Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “I am the one-man woman. My man is my man.” There was hurt enough in the woman who called herself Kate Halsey. She didn’t parade it. A few such people, men sometimes, women sometimes, hurt, kicked about by life... the artist man for example, the poet, the painter who does beautiful work, giving himself in all cleanliness, a D. H. Lawrence, a Rembrandt, when his world so carefully built fell down upon him when he was an old man, a Vincent Van Gogh, in America the poet Vachel Lindsay, examples of artist men so hurt... run, Vincent Van Gogh, to the woman in the house of prostitution with your ear in your hand... “Here, woman, if you cannot take me, take this bit of me.” There are some such men, some such women, who get out of such hurts a kind of inner laughter but others cannot get it. The hurt endures.

  The woman Kate came into the room where Kit sat with Gordon. The curtains of the room were drawn, although it was still light outside... Kit and Gordon had arrived in the early evening of a summer Sunday. Electric lights were turned on. Kate came bringing bottles of beer and glasses and without speaking set them down before the men and, without looking at Kit or Gordon, returned to her kitchen. One of the men growled at her. “Thanks,” he said.

  At that time, in the early days of prohibition and of the rapidly expanding illicit liquor trade, men like Tom Halsey, who had quickly spread themselves and the organization they had got together out over certain territories, were determined to control there, opportunity grasped in firm hands, much as nations put out strong hands to control trade areas, usually so-called backward countries... certainly backward in the ability to grasp and hold... spheres of influence established... ruthlessness in nations... ruthlessness in men, in the illicit liquor trade war outside the law. Against the high-jacker and his gang, who held up your liquor cars or trucks on the road, there was no legal redress. It was necessary to maintain your own army. Such men as Tom had become often brought into their territories tough guys, even city gun men. There was property to be protected. Oh, sacred property! There were now and then men who must be put out of the way. Two of the men playing cards in Kate’s house when Gordon and Kit came there were of this sort. The third man was a countryman, a tall fellow in overalls, a mountain man... he may have been learning the gun man’s trade. He had a long, rather serious-looking face and small gray eyes set close together.

  He and who else?

  There was one of the men in the room that day who had secret ambitions. He was one of the two city gun men brought in and his name was — or at least he spoke of himself as — Steve Wyagle. He was known as Shorty, being short of stature, a swarthy-skinned man, ancestry somewhere in the south of Europe, a fellow with blue-black hair, cut close to the head, thick-necked, the hair growing far down over his low forehead, a scar, evidently from an old knife wound, running down from near his left eye and disappearing behind his neck. The cut had not been properly mended. There had been a rough, careless job of sewing. White and red puckers of flesh showed against the dark brown of the skin.

  He was ambitious. He was secretly at work. He looked at Gordon Halsey, who had brought a woman to that place. He was having himself a good look at Kit. He had heard tales. “This Tom Halsey, the big shot here, he has a weakness. It is his son and the son has a weakness. It is women.

  “And now the son has got himself a new skirt, eh? The other one he had was a talker. All women talk. She came near getting Tom and the whole crowd into trouble.

  “Now there will be a chance for me. If Tom doesn’t speak out, tell that son of his where to get off, kick this new dame of his out of the picture, I’ll do some talking myself. It will be a chance for spreading dissension. Perhaps, if he lets his son get away with this I’ll even put up a spiel to the big shot himself. I’ll have my say about this woman business and I’ll do it where some of the others can hear.

  “And then, if he doesn’t kick her out, I’ll put it up to the boys. I’ll show this Tom Halsey who is the big shot here.”

  The man Steve Wyagle, sitting and thinking, turning occasionally from his card playing for another look at Kit. Kit was also thinking. She had been brought to the place... she knew vaguely, although it had never been definitely put up to her, that she had been brought there to be inspected by Tom Halsey, Gordon’s father. Well, where was the man? Why didn’t he show himself? The man she was presumed to be about to marry was sitting beside her, obviously nervous. He kept the newspaper before his face, pretended to be absorbed in it. That would be, always... one might as well face the truth... about his speed. He was a pretender. He would be always, now pretending to be tough, now to be more or less the gentleman, now a sport, now a man in love. He would be the sort almost any woman could knock off, terribly in love today, quite cold tomorrow.

