formerly, when the house belonged to a farming family, the dining-room and parlor. There was a closed stairway leading up from a little hallway, the door to the hallway standing open and beyond the hallway a bedroom. As it turned out, that was Tom Halsey’s room although he seldom slept there. There was no desk and only one chair but he conducted conferences with men in the room, made arrangements and gave orders. He or his guest sat on the edge of the bed.

  The upstairs, probably taken by bedrooms, was Kate’s.

  Although they were not married she was known among Tom’s people as Kate Halsey. It wasn’t in the mode for fellows in Tom’s racket to inquire too closely into other fellows’ personal relations. The point went deeper. Was she okay? Did she keep her mouth shut? At that time Kit had never before seen Kate and did not see her at once when she entered the room with Gordon. There was a large long kitchen, running the whole length of the back of the house, with doors into the large room and into Tom’s room and it was equipped with the very latest in kitchen improvements, an electric stove, electric dish washer and clothes washer and a huge electric refrigerator. Kit and Gordon had entered by a side door into the large room and there were some men sitting at one of the tables and playing cards. They did not speak to Gordon nor he to them. The table was by a small fireplace in which there was a pile of dead wood ashes. Gordon went to sit on the couch. There was a small table with an electric lamp near it and on the table a newspaper was lying. It was an old newspaper but he picked it up and turning on the light pretended to read. Kit sat beside him and as she sat thus the men at the table turned, one at a time, and each took a long careful look at her.

  It was an uncomfortable moment. Kit was uncomfortable and so also, very evidently, was Gordon. “So this had been his home, where he had spent his boyhood, this place?” She felt at once a certain sympathy for Gordon. Already he had told her of the woman
Kate and of his father and she was eaten by curiosity. Would the father be like the men sitting at the table and one by one turning to stare at her?

  How unfriendly they seemed in their attitude toward Gordon! “Will his father be like one of these men?” There was at once a feeling of relief. “After all I’m not yet married to him.” She had held him off. “I’ll see. I’ll think about it.” There was the temptation. It was evident there would be plenty of money, what seemed to her fairly oceans of money.

  And most of all there would be a big fast sporty car to drive. Already she had managed that and when they were in the car... two or three evenings a week for several weeks it had been going on... there was a long trip on Sunday afternoons, often lasting until late at night... on all such trips she was at the wheel.

  It was better so. He was pleading, pleading. “Oh, Kit, it is such a hard time for me.

  “Do you not love me, Kit?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I can’t tell yet.”

  There was one thing certain. She loved his car. When you are at the wheel of a car and there is a man with you, trying so hard to make you... he can’t do much.

  His arm about your shoulders sometimes. “But, Gordon, I can’t drive comfortably with your arm there.” She had been learning.

  You do not put them off too abruptly, get cross, speak sharply. You smile or laugh. There is a thing you do with the eyes. It’s best when you are in some safe place, in a hotel dining-room. Kit had learned to be at her ease in such places. Gordon had surely done that for her, taking her about blowing in his money. She now knew what to do with the knives and forks, the little bird baths they put down before you with the dessert... she had been terribly puzzled at first.

  You can do something with the eyes. You pretend you are afraid... Kit wasn’t, not of Gordon... all of his little tricks were too obvious, too easy to see through. You can make the eyes say things... “Oh, man, man, I long for you so but I am a pure young girl and so afraid. I do not dare, for a minute, surrender to my own feeling.” All of that implied by a look you now and then give him. Any woman who is a woman knows how. Working women, who are good-lookers and pursued by men, have to learn fast.

  Or they will go under.

  Under what?

  Some man, of course.

  And then what? “Well, I’ve got what I was after.” Perhaps all men were not like Gordon, but he was typical of a lot. Kit sensed that.

  “The hunt is up. I am matching myself against this neat little piece.

  “If I get her, win out, I will have proved something.

  “That I am a real hunter, bring down my game when I go after it. We men, we have sometimes to prove ourselves real men.”

  “But don’t you care for me, even a little?”

  “Gordon, you know I do.” She did care. There was a side to him, a kind of boyishness sometimes. The old thing, the story of so many marriages... they are often enough not unhappy marriages... it is possible, even probable, that women can come to maturity, do often come to their own kind of maturity, quickly, in a way men cannot.

  As some trees come to early maturity while others come slowly, oh, so slowly, if they come at all... the thing implied, often a quick natural growing.

  Something in women closer perhaps to earth, to nature.

  In working women often the seeming phenomenon, the constant contact with other and older women and with men, the kind of fine comradeship that does grow up between such women, as in Kit’s case with Agnes and with Sarah... “Get wise, kid, get wise. Get wise fast.”

  Was there something to be held on to at all costs.. - the thing taught many girls?

