by Collected Stories- Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses
I went into our apartment and closed the door.
For a long time, perhaps for ten minutes, I stood just inside the door of our apartment thinking and thinking, just as I have been doing ever since. Two or three times I tried to speak, to call out to my wife, to question her and find out the bitter truth at once but my voice failed me.
What was I to do? Was I to go to her, seize her by the wrists, force her down into a chair, make her confess at the risk of personal violence? I asked myself that question.
“No,” I said to myself, “I will not do that. I will use finesse.”
For a long time I stood there thinking. My world had tumbled down about my ears. When I tried to speak, the words would not come out of my mouth.
At last I did speak, quite calmly. There is something of the man of the world about me. When I am compelled to meet a situation I do it. “What are you doing?” I said to my wife, speaking in a calm voice. “I am taking a bath,” she answered.
And so I left the house and came out here to the park to think, just as I have done tonight. On that night, and just as I came out at our front door, I did something I have not done since I was a boy. I am a deeply religious man but I swore. My wife and I have had a good many arguments as to whether or not a man in business should have dealings with those who do such things; that is to say, with men who swear. “I cannot refuse to sell a man a piece of property because he swears,” I have always said. “Yes, you can,” my wife says.
It only shows how little women know about business. What I have always maintained is I am right.
And I maintain too that we men must protect the integrity of our homes and our firesides. On that first night I walked about until dinner time and then went home. I had decided not to say anything for the present but to remain quiet and use finesse, but at dinner my hand trembled and I spilled the dessert on the table-cloth.
And a week later I went to see a detective.
But first something else happened. On Wednesday—I had found the note on Monday evening—I could not bear sitting in my office and thinking perhaps that that young squirt was meeting my wife in the park, so I went to the park myself.
Sure enough there was my wife sitting on a bench near the animal cages and knitting a sweater.
At first I thought I would conceal myself in some bushes but instead I went to where she was seated and sat down beside her. “How nice! What brings you here?” my wife said smiling. She looked at me with surprise in her eyes.
Was I to tell her or was I not to tell her? It was a moot question with me. “No,” I said to myself. “I will not. I will go see a detective. My honor has no doubt already been tampered with and I shall find out.” My naturally quick wits came to my rescue. Looking directly into my wife’s eyes I said: “There was a paper to be signed and I had my own reasons for thinking you might be here, in the park.”
As soon as I had spoken I could have torn out my tongue. However, she had noticed nothing and I took a paper out of my pocket and, handing her my fountain pen, asked her to sign; and when she had done so I hurried away. At first I thought perhaps I would linger about, in the distance, that is to say, but no, I decided not to do that. He will no doubt have his confederate on the watchout for me, I told myself.
And so on the next afternoon, I went to the office of the detective. He was a large man, and when I told him what I wanted he smiled. “I understand,” he said, “we have many such cases. We’ll track the guy down.”
And so, you see, there it was. Everything was arranged. It was to cost me a pretty penny but my house was to be watched and I was to have a report on everything. To tell the truth, when everything was arranged I felt ashamed of myself. The man in the detective place—there were several men standing about—followed me to the door and put his hand on my shoulder. For some reason I don’t understand, that made me mad. He kept patting me on the shoulder as though I were a little boy. “Don’t worry. We’ll manage everything,” was what he said. It was all right. Business is business but for some reason I wanted to bang him in the face with my fist.
That’s the way I am, you see. I can’t make myself out. “Am I a fool, or am I a man among men?” I keep asking myself, and I can’t get an answer.
After I had arranged with the detective I went home and didn’t sleep all night long.
To tell the truth I began to wish I had never found that note. I suppose that is wrong of me. It makes me less a man, perhaps, but it’s the truth.
Well, you see, I couldn’t sleep. “No matter what my wife was up to I could sleep now if I hadn’t found that note,” was what I said to myself. It was dreadful. I was ashamed of what I had done and at the same time ashamed of myself for being ashamed. I had done what any American man, who is a man at all, would have done, and there I was. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I came home in the evening I kept thinking: “There is that man standing over there by a tree—I’ll bet he is a detective.” I kept thinking of the fellow who had patted me on the shoulders in the detective office, and every time I thought of him I grew madder and madder. Pretty soon I hated him more than I did the young man who had pretended to sell the carpet-sweeper to Mabel.
And then I did the most foolish thing of all. One afternoon—it was just a week ago—I thought of something. When I had been in the detective office I had seen several men standing about but had not been introduced to any of them. “And so,” I thought, “I’ll go there pretending to get my reports. If the man I engaged is not there I’ll engage some one else.”
So I did it. I went to the detective office, and sure enough my man was out. There was another fellow sitting by a desk and I made a sign to him. We went into an inner office. “Look here,” I whispered; you see I had made up my mind to pretend I was the man who was ruining my own fireside, wrecking my own honor. “Do I make clear what I mean?”
