“Now, forget it. I tell you, you’re both wrong.” John thought of his son at the camp up in Vermont. “I haven’t written him a letter today.” He felt guilty.
Opening his bag, he took out paper and sat down to write; but after two or three attempts gave it up and put the paper away again. How fine the night had been as he sat on the bench beside the woman at Lylse’s! Now the woman was in bed with her husband. They were not speaking to each other.
“Could I do it?” John asked himself, and then, for the first time that evening, a smile came to his lips.
“Why not?” he asked himself.
With his bag in his hand he went down the dark hallway and into the hotel office and began pounding on a desk. A fat old man with thin red hair and sleep-heavy eyes appeared from somewhere. John explained.
“I can’t sleep. I think I’ll drive on. I want to get to Pittsburgh and as I can’t sleep, I might as well be driving.” He paid his bill.
Then he asked the clerk to go and arouse the man in the garage, and gave him an extra dollar. “If I need gas, is there any place open?” he asked, but evidently the man did not hear. Perhaps he thought the question absurd.
He stood in the moonlight on the sidewalk before the door of the hotel and heard the clerk pounding on a door. Presently voices were heard, and the headlights of his car shone. The car appeared, driven by a boy. He seemed very alive and alert.
“I saw you out to Lylse’s,” he said, and, without being asked, went to look at the tank. “You’re all right; you got ’most eight gallons,” he assured John, who had climbed into the driver’s seat.
How friendly the car, how friendly the night! John was not one who enjoyed fast driving, but he went out of the town at very high speed. “You go down two blocks, turn to your right, and go three. There you hit the cement. Go right straight to the east. You can’t miss it.”
John was taking the turns at racing speed. At the edge of town some one shouted to him from the darkness, but he did not stop. He hungered to get into the road going east.
“I’ll let her out,” he thought. “Lord! It will be fun! I’ll let her out.”
There She is—She is Taking Her Bath
* * *
ANOTHER day when I have done no work. It is maddening. I went to the office this morning as usual and tonight came home at the regular time. My wife and I live in an apartment in the Bronx, here in New York City, and we have no children. I am ten years older than she. Our apartment is on the second floor and there is a little hallway downstairs used by all the people in the building.
If I could only decide whether or not I am a fool, a man turned suddenly a little mad or a man whose honor has really been tampered with, I should be quite all right. Tonight I went home, after something most unusual had happened at the office, determined to tell everything to my wife. “I will tell her and then watch her face. If she blanches, then I will know all I suspect is true,” I said to myself. Within the last two weeks everything about me has changed. I am no longer the same man. For example, I never in my life before used the word “blanched.” What does it mean? How am I to tell whether my wife blanches or not when I do not know what the word means? It must be a word I saw in a book when I was a boy, perhaps a book of detective stories. But wait, I know how that happened to pop into my head.
But that is not what I started to tell you about. Tonight, as I have already said, I came home and climbed the stairs to our apartment.
When I got inside the house I spoke in a loud voice to my wife. “My dear, what are you doing?” I asked. My voice sounded strange.
“I am taking a bath,” my wife answered.
And so you see she was at home taking a bath. There she was.
She is always pretending she loves me, but look at her now. Am I in her thoughts? Is there a tender look in her eyes? Is she dreaming of me as she walks along the streets?
You see she is smiling. There is a young man who has just passed her. He is a tall fellow with a little mustache and is smoking a cigarette. Now I ask you—is he one of the men who, like myself, does, in a way, keep the world going?
Once I knew a man who was president of a whist club. Well, he was something. People wanted to know how to play whist. They wrote to him. “If it turns out that after three cards are played the man to my right still has three cards while I have only two, etc., etc.”
My friend, the man of whom I am now speaking, looks the matter up. “In rule four hundred and six you will see, etc., etc.,” he writes.
My point is that he is of some account in the world. He helps keep things going and I respect him. Often we used to have lunch together.
But I am a little off the point. The fellows of whom I am now thinking, these young squirts who go through the streets ogling women—what do they do? They twirl their mustaches. They carry canes. Some honest man is supporting them too. Some fool is their father.
And such a fellow is walking in the street. He meets a woman like my wife, an honest woman without too much experience of life. He smiles. A tender look comes into his eyes. Such deceit. Such callow nonsense.
And how are the women to know? They are children. They know nothing. There is a man, working somewhere in an office, keeping things moving, but do they think of him?
The truth is the woman is flattered. A tender look, that should be saved and bestowed only upon her husband, is thrown away. One never knows what will happen.
But pshaw, if I am to tell you the story, let me begin. There are men everywhere who talk and talk, saying nothing. I am afraid I am becoming one of that kind. As I have already told you, I have come home from the office at evening and am standing in the hallway of our apartment, just inside the door. I have asked my wife what she is doing and she has told me she is taking a bath.
Very well, I am then a fool. I shall go out for a walk in the park. There is no use my not facing everything frankly. By facing everything frankly one gets everything quite cleared up.
