Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  And then the doctor coming hurriedly, father having run for him. He would be a large man with side whiskers and large red hands. Well; he is a doctor of the new school, a modernist, like the child he is about to help into the world. What he believes in, is fresh air. Wherever he goes, and no matter what the disease he is treating, he always says the same things. Modernists sometimes are like that. “Clean and fresh air — that’s what I believe in. Throw open the doors and the windows. Let’s have some fresh air in here.”

  While the child is being born he tells his one joke. One might as well be cheerful. Cheerfulness is a great healer, and what he believes in is in making his patients smile in the midst of suffering. “Do you want to know why I’m so strong on cleanliness?” he asks. “It’s because I’m a damned sinner, I guess, and I don’t go to church, and I’ve heard that cleanliness is next to Godliness. I’m trying to slip into Heaven on a cake of soap — ha! that’s what I’m up to.”

  A quick nervous laugh from the lips of father. He goes out of the house to tell the story to a neighbor he has seen raking leaves in a near-by yard. It is September now. He is a little unstrung. Under such conditions a man feels faintly guilty. People conspire to give him the feeling. It is as though all the women of the town were pointing accusing fingers and as though all the men were laughing, “greasy-eyed married men,” Bernard Shaw once called them. One will have to set up the cigars to the men, darn ’em. As for the women — they are saying, half jokingly, half in earnest:— “There, you devil; see what you have done — this is your doings.”

  Father stands beside the fence telling the doctor’s joke to the neighbor, who has heard it many times before but who, out of sympathy, now laughs heartily. As though drawn toward each other by some invisible cord they both sidle along the fence until they are standing close together. It is a moment of masculine obscurity. Men must stand shoulder to shoulder. The women have the centre of the stage — as father would have said later, when he became an actor and loved to sling the actor’s jargon, they were “hogging the footlights.”

  Not quite succeeding however. This is the moment for me to come upon the stage. The two men stand closely together, father fingering nervously the heavy gold watch chain — he is soon to lose it with all his other property in one of his frequent business failures — and from the house comes a faint cry. To the two men standing there it sounds not unlike the cry of a puppy inadvertently stepped on by a careless master, and father jumps suddenly aside so that his neighbor laughs again.

  And that is myself — just being actually born into the world.

  Which is one thing, but sometimes one’s fancy wants something else. As I lay, deep buried in the hay in the barn on another fall day, and as the resentment — born in me through having been made the son of two decaying, gentle families — grew deeper and deeper, and also as the grateful warmth of the departed summer — captured and held by the hay — stole over my body, cold from the day of tramping in the wood in a cold rain in pursuit of the squirrels — as the warmth took hold of my body, the scene of my actual birth hour, just depicted, faded. I fled from the field of fact and into the field of fancy.

  Upon the sand on a desolated coast far down on the Gulf of Mexico an athletic looking man of perhaps thirty lies looking out over the sea. What cruel eyes he has, like the eyes of some cunning beast of prey.

  He is perhaps thirty years of age, but one can see well enough, just by looking at him casually, that he has retained all the youthful strength and elasticity of his splendid body. He has a small black mustache and black hair and his skin is burned to a deep brown. Even as he lies, relaxed and listless, on the yellow sand a glow of life and of strength seems to emanate from him.

  As he lies thus one can tell, any schoolboy could tell, that he is physically made to be the very ideal of American romance. He is a man of action — young and strong — there can be little doubt he is a man of daring. What might not be done with such a man! Throw him back into the days of the early pioneers and he will turn you out another Daniel Boone. He will creep through hundreds of miles of forests, never disturbing a grass blade, and bring you back the fair daughter of the English nobleman, traveling in this country, whose daughter inadvertently went for an afternoon’s stroll in the wood and was captured by a skulking Indian; or he will shoot you a squirrel in the eye at five hundred yards with his faithful rifle, called, playfully, “Old Betsy.” Move him up a little now. Let, say Bret Harte, have him. There he is, fine and dandy. He is a gambler in a Western mining camp now, wearing a silk shirt and a Stetson hat. He will lose you a whole fortune without the bat of an eye, but his personal associates are a bit rough. He is always being seen about with Black Peg, who runs a house of prostitution, and with Silent Smith, the killer.

  Until, well, until one day when a New England school-teacher comes into the rough mining camp. One night she is set upon and is about to be outraged by a drunken miner. Then he, the associate of Black Peg, steps forward and shoots the miner. Ten minutes before, he was drunk and lying in the gutter, so drunk in fact that flies had been using his eyeballs as sliding places, but the danger to the school-teacher had sobered him instantly. He is a gentleman now. He offers the school-teacher his arm and they walk to her cabin discussing Emerson and Longfellow, and then our central figure of romance leaves her at her cabin door and goes to a lonely spot in the mountains. He sits down to wait until winter and the deep snows come, in order that he may freeze to death. He has realized that he loves the New England lady and is, in the language of the Far West, as set forth in all the best books, “not fitten for her.”