It was like this, you see—well, I had to have some sleep, didn’t I? Only the night before my wife had said to me, “John, I think you had better run away for a little vacation. Run away by yourself for a time and forget about business.”
At another time her saying that would have been nice, you see, but now it only upset me worse than ever. “She wants me out of the way,” I thought, and for just a moment I felt like jumping up and telling her everything I knew. Still I didn’t. “I’ll just keep quiet. I’ll use finesse,” I thought.
A pretty kind of finesse. There I was in that detective office again hiring a second detective. I came right out and pretended I was my wife’s paramour. The man kept nodding his head and I kept whispering like a fool. Well, I told him that a man named Smith had hired a detective from that office to watch his wife. “I have my own reasons for wanting him to get a report that his wife is all right,” I said, pushing some money across a table toward him. I had become utterly reckless about money. “Here is fifty dollars and when he gets such a report from your office you come to me and you may have two hundred more,” I said.
I had thought everything out. I told the second man my name was Jones and that I worked in the same office with Smith. “I’m in business with him,” I said, “a silent partner, you see.”
Then I went out and, of course, he, like the first one, followed me to the door and patted me on the shoulder. That was the hardest thing of all to stand, but I stood it. A man has to have sleep.
And, of course, today both men had to come to my office within five minutes of each other. The first one came, of course, and told me my wife was innocent. “She is as innocent as a little lamb,” he said. “I congratulate you upon having such an innocent wife.”
Then I paid him, backing away so he couldn’t pat me on the shoulders, and he had only just closed the door when in came the other man, asking for Jones.
And I had to see him too and give him two hundred dollars.
Then I decided to come on home, and I did, walking along the same street I have walked on every afternoon since my wife and I married. I went home and climbed the stairs to our apartment ju
st as I described everything to you a little while ago. I could not decide whether I was a fool, a man who has gone a little mad, or a man whose honor has been tampered with, but anyway I knew there would be no detectives about.
What I thought was that I would go home and have everything out with my wife, tell her of my suspicions and then watch her face. As I have said before, I intended to watch her face and see if she blanched when I told her of the note I had found in the hallway downstairs. The word “blanched” got into my mind because I once read it in a detective story when I was a boy and I had been dealing with detectives.
And so I intended to face my wife down, force a confession from her, but you see how it turned out. When I got home the apartment was silent and at first I thought it was empty. “Has she run away with him?” I asked myself, and maybe my own face blanched a little.
“Where are you, dear, what are you doing?” I shouted in a loud voice and she told me she was taking a bath.
And so I came out here in the park.
But now I must be going home. Dinner will be waiting. I am wondering what property that Mr. Albright had in his mind. When I sit at dinner with my wife my hands will shake. I will spill the dessert. A man does not come in and speak of property in that offhand manner unless there has been conversation about it before.
The Lost Novel
* * *
HE said it was all like a dream. A man like that, a writer. Well, he works for months and, perhaps, years, on a book, and there is not a word put down. What I mean is that his mind is working. What is to be the book builds itself up and is destroyed.
In his fancy, figures are moving back and forth.
But there is something I neglected to say. I am talking of a certain English novelist who has got some fame, of a thing that once happened to him.
He told me about it one day in London when we were walking together. We had been together for hours. I remember that we were on the Thames Embankment when he told me about his lost novel.
He had come to see me early in the evening at my hotel. He spoke of certain stories of my own. “You almost get at something, sometimes,” he said.
We agreed that no man ever quite got at—the thing.
If some one once got at it, if he really put the ball over the plate, you know, if he hit the bull’s-eye.
What would be the sense of anyone trying to do anything after that?
I’ll tell you what, some of the old fellows have come pretty near.
Keats, eh? And Shakespeare. And George Borrow and DeFoe.
We spent a half hour going over names.
We went off to dine together and later walked. He was a little, black, nervous man with ragged locks of hair sticking out from under his hat.
I began talking of his first book.
* * *
But here is a brief outline of his history. He came from a poor farming family in some English village. He was like all writers. From the very beginning he wanted to write.
He had no education. At twenty he got married.
She must have been a very respectable, nice girl. If I remember rightly she was the daughter of a priest of the Established English Church.
Just the kind he should not have married. But who shall say whom anyone shall love—or marry? She was above him in station. She had been to a woman’s college; she was well educated.
I have no doubt she thought him an ignorant man.
“She thought me a sweet man, too. The hell with that,” he said, speaking of it. “I am not sweet. I hate sweetness.”
We had got to that sort of intimacy, walking in the London night, going now and then into a pub to get a drink.
I remember that we each got a bottle, fearing the pubs would close before we got through talking.
What I told him about myself and my own adventures I can’t remember.
The point is he wanted to make some kind of a pagan out of his woman, and the possibilities weren’t in her.
They had two kids.
Then suddenly he did begin to burst out writing—that is to say, really writing.
