* * *
And so I walk in such a strange place. I dream. I let myself have fancies. Already I have been out into the street, into several streets of this town and have walked about. I have aroused in myself a little stream of fresh fancies, clustered about strange lives, and as I walked, being a stranger, going along slowly, carrying a cane, stopping to look into stores, stopping to look into the windows of houses and into gardens, I have, you see, aroused in others something of the same feeling that has been in me.
I have liked that. Tonight, in the houses of this town, there will be something to speak of.
“There was a strange man about. He acted queerly. I wonder who he was.”
“What did he look like?”
An attempt to delve into me too, to describe me. Pictures being made in other minds. A little current of thoughts, fancies, started in others, in me too.
* * *
I sit here in this room in this strange town, in this hotel, feeling oddly refreshed. Already I have slept here. My sleep was sweet. Now it is morning and everything is still. I dare say that, some time today, I shall get on another train and go home.
* * *
But now I am remembering things.
Yesterday, in this town, I was in a barber shop. I got my hair cut. I hate getting my hair cut.
“I am in a strange town, with nothing to do, so I’ll get my hair cut,” I said to myself as I went in.
A man cut my hair. “It rained a week ago,” he said. “Yes,” I said. That is all the conversation there was between us.
However, there was other talk in that barber shop, plenty of it.
A man had been here in this town and had passed some bad checks. One of them was for ten dollars and was made out in the name of one of the barbers in the shop.
The man who passed the checks was a stranger, like myself. There was talk of that.
A man came in who looked like President Coolidge and had his hair cut.
Then there was another man who came for a shave. He was an old man with sunken cheeks and for some reason looked like a sailor. I dare say he was just a farmer. This town is not by the sea.
There was talk enough in there, a whirl of talk.
* * *
I came out thinking.
Well, with me it is like this. A while ago I was speaking of a habit I have formed of going suddenly off like this to some strange place. “I have been doing it ever since it happened,” I said. I used the expression “it happened.”
Well, what happened?
Not so very much.
A girl got killed. She was struck by an automobile. She was a girl in one of my classes.
She was nothing special to me. She was just a girl—a woman, really—in one of my classes. When she was killed I was already married.
* * *
She used to come into my room, into my office. We used to sit in there and talk.
We used to sit and talk about something I had said in my lecture.
“Did you mean this?”
“No, that is not exactly it. It is rather like this.”
I suppose you know how we philosophers talk. We have almost a language of our own. Sometimes I think it is largely nonsense.
I would begin talking to that girl—that woman—and on and on I would go. She had gray eyes. There was a sweet serious look on her face.
* * *
Do you know, sometimes, when I talked to her like that (it is, I am pretty sure, all nonsense), well, I thought . . .
Her eyes seemed to me sometimes to grow a little larger as I talked to her. I had a notion she did not hear what I said.
I did not care much.
I talked so that I would have something to say.
Sometimes, when we were together that way, in my office in the college building, there would come odd times of silence.
* * *
No, it was not silence. There were sounds.
There was a man walking in a hallway, in the college building outside my door. Once when this happened I counted the man’s footsteps. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight.
I was looking at the girl—the woman—and she was looking at me.
* * *
You see I was an older man. I was married.
I am not such an attractive man. I did, however, think she was very beautiful. There were plenty of young fellows about.
* * *
I remember now that when she had been with me like that—after she had left—I used to sit sometimes for hours alone in my office, as I have been sitting here, in this hotel room, in a strange town.
* * *
I sat thinking of nothing. Sounds came in to me. I remembered things of my boyhood.
I remembered things about my courtship and marriage. I sat like that dumbly, a long time.
I was dumb, but I was at the same time more aware than I had ever been in my life.
It was at that time I got the reputation with my wife of being a little queer. I used to go home, after sitting dumbly like that, with that girl, that woman, and I was even more dumb and silent when I got home.
* * *
“Why don’t you talk?” my wife said.
“I’m thinking,” I said.
I wanted her to believe that I was thinking of my work, my studies. Perhaps I was.
* * *
Well, the girl, the woman, was killed. An automobile struck her when she was crossing a street. They said she was absent-minded—that she walked right in front of a car. I was in my office, sitting there, when a man, another professor, came in and told me. “She is quite dead, was quite dead when they picked her up,” he said.
“Yes.” I dare say he thought I was pretty cold and unsympathetic—a scholar, eh, having no heart.
“It was not the driver’s fault. He was quite blameless.”
“She walked right out in front of the car?”
“Yes.”
I remember that at the moment I was fingering a pencil. I did not move. I must have been sitting like that for two or three hours.
I got out and walked. I was walking when I saw a train. So I got on.
Afterward I telephoned to my wife. I don’t remember what I told her at that time.
