Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  They were to show at country schoolhouses in the farming districts of northern Ohio. There was to be a sheet hung across the end of the room, near the place where the teacher’s desk would sit, and on this would be thrown certain pictures Aldrich had got hold of.

  Those of you who have lived in the farming sections of mid-America, in the days before the movies, will understand that show. There would be a picture of Niagara Falls — taken in the winter — Niagara Falls frozen into a series of ice bridges and with small black figures of men running over the bridges.

  These, you are to understand, however, would not be moving men. They would be frozen still and still — petrified men with legs upraised to take a step, and holding them there — to the end of time — forever.

  Then there would be a picture of President McKinley and one of Abe Lincoln and Grover Cleveland — one of an emigrant wagon going across the Western plains to California, with Indians on ponies circling in the middle distance — a picture of the driving of the last railroad spike, when the railroad builders coming from the West had met the railroad builders coming from the East — somewhere out on the plains. The spike would be a golden one, as everyone in the audience would know, but in the picture it would be black. Several men with silk hats on their heads stood about while a workman drove the spike. The hammer was upraised. It stayed there. In the background was an engine, and several Indians wrapped in blankets and looking sad, as though to say:— “This cooks our bacon.”

  Most of the pictures would be in dead blacks and whites, but there would be, at the very end, in colors, the old flag floating — that last of all. It was as good for a hand then as it was later when George Cohan got rich and became famous with it, and father and Aldrich evidently knew it would “go.”

  The admission charge would be ten cents.

  As I have said, Aldrich was a red-faced mild middle-aged appearing man. What things will not such quiet-looking fellows sometimes do? No one in the world would ever be understood at all if your mild quiet-looking man did not have, buried away in him somewhere, the possibility of being almost any known sort of a fool.

  In the arrangement that had been made father was to be the actor — a comedian. He was to sing certain songs.

  First, a few pictures from the magic lantern; then a song by father, with a little dance. Then more pictures and another song; and at last the colored pictures, ending with the flag flying. The inference might be that the flag, at any rate, had survived the ordeal.

  And a dream of a harvest of dimes too. As for expense — well, let us say, a dollar for the use of the country schoolhouse and enough firewood to heat it for the evening. A boy would build the fire for the chance to be admitted free; and the horse and the two men would be fed at the bounty of some farmer. Father would have promised that — he would have been very sure of being able to accomplish that — would have depended upon his personal charm. I can fancy him explaining to Aldrich, or rather not explaining. He would smile and throw out his hands in a peculiar way. “You leave that to me, just you leave that to me:”

  And his hopes would not be unjustified either. What a boon for a quiet, dull, farming family in the winter, to have such a one light down upon it! He and his companion would have to stay in the one school district for two or three days. Arrangements would have to be made about getting the schoolhouse, and he and Aldrich would have to drive around the neighborhood and distribute the play bills.

  AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE FRIDAY EVENING MAJOR IRWIN ANDERSON THE ACTOR IN SONG AND DANCE MARVELOUS MAGIC-LANTERN SHOW A VISIT TO ALL THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD

  10 CENTS

  And then the evenings in the farmhouses! Aldrich would sit like an Indian in his corner by the farmhouse stove; and he must have been saying to himself constantly:— “Now, how did I get into this? How did I get into this?”

  The farmer’s wife the hired man and perhaps a grown daughter would be there and there would be a maiden of uncertain age — the farm woman’s sister, who had never married and so just stayed about and worked for her board — and, in a corner, two or three towheaded boys who would presently have to go off to bed.

  All the others silent, but father talking and talking. An actor in the house! It was wonderful, like having Charlie Chaplin to dinner with you nowadays! Father was in his element now. This was pie for him. No hungry sons about, no sick wife, no grocery bills or rent to be paid. This the golden age — timeless; there was no past, no future — the quiet, unsophisticated people in the room were putty to his hands.

  Surely there was something magnificent in my father’s utter disregard for the facts of life. In the picture I have of him’ — that is to say in my fancy — in the picture I have of him during his pilgrimages of that winter I always see his partner in the affair, Aldrich, fast asleep in a chair.

  But the farmer and his wife, and the wife’s sister — they are not asleep. The unmarried woman in the house is, let us say, thirty-eight. She is tall and gaunt and has several teeth missing and her name is Tilly. It would be bound to be Tilly.

  And when father has been in the house two hours he is calling her “Tilly,” and the farmer he is addressing familiarly as “Ed.”

  After the evening meal the farmer has had to go to his stable to look at his stock, to bed the stock down for the night, and father has gone with him. Father runs about the stable holding the lantern. He boasts about the horses and cattle in his father’s stables when he was a boy. Whether that early home of his ever existed anywhere but in his fancy is doubtful.

  What a fellow, wanting to be loved, was my father!

  And now he is in the farmhouse sitting room and it is late evening and the towheaded children have gone regretfully to bed. There is something in the air of the room, a kind of suspense, a feeling that something is about to happen. Father has so carefully worked that up. He would do it by silences, by sudden breakings out into suppressed laughter, and then by quickly looking sad. I have seen him do the thing, oh, many times. “My dear people — you wait! There is something inside me that is wonderful, and if you will only be patient you will presently see or hear it come forth,” he seemed to be saying.

