That I should be afraid of anything in the realm of the spirit, that there should perhaps be a force in the world I did not understand, could not understand, irritated me profoundly.
As the week advanced my irritation grew and I have never had any doubt at all that Alonzo Berners knew of it. He said nothing and when I went away he had nothing to say. I spent the days of that week in his presence, saw the men who came to visit him and whom I thought I understood well enough and then at night went to my bed and did not sleep. I was like one tortured by a desire for conversion to something like the love of God, by a desire to love and be loved and sometimes in the night I lay in my bed like a very lovelorn maiden and sometimes I grew angry and walked up and down in the moonlight in my room swearing and shaking my fist at the shadows that flitted across the walls in the moonlight.
It was two o’clock of the morning of one of the last nights I spent in the house and I let myself out at the kitchen door and went for a walk, going down along the hillside to the town and through the newer town to the older place by the river. The moon was shining and all was hushed and silent. What a quiet night! “I will give myself over to these new impulses,” I thought, and so went along thinking thoughts that had never before come into my head.
Could it be that force, all power was disease, that man on his way up from savagery and having discovered the mind and its uses had gone a little off his head in using his new toy? I had always been drawn toward horses dogs and other animals and among people had cared most for simple folk who made no pretense of having an intellect, workmen who in spite of the handicaps put in their way by modern life still loved the materials in which they worked, who loved the play of hands over materials, who followed instinctively a force outside themselves — they felt to be greater and more worthy than themselves — women who gave themselves to physical experiences with grave and fine abandon, all people in fact who lived for something outside themselves, for materials in which they worked, for people other than themselves, things over which they made no claim of ownership.
Was I, who thought of myself as a young man having no morality now face to face with a new morality? In the fifteenth century man had discovered man. Had man later been lost to man? Was Alonzo Berners simply one who loved his fellows and was he by that token stronger in his weakness, more notable in his obscure Illinois village life than all these great and powerful ones I had been following with my own mind across the pages of history?
There was no doubt I was in a magnificent mood and that I enjoyed it and when I got to the old town I went and stood by a small brick building that had once been a residence but was now a cowshed. In a near-by house a child cried and a man and a woman awoke from sleep and talked for a time in low hushed voices. Two dogs came and discovered me where I stood in the silence. As I remained unmoved they did not know what to make of their discovery. At first they barked and then they wagged their tails, and then, as I continued to ignore them, they went away looking offended. “You are not treating us fairly,” they seemed to be saying.
“And they are something like myself,” I thought, looking at the dusty road on which the soft moonlight was falling and smiling at nothingness.
I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming a ridiculous desire to abase myself before something not human and so stepping into the moonlit road I knelt in the dust. Having no God, the gods having been taken from me by the life about me, as a personal God has been taken from all modern men by a force within that man himself does not understand but that is called the intellect, I kept smiling at the figure I cut in my own eyes as I knelt in the road and as I had smiled at the figure I had cut in the Chicago saloon when I went with such an outward show of indifference to the rescue of Alonzo Berners.
There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myself that I had the power to believe in a God, and so I merely knelt in the dust in the silence and no words came to my lips.
Did I worship merely the dust under my knees? There was the coincidence as there is always the coincidence. The symbol flashed into my mind. A child cried again in a near-by house and I presume some traditional feeling come down from old tellers of tales took possession of me. My fancy played with the figure of myself in the ridiculous position into which I had got and I thought of the wise men of old times who were reputed to have come to worship at the feet of another crying babe in an obscure place. How grand! The wise men of an older time had followed a star to a cowshed. Was I becoming wise? Smiling at myself and with also a kind of contempt of myself and my own sentimentality I half decided I would try to devote myself to something, give my life a purpose. “Why not to another effort at the rediscovery of man by man?” I thought rather grandly, getting up and beating the dust off my knees, the while I continued the trick I had learned of pointing the laughing finger of scorn at myself. I laughed at myself but all the time kept thinking of the occasional flashes of laughter that came from the drawn lips of Alonzo Berners. Why was his laughter freer and more filled with joy than my own?
NOTE XIV
WAR, LEISURE AND the South!
The leisure was not too much cut across “by the hours spent in drills and manœuvres and the other duties of a soldier. Here was a life in which everything was physical, the mind on a vacation and the imagination having leisure to play while the body worked. One’s individuality became lost and one became part of something wholly physical, vast, strong, capable of being fine and heroic, capable of being brutal and cruel.
One’s body was a house in which had lived two, three, perhaps ten or twelve personalities. The fancy became the head of the house and swept the body away into some absurd adventure or the mind took charge and laid down laws. These then were in turn driven out of the house by physical desire, by the lustful self. Dumb nights of walking city streets, wanting women, wanting to touch with the hands lovely things.
“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too. — What’s become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms?
All gone now, that kind of imaginings, for the time anyway. In the distance, beckoning, the women of the southern island, the dark Cuban women. Would they like us when we came, we American lads, in our brown clothes? Would they take us as lovers, we the land’s deliverers?