You know a man like that. When he writes he writes. He had some kind of a job in his English town. I believe he was a clerk.
Because he was writing, he, of course, neglected his job, his wife, his kids.
He used to walk about the fields at night. His wife scolded. Of course, she was all broken up—would be. No woman can quite bear the absolute way in which a man who has been her lover can sometimes drop her when he is at work.
I mean an artist, of course. They can be first-class lovers. It may be they are the only lovers.
And they are absolutely ruthless about throwing direct personal love aside.
You can imagine that household. The man told me there was a little bedroom upstairs in the house where they were living at that time. This was while he was still in the English town.
The man used to come home from his job and go upstairs. Upstairs he went and locked his door. Often he did not stop to eat, and sometimes he did not even speak to his wife.
He wrote and wrote and wrote and threw away.
Then he lost his job. “The hell,” he said, when he spoke of it.
He didn’t care, of course. What is a job?
What is a wife or child? There must be a few ruthless people in this world.
Pretty soon there was practically no food in the house.
He was upstairs in that room behind the door, writing. The house was small and the children cried. “The little brats,” he said, speaking of them. He did not mean that, of course. I understand what he meant. His wife used to come and sit on the stairs outside the door, back of which he was at work. She cried audibly and the child she had in her arms cried.
“A patient soul, eh?” the English novelist said to me when he told me of it. “And a good soul, too,” he said. “To hell with her,” he also said.
You see, he had begun writing about her. She was what his novel was about, his first one. In time it may prove to be his best one.
Such tenderness of understanding—of her difficulties and her limitations, and such a casual, brutal way of treating her, personally.
Well, if we have a soul, that is worth something, eh?
It got so they were never together a moment without quarreling.
And then one night he struck her. He had forgotten to fasten the door of the room in which he worked. She came bursting in.
And just as he was getting at something about her, some understanding of the reality of her. Any writer will understand the difficulty of his position. In a fury he rushed at her, struck her and knocked her down.
And then, well, she quit him then. Why not? However, he finished the book. It was a real book.
But about his lost novel. He said he came up to London after his wife left him and began living alone. He thought he would write another novel.
You understand that he had got recognition, had been acclaimed.
And the second novel was just as difficult to write as the first. It may be that he was a good deal exhausted.
And, of course, he was ashamed. He was ashamed of the way in which he had treated his wife. He tried to write another novel so that he wouldn’t always be thinking. He told me that, for the next year or two, the words he wrote on the paper were all wooden. Nothing was alive.
Months and months of that sort of thing. He withdrew from people. Well, what about his children? He sent money to his wife and went to see her once.
He said she was living with her father’s people, and he went to her father’s house and got her. They went to walk in the fields. “We couldn’t talk,” he said. “She began to cry and called me a crazy man. Then I glared at her, as I had once done that time I struck her, and she turned and ran away from me back to her father’s house, and I came away.”
Having written one splendid novel, he wanted, of course, to write some more. He said there were all sorts of characters and situations in his head. He used to sit at his desk f
or hours writing and then go out in the streets and walk as he and I walked together that night.
Nothing would come right for him.
He had got some sort of theory about himself. He said that the second novel was inside him like an unborn child. His conscience was hurting him about his wife and children. He said he loved them all right but did not want to see them again.
Sometimes he thought he hated them. One evening, he said, after he had been struggling like that, and long after he had quit seeing people, he wrote his second novel. It happened like this.
All morning he had been sitting in his room. It was a small room he had rented in a poor part of London. He had got out of bed early, and without eating any breakfast had begun to write. And everything he wrote that morning was also no good.
About three o’clock in the afternoon, as he had been in the habit of doing, he went out to walk. He took a lot of writing-paper with him.
“I had an idea I might begin to write at any time,” he said.
He went walking in Hyde Park. He said it was a clear, bright day, and people were walking about together. He sat on a bench.
He hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. As he sat there he tried a trick. Later I heard that a group of young poets in Paris took up that sort of thing and were profoundly serious about it.
The Englishman tried what is called “automatic writing.”
He just put his pencil on the paper and let the pencil make what words it would.
Of course the pencil made a queer jumble of absurd words. He quit doing that.
There he sat on the bench staring at the people walking past.
He was tired, like a man who has been in love for a long time with some woman he cannot get.
Let us say there are difficulties. He is married or she is. They look at each other with promises in their eyes and nothing happens.
Wait and wait. Most people’s lives are spent waiting.
And then suddenly, he said, he began writing his novel. The theme, of course, was men and women—lovers. What other theme is there for such a man? He told me that he must have been thinking a great deal of his wife and of his cruelty to her. He wrote and wrote. The evening passed and night came. Fortunately, there was a moon. He kept on writing. He said it was the most intense writing he ever did or ever hoped to do. Hours and hours passed. He sat there on that bench writing like a crazy man.
