* * *
At Cleveland Will had crawled off of the freight train and had gone across the city in a street car. Workingmen were just going to the factories and he passed among them unnoticed. If his clothes were crumpled and soiled, their clothes weren’t so fine. The workingmen were all silent, looking at the car floor, or out at the car windows. Long rows of factories stood along the streets through which the car moved.
He had been lucky, and had caught another freight out of a place called Collinswood at eight, but at Ashtabula had made up his mind it would be better to drop off the freight and take a passenger train. If he was to live in Erie it would be just as well to arrive looking more like a gentleman and having paid his fare.
* * *
As he sat in the smoking car of the train he did not feel much like a gentleman. The coal dust had got into his hair and the rain had washed it in long dirty streaks down over his face. His clothes were badly soiled and wanted cleaning and brushing and the paper package, in which his overalls and shirts were tied, had become torn and dirty.
Outside the train window the sky was grey, and no doubt the night was going to turn cold. Perhaps there would be a cold rain.
It was an odd thing about the towns through which the train kept passing—all of the houses in all the towns looked cold and forbidding. “Dang it all.” In Bidwell, before the night when his father got so badly burned being such a fool about old Bill Bardshare’s party—all the houses had always seemed warm cozy places. When one was alone, one walked along the streets whistling. At night warm lights shone through the windows of the houses. “John Wyatt, the drayman, lives in that house. His wife has a wen on her neck. In that barn over there old Doctor Musgrave keeps his bony old white horse. The horse looks like the devil, but you bet he can go.”
* * *
Will squirmed about on the car seat. The old man who sat beside him was small, almost as small as Fred, and he wore a queer looking suit. The pants were brown, and the coat checked, grey and black. There was a small leather case on the floor at his feet.
Long before the man spoke Will knew what would happen. It was bound to turn out that such a fellow played a cornet. He was a man, old in years, but there was no dignity in him. Will remembered his father’s marchings through the main street of Bidwell with the band. It was some great day, Fourth of July, perhaps, and all the people were assembled and there was Tony Appleton, making a show of blowing his cornet at a great rate. Did all the people along the street know how badly he played and was there a kind of conspiracy, that kept grown men from laughing at each other? In spite of the seriousness of his own situation a smile crept over Will’s face.
The little man at his side smiled in return.
“Well,” he began, not stopping for anything but plunging headlong into a tale concerning some dissatisfaction he felt with life, “well, you see before you a man who is up against it, young fellow.” The old man tried to laugh at his own words, but did not make much of a success of it. His lip trembled. “I got to go home like a dog, with my tail ’twixt my legs,” he declared abruptly.
The old man balanced back and forth between two impulses. He had met a young man on a train, and hungered for companionship and one got oneself in with others by being jolly, a little gay perhaps. When one met a stranger on a train one told a story—“By the way, Mister, I heard a new one the other day—perhaps you haven’t heard it? It’s about the miner up in Alaska who hadn’t seen a woman for years.” One began in that way, and then later perhaps, spoke of oneself, and one’s affairs.
But the old man wanted to plunge at once into his own story. He talked, saying sad discouraged words, while his eyes kept smiling with a peculiar appealing little smile. “If the words uttered by my lips annoy or bore you, do not pay any attention to them. I am really a jolly fellow although I am an old man, and not of much use any more,” the eyes were saying. The eyes were pale blue and watery. How strange to see them set in the head of an old man. They belonged in the head of a lost dog. The smile was not really a smile. “Don’t kick me, young fellow. If you can’t give me anything to eat, scratch my head. At least show you are a fellow of good intentions. I’ve been kicked about quite enough.” It was so very evident the eyes were speaking a language of their own.
Will found himself smiling sympathetically. It was true there was something dog-like in the little old man and Will was pleased with himself for having so quickly caught the sense of him. “One who can see things with his eyes will perhaps get along all right in the world, after all,” he thought. His thoughts wandered away from the old man. In Bidwell there was an old woman lived alone and owned a shepherd dog. Every summer she decided to cut away the dog’s coat, and then—at the last moment and after she had in fact started the job—she changed her mind. Well, she grasped a long pair of scissors firmly in her hand and started on the dog’s flanks. Her hand trembled a little. “Shall I go ahead, or shall I stop?” After two minutes she gave up the job. “It makes him look too ugly,” she thought, justifying her timidity.
Later the hot days came, the dog went about with his tongue hanging out and again the old woman took the scissors in her hand. The dog stood patiently waiting but, when she had cut a long wide furrow through the thick hair of his back, she stopped again. In a sense, and to her way of looking at the matter, cutting away his splendid coat was like cutting away a part of himself. She couldn’t go on. “Now there—that made him look worse than ever,” she declared to herself. With a determined air she put the scissors away, and all summer the dog went about looking a little puzzled and ashamed.
Will kept smiling and thinking of the old woman’s dog and then looked again at his companion of the train. The variegated suit the old man wore gave him something of the air of the half-sheared shepherd dog. Both had the same puzzled, ashamed air.
