“Why, what’s the matter,—what’s the matter?” asked her husband but she did not answer but ran and threw herself into his arms, and as the two stood thus, like two grotesque bags of grain, embracing in a black newly-plowed field under a grey sky, the son, who had stopped in a small clump of trees, saw them. He walked to the edge of a wood and stood for a moment and then went off along the road. Afterward he never saw or heard from them again.
* * *
About Tom’s woman adventure—he told it as I have told you the story of his departure from home, that is to say in a fragmentary way. The story, like the one I have just tried to tell, or rather perhaps give you a sense of, was told in broken sentences, dropped between long silences. As my friend talked I sat looking at him and I will admit I sometimes found myself thinking he must be the greatest man I would ever know. “He has felt more things, has by his capacity for silently feeling things, penetrated further into human life than any other man I am likely ever to know, perhaps than any other man who lives in my day,” I thought—deeply stirred.
And so he was on the road now and working his way slowly along afoot through Southern Ohio. He intended to make his way to some city and begin educating himself. In the winter, during boyhood, he had attended a country school, but there were certain things he wanted he could not find in the country, books, for one thing. “I knew then, as I know now, something of the importance of books, that is to say real books. There are only a few such books in the world and it takes a long time to find them out. Hardly anyone knows what they are and one of the reasons I have never married is because I did not want some woman coming between me and the search for the books that really have something to say,” he explained. He was forever breaking the thread of his stories with little comments of this kind.
All during that summer he worked on the farms, staying sometimes for two or three weeks and then moving on and in June he had got to a place, some twenty miles west of Cincinnati, where he went to work on the farm of a German, and where the adventure happened that he told me about that night on the park bench.
The farm on which he was at work belonged to a tall, solidly-built German of fifty, who had come to America twenty years before, and who, by hard work, had prospered and had acquired much land. Three years before he had made up his mind he had better marry and had written to a friend in Germany about getting him a wife. “I do not want one of these American girls, and I would like a young woman, not an old one,” he wrote. He explained that the American girls all had the idea in their heads that they could run their husbands and that most of them succeeded. “It’s getting so all they want is to ride around all dressed up or trot off to town,” he said. Even the older American women he employed as housekeepers were the same way; none of them would take hold, help about the farm, feed the stock and do things the wife of a European farmer expected to do. When he employed a housekeeper she did the housework and that was all.
Then she went to sit on the front porch, to sew or read a book. “What nonsense! You get me a good German girl, strong and pretty good-looking. I’ll send the money and she can come over here and be my wife,” he wrote.
The letter had been sent to a friend of his young manhood, now a small merchant in a German town and after talking the matter over with his wife the merchant decided to send his daughter, a woman of twenty-four. She had been engaged to marry a man who was taken sick and had died while he was serving his term in the army and her father decided she had been mooning about long enough. The merchant called the daughter into a room where he and his wife sat and told her of his decision and, for a long time she sat looking at the floor. Was she about to make a fuss? A prosperous American husband who owned a big farm was not to be sneezed at. The daughter put up her hand and fumbled with her black hair—there was a great mass of it. After all she was a big strong woman. Her husband wouldn’t be cheated. “Yes, I’ll go,” she said quietly, and getting up walked out of the room.
In America the woman had turned out all right but her husband thought her a little too silent. Even though the main purpose in life be to do the work of a house and farm, feed the stock and keep a man’s clothes in order, so that he is not always having to buy new ones, still there are times when something else is in order. As he worked in his fields the farmer sometimes muttered to himself. “Everything in its place. For everything there is a time and a place,” he told himself. One worked and then the time came when one played a little too. Now and then it was nice to have a few friends about, drink beer, eat a good deal of heavy food and then have some fun, in a kind of way. One did not go too far but if there were women in the party someone tickled one of them and she giggled. One made a remark about legs—nothing out of the way. “Legs is legs. On horses or women legs count a good deal.” Everyone laughed. One had a jolly evening, one had some fun.
Often, after his woman came, the farmer, working in his fields, tried to think what was the matter with her. She worked all the time and the house was in order. Well, she fed the stock so that he did not have to bother about that. What a good cook she was. She even made beer, in the old-fashioned German way, at home—and that was fine too.
The whole trouble lay in the fact that she was silent, too silent. When one spoke to her she answered nicely but she herself made no conversation and at night she lay in the bed silently. The German wondered if she would be showing signs of having a child pretty soon. “That might make a difference,” he thought. He stopped working and looked across the fields to where there was a meadow. His cattle were there feeding quietly. “Even cows, and surely cows were quiet and silent enough things, even cows had times. Sometimes the very devil got into a cow. You were leading her along a road or a lane and suddenly she went half insane. If one weren’t careful she would jam her head through fences, knock a man over, do almost anything. She wanted something insanely, with a riotous hunger. Even a cow wasn’t always just passive and quiet.” The German felt cheated. He thought of the friend in Germany who had sent his daughter. “Ugh, the deuce, he might have sent a livelier one,” he thought.