Long days of marching. We were in a forest of the South where once our fathers had fought a great battle. Everywhere camps among the trees and the ground worn hard as bricks by the constant tramping of feet. In the morning one awoke with five other men in a tent. There was morning roll call standing shoulder to shoulder. “Corporal Smith!”
“Here!”
“Corporal Anderson!”
“Here!” Then breakfast out of flat tin dishes and the falling into line for hours of drill.
Out from under the trees into a wide field we went, the southern sun pouring down on us and presently the back tired, the legs tired. One sank into a half-dead state. This did not signify battles, killing other men. The men with whom one marched were comrades, feeling the same weariness, obeying the same commands, being molded with oneself into something apart from oneself. We were being hardened, whipped into shape. For what? Well, never mind. Take what is before you! You have come out from under the shadow of the factory, the sun shines. The tall boys marching with you were raised in the same town with yourself. Now they are all silent, marching, marching. Times of adventure ahead. You and they will see strange people, hear strange tongues spoken.
The Spaniards, eh! You know of them from books? Stout Cortez, silent upon his peak in Darien. Dark cruel eyes, dark swaggering men — in one’s fancy. In the fancy picture ships coming suddenly up out of the western seas, bearing gold, bearing dark, adventurous men.
Is one going to fight such men, with one’s comrades, some thousands of such men? Tall boys from an Ohio town, baseball players, clerks in stores, Eddie Sanger over there who got Nell Brinker into trouble and was made to marry her a
t the point of a shotgun; Tom Means, who was once sent to the state reform farm; Harry Bacon, who got religion when the evangelist came to preach in the Methodist Church but got over it afterward — are these men to become killers, to try to kill Spaniards, who will try to kill them?
Now, never mind! There is before you now but the marching for long hours with all these men. Here is something your mind has always been groping about trying to understand, the physical relation of man to man, of man to woman, of woman to woman. The mind is ugly when the flesh does not come in too. The flesh is ugly when the mind is put out of the house that is the body. Is the flesh ugly now? No, this is something special. This is something felt.
Suppose a man spend certain months, not thinking consciously, letting himself be swept along by other men, with other men, feeling the weariness of a thousand other men’s legs in his own legs, desiring with others, fearing with the others, being brave sometimes with the others. By such an experience can one gain knowledge of the others and of oneself too?
Comrades loved! Never mind now the thoughts of the hour of killing. One gets little enough. Take what is offered. And the killing may not come. Let the Roosevelts and others of that sort, the men of action, talk and think now of the hour of action, of the drawn sword, the pointed gun, victory, defeat, glory, bloody fields. You are not a general or a statesman. Take the thing before you, the physical marching fact of an army of which you are a part.
There is just the possibility that you are yourself a disease and that you may be cured here. This tremendous physical experience may cure you of the disease of yourself. Can one lose oneself utterly, become as nothing, become but a part of something, the state, the army? The army is something physical and actual while the state is nothing. The state exists but in men’s minds and imaginations and you have let your own imagination rule in your house too long. Let this young body of yours, so straight, so fair, so strong, let it have full possession of the house now. The imagination may play now over fields, over mountain tops if it please. “We are coming, Father Abraham, a hundred thousand strong!” You have forced your fancy to grovel in factory dust too long. Let it go now. You are nothing, so many little pounds of flesh and bone, a small unit in a vast thing that is marching, marching — the army. Blossoms on apple trees, sap in the branches of trees, a single head of wheat in a vast wheat field, eh?
All day long the march goes on and dust gathers in little circles about the eyes of weary men. A thin sharp voice is heard, an impersonal voice. It is speaking, not to you, not to one man only, but to a thousand men. “Fours right into line.”
“Fours right into line!” You have so wanted that, have so hungered for it. Has not your whole life been filled with a vague indefinite desire to wheel into some vast line with all the others you have known and seen?
It is enough! The legs respond. Tears sometimes gather in the eyes at the thought of being able, without question, to do some one thing with thousands of others, with comrades.
NOTE XV
I HAD ENLISTED for a soldier shortly after my visit to Alonzo Berners and because I was broke and could see no other way to avoid going back into a factory. The voices crying out for war with Spain, for the freeing of Cuba, I had heard not at all but there had been a voice within myself that was plain and clear enough and I did not believe there was danger of many battles being fought. The glory of Spain, read about in the books, was dead. We had old Spain at a disadvantage, poor old woman. The situation was unique. America, the young and swaggering giant of the West had been fortunate. She had not been compelled to face, on the field of battle, the giant of the Old World in the days of her Old World strength. Now the young western giant was going to assert himself and it would be like taking pennies from a child, like robbing an old gypsy woman in a vacant lot at night after a fair. The newspapers might call into service Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, all the writers of battle tales trying to work up the illusion of a great war about to be fought, but no one believed, no one was afraid. In the camps the soldiers laughed. Songs were being sung. To the soldiers the Spaniards were something like performers in a circus to which the American boys had been invited. It was said they had bells on their hats, wore swords and played guitars under the windows of ladies’ bedrooms at night.