It was all right with her. I made some excuse. She is a patient and a good-natured woman. We have four children. I dare say she is absorbed in the children.
I came to a strange town and I walked about there. I forced myself to observe the little details of life. That time I stayed three or four days and then I went home.
* * *
At intervals I have been doing the same thing ever since. It is because at home I grow dull to little things. Being in a strange place like this makes me more aware. I like it. It makes me more alive. So you see, it is morning and I have been in a strange town, where I know no one and where no one knows me.
As it was yesterday morning, when I came here, to this hotel room, there are sounds. A boy whistles in the street. Another boy, far off, shouts “A-ho.”
There are voices in the street, below my window, strange voices. Some one, somewhere in this town, is beating a carpet. I hear the sound of the arrival of a train. The sun is shining.
I may stay here in this town another day or I may go on to another town. No one knows where I am. I am taking this bath in life, as you see, and when I have had enough of it I shall go home feeling refreshed.
These Mountaineers
* * *
WHEN I had lived in the Southwest Virginia mountains for some time, people of the North, when I went up there, used to ask me many questions about the mountain people. They did it whenever I went to the city. You know how people are. They like to have everything ticketed.
The rich are so and so, the poor are so and so, the politicians, the people of the Western Coast. As though you could draw one figure and say—“there it is. That’s it.”
The men and women of the mountains were what they were. They were people. They were poor whites. That certainly meant that th
ey were white and poor. Also they were mountaineers.
After the factories began to come down into this country, into Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, a lot of them went, with their families, to work in the factories and to live in mill towns. For a time all was peace and quiet, and then strikes broke out. Every one who reads newspapers knows about that. There was a lot of writing in newspapers about these mountain people. Some of it was pretty keen.
But there had been a lot of romancing about them before that. That sort of thing never did any one much good.
So I was walking alone in the mountains and had got down into what in the mountain country is called “a hollow.” I was lost. I had been fishing for trout in mountain streams and was tired and hungry. There was a road of a sort I had got into. It would have been difficult to get a car over that road. “This ought to be a good whisky-making country,” I thought.
In the hollow along which the road went I came to a little town. Well, now, you would hardly call it a town. There were six or eight little unpainted frame houses and, at a cross roads, a general store.
The mountains stretched away, above the poor little houses. On both sides of the road were the magnificent hills. You understand, when you have been down there, why they are called the “Blue Ridge.” They are always blue, a glorious blue. What a country it must have been before the lumber men came! Over near my place in the mountains men were always talking of the spruce forests of former days. Many of them worked in the lumber camps. They speak of soft moss into which a man sank almost to the knees, the silence of the forest, the great trees.
The great forest is gone now, but the young trees are growing. Much of the country will grow nothing but timber.
The store before which I stood that day was closed, but an old man sat on a little porch in front. He said that the storekeeper also carried the mail and was out on his route but that he would be back and open his store in an hour or two.
I had thought I might at least get some cheese and crackers or a can of sardines.
The man on the porch was old. He was an evil-looking old man. He had gray hair and a gray beard and might have been seventy, but I could see that he was a tough-bodied old fellow.
I asked my way back over the mountain to the main road and had started to move off up the hollow when he called to me. “Are you the man who has moved in here from the North and has built a house in here?”
There is no use my trying to reproduce the mountain speech. I am not skilled at it.
The old man invited me to his house to eat. “You don’t mind eating beans, do you?” he asked.
I was hungry and would be glad to have beans. I would have eaten anything at the moment. He said he hadn’t any woman, that his old woman was dead. “Come on,” he said, “I think I can fix you up.”
We went up a path, over a half mountain and into another hollow, perhaps a mile away. It was amazing. The man was old. The skin on his face and neck was wrinkled like an old man’s skin and his legs and body were thin, but he walked at such a pace that to follow him kept me panting.
It was a hot, still day in the hills. Not a breath of air stirred. That old man was the only being I saw that day in that town. If any one else lived there he had kept out of sight.
The old man’s house was on the bank of another mountain stream. That afternoon, after eating with him, I got some fine trout out of the stream.
But this isn’t a fishing story. We went to his house.
It was dirty and small and seemed about to fall down. The old man was dirty. There were layers of dirt on his old hands and on his wrinkled neck. When we were in the house, which had but one room on the ground floor, he went to a small stove. “The fire is out,” he said. “Do you care if the beans are cold?”
“No,” I said. By this time I did not want any beans and wished I had not come. There was something evil about this old mountain man. Surely the romancers could not have made much out of him.
Unless they played on the Southern hospitality chord. He had invited me there. I had been hungry. The beans were all he had.
He put some of them on a plate and put them on a table before me. The table was a home-made one covered with a red oil cloth, now quite worn. There were large holes in it. Dirt and grease clung about the edges of the holes. He had wiped the plate, on which he had put the beans, on the sleeve of his coat.