It was June when Tom came to the farm and the harvest was on. The German had planted several large fields to wheat and the yield was good. Another man had been employed to work on the farm all summer but Tom could be used too. He would have to sleep on the hay in the barn but that he did not mind. He went to work at once.
And anyone knowing Tom, and seeing his huge and rather ungainly body, must realize that, in his youth, he might have been unusually strong. For one thing he had not done so much thinking as he must have done later, nor had he been for years seated at a desk. He worked in the fields with the other two men and at the meal time came into the house with them to eat. He and the German’s wife must have been a good deal alike. Tom had in his mind certain things—thoughts concerning his boyhood—and he was thinking a good deal of the future. Well, there he was working his way westward and making a little money all the time as he went, and every cent he made he kept. He had not yet been into an American city, had purposely avoided such places as Springfield, Dayton and Cincinnatti and had kept to the smaller places and the farms.
After a time he would have an accumulation of money and would go into cities, study, read books, live. He had then a kind of illusion about American cities. “A city was a great gathering of people who had grown tired of loneliness and isolation. They had come to realize that only by working together could they have the better things of life. Many hands working together might build wonderfully, many minds working together might think clearly, many impulses working together might channel all lives into an expression of something rather fine.”
I am making a mistake if I give you the impression that Tom, the boy from the Ohio farm, had any such definite notions. He had a feeling—of a sort. There was a dumb kind of hope in him. He had even then, I am quite sure, something else, that he later always retained, a kind of almost holy inner modesty. It was his chief attraction as a man but perhaps it stood in the way of his
ever achieving the kind of outstanding and assertive manhood we Americans all seem to think we value so highly.
At any rate there he was, and there was that woman, the silent one, now twenty-seven years old. The three men sat at table eating and she waited on them. They ate in the farm kitchen, a large old-fashioned one, and she stood by the stove or went silently about putting more food on the table as it was consumed.
At night the men did not eat until late and sometimes darkness came as they sat at table and then she brought lighted lamps for them. Great winged insects flew violently against the screen door and a few moths, that had managed to get into the house, flew about the lamps. When the men had finished eating they sat at the table drinking beer and the woman washed the dishes.
The farm hand, employed for the summer, was a man of thirty-five, a large bony man with a drooping mustache. He and the German talked. Well, it was good, the German thought, to have the silence of his house broken. The two men spoke of the coming threshing time and of the hay harvest just completed. One of the cows would be calving next week. Her time was almost here. The man with the mustache took a drink of beer and wiped his mustache with the back of his hand, that was covered with long black hair.
Tom had drawn his chair back against the wall and sat in silence and, when the German was deeply engaged in conversation, he looked at the woman, who sometimes turned from her dish-washing to look at him.
There was something, a certain feeling he had sometimes—she, it might be, also had—but of the two men in the room that could not be said. It was too bad she spoke no English. Perhaps, however even though she spoke his language, he could not speak to her of the things he meant. But, pshaw, there wasn’t anything in his mind, nothing that could be said in words. Now and then her husband spoke to her in German and she replied quietly, and then the conversation between the two men was resumed in English. More beer was brought. The German felt expansive. How good to have talk in the house. He urged beer upon Tom who took it and drank. “You’re another close-mouthed one, eh?” he said laughing.
Tom’s adventure happened during the second week of his stay. All the people about the place had gone to sleep for the night but, as he could not sleep, he arose silently and came down out of the hay loft carrying his blanket. It was a silent hot soft night without a moon and he went to where there was a small grass plot that came down to the barn and spreading his blanket sat with his back to the wall of the barn.
That he could not sleep did not matter. He was young and strong. “If I do not sleep tonight I will sleep tomorrow night,” he thought. There was something in the air that he thought concerned only himself, and that made him want to be thus awake, sitting out of doors and looking at the dim distant trees in the apple orchard near the barn, at the stars in the sky, at the farm house, faintly seen some few hundred feet away. Now that he was out of doors he no longer felt restless. Perhaps it was only that he was nearer something that was like himself at the moment, just the night perhaps.
He became aware of something, of something moving, restlessly in the darkness. There was a fence between the farm yard and the orchard, with berry bushes growing beside it, and something was moving in the darkness along the berry bushes. Was it a cow that had got out of the stable or were the bushes moved by a wind? He did a trick known to country boys. Thrusting a finger into his mouth he stood up and put the wet finger out before him. A wind would dry one side of the warm wet finger quickly and that side would turn cold. Thus one told oneself something, not only of the strength of a wind but its direction. Well, there was no wind strong enough to move berry bushes—there was no wind at all. He had come down out of the barn loft in his bare feet and in moving about had made no sound and now he went and stood silently on the blanket with his back against the wall of the barn.
The movement among the bushes was growing more distinct but it wasn’t in the bushes. Something was moving along the fence, between him and the orchard. There was a place along the fence, an old rail one, where no bushes grew and now the silent moving thing was passing the open space.