Now Will had begun using the old man for his own ends. There was something inside himself that wanted facing, he didn’t want to face—not yet. Ever since he had left home, in fact ever since that day when he had come home from the country and had told Kate of his intention to set out into the world, he had been dodging something. If one thought of the little old man, and of the half-sheared dog, one did not have to think of oneself.
One thought of Bidwell on a summer afternoon. There was the old woman, who owned the dog, standing on the porch of her house, and the dog had run down to the gate. In the winter, when his coat had again fully grown, the dog would bark and make a great fuss about a boy passing in the street but now he started to bark and growl, and then stopped. “I look like the devil, and I’m attracting unnecessary attention to myself,” the dog seemed to have decided suddenly. He ran furiously down to the gate, opened his mouth to bark, and then, quite abruptly, changed his mind and trotted back to the house with his tail between his legs.
Will kept smiling at his own thoughts. For the first time since he had left Bidwell he felt quite cheerful.
And now the old man was telling a story of himself and his life, but Will wasn’t listening. Within the young man a crosscurrent of impulses had been set up and he was like one standing silently in the hallway of a house, and listening to two voices, talking at a distance. The voices came from two widely separated rooms of the house and one couldn’t make up one’s mind to which voice to listen.
To be sure the old man was another cornet player like his father—he was a horn blower. That was his horn in the little worn leather case on the car floor.
And after he had reached middle age, and after his first wife had died, he had married again. He had a little property then and, in a foolish moment, went and made it all over to his second wife, who was fifteen years younger than himself. She took the money and bought a large house in the factory district of Erie, and then began taking in boarders.
There was the old man, feeling lost, of no account in his own house. It just came about. One had to think of the boarders—their wants had to be satisfied. His wife had two sons, almost fully grown now, both of w
hom worked in a factory.
Well, it was all right—everything on the square—the sons paid board all right. Their wants had to be thought of, too. He liked blowing his cornet a while in the evenings, before he went to bed, but it might disturb the others in the house. One got rather desperate going about saying nothing, keeping out of the way and he had tried getting work in a factory himself, but they wouldn’t have him. His grey hairs stood in his way, and so one night he had just got out, had gone to Cleveland, where he had hoped to get a job in a band, in a movie theatre perhaps. Anyway it hadn’t turned out and now he was going back to Erie and to his wife. He had written and she had told him to come on home.
“They didn’t turn me down back there in Cleveland because I’m old. It’s because my lip is no good any more,” he explained. His shrunken old lip trembled a little.
Will kept thinking of the old woman’s dog. In spite of himself, and when the old man’s lip trembled, his lip also trembled.
What was the matter with him?
He stood in the hallway of a house hearing two voices. Was he trying to close his ears to one of them? Did the second voice, the one he had been trying all day, and all the night before, not to hear, did that have something to do with the end of his life in the Appleton house at Bidwell? Was the voice trying to taunt him, trying to tell him that now he was a thing swinging in air, that there was no place to put down his feet? Was he afraid? Of what was he afraid? He had wanted so much to be a man, to stand on his own feet and now what was the matter with him? Was he afraid of manhood?
He was fighting desperately now. There were tears in the old man’s eyes, and Will also began crying silently and that was the one thing he felt he must not do.
The old man talked on and on, telling the tale of his troubles, but Will could not hear his words. The struggle within was becoming more and more definite. His mind clung to the life of his boyhood, to the life in the Appleton house in Bidwell.
There was Fred, standing in the field of his fancy now, with just the triumphant look in his eyes that came when other boys saw him doing a man’s work. A whole series of pictures floated up before Will’s mind. He and his father and Fred were painting a barn and two farmer boys had come along a road and stood looking at Fred, who was on a ladder, putting on paint. They shouted, but Fred wouldn’t answer. There was a certain air Fred had—he slapped on the paint, and then turning his head, spat on the ground. Tom Appleton’s eyes looked into Will’s and there was a smile playing about the corners of the father’s eyes and the son’s eyes too. The father and his oldest son were like two men, two workmen, having a delicious little secret between them. They were both looking lovingly at Fred. “Bless him! He thinks he’s a man already.”
And now Tom Appleton was standing in the kitchen of his house, and his brushes were laid out on the kitchen table. Kate was rubbing a brush back and forth over the palm of her hand. “It’s as soft as the cat’s back,” she was saying.
Something gripped at Will’s throat. As in a dream, he saw his sister Kate walking off along the street on Sunday evening with that young fellow who clerked in the jewelry store. They were going to church. Her being with him meant—well, it perhaps meant the beginning of a new home—it meant the end of the Appleton home.
Will started to climb out of the seat beside the old man in the smoking car of the train. It had grown almost dark in the car. The old man was still talking, telling his tale over and over. “I might as well not have any home at all,” he was saying. Was Will about to begin crying aloud on a train, in a strange place, before many strange men. He tried to speak, to make some commonplace remark, but his mouth only opened and closed like the mouth of a fish taken out of the water.
And now the train had run into a train shed, and it was quite dark. Will’s hand clutched convulsively into the darkness and alighted upon the old man’s shoulder.