  The truth is that father, that is to say, my fanciful father, might well have been used by any one of a dozen of our American hero-makers. He is in the goods. That is the idea. In the hands of a Jack London he might have been another Sea Wolf or a musher trudging through the deep snow of the frozen North, cornering some fair virgin in an isolated cabin, only to let her off at the last moment out of respect for her dead mother, who expected something quite different of her. Then later he might have gone to Yale, and after that become a stock broker, taking daring chances with railroad stocks, married a woman who loved only the glare and shine of social life, chucked her, failed in business, gone farming, and turned out a clean man after all, say in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. It could have been done.

  Where my fanciful father was unfortunate, however, was in that he had to live in the fancy of a boy in a hay barn — one who had as yet had little or no experience with heroes.

  And then there is no doubt he, from the first, had certain weaknesses. He wasn’t always kind to old women and children and, as you will see in the sequel, he wasn’t to be trusted with a virgin. He just wouldn’t behave himself, and when it comes to this matter of virgins, perhaps the least said about any man’s attitude toward them — except, to be sure, in novels and in the movies — the better. As Mr. Howells once pointed out, “it is better to present to the readers only the brighter and more pleasant aspects of our common lives.”

  However, let us return to the man lying on the sand. There he is, you see, and it was sure he had been all his life, at any rate, a man of action. The Civil War had just come to an end a few years before and during the war he had been rather busily engaged. He had gone into the war as a spy for the Federal government and when he had got into the South had managed to engage himself as a spy for the Confederate side also. This had permitted him to move rather freely back and forth and to do well carrying contraband goods. When he had no special information to give to one or the other of his employers he could invent information — during a war that is always easy. He was, as I have said, a man of action. He aimed to get results, as they say in the advertising profession.

  The war at an end, he had gone into the South, having several projects in mind and, at the time we meet him first, he was waiting on the lonely coast to sight a ship that was to bring some business associates of his. In a bayou, near the mouth of the river, some ten miles
away, there was a ship, manned by his own men, awaiting his return. He was engaged in the business of smuggling firearms to various revolutionary parties in South American republics and was now only waiting for the coming of a man who was to hand over to him certain monies.

  And so the day passed and the evening came and at last an hour before darkness settled down over the lonely sand dunes a ship appeared. My mythical father arose and, fastening a cloth to the end of a stick, waved it back and forth over his head. The ship drew near and two boats were lowered. Some ten or twelve men were coming ashore and with them a woman. When they had got into the boats the ship did not wait but immediately steamed away.

  The man on the beach began gathering a great pile of sticks and bits of driftwood, preparative to building a fire, and now and then he turned his head to look toward the approaching boats. That there was a woman among his visitors bothered him. Women were always interfering with business. Why had they wanted to bring a woman? “To the deuce with women!” he growled, making his way through the deep sand with a great pile of sticks in his arms.

  Then the boat had landed and there was the old Harry to pay. A revolutionary party in one of the South American republics had gone to pieces and nearly all its members had been arrested and were to be executed. There was no money to pay for the firearms that were to have been shipped, and the little band of men, now standing on the lonely beach and facing the smugglers, had barely escaped with their lives. They had rowed out to sea in two boats and had been picked up by a steamer, and one among them had in his possession money enough to bribe the steamer captain to bring them to this spot, where they were to have landed, just at this time, under quite different circumstances.

  Different circumstances indeed I The lady of the party — well, she was something special — the daughter of one of the wealthiest sugar planters of her native land, she had given her young soul to the cause of the revolution and when the smash came had been compelled to fly with the others. Her own father disowned her in a moment of cowardice and the death sentence was out against her. What else could she do but flee?

  If they had brought nothing else, they had brought food ashore from the ship, and the party might as well eat, since they would, in any event, have to spend the night on the beach. In the morning, it was the hope expressed by the leader of the party, that the firearms smuggler would guide them inland. They had friends in America but had they landed at a regular port of entry it might well have turned out that their own government would have asked the American government to send them home — to face the consequences of their folly.

  With a grim smile on his cruel lips my fanciful father had heard them out in silence and now began building a fire. Night came and he moved softly about. A strange and new impulse had come into his hard and cruel heart. He had fallen instantly in love with the young female leader of revolution from the foreign land and was trying to figure out how he could get away from the others and have a talk with her.

  At last when food had been prepared and eaten, he spoke, agreeing to perform all that had been asked of him, but declaring that the young woman could not be compelled to spend the night in such a place. Speaking in the Spanish language — with which he was marvelously conversant — he commanded the others to stay by the fire while he took the young woman inland to where, some two miles away, he declared he had some horses concealed in the stable of an oyster thief, a friend of his who lived up the bay.

  The others consenting, he and the young woman set off. She was very beautiful and, as they had all been seated about the fire, she had kept her eyes almost constantly upon the American.