It was the woman of the house, the German’s wife. What was up? Was she also trying dumbly to draw nearer something that was like herself, that she could understand, a little? Thoughts flitted through Tom’s head and a dumb kind of desire arose within him. He began hoping vaguely that the woman was in search of himself.
Later, when he told me of the happenings of that night, he was quite sure that the feeling that then possessed him was not physical desire for a woman. His own mother had died several years before and the woman his father had later married had seemed to him just a thing about the house, a not very competent thing, bones, a hank of hair, a body that did not do very well what one’s body was supposed to do. “I was intolerant as the devil, about all women. Maybe I always have been but then—I’m sure I was a queer kind of country bumpkin aristocrat. I thought myself something, a special thing in the world, and that woman, any women I had ever seen or known, the wives of a few neighbors as poor as my father, a few country girls—I had thought them all beneath my contempt, dirt under my feet.
“About that German’s wife I had not felt that way. I don’t know why. Perhaps because she had a habit of keeping her mouth shut as I did just at that time, a habit I have since lost.”
And so Tom stood there—waiting. The woman came slowly along the fence, keeping in the shadow of the bushes and then crossed an open space toward the barn.
Now she was walking slowly along the barn wall, directly toward the young man who stood in the heavy shadows holding his breath and waiting for her coming.
Afterwards, when he thought of what had happened, he could never quite make up his mind whether she was walking in sleep or was awake as she came slowly toward him. They did not speak the same language and they never saw each other after that night. Perhaps she had only been restless and had got out of the bed beside her husband and made her way out of the house, without any conscious knowledge of what she was doing.
She became conscious when she came to where he was standing however, conscious and frightened. He stepped out toward her and she stopped. Their faces were very close together and her eyes were large with alarm. “The pupils dilated,” he said in speaking of that moment. He insisted upon the eyes. “There was a fluttering something in them. I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that at the moment I saw everything as clearly as though we had been standing together in the broad daylight. Perhaps something had happened to my own eyes, eh? That might be possible. I could not speak to her, reassure her—I could not say, ‘Do not be frightened, woman.’ I couldn’t say anything. My eyes I suppose had to do all the saying.”
Evidently there was something to be said. At any rate there my friend stood, on that remarkable night of his youth, and his face and the woman’s face drew nearer each other. Then their lips met and he took her into his arms and held her for a moment.
That was all. They stood together, the woman of twenty-seven and the young man of nineteen and he was a country boy and was afraid. That may be the explanation of the fact that nothing else happened.
I do not know as to that but in telling this tale I have an advantage you who read cannot have. I heard the tale told, brokenly, by the man—who had the experience I am trying to describe. Story-tellers of old times, who went from place to place telling their wonder tales, had an advantage we, who have come in the age of the printed word, do not have. They were both story tellers and actors. As they talked they modulated their voices, made gestures with their hands. Often they carried conviction simply by the power of their own conviction. All of our modern fussing with style in writing is an attempt to do the same thing.
And what I am trying to express now is a sense I had that night, as my friend talked to me in the park, of a union of two people that took place in the heavy shadows by a barn in Ohio, a union of two people that was not personal, that concerned their two bodies and at the same time did not concern their bodies. The thing has to be
felt, not understood with the thinking mind.
Anyway they stood for a few minutes, five minutes perhaps, with their bodies pressed against the wall of the barn and their hands together, clasped together tightly. Now and then one of them stepped away from the barn and stood for a moment directly facing the other. One might say it was Europe facing America in the darkness by a barn. One might grow fancy and learned and say almost anything but all I am saying is that they stood as I am describing them, and oddly enough with their faces to the barn wall—instinctively turning from the house I presume—and that now and then one of them stepped out and stood for a moment facing the other. Their lips did not meet after the first moment.
The next step was taken. The German awoke in the house and began calling, and then he appeared at the kitchen door with a lantern in his hand. It was the lantern, his carrying of the lantern, that saved the situation for the wife and my friend. It made a little circle of light outside of which he could see nothing, but he kept calling his wife, whose name was Katherine, in a distracted frightened way. “Oh, Katherine. Where are you? Oh, Katherine,” he called.
My friend acted at once. Taking hold of the woman’s hand he ran—making no sound—along the shadows of the barn and across the open space between the barn and the fence. The two people were two dim shadows flitting along the dark wall of the barn, nothing more and at the place in the fence where there were no bushes he lifted her over and climbed over after her. Then he ran through the orchard and into the road before the house and putting his two hands on her shoulders shook her. As though understanding his wish, she answered her husband’s call and as the lantern came swinging down toward them my friend dodged back into the orchard.
The man and wife went toward the house, the German talking vigorously and the woman answering quietly, as she had always answered him. Tom was puzzled. Everything that happened to him that night puzzled him then and long afterward when he told me of it. Later he worked out a kind of explanation of it—as all men will do in such cases—but that is another story and the time to tell it is not now.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 52