Then suddenly, the train had stopped, and the two stood half embracing each other. The tears were quite evident in Will’s eyes, when a brakeman lighted the overhead lamps in the car, but the luckiest thing in the world had happened. The old man, who had seen Will’s tears, thought they were tears of sympathy for his own unfortunate position in life and a look of gratitude came into his blue watery eyes. Well, this was something new in life for him, too. In one of the pauses, when he had first begun telling his tale, Will had said he was going to Erie to try to get work in some factory and now, as they got off the train, the old man clung to Will’s arm. “You might as well come live at our house,” he said. A look of hope flared up in the old man’s eyes. If he could bring home with him, to his young wife, a new boarder, the gloom of his own home-coming would be somewhat lightened. “You come on. That’s the best thing to do. You just come on with me to our house,” he plead, clinging to Will.
* * *
Two weeks had passed and Will had, outwardly, and to the eyes of the people about him, settled into his new life as a factory hand at Erie, Pennsylvania.
Then suddenly, on a Saturday evening, the thing happened that he had unconsciously been expecting and dreading ever since the moment when he climbed aboard the freight train in the shadow of Whaley’s Warehouse at Bidwell. A letter, containing great news, had come from Kate.
At the moment of their parting, and before he settled himself down out of sight in a corner of the empty coal car, on that night of his leaving, he had leaned out for a last look at his sister. She had been standing silently in the shadows of the warehouse, but just as the train was about to start, stepped toward him and a light from a distant street lamp fell on her face.
Well, the face did not jump toward Will, but remained dimly outlined in the uncertain light.
Did her lips open and close, as though in an effort to say something to him, or was that an effect produced by the distant, uncertain and wavering light? In the families of working people the dramatic and vital moments of life are passed over in silence. Even in the moments of death and birth, little is said. A child is born to a laborer’s wife and he goes into the room. She is in bed with the little red bundle of new life beside her and her husband stands a moment, fumblingly, beside the bed. Neither he or his wife can look directly into each other’s eyes. “Take care of yourself, Ma. Have a good rest,” he says, and hurries out of the room.
In the darkness by the warehouse at Bidwell Kate had taken two or three steps toward Will, and then had stopped. There was a little strip of grass between the warehouse and the tracks, and she stood upon it. Was there a more final farewell trembling on her lips at the moment? A kind of dread had swept over Will, and no doubt Kate had felt the same thing. At the moment she had become altogether the mother, in the presence of her child, and the thing within that wanted utterance became submerged. There was a word to be said that she could not say. Her form seemed to sway a little in the darkness and, to Will’s eyes, she became a slender indistinct thing. “Goodbye,” he had whispered into the darkness, and perhaps her lips had formed the same words. Outwardly there had been only the silence, and in the silence she had stood as the train rumbled away.
And now, on the Saturday evening, Will had come home from the factory and had found Kate saying in the letter what she had been unable to say on the night of his departure. The factory closed at five on Saturday and he came home in his overalls and went to his room. He had found the letter on a little broken table under a spluttering oil lamp, by the front door, and had climbed the stairs carrying it in his hand. He read the letter anxiously, waiting as for a hand to come out of the blank wall of the room and strike.
His father was getting better. The deep burns that had taken such a long time to heal, were really healing now and the doctor had said the danger of infection had passed. Kate had found a new and soothing remedy. One took slippery elm and let it lie in milk until it became soft. This applied to the burns enabled Tom to sleep better at night.
As for Fred, Kate and her father had decided he might as well go back to school. It was really too bad for a young boy
to miss the chance to get an education, and anyway there was no work to be had. Perhaps he could get a job, helping in some store on Saturday afternoons.
A woman from the Woman’s Relief Corps had had the nerve to come to the Appleton house and ask Kate if the family needed help. Well, Kate had managed to hold herself back, and had been polite but, had the woman known what was in her mind, her ears would have been itching for a month. The idea!
It had been fine of Will to send a postcard, as soon as he had got to Erie and got a job. As for his sending money home—of course the family would be glad to have anything he could spare—but he wasn’t to go depriving himself. “We’ve got good credit at the stores. We’ll get along all right,” Kate had said stoutly.
And then it was she had added the line, had said the thing she could not say that night when he was leaving. It concerned herself and her future plans. “That night when you were going away I wanted to tell you something, but I thought it was silly, talking too soon.” After all though, Will might as well know she was planning to be married in the spring. What she wanted was for Fred to come and live with her and her husband. He could keep on going to school, and perhaps they could manage so that he could go to college. Some one in the family ought to have a decent education. Now that Will had made his start in life, there was no point in waiting longer before making her own.
* * *
Will sat, in his tiny room at the top of the huge frame house, owned now by the wife of the old cornet player of the train, and held the letter in his hand. The room was on the third floor, under the roof, in a wing of the house, and beside it was another small room, occupied by the old man himself. Will had taken the room because it was to be had at a low price and he could manage the room and his meals, get his washing done, send three dollars a week to Kate, and still have left a dollar a week to spend. One could get a little tobacco, and now and then see a movie.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 59