America wanted heroes and I thought I would enjoy being a hero and so I did not enlist for a soldier in Chicago, where I was unknown and my rushing to my country’s aid might have passed unnoticed, but sent off a wire to the captain of militia of my home town in Ohio and got on a train to go there. Alonzo Berners had pressed upon me a loan of a hundred dollars but I did not want to spend any of it for railroad fare so beat my way homeward on a freight train and even the hoboes with whom I sat in an empty freight car treated me with respect as though I were already the hero of a hundred hard-fought battles. At a station twenty miles from home I bought a new suit of clothes, a new hat, neckties and even a walking stick. My home town would want to think I had given up a lucrative position in the city to answer my country’s call, they would want a Cincinnatus dropping his plow handles, and why should I not give them the best imitation I could manage? What I achieved was something between a bank clerk and an actor out of work.
I was received with acclaim. Never before that time or since have I had a personal triumph and I liked it. When, with the others of my company, I marched away to the railroad station to entrain for war the entire town turned out and cheered. Girls ran out of houses to kiss us and old veterans of the Civil War — they had known that of battles we would never know — stood with tears in their eyes.
To the young factory hand of the cities — that was myself, as I now remember myself at that moment — it was grand and glorious. There has always been a kind of shrewdness and foxiness in me and I could not convince myself that Spain, clinging to its old traditions, old guns, old ships, could offer much resistance to the strong young nation now about to attack and I could not get over the feeling that I was going off with many others on a kind of glorious national picnic. Very well, if I was to be given credit for being a hero I could not see why I should object.
And then the camp at the edge of a southern city under forest trees, the physical hardening process that I instinctively liked. I have always enjoyed with a kind of intoxicating gusto any physical use of my body out in the sun and wind. In the army it brought me untroubled sleep at night, physical delight in my own body, the drunkenness of physical well-being and often in my tent at night, after a long day of drilling and when the others slept, I rolled quietly out under the tent flap and lay on my back on the ground, looking at the stars seen through the branches of trees. About me many thousands of men were sleeping and along a guard line, somewhere over there in the darkness, guards were walking up and down. Was it a kind of vast child’s play? The guards were pretending the army was in danger, why should not my own imagination play for a time?
How strong my body felt! I stretched and threw my arms above my head. For a time my fancy played with the notion of becoming a great general. Why might not Napoleon in his boyhood have been just such a fellow as myself? I had read somewhere that he had had an inclination to be a scribbler. I fancied the army, of which I was a part, hemmed in on all sides by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards. No one could think what to do and so I (Corporal Anderson) was sent for. The Americans were in the same position the French revolutionists had been in when young Napoleon appeared and with “a whiff of grapeshot” took the destinies of a nation in his hands. Oh, I had read my Carlyle and knew something also of Machiavelli and his Prince. Aha! In fancy also I could be a great and cruel conqueror. The American army was surrounded by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards but in the American army was myself. This was my hour. I sat up on the ground outside the tent where my comrades were sleeping and in the darkness gave quick and accurate orders. Certain ones of my soldiers were to make a sortie. I did not quite know what a sortie was but anyway why not have one made? It would create a diversion, give my marvelou
s mind time to work. And now it was done and I began to fling bunches of troops here and there. My courier sprang upon a swift horse and rode away in the darkness. In his tent the Spanish commander was feasting — and here I, being a true Anglo-Saxon, must needs make out that the imaginary Spaniard was something of a monster. He was half drunk in his tent and was surrounded by concubines. Ah! he is sure to have concubines about and is proud and sure of victory but little does he know of me, the sleepless one. Grand phrases, grand ideas, flocking like birds! Now the Spanish commander has shown his true nature. A young boy comes to bring him wine and trips, spilling a little of the wine on the commander’s uniform. He arises and unsheathing his sword plunges it into the little boy’s breast. All are aghast. The Spaniards all stand aghast, and at that very moment I, like an avenging angel, and followed by thousands of pure clean-living Americans (Anglo-Saxon Americans, let it be understood), I swoop down upon him.
At the time of which I am writing America had not learned as it did during the World War that in order to stamp out brutal militarism it is best to adopt brutal militarism, teach it to our sons, do everything possible to brutalize our own people. During the World War I am told boys and young men in the training camps were made to attack with the bayonet dummy figures of men and were even told to grunt as they plunged the bayonet into the figure. Everything possible was done to brutalize the imaginations of the young men, but in our war— “my war” I find myself calling it at times — we had not yet carried our education that far. There was as yet a childish belief in democracy. Men even supposed that the purpose of democracy was to raise free men who could think for themselves, act for themselves in an emergency. The modern idea of the standardization of men had not taken hold and was even thought to be inimical to the very notion of democracy. And we had not learned yet, as we did later, that when an army is to be organized you must split your men up, so that no man knows his fellows, that you must not have officers coming from the same towns as their soldiers, that everything must be made as machine-like and impersonal as possible.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 351