  “He hasn’t got me yet.”

  “But there is something else too.” It is likely that all morals, all moral codes are the inventions of men. Kit had something — the grand unmoral nature of all true women. There was hunger in her, it had been growing in her. “I want what I want, good clothes, above all a fine fast car to drive.

  “It is all right to talk about the nobility of labor, the sort of talk I used to hear on the lips of Agnes... I guess it was O. K. for her, talking that way, feeling that way, but I’m different. You have to try to get a few things you want for yourself. It’s all right, I guess, this talk about the nobility of labor, but what’s noble in this wearing yourself out as a clerk in a five-and-ten?

  “Or in a cotton mill or shoe factory?

  “It must be that all such talk comes from those who never did any real work.”

  There were those like the revolutionist Agnes.

  “Well, all right, but I’m not Agnes.”

  There was that in Kit that demanded something out of life while she was young, felt the power of youth in herself.

  And there was another angle. As she sat in that room with the not-very-cheerful-looking card players and the nervous Gordon she was aware of a growing fear in her. She had been to movies, had read newspapers. The young Italian man, in the place where she had the room in the shoe factory town, was addicted to detective stories and she had read several of them. When you read such a book you got excited, were held tightly, but afterwards it all faded away. You could remember nothing at all of the characters in the book. Your knowledge of people was in no way extended. There was, in fact, after reading, a queer sold-out feeling in you but something remained.

  If not people at least thoughts coming back of a murder on some lonely road at night, or in a lonely farmhouse — blood flowing, a dead man or woman. The women were so often young and beautiful. Kit began to be afraid. There were such things as gang killings, people not wanted put out of the way. How did she know the man, Gordon’s father, wanted his son to take another wife?

  Something else. There were gang rapings. Groups of men, roughs, usually after drinking, sometimes attacked young girls in small American towns. Almost every town had in its history some such story. The stories were whispered about among the girls in the factories. There was even a story in the Bible. Some girl had told Kit to look it up and read it. “It was in the Old Testament, Genesis XIX.”

  Lot in the house in Sodom — gang of the boys outside.

  “Behold, now, I have two daughters who have not known man.” Big night for the boys.

  There was fear but it passed quickly. Kit sat up very straight beside Gordon who had slumped and sat with the newspaper still held before his face. She had, at the moment, something of the quality in her bearing that had made Tom Halsey a leader. She was neatly but not flashily dressed, in a well-fitted suit, certainly well-tailored, and there was something quiet and steady in her eyes. “They don’t rape my kind. I’ve got something they won’t dare try to touch.”

  There was surely something ridiculous in her attitude at that moment. She was unarmed. The three men at the table were all physically powerful men. They were not sensitive to attitudes.

  A door opened and Tom Halsey came into the room through the door that led into th
e downstairs bedroom and walked straight across the room to Kit and Gordon, and Gordon immediately jumped up. He tried to be at ease, to be cheerful, a kind of hail-fellow.

  “Why, hello, Dad.”

  “Hello, Gordon.” Tom was smiling. How much affection, how much contempt there can be in the attitude of a father toward a son. “Hello.” Gordon was muttering an introduction. He sat and then quickly got to his feet again. The newspaper he had been holding fell to the floor. The three men at the table were staring but Tom Halsey paid no attention to them or to the confusion of his son. He had the detached air of a doctor coming into his waiting room. There are several people sitting and he nods to one of them. “Will you please come this way?” He walked to the door of his bedroom and opening it stepped aside and Kit, who had followed, went in.