Aha! The very devil has got into me now. I said I would remain cool and collected, but I am not cool. The truth is I am growing angry.
I am a small man but I tell you that, once aroused, I will fight. Once when I was a boy I fought another boy in the school yard. He gave me a black eye but I loosened one of his teeth. “There, take that and that. Now I have got you against a wall. I will muss your mustache. Give me that cane. I will break it over your head. I do not intend to kill you, young man. I intend to vindicate my honor. No, I will not let you go. Take that and that. When next you see a respectable married woman on the street, going to the store, behaving herself, do not look at her with a tender light in your eyes. What you had better do is to go to work. Get a job in a bank. Work your way up. You said I was an old goat but I will show you an old goat can butt. Take that and that.”
Very well, you, who read, also think me a fool. You laugh. You smile. Look at me. You are walking along here in the park. You are leading a dog.
Where is your wife? What is she doing?
Well, suppose she is at home taking a bath. What is she thinking? If she is dreaming, as she takes her bath, of whom is she dreaming?
I will tell you what, you who go along leading that dog, you may have no reason to suspect your wife, but you are in the same position as myself.
She was at home taking a bath and all day I had been sitting at my desk and thinking such thoughts. Under the circumstances I would never have had the temerity to go calmly off and take a bath. I admire my wife. Ha, ha. If she is innocent I admire her, of course, as a husband should, and if she is guilty I admire her even more. What nerve, what insouciance. There is something noble, something almost heroic in her attitude toward me, just at this time.
With me this day is like every day now. Well, you see, I have been sitting all day with my head in my hand thinking and thinking and while I have been doing that she has been going about, leading her regular life.
She has got up in the morning and has had her breakfast sitting opposite her husb
and; that is, myself. Her husband has gone off to his office. Now she is speaking to our maid. She is going to the stores. She is sewing, perhaps making new curtains for the windows of our apartment.
There is the woman for you. Nero fiddled while Rome was burning. There was something of the woman in him.
A wife has been unfaithful to her husband. She has gone gayly off, let us say on the arm of a young blade. Who is he? He dances. He smokes cigarettes. When he is with his companions, his own kind of fellows, he laughs. “I have got me a woman,” he says. “She is not very young but she is terrifically in love with me. It is very convenient.” I have heard such fellows talk, in the smoking cars, on trains and in other places.
And there is the husband, a fellow like myself. Is he calm? Is he collected? Is he cool? His honor is perhaps being tampered with. He sits at his desk. He smokes a cigar. People come and go. He is thinking, thinking.
And what are his thoughts? They concern her. “Now she is still at home, in our apartment,” he thinks. “Now she is walking along a street.” What do you know of the secret life led by your wife? What do you know of her thoughts? Well, hello! You smoke a pipe. You put your hands in your pockets. For you, your life is all very well. You are gay and happy. “What does it matter, my wife is at home taking a bath,” you are telling yourself. In your daily life you are, let us say, a useful man. You publish books, you run a store, you write advertisements. Sometimes you say to yourself, “I am lifting the burden off the shoulders of others.” That makes you feel good. I sympathize with you. If you let me, or rather I should say, if we had met in the formal transactions of our regular occupations, I dare say we would be great friends. Well, we would have lunch together, not too often, but now and then. I would tell you of some real-estate deal and you would tell me what you had been doing. “I am glad we met! Call me up. Before you go away, have a cigar.”
With me it is quite different. All today, for example, I have been in my office, but I have not worked. A man came in, a Mr. Albright. “Well, are you going to let that property go or are you going to hold on?” he said.
What property did he mean? What was he talking about?
You can see for yourself what a state I am in.
And now I must be going home. My wife will have finished taking her bath. We will sit down to dinner. Nothing of all this I have been speaking about will be mentioned at all. “John, what is the matter with you?” “Aha. There is nothing the matter. I am worried about business a little. A Mr. Albright came in. Shall I sell or shall I hold on?” The real thing that is on my mind shall not be mentioned at all. I will grow a little nervous. The coffee will be spilled on the table-cloth or I will upset my dessert.
“John, what is the matter with you?” What coolness. As I have already said, what insouciance.
What is the matter? Matter enough.
A week, two weeks, to be exact, just seventeen days ago, I was a happy man. I went about my affairs. In the morning I rode to my office in the subway, but, had I wished to do so, I could long ago have bought an automobile.
But no, long ago, my wife and I had agreed there should be no such silly extravagance. To tell the truth, just ten years ago I failed in business and had to put some property in my wife’s name. I bring the papers home to her and she signs. That is the way it is done.
“Well, John,” said my wife, “we will not get us any automobile.” That was before the thing happened that so upset me. We were walking together in the park. “Mabel, shall we get us an automobile?” I asked. “No,” she said, “we will not get us an automobile.” “Our money,” she has said, more than a thousand times, “will be a comfort to us later.”
A comfort indeed. What can be a comfort now that this thing has happened?
It was just two weeks, more than that, just seventeen days ago, that I went home from the office just as I came home tonight. Well, I walked in the same streets, passed the same stores.