  He was of the type of which American heroes are made, you see, and she had, in her young girlhood, read American novels. In American novels, as in American plays — as everyone knows — a man can, just as well as not, be a horse thief, a desperado, a child-kidnapper, a gentleman burglar, or a well-poisoner for years and years, and then, in an instant, become the sweetest and most amiable fellow possible, and with perfect manners too. It is one of the most interesting things about us Americans. No doubt it came to us from the English. It seems to be an Anglo-Saxon trait and a very lovely one too. All anyone need do is to mention in the presence of any one of us at any time the word “mother,” or leave one of us alone in the darkness in a forest in a lonely cabin on a mountain at night with a virgin.

  With some of us — that is to say, with those of us who have gone into politics — the same results can sometimes be had by speaking of the simple and humble laboring man, but it is the virgin that gets us every shot. In bringing out all the best in us she is a hundred per cent, efficient.

  In the presence of a virgin something like a dawn among mountains creeps over the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon and a gentle light comes into his eyes. If he has a dress suit anywhere about he goes and puts it on. Also he gets himself a shave and a hair cut, and you would be surprised to see how everything clears up after that.

  I, however, digress. In my enthusiasm for my fellows I jerk myself too violently out of my boyhood. No boy could so whole-heartedly appreciate or understand our national traits.

  The story I had set myself down to tell was that of my own birth into the world of fancy — as opposed to the rather too realistic birth already depicted — and that, as I have explained, took place in Camden, Ohio.

  Very well, then, a year has passed and I am being born a second time, as it were, but this second birth is quite different from the one in the Ohio town. There is more punch to it. Reading of it will lift you, who have been patient enough to follow me so far, out of your common everyday humdrum existences.

  And if you have read Freud you will find it of additional interest that, in my fanciful birth, I have retained the very form and substance of my earthly mother while getting an entirely new father, whom I set up — making anything but a hero of him — only to sling mud at him. I am giving myself away to the initiated, that is certain.

  But be that as it may, however, there is mother lying in bed in a lonely cabin on another long sandy beach, also on the Gulf of Mexico. (In my fanciful life I have always had a hunger for the warm South.) Mother has been honorably married to my fanciful father on that very evening when she went with him from among her fellow-countrymen, sitting by the fire on that other beach, and after just such a metamorphosis of his character as she had come to expect through having read American novels and through having seen two or three American plays produced in the capital of her native land.

  After having secured the horses from the stable of the oyster thief they had ridden off together and had come at last into a deep forest of magnolia trees in blossom. A southern moon came up into the sky and so soft was the night, so gentle the breezes from the now distant sea, and so sweet the hum of insect life under their horses’ feet, that mother found herself speaking of her lost home and of her mother.

  To “my fanciful father the combination — the deep forest, the scent of the magnolia blossoms and the word “mother” — together with the fact that he was alone in a dark place with a virgin, an innocent one, these things were all irresistible to him. The metamorphosis spoken of above took place, and he proposes marriage and on the spot proposed to live a better life.

  And so they rode together out of the forest and were married, but, in his case, the metamorphosis did not hold.

  Within a few months he had gone back to his old life, leaving mother alone in a strange land until the time should come when I, having been born, could take up the task of being her protector and guardian.

  And now I am being born. It is late in the afternoon of a still hot day and I, having just been ushered into the world by the aid of a fisherman’s wife, who also does duty as a midwife in that isolated place and who has now left to return again late at night — I, having been so born, am lying on the bed beside mother and thinking my first thoughts. In my own fancy I was, from the very first, a remarkable child and did not cry out as most newly born infants do, but lay buried in deep thought. I
n the little hut it is stifling hot, and flies and other winged insects of the warm South are buzzing in the air. Strange insects of gigantic size crawl over the walls and, from far-away somewhere, there comes the murmur of the sea. Mother is lying beside me, weak and wan.

  We lie there for a long time and, young as I am, I realize that she is tired and discouraged about life. “Why has not life in America turned out as it always did in the novels and plays?” she is asking herself; but I, having at that time still retained all my young courage and freshness of outlook, am not discouraged.

  There is a sound outside the cabin, the swishing sound of heavy feet dragged through the hot dry sands, and the low moaning sound of a woman crying.

  Again a steamer, from foreign parts, has visited that lonely coast and again a boat has been lowered. In the boat is my fanciful father accompanied by four of his evil henchmen and accompanied also by another woman. She is young and fair, another virgin; but now, alas, father has become hardened on that subject!

  The strange woman is terribly afraid but is at the same time in love with her captor (owing to the strange natures of women, this, you will understand, is entirely possible), and father has had the cruel impulse to bring the two women together. Perhaps he wants to see them suffer the pangs of jealousy.

  But he will get no such pangs from mother. With her son beside her she lies silently waiting.

  For what? That is the question that, try as he would, the son could not answer.

  And so the two lie there in silence on the poor bed in the hut while that strange monster of a man drags another woman across the yellow sands and in at the door of the hut. What has happened is that he has gone back to his old wicked life and, with his comrade, has joined another revolutionary party in another South American republic, and this time the revolution has been successful and he and his partners have helped sack a South American city.

  At the forefront of the invaders was my fanciful father and — whatever else may be said of him it can never be said that he lacked in courage — it was from him, in fact, that I got my own courage.