  “It’s a bedroom, you see,” he said when they were both inside and the door closed. “I’ll have to apologize but it is also my office.” If Kit Brandon had been learning, picking up points as she went along in life, so had Tom. If you are in the illicit liquor business in a big way, if you want to be a big shot in the game, you’d better learn. You’ll be meeting all sorts of people who must be handled. Better step carefully, learn fast. In Tom Halsey there were also secret new ambitions. They all get it, the successful ones, big stock-market riggers, big shots in finance and industry. “Look here, I’m in this game now but I’m going to get out when I get mine. I’m going to be respectable and respected.”

  “There’s only the one chair, you see. You take it. I’ll sit here, on the edge of the bed.”

  There was a second door to the room and it led into the kitchen and at once Kit knew that the woman Kate, she had just seen for the first time, was in there, standing in there, not moving, listening.

  Antagonism in the men she had seen in the other room, antagonism in Kate. There was Gordon’s father, Tom Halsey, sitting on the edge of the bed. Silence. “So he’s having himself a good look, appraising me.

  “He and his son can both go to hell for all I care.”

  It was well for Kit that she had been born a mountain lass, daughter of mountain folk. They all have it, the mountain people, Gipsies, American Indians. All can sit in the presence of others in prolonged silence... poker-faced. Tom Halsey would have been thinking of his son as he sat looking at Kit.

  “So he thinks he wants this one. That’s strange.” This out of a contempt for the son he wouldn’t have dared admit to himself. There was this other thing, growing in him. “If I make good in this game I’m in, pile up a lot of money, I’ll be wanting something I can’t get in my own self. It’s a tough game. I’ll have made too scaly a record. I’ll have to get it through my son... respectability, a Halsey thrust up out of the muck.

  “I wish he were better stuff. In this matter a man must work with what he has. But the woman his son gets and by whom he may have a son must be O. K.”

  “This looks like a firm little thing.”

  Tom had sense enough to know that his Gordon was not likely to cut in on one of the so-called established families in the section of country he had marked down as his own, for which there would be a constant, a ruthless war, under cover, with other ambitious men. “She might do for what I want for my son.”

  He was looking at her not coldly, not warmly. “My son tells me that you and he are planning to be married,” he said finally and Kit answered in a tone much like his own. She smiled. “He may be planning. He has spoken of it. I’m not planning.”

  “You may take that. Put it in your pipe. Smoke it.” Kit said nothing of the sort. She may again have been thinking of Sarah... luxury of the rich that Sarah had spoken of. “I wonder if he lives here, in this dump, men like those fellows outside there for companions? It doesn’t look to me like a life I want.”

  Tom arose, from his seat on the bed. “Let’s step outside,” he said, and they went out of the room, through Kate’s kitchen, as Kit had already guessed, the woman Kate standing just outside the half-closed door. She made no effort to conceal the fact that she had been standing, looking and listening, and Tom did not look at her.

  He led the way out onto a back porch and into an orchard. Kit smiled. “Well, this is good,” she thought. She was thinking of Gordon, behind his newspaper in the room with the three men, of his sitting there and waiting, wanting, she thought, to be self-possessed, to create an impression of strength. How many men in the world always wanting to seem to be what they cannot be, never getting the idea that strength is in acceptance of limitations, not in stretching them!

  What a splendid big game hunter Gordon would have made! How much false hair grows on the breasts of some men?

  At the same time, in Kit, something very feminine. The father would walk with her, trying to get her number, he deciding whether or not he wanted her for his son’s wife, leaving the son to sit in there. There is a mother in every real woman. “Don’t you think we’d better call Gordon? He and I will be getting back to town.”

