The Russians too were great wanderers. They believed in the possibility of the salvation of their race through new forms of government—“all that sort of rot,” the Englishman had said when he talked to Cook. You understand that Mabel and I got all this from Cook, who had certainly learned a lot since he left Texas.
The young Englishman thought the Americans an altogether primitive people. They could still believe in government. They looked toward Heaven as another and more successful America, he thought. They believed in such things as Prohibition, for example.
And it wasn’t, as it sometimes seemed on the surface, merely a matter of a passion for interfering in the lives of others. There was a deep-seated and rather childish belief that all people could be saved.
But what did they mean by “being saved”?
“They meant just what they said when they used the words. They thought vaguely that a good and powerful leader would be found to lead them out of the wilderness of this life.”
“Something as Moses led the Children of Israel out of Egypt, eh?”
“But he is not speaking about Jews,” Mabel said. Afterwards she spoke several times about what an intellectual afternoon it was. She said she thought it was swell. Just the same there was a lot of—shall I say Krafft-Ebing—talk that got over my head and that I know Mabel didn’t get. We had both missed something, not having been enough among the world-weary, I guess.
But I have got a long way from Henry Longman. Now I will come to him.
He came from Cleveland, Ohio. We saw him first, at least I did, that afternoon at Madam T.’s. He was a strange figure there. For one thing he had his wife with him. That, in that place, was strange in itself.
It seemed Cook and the young Englishman had pounced on him. I have already said that he lived in a studio apartment, on the Boulevard Raspail, on the top floor.
It was a six-storied building, six flights of stairs to climb.
Henry’s wife was a big blonde and he was a big man with a fat, red face. Cook had in some way got the low-down on him.
He came from Cleveland where he had got his wife. His father was a candy manufacturer out there.
And his wife’s father was also rich.
The two fathers had been hard-working young men and had got on, in the American world. They both got rich.
Then their son and daughter had got the culture hunger. Their fathers might have been half proud of them, half ashamed. The woman, when she was in college, won a poetry prize. An American magazine, of the better class, published the poem.
Then she married the young man, the son of her father’s friend. They went to live in Paris. They were conducting a salon.
They had taken that top floor, in the old building without an elevator, because it seemed to them artistic.
Their effort was to get the French to come to their place, and they did come, of course. Why not? There was food and drink, an abundance of both.
Longman and his wife spoke little French, about as much as Mabel and I. They couldn’t get the hang of it.
Longman wanted us to think him an Englishman of the upper classes.
He hinted vaguely of an English family, of good blood, ruined, I gathered. “How could that be—his having all of that money?” the young Englishman asked Mabel. He, the young Englishman, had taken a fancy to Mabel. “He thinks you primitive and interesting,” I kept telling her. I knew how to be nasty too. Longman’s father sent him a lot of money and his wife’s father sent her some money and—having all of that money—they fancied the idea of seeming poor. “We are dreadfully in debt,” Longman’s wife was always saying.
As she said it, we sat drinking the most expensive wines to be had in France.
They had a crowd always about—feeding people as they did, wining them.
The wine was brought in. It was opened and a glass poured for the blonde wife. She always made a wry face at the first taste. “Henry,” she said sharply to her husband, “I think the wine is slightly corked.” Mabel thought it was grand technique. It was a word the blonde had got hold of. When she said it her husband ran to her. We were in a large studio room, built for a painter. There was a glass roof. In the corner there was a cheap sink, such as you see in American small hotels. The husband, with a look of horror on his face, ran and poured the wine down the sink.
Expensive wine going off like that. I could see Mabel shiver. “I’ll bet Mabel is a good economical housewife at home,” Cook whispered to me.
Longman began to talk. He liked to give the impression that he was in Paris on some important mission, say, for the British government—for Downing Street, say. He didn’t exactly say so.
And he referred to a book—one, you were to understand he was writing or had written. I couldn’t get that clear. He did not say, “My Life of Napoleon” or “My Secrets of Downing Street.” Just how did he get it across? There was the distinct impression left that he had written several important works. He was like an author, too modest really to refer directly to his work.
We got all that, going on day after day, month after month.
The Americans from Cleveland pretending to themselves they were important people, the guests pretending they were important.
They, the guests, pretending they had important reasons for being in Paris. A little string of lies, each telling the other a lie.
Why not? I went there on several occasions with Cook, Mabel and the young Englishman. Every evening the same thing happened.
Mabel, Cook and I got a little tired of the young Englishman sometimes, and Mabel let him know it. It was a little hard on him and Cook. Cook had to decide whether he wanted to stick to the Englishman or to us. He stuck to us—on account of Mabel, of course.