  He is by the fire with his legs spread out and his hands are in his trousers pockets. He stares at the floor. He is smoking a cigar. In some ways he always managed to keep himself supplied with the little comforts of life.

  And he has so placed his chair that he can look at Tilly, who has retired into her corner, without anyone else in the room seeing the look. Now she is sitting in deep shadows, far away from the kerosene lamp with which the room is lighted and as she sits there, half lost in the darkness, there is suddenly something — a haunting kind of beauty hangs over her.

  She is a little excited by something father has managed in some indescribable way to do to the very air of the room. Tilly also was once young and must at some time have had her grand moment in life. Her moment was not very prolonged. Once, when she was a young woman, she went to a country dance and a man, who dealt in horses, took a fancy to her and carried her home after the dance in his buggy. He was a tall man with a heavy mustache and she — it was a moonlight night in October — she grew sad and wistful. The horse dealer half intended — well, he had been buying horses for a trucking company at Toledo, Ohio, had secured all he wanted and was leaving the neighborhood on the next day — the thing he felt during that evening later quite went out of his mind.

  As for father he is, at the moment perhaps thinking of mother, when she was young and lovely and was a bound girl in just such another farmhouse, and surely he wanted something lovely for mother then as he does for Tilly now. I have no doubt at all that father always wanted lovely things for people — to happen to people — and that he had also an absurd and never-dying faith in himself — that he was, in some inscrutable way, appointed to be the bearer of lovely things to obscure people.

  However, there is something else in his mind also. Is he not the fellow who, by his personal charm, is to earn for himself, Aldrich
and the horse, board, a bed, a welcome — without pay — until the show is pulled off at the schoolhouse? That is his business now and this is his hour.

  In fancy I can hear the tale he would now begin telling. There was that one about his escape from the guards when he was a Union soldier in the Civil War and was being marched off to a Southern prison camp. He would no doubt use that. It was a bull’s-eye story and always hit the mark! Oh, how often and under what varying circumstances has not my father escaped from prisons! Benvenuto Cellini or the Count of Monte Cristo had nothing on him.

  Yes, the story he would now tell would be that once when it rained and the Union prisoners, father among them — some forty men in all — were being marched off along a road in the deep mud —

  That was indeed a night of adventure! It was a tale he loved telling, and what realistic touches he could put into it: the rain that wet the prisoners to the skin — the cold — the chattering teeth — the groans of weary men — the closeness of the dark forest on either hand — the steady weary chug-chug of the feet of the prisoners in the mud — the line of guards at either side of the road, with the guns over their shoulders — the curses of the Rebel guards when they stumbled in the darkness.

  What a night of weary anguish on the part of the prisoners! When they stopped to rest the guards went into a house and left the prisoners to stand outside in the rain, or lie on the bare ground, guarded by part of the company. If any died of exposure — well, there would be that many less men to feed when they were got into the Southern prison camp.

  And now, after many days and nights, marching thus, the souls of the prisoners were sick with weariness. A dreary desolated look would come upon father’s face as he spoke of it.

  They marched steadily along in the deep mud and the rain. How cold the rain was! Now and then, in the darkness, a dog barked, far away somewhere. There was a break in the solid line of timber along the road and the men marched across the crest of a low hill. There are lights to be seen now, in distant farmhouses, far away across a valley — a few lights like stars shining.

  The story-teller has got his audience leaning forward in their chairs. Outside the farmhouse in which they sit a wind begins to blow and a broken branch from a near-by tree is blown against the side of the house. The farmer, a heavy, stolid-looking man, starts a little and his wife shivers as with cold and Tilly is absorbed — she does not want to miss a word of the tale.

  And now father is describing the darkness of the valley below the hill and the lights seen, far off. Will any of the little company of prisoners ever see their own homes again, their wives, their children, their sweethearts? The lights of the farmhouses in the valley are like stars in the sky of a world turned upside down.

  The Rebel commander of the guard has issued a warning and a command:— “It’s pretty dark here, and if any of the Yanks make a stir to move out of the centre of the road fire straight into the mass of them. Kill them like dogs.”

  A feeling creeps over father. He is, you see, a southern man himself, a man of the Georgia hills and plains. There is no law that shall prevent his having been born in Georgia, although to-morrow night it may be North Carolina or Kentucky. But to-night his birthplace shall be Georgia. He is a man who lives by his fancy and to-night it shall suit his fancy and the drift of his tale to be a Georgian.

  And so he, a prisoner of the Rebels, is being marched over the low hill, with the lights from distant farmhouses shining like stars in the darkness below, and suddenly a feeling comes to him, a feeling such as one sometimes has when one is alone in one’s own house at night. You have had the feeling. You are alone in the house and there are no lights and it is cold and dark. Everything you touch — feel with your hands in the darkness — is strange and at the same time familiar. You know how it is.

  The farmer is nodding his head and his wife has her hands gripped, lying in her lap. Even Aldrich is awake now. The devil! Father has given this particular tale a new turn since he told it last. “This is something like.” Aldrich leans forward to listen.