  Tom stopped and stood looking at her. There was Gordon’s flashy car parked near the house. They were in a path that led through an orchard, crossed a bridge over a small stream, and led into a wood. The day was growing old and dusk was coming on. Tom took no notice of the implication of her remark, that she and not Gordon’s father would make the decision about her marriage, that just the same she was sorry for Gordon, did not like leaving him sitting in that room, the woman Kate and the men sitting in there no doubt having guessed what the son’s visit to his father was all about.. they making a kind of tame and impotent bull of him who so wanted to be thought of as so very male, so very bullish. Tom stood for a moment looking at Gordon’s car. “I’m afraid he likes to advertise the fact that he has plenty of money to spend,” he said. He went on along the path, Kit beside him. “Oh, all right,” she thought. “If he is willing to rub it into his son why should I worry?”

  Kit with Tom Halsey walked along a path through an old orchard, the path grass-grown. She got curiously alive that day.

  “So there is a way for a man to get at a woman other than, well, let’s say Gordon’s way.” She didn’t think any such thoughts definitely. They were implicit afterwards, in her talks regarding her life... the curious jumping from moment to moment. “I was sorry for Gordon.”

  “I thought his father was a man, all right. In all that happened after I met him I always did think that.”

  She would have walked with the man that day a little defiant. It was all right, in a way, the idea of marriage with Gordon. It meant for her... well, what did it mean? She had no notion that he would be what is called a faithful husband. Several of the girls in the five-and-ten had spoken on that angle. “There couldn’t any woman bank on that guy.

  “He’d be after some new skirt inside a year.

  “Any girl that flattered him a little could get him.”

  It was a little rough, his being left, sitting in there... in the room in the house where the three tough ones were playing cards.

  On the other hand, nothing so swell about staying in the five-and-ten. Pretty soon a girl is worn out, begins to look tired, hasn’t got any pep.

  You get to the place where you’ll just take anything that comes along. Then kid§ come, yourself dragging along through life. If you want to kick loose you can’t get a job any more. They all want the young good-lookers. It was a good thing that one like Gordon didn’t know what he had to offer. If he was really smart he’d know he could pick ’em like apples off a tree. What, a swell car to drive, putting it over on other women? Money to buy clothes? Perhaps in Kit, that day as she walked with Tom Halsey... on the spot with him, as it were... a kind of something, not very clearly defined... something all American women very passionately deny... it may be they don’t really want it... it might be called, “manhood.”

  What do you mean, a big he-man?

  No, not that... Christ, not that.

  Women plastering themselves all over the place. What’s done gone with a certain old, old, oh very old,
relationship between man and woman? Tag! You’re it!

  It may well be that, in certain periods in man’s stumbling progress through, let’s say history, he not too aware... she always sheing and sheing...

  Being always more sensibly aware... this not to say she is necessarily top hole...

  Not really wanting to be... always a little self-consciously hurt when she is shoved up there... you know, on top...

  It may be that the man, Tom Halsey, had it for Kit Brandon. I thought so more than once as she told me her story. They walked through an old apple orchard, the sort of old apple trees that are left for years untrimmed, producing every year smaller and smaller apples, a forest of sprouts growing up from each limb, then across a bit of meadow and a bridge. They got into a small wood and went through it to stand by a fence in a place that gave a view of distant meadows, the land going up and up, softly rolling toward distant hills. There was a paved road to be seen, a cement road, a thread of grayish white against the green of meadows. It was getting on toward dark and the cars... people of near-by towns were out for a late Sunday drive... headlights of some of the cars were already lighted... there was a flow, a swift moving procession. The cars came from behind a hill, almost black now in that light, moved across a high clear place, disappeared temporarily behind a little hill, emerged again, the headlight of one car making a patch of light in which the car before it moved... swiftly... seemingly swift...

  The moving lights, people hurled thus so easily, swiftly, through space...

  Story of the modern American world... significant of what was going on out there, across darkening fields... an age when man, in his concentration on one phase of life, the mechanical... much, oh much achieved... the automobile perhaps the finest expression of it all...

  “I want”... (in a material world)... “I want.”

  The overbalance, science gone a little insane. “Let’s go to the moon or to Mars next.”

  O.K. Go on child-man. We’ll see what you get out of that.