He said it was a fair sight to see the way Mabel could cut people out of our herd. We did make up a small herd, the crowd of us at our cheap Left Bank hotel. Cook came to live there and we got three or four more—males, you may be sure.
We all used to go to Longman’s a lot. There was good food and good wine and we all liked to hear Longman’s wife say the wine was corked. She always said it at the first taste of the first bottle after we arrived. When someone else came in, she said it again. Mabel said she was sorry we had Prohibition in America. She would have liked, she said, to spring it on the folks at home, but it would cost too much.
She said she had come to Europe, as we all had, to get sophistication and that she thought she was getting it. Cook and I and several others tried to give her some.
She said the trouble was that the more sophistication she got the more she felt like Chicago. She said it was almost like being in Chicago, the sophistication she picked up after four or five other Americans, all of them men, began living with us at our hotel.
“I might have saved my husband all this money and got all this sophistication I’m getting, or anyway all I needed, right in Chicago,” she declared several times during that Summer.
In a Strange Town
* * *
A MORNING in a country town in a strange place. Everything is quiet. No, there are sounds. Sounds assert themselves. A boy whistles. I can hear the sound here, where I stand, at a railroad station. I have come away from home. I am in a strange place. There is no such thing as silence. Once I was in the country. I was at the house of a friend. “You see, there is not a sound here. It is absolutely silent.” My friend said that because he was used to the little sounds of the place, the humming of insects, the sound of falling water—far-off—the faint clattering sound of a man with a machine in the distance, cutting hay. He was accustomed to the sounds and did not hear them. Here, where I am now, I hear a beating sound. Some one has hung a carpet on a clothesline and is beating it. Another boy shouts, far off—“A-ho, a-ho.”
It is good to go and come. You arrive in a strange place. There is a street facing a railroad track. You get off a train with your bags. Two porters fight for possession of you and the bags as you have seen porters do with strangers in your own town.
The mind is always saying such things to people. “Look, be aware,” it says. The fancy wants to float free of the body. We put a stop to that.
Most of us live our lives like toads, sitting perfectly still, under a plantain leaf. We are waiting for a fly to come our way. When it comes out darts the tongue. We nab it.
That is all. We eat it.
But how many questions to be asked that are never asked. Whence came the fly? Where was he going?
The fly might have been going to meet his sweetheart. He was stopped; a spider ate him.
The train on which I have been riding, a slow one, pauses for a time. All right, I’ll go to the Empire House. As though I cared.
It is a small town—this one—to which I have come. In any event I’ll be uncomfortable here. There will be the same kind of cheap brass beds as at the last place to which I went unexpectedly like this—with bugs in the bed perhaps. A traveling salesman will talk in a loud voice in the next room. He will be talking to a friend, another traveling salesman. “Trade is bad,” one of them will say. “Yes, it’s rotten.”
There will be confidences about women picked up—some words heard, others missed. That is always annoying.
But why did I get off the train here at this particular town? I remember that I had been told there was a lake here—that there was fishing. I thought I would go fishing.
Perhaps I expected to swim. I remember now.
“Porter, where is the Empire House? Oh, the brick one. All right, go ahead. I’ll be along pretty soon. You tell the clerk to save me a room, with a bath, if they have one.”
* * *
I remember what I was thinking about. All my life, since that happened, I have gone off on adventures like this. A man likes to be alone sometimes.
Being alone doesn’t mean being where there are no people. It means being where people are all strangers to you.
* * *
There is a woman crying there. She is getting old, that woman. Well, I am myself no longer young. See how tired her eyes are. There is a younger woman with her. In time that younger woman will look exactly like her mother.
She will have the same patient, resigned look. The skin will sag on her cheeks that are plump now. The mother has a large nose and so has the daughter.
There is a man with them. He is fat and has red veins in his face. For some reason I think he must be a butcher.
He has that kind of hands, that kind of eyes.
I am pretty sure he is the woman’s brother. Her husband is dead. They are putting a coffin on the train.
They are people of no importance. People pass them casually. No one has come to the station to be with them in their hour of trouble. I wonder if they live here. Yes, of course they do. They live somewhere, in a rather mean little house, at the edge of town, or perhaps outside the town. You see the brother is not going away with the mother and daughter. He has just come down to see them off.
They are going, with the body, to another town where the husband, who is dead, formerly lived.
The butcher-like man has taken his sister’s arm. That is a gesture of tenderness. Such people make such gestures only when someone in the family is dead.
The sun shines. The conductor of the train is walking along the station platform and talking to the station-master. They have been laughing loudly, having their little joke.
That conductor is one of the jolly sort. His eyes twinkle, as the saying is. He has his little joke with every station-master, every telegraph operator, baggage man, express man, along the way. There are all kinds of conductors of passenger trains.