But perhaps you have not eaten beans prepared in the mountains, in the mountain way. They are the staff of life down there. Without beans there would be no life in some of the hills. The beans are, when prepared by a mountain woman and served hot, often delicious. I do not know what they put in them or how they cook them, but they are unlike any beans you will find anywhere else in the world.
As Smithfield ham, when it is real Smithfield ham, is unlike any other ham.
But beans cold, beans dirty, beans served on a plate wiped on the sleeve of that coat . . .
I sat looking about. There was a dirty bed in the room in which we sat and an open stairway, leading up to the room above.
Some one moved up there. Some one walked barefooted across the floor. There was silence for a time and then it happened again.
You must get the picture of a very hot still place between hills. It was June. The old man had become silent. He was watching me. Perhaps he wanted to see whether or not I was going to scorn his hospitality. I began eating the beans with a dirty spoon. I was many miles away from any place I had ever been before.
And then there was that sound again. I had got the impression that the old man had told me his wife was dead, that he lived alone.
How did I know it was a woman upstairs? I did know.
“Have you got a woman up there?” I asked. He grinned, a toothless malicious grin, as though to say, “Oh, you’re curious, eh?”
And then he laughed, a queer cackle.
“She ain’t mine,” he said.
We sat in silence after that and then there was the sound again. I heard bare feet walking across a plank floor.
Now the feet were descending the crude open stairs. Two legs appeared, two thin, young girl’s legs.
She didn’t look to be over twelve or thirteen.
She came down, almost to the foot of the stairs, and then stopped and sat down.
How dirty she was, how thin, what a wild look she had! I have never seen a wilder-looking creature. Her eyes were bright. They were like the eyes of a wild animal.
And, at that, there was something about her face. In many of these young mountain faces there is a look it is difficult to explain—it is a look of breeding, of aristocracy. I know no other word for the look.
And she had it.
And now the two were sitting there, and I was trying to eat. Suppose I rose and threw the dirty beans out at the open door. I might have said, “Thank you, I have enough.” I didn’t dare.
But perhaps they weren’t thinking of the beans. The old man began to speak of the girl, sitting ten feet from him, as though she were not there.
“She ain’t mine,” he said. “She came here. Her pop died. She ain’t got any one.”
I am making a bad job of trying to reproduce his speech.
He was giggling now, a toothless old man’s giggle. “Ha, she won’t eat.
“She’s a hell cat,” he said.
He reached over and touched me on the arm. “You know what. She’s a hell cat. You couldn’t satisfy her. She had to have her a man.
“And she got one too.”
“Is she married?” I asked, half whispering the words, not wanting her to hear.
He laughed at the idea. “Ha. Married, eh?”
He said it was a young man from farther down the hollow. “He lives here with us,” the old man said laughing, and as he said it the girl rose and started back up the stairs. She had said nothing, but her young eyes had looked at us, filled with hatred. As she went up the stairs the old man kept laughing at her, his queer, high-pitched, old man’s laugh. It was really a giggle. “H
a, she can’t eat. When she tries to eat she can’t keep it down. She thinks I don’t know why. She’s a hell cat. She would have a man and now she’s got one.
“Now she can’t eat.”
I fished in the creek in the hollow during the afternoon and toward evening began to get trout. They were fine ones. I got fourteen of them and got back over a mountain and into the main road before dark.
What took me back into the hollow I don’t know. The face of the girl possessed me.
And then there was good trout fishing there. That stream at least had not been fished out.
When I went back I put a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket. “Well,” I thought—I hardly know what I did think. There were notions in my head, of course.
The girl was very, very young.
“She might have been kept there by that old man,” I thought, “and by some young mountain rough. There might be a chance for her.”
I thought I would give her the twenty dollars. “If she wants to get out perhaps she can,” I thought. Twenty dollars is a lot of money in the hills.
It was just another hot day when I got in there again and the old man was not at home. At first I thought there was no one there. The house stood alone by a hardly discernible road and near the creek. The creek was clear and had a swift current. It made a chattering sound.
I stood on the bank of the creek before the house and tried to think.
“If I interfere . . .
Well, let’s admit it. I was a bit afraid. I thought I had been a fool to come back.
And then the girl suddenly came out of the house and came toward me. There was no doubt about it. She was that way. And unmarried, of course.
At least my money, if I could give it to her, would serve to buy her some clothes. The ones she had on were very ragged and dirty. Her feet and legs were bare. It would be winter by the time the child was born.
A man came out of the house. He was a tall young mountain man. He looked rough. “That’s him,” I thought. He said nothing.
He was dirty and unkempt as the old man had been and as the child was.
At any rate she was not afraid of me. “Hello, you are back here,” she said. Her voice was clear.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 74