  “Look here. You’ve got something they want. They’ll be after it, hot after it. You must remember you are a poor girl, just a working girl. It’s all you’ve got. When you let go of it, be smart. Be sure you get something for it.”

  All of that to such young women as Kit Brandon had been often said, whispered, with girlish giggles, said outright, plainly, as by one like Agnes.

  “But don’t you care for me a little?”

  “Well say, why do you suppose I go out with you?” His pleading. “It is so hard for me.” It was true, she in her own way knew, that he did suffer in his longing for her. She felt it in him. No woman is ever really hurt by that knowing, even when it is connected with a man not at all desirable to her.

  And Gordon Halsey was, in his own way, desirable. Often his pleading, when they had driven to some other town on a Sunday afternoon, had dined in a hotel... he took her always to the best places... he had learned something of ordering a dinner... his boyish eagerness, the hurt look in his eyes... his wanting her to stay there with him, in the hotel for the night... as Sarah with that lawyer of hers. “But there’s my job, Gordon.”

  “Oh, the hell with that.”

  He offered her money. “Now listen, Kit, I’m not trying to buy you. I’ve found out you’re not one who can be bought. You need it.”

  She did need it. “If I am to go about with him in his car and to such places.” She had taken his money and had built up her wardrobe carefully, with growing understanding of her own needs, keeping in mind always that it was better not to display her new and more expensive clothes at the store, to the other girls in the store.

  They were interested, absorbed, giving to her the sort of sympathy such girls and women can give to their fellows, to one of their fellows trying to play the game, to win in the game. “Do you think he’s getting to her? Is she putting out?”

  “No, he’s not, not from her.”

  “I tell you what, Kit’s too smart. I tell you, she’s a smart kid.”

  “You know I care for you. If not, why would I waste my time, going out with you?” A man can’t get too close, begin kissing, all that sort of thing in a car when the woman is driving. He had kept wanting her to stop by some dark roadside at night but she wouldn’t. “I’ll tell you straight, Gordon. If I marry you I’ll marry you.” She meant that at the moment, a kind of loyalty, woman to her man implied. “I guess, if you really want me to be your wife, you won’t want me trailing off after other men, as that other woman did.”

  That kind of talking helping to hold him too. Whether or not it was talk just invented, as a part of the game she was playing, she didn’t herself know. She was becoming constantly sharper, keener, no doubt, from the first, too keen for him.

  Were her words to him altogether lying words? “I care for his car, for his money.”

  She did care for something else too. There is a thing, quite natural, strong in many women. “It may be that I can make him be what I want, if I know what I want”... the maternal, the feeling of maternal strength in the woman. The very fact that he couldn’t, didn’t dare come quite straight with her, about his father for example, having to bring her to the father for a kind of inspection, Gordon not being that far his own man...

  The bluff he put up to her. “I want Dad to know you,” the implication that it was because he wanted to arouse in his father affection for her, that he was proud of her.

  He perhaps was that. She was, she had no doubt of that... he had once shown her a photograph of the other one, his first wife... Kit was the best thing he had found or was likely to find.

  The silence in the room to which Gordon had brought Kit continued for what seemed to her a long, long time. The men at the table, silently at their card playing, continued to turn from time to time, one after the other, to stare at her. One of them suddenly spoke. He called and his voice coming out of the silence made both Gordon and Kit jump. “Kate,” he called. “What about some beer here, Kate?”

  The woman Kate came presently through a door that led to her kitchen and at the time Kit had the feeling that Kate was a good deal like a spider running out of some hidden hole at the base of its web. She changed her mind about Kate later, came to admire her.

  She gave at first so distinctly the impression of a hard, ruthless woman. There were the heavy lines in her life-bitten face, a kind of rigid
ity. You felt something, a question... “Who, or what, has done this to you?

  “You have been hurt, deeply hurt. Will you now begin to hurt others?”

  Kate had been carried away from her man... the son Gordon did not know that story, knew only that she was not his mother... that mountain God-man ruthlessly robbed of his woman by Tom, as Tom was afterwards to do all things, with a sort of quiet ruthlessness. “There is a babe at your breast, woman. What more do you want?”

  Why, indeed, there is something else wanted, something very deep, often very subtle, hidden away, in all women who are women. It is the desire, the hunger, to bear the child within the woman’s own body, feel the movement of it, the pain to be faced... act of creation. “Here is our woman thing. No man can ever go through this, feel this.” Afterwards to mark the child’s growth, hope for it, dream for it. The child that had been Kate’s child was not her child.

  There was in her, as Kit later found out, a kind of blind loyalty. Such a woman must give of herself, blindly, to some man, the one-man woman. She had not been able to give what she had to give, to the other, the God-man... God-men are rarely woman-men... so she gave it to Tom Halsey.

  That the giving was not quite wanted, that it was accepted only in a certain way... the woman to be used, put aside, then again used...

  “Very well, then, I will be your servant.