There, you see, they are passing the woman whose husband has died and is being taken away somewhere to be buried. They drop their jokes, their laughter. They become silent.
A little path of silence made by that woman in black and her daughter and the fat brother. The little path of silence has started with them at their house, has gone with them along streets to the railroad station, will be with them on the train and in the town to which they are going. They are people of no importance, but they have suddenly become important.
They are symbols of Death. Death is an important, a majestic thing, eh?
* * *
How easily you can comprehend a whole life, when you are in a place like this, in a strange place, among strange people. Everything is so much like other towns you have been in. Lives are made up of little series of circumstances. They repeat themselves, over and over, in towns everywhere, in cities, in all countries.
They are of infinite variety. In Paris, when I was there last year, I went into the Louvre. There were men and women there, making copies of the works of the old masters that were hung on the walls. They were professional copyists.
They worked painstakingly, were trained to do just that kind of work, very exactly.
And yet no one of them could make a copy. There were no copies made.
The little circumstances of no two lives anywhere in the world are just alike.
* * *
You see I have come over into a hotel room now, in this strange town. It is a country-town hotel. There are flies in here. A fly has just alighted on this paper on which I have been writing these impressions. I stopped writing and looked at the fly. There must be billions of flies in the world and yet, I dare say, no two of them are alike.
The circumstances of their lives are not just alike.
* * *
I think I must come away from my own place on trips, such as I am on now, for a specific reason.
At home I live in a certain house. There is my own household, the servants, the people of my household. I am a professor of philosophy in a college in my town, hold a certain definite position there, in the town life and in the college life.
Conversations in the evening, music, people coming into our house.
Myself going to a certain office, then to a class room where I lecture, seeing people there.
I know some things about these people. That is the trouble with me perhaps. I know something but not enough.
My mind, my fancy, becomes dulled looking at them.
I know too much and not enough.
* * *
It is like a house in the street in which I live. There is a particular house in that street—in my home town—I was formerly very curious about. For some reason the people who lived in it were recluses. They seldom came out of their house and hardly ever out of the yard, into the street.
Well, what of all that?
My curiosity was aroused. That is all.
I used to walk past the house with something strangely alive in me. I had figured out this much. An old man with a beard and a white-faced woman lived there. There was a tall hedge and once I looked through. I saw the man walking nervously up and down, on a bit of lawn, under a tree. He was clasping and unclasping his hands and muttering words. The doors and shutters of the mysterious house were all closed. As I looked, the old woman with the white face opened the door a little and looked out at the man. Then the door closed again. She said nothing to him. Did she look at him with love or with fear in her eyes? How do I know? I could not see.
Another time I heard a young woman’s voice, although I never saw a young woman about the place. It was evening and the woman was singing—a rather sweet young woman’s voice it was.
* * *
There you are. That is all. Life is more like that than people suppose. Little odd fragmentary ends of things. That is about all we get. I used to walk past that place all alive, curious. I enjoyed it. My heart thumped a little.
I heard sounds more distinctly, felt more.
* * *
I was curious enough to ask my friends along the street about the people.
“They’re queer,” people
said.
Well, who is not queer?
The point is that my curiosity gradually died. I accepted the queerness of the life of that house. It became a part of the life of my street. I became dulled to it.
* * *
I have become dulled to the life of my own house, or my street, to the lives of my pupils.
“Where am I? Who am I? Whence came I?” Who asks himself these questions any more?
* * *
There is that woman I saw taking her dead husband away on the train. I saw her only for a moment before I walked over to this hotel and came up to this room (an entirely commonplace hotel room it is) but here I sit, thinking of her. I reconstruct her life, go on living the rest of her life with her.
Often I do things like this, come off alone to a strange place like this. “Where are you going?” my wife says to me. “I am going to take a bath,” I say.
My wife thinks I am a bit queer too, but she has grown used to me. Thank God, she is a patient and a good-natured woman.
“I am going to bathe myself in the lives of people about whom I know nothing.”
I will sit in this hotel until I am tired of it and then I will walk in strange streets, see strange houses, strange faces. People will see me.
Who is he?
He is a stranger.
* * *
That is nice. I like that. To be a stranger sometimes, going about in a strange place, having no business there, just walking, thinking, bathing myself.
To give others, the people here in this strange place, a little jump at the heart too—because I am something strange.
Once, when I was a young man I would have tried to pick up a girl. Being in a strange place, I would have tried to get my jump at the heart out of trying to be with her.
Now I do not do that. It is not because I am especially faithful—as the saying goes—to my wife, or that I am not interested in strange and attractive women.
It is because of something else. It may be that I am a bit dirty with life and have come here, to this strange place, to bathe myself in strange life and get clean and fresh again.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 73