  And there is the woman Tilly, in the half darkness. See, she is quite lovely now, quite as she was on that evening when she rode with the horse dealer in the buggy! Something has happened to soften the long, harsh lines of her face and she might be a princess sitting there now in the half-light.

  Father would have thought of that. It would be something worth while now to be a tale-teller to a princess. He stops talking to consider for a moment the possibilities of the notion, and then with a sigh gives it up.

  It is a sweet notion but it won’t do. Tale-teller to a princess, eh! Evenings in a castle and the prince has come in from hunting in a forest. The tale-teller is dressed in flashy clothes and with a crowd of courtiers, ladies in waiting — whatever hangers-on a princess has — is sitting by an open fire. There are great, magnificent dogs lying about too.

  Father is considering whether or not it is worth trying sometime — the telling of a tale of himself in just that rôle. An idea crosses his mind. The princess has a lover who creeps one night into the castle and the prince has become aware of his presence, is told of his presence by a trusty varlet. Taking his sword in hand the prince creeps through the dark hallways to kill his rival, but father has warned the lovers and they have fled. It afterward comes to the ears of the prince that father has protected the lovers and he — that is to say, father — is compelled to flee for his life. He comes to America and lives the life of an exile, far from the splendor to which he has been accustomed.

  Father is thinking whether it would be worth trying — the telling of such a fable of his former existence, some evening at some farmhouse where he and Aldrich are staying; and for a moment a sort of George Barr McCutcheon light comes into his eyes, but with a sigh he gives it up.

  It wouldn’t go over — not in a farmhouse in northern Ohio, he concludes.

  He returns to the tale, that so evidently is going over; but, before he resumes, casts another glance at Tilly. “Oh, Tilly, thou dear lovely one,” he sighs inwardly.

  The farmhouse is in the North and he has set himself forth as a southerner enlisted in the northern army. An explanation is in order, and he makes it, with a flourish.

  Born a southerner, the son of a proud southern family, he was sent to school, to a college in the North. In college he had a roommate, a dear fellow from the state of Illinois. The “roommate’s father was owner and editor of the Chicago Tribune” he explains.

  And during one summer, a few years before the breaking out of the war, he went on a visit to the home of his Illinois friend, and while he was there he, with his friend, went to hear the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. It was odd, but the facts were that the young fellow from Illinois became enamored of the brilliant Douglas while he — well, to tell the truth, his own heart was wrung by the simplicity and nobility of the rail-splitter, Lincoln. “Never shall I forget the nobility of that countenance,” he says in speaking of it. He appears about to cry and does in fact take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his eyes. “Oh, the noble, the indescribable effect upon my boyhood heart of the stirring words of that man. There he stood like a mighty oak of the forest breasting the storms. ‘A nation cannot exist half slave and half free. A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ he said, and his words thrilled me to the very marrow of my being.”

  And then father would have described his homecoming after that terrific experience. War was coming on and all the South was aflame.

  One day at table in his southern home, with his brothers, his father and mother and his beautiful and innocent young sister sitting with him, he dared to say something in defense of Lincoln.

  What a storm was then raised! The father getting up from his place at table pointed a trembling finger at his son. All eyes, except only those of his younger sister, were turned on him in wrath and disapproval. “Mention that hated name again in this house and I will shoot you like a dog, though you are my son,” his father said, and the son got up from the tabl
e and went away, filled with the sense of filial duty that would not let a born southerner answer his own father, but nevertheless determined to stick to the faith aroused in him by the words of the noble Lincoln.

  And so he had ridden away from his southern home in the night and had finally joined the Union forces.

  What a night — riding away from his father’s house in the darkness, leaving his mother behind, leaving all tradition behind, condemning himself to be an outlaw in the hearts of those he had always loved — for the sake of duty!

  One can imagine Aldrich blinking a little and rubbing his hands together. “Teddy is laying it on rather thick,” he no doubt says to himself; but he must nevertheless have been filled with admiration.

  However, let us, who are together revisiting the scene of my father’s triumph on that evening in the farmhouse long ago, be not too much in fear for the heart of the woman Tilly. At any rate her physical self, if not her heart, was safe.

  Although there can be little doubt that the presence of the virgin Tilly, sitting in the half darkness, and the kindliness of the shadows that had temporarily enhanced her failing beauty, may have had a good deal to do with father’s talent on that evening, I am sure nothing else ever came of it. Father, in his own way, was devoted to mother.

  And he had his own way of treasuring her. Did he not treasure always the lovelier moments of her?

  He had found her in a farmhouse when he was by way of being something of a young swell himself and she was a bound girl; and she was then beautiful — beautiful without the aid of shadows cast by a kerosene lamp.

  In reality she was the aristocrat of the two, as the beautiful one is always the aristocrat; and oh, how little beauty in woman is understood! The popular magazine covers and the moving-picture actresses have raised the very devil with our American conception of womanly beauty.

  But father had delicacy, of a sort, of that you may be quite sure; and do you not suppose that Tilly, in the Ohio farmhouse, sensed something of his attitude toward what fragment of beauty was left in her, and that she loved him for that attitude — as I am sure my own mother also did?