I am puzzled as to what that Mr. Albright meant when he asked me if I intended to sell the property or hold on to it. I answered in a noncommittal way. “We’ll see,” I said. To what property did he refer? We must have had some previous conversation regarding the matter. A mere acquaintance does not come into your office and speak of property in that careless, one might say, familiar way, without having previous conversation on the same subject.
As you see I am still a little confused. Even though I am facing things now, I am still, as you have guessed, somewhat confused. This morning I was in the bathroom, shaving as usual. I always shave in the morning, not in the evening, unless my wife and I are going out. I was shaving and my shaving brush dropped to the floor. I stooped to pick it up and struck my head on the bath-tub. I only tell you this to show what a state I am in. It made a large bump on my head. My wife heard me groan and asked me what was the matter. “I struck my head,” I said. Of course, one quite in control of his faculties does not hit his head on a bath-tub when he knows it is there, and what man does not know where the bath-tub stands in his own house?
But now I am thinking again of what happened, of what has upset me this way. I was going home on that evening, just seventeen days ago. Well, I walked along, thinking nothing. When I reached our apartment building I went in, and there, lying on the floor in the little hallway, in front, was a pink envelope with my wife’s name, Mabel Smith, written on it. I picked it up thinking, “This is strange.” It had perfume on it and there was no address, just the name Mabel Smith, written in a bold man’s hand.
I quite automatically opened it and read.
Since I first met her, twelve years ago at a party at Mr. Westley’s house, there have never been any secrets between me and my wife; at least, until that moment in the hallway seventeen days ago this evening, I had never thought there were any secrets between us. I have always opened her letters and she had always opened mine. I think it should be that way between a man and his wife. I know there are some who do not agree with me but what I have always argued is I am right.
I went to the party with Harry Selfridge and afterward took my wife home. I offered to get a cab. “Shall we have a cab?” I asked her. “No,” she said, “let’s walk.” She was the daughter of a man in the furniture business and he has died since. Every one thought he would leave her some money but he didn’t. It turned out he owed almost all he was worth to a firm in Grand Rapids. Some would have been upset, but I wasn’t. “I married you for love, my dear,” I said to her on the night when her father died. We were walking home from his house, also in the Bronx, and it was raining a little, but we did not get very wet. “I married you for love,” I said, and I meant what I said.
But to return to the note. “Dear Mabel,” it said, “come to the park on Wednesday when the old goat has gone away. Wait for me on the bench near the animal cages where I met you before.”
It was signed Bill. I put it in my pocket and went upstairs.
When I got into my apartment, I heard a man’s voice. The voice was urging something upon my wife. Did the voice change when I came in? I walked boldly into our front room where my wife sat facing a young man who sat in another chair. He was tall and had a little mustache.
The man was pretending to be trying to sell my wife a patent carpet-sweeper, but just the same, when I sat down in a chair in the corner and remained there, keeping silent, they both became self-conscious. My wife, in fact, became positively excited. She got up out of her chair and said in a loud voice, “I tell you I do not want any carpet-sweeper.”
The young man got up and went to the door and I followed. “Well, I had better be getting out of here,” he was saying to himself. And so he had been intending to leave a note telling my wife to meet him in the park on Wednesday but at the last moment he had decided to take the risk of coming to our house. What he had probably thought was something like this: “Her husband may come and get the note out of the mail box.” Then he decided to come and see her and had quite accidentally dropped the note in the hallway. Now he was frightened
. One could see that. Such men as myself are small but we will fight sometimes.
He hurried to the door and I followed him into the hallway. There was another young man coming from the floor above, also with a carpet-sweeper in his hand. It is a pretty slick scheme, this carrying carpet-sweepers with them, the young men of this generation have worked out, but we older men are not to have the wool pulled over our eyes. I saw through everything at once. The second young man was a confederate and had been concealed in the hallway in order to warn the first young man of my approach. When I got upstairs, of course, the first young man was pretending to sell my wife a carpet-sweeper. Perhaps the second young man had tapped with the handle of the carpet-sweeper on the floor above. Now that I think of that I remember there was a tapping sound.
At the time, however, I did not think everything out as I have since done. I stood in the hallway with my back against the wall and watched them go down the stairs. One of them turned and laughed at me, but I did not say anything. I suppose I might have gone down the stairs after them and challenged them both to fight but what I thought was, “I won’t.”
And sure enough, just as I suspected from the first, it was the young man pretending to sell carpet-sweepers I had found sitting in my apartment with my wife, who had lost the note. When they got down to the hallway at the front of the house the man I had caught with my wife began to feel in his pocket. Then, as I leaned over the railing above, I saw him looking about the hallway. He laughed. “Say, Tom, I had a note to Mabel in my pocket. I intended to get a stamp at the postoffice and mail it. I had forgotten the street number. ‘Oh, well,’ I thought, ‘I’ll go see her!’ I didn’t want to bump into that old goat, her husband.”
“You have bumped into him,” I said to myself; “now we will see who will come out victorious.”
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.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 69