The daughter, then a young woman of seventeen, had to spend most of her life in a wheel chair. It was possible that, with plenty of money to send her off to some famous physician, perhaps to Europe . . . the woman in her letter suggested something of the sort . . . she might be cured.
“Oho!” The doctor was one of the men who throw money about, cannot save it, cannot accumulate. He was very careless about sending bills. His wife had undertaken that job but there were many calls he did not report to her. He forgot them, often purposely.
“My husband need know nothing of all this.”
“Is that so? What, that little ferret-eyed man? Why, he has never missed a money bet in his life.”
The doctor took the letter to his wife who read it and smiled. I have already said that his wife was in her own way beautiful. Her beauty was certainly not very obvious. She had been through too much, had been too badly hurt in the loss of her sons. She had grown thin and, in repose, there was a seeming hardness about her mouth and about her eyes that were of a curious greenish grey. The great beauty of the doctor’s wife only came to life when she smiled. There was then a curious, a quite wonderful transformation. “By this woman, hard or soft, hurt or unhurt, I will stand until I die.
“It is not always, however, so easy,” said the doctor. He spoke of something. We had gone for an afternoon fishing and were sitting and resting on a flat rock, under a small tree by a mountain brook. We had brought some beer packed in ice in a hamper. “It is not a story you may care to use.” I have already said that the doctor is a great reader. “Nowadays, it seems there is not much interest in human relations. Human relations are out of style. You must write now of the capitalists and of the proletariat. You must give things an economic slant. Hurrah for economics! Economics forever!”
I have spoken of his wife’s smile. The doctor seldom smiled. He laughed heartily, with a great roar of laughter that could frighten the trout for a mile along a stream. His big body and his big head shook. He enjoyed his own laughter.
“And so it shall be an old fashioned story of love, eh, what?”
Another woman had come to him. It had all happened some two or three years before the summer when I knew him and when I spent so much time in his company. There was a well-to-do family, he said, that came into that country for the summer and they had an only child, a daughter, crippled as was his own daughter. They were not, he said, extremely rich but they had money enough or at first he thought they had. He said that the father, the head of that family, was some sort of manufacturer. “I never saw him but twice and then we did not have much talk, although I think we liked each other. He let me know that he was very busy and I saw that he was a little worried. It was because things at his factory were not going so well.
“There was the man’s wife and daughter and a servant and they had brought for the daughter a nurse. She was a very strong woman, a Pole. They engaged me to come on my regular rounds to their house. They had taken a house in the country, some three miles out of town. There were certain instructions from their city doctor. There was the wish to have within call a doctor, to be at hand in case of an emergency.
“And so I went there.” I have already spoken of sitting with the doctor at the end of an afternoon’s fishing. Moments and hours with such people as the doctor are always afterward remembered. There is something . . . shall I call it inner laughter . . . to speak in the terms of fighters, “They can take it.” They have something . . . it may be knowledge, or better yet maturity . . . surely a rare enough quality, that last, that maturity. You get the feeling from all sorts of people.
There is a little farmer who has worked for years. For no fault of his own . . . as everyone knows, nature can be very whimsical and cruel . . . long droughts coming, corn withering, hail in the young crops, or sudden pests of insects coming suddenly, destroying all. And so everything goes. You imagine such a one, struggling on into late middle life, trying, let us say, to get money to educate his children, to give them a chance he did not have, a man not afraid of work, an upstanding straight-going man.
And so all is gone. Let us think of him thus, say on a fall day. His little place, fields he has learned to love, as all real workers love the materials in which they work, to be sold over his head. You imagine him, the sun shining. He takes a walk alone over the fields. His old wife, who has also worked as he has, with rough hands and careworn face . . . she is in the house, has been trying to brace him up. “Never mind, John. We’ll start over again. We’ll make it yet.” The children with solemn faces. The wife would really like to go alone into a room and cry. “We’ll make it yet, eh.”
“The hell we will. Not us.”
He says nothing of the sort. He walks across his fields, goes into a wood. He stands for a while there, perhaps at the edge of the wood, looking over the fields.
And then the laughter, down inside him . . . laughter not bitter. “It has happened to others. I am not alone in this. All over the world men are getting it in the neck as I am now . . . men are being forced into wars in which they do not believe . . . there is a Jew, an upright man, cultured, a man of fine feeling, suddenly insulted in a hotel or in the street . . . the bitter necessity of standing and taking it . . . a Negro scholar spat upon by some ignorant white.
“Well, men, here we are. Life is like this.
“But I do not go back on life. I have learned to laugh, not loudly, boisterously, bitterly, because it happens that I, by some strange chance, have been picked upon by fate. I laugh quietly.
“Why?
“Why, because I laugh.”
There must be thousands of men and women . . . they may be the finest flowers of humanity . . . who will understand the above. It is the secret of America’s veneration for Abraham Lincoln. He was that sort of man.
“And so.
“So I went to that house.” It was my friend, the country doctor, telling his tale. “There was the woman, the mother of the crippled girl, a very gentle-looking woman, in some odd way like my wife. I have told you that I had a talk with the girl’s father, the manufacturer.
“There was the crippled girl herself, destined perhaps to spend her life in bed, or going laboriously about in a wheel chair. Surely she had done nothing, this girl, that God, or nature, call it what you will, should have done this to her. Would it not be wonderful to have some of these cock-sure people explain the mystery of such things in the world? There is a job for your thinker, eh what?”
And then there was the woman, the Polish woman. The doctor, with a queer smile, began to speak of something that often happens suddenly to men and women. He was a man at that time forty-seven years old and the Polish woman . . . he never told me her name . . . might have been thirty. I have already said that the doctor was physically very strong, have tried to give the suggestion of a fine animal. There are men like that who are sometimes subject to very direct and powerful sex calls. The calls descend on them as storms descend on peaceful fields. It happened to him with the Polish woman the moment he saw her and as it turned out it also happened to her.
He said that she was in the room with the crippled girl when he went in. She was sitting in a chair near the bed. She arose and they faced each other. It all happened, I gather, at once. “I am the doctor.”
“Yes,” she said. There was something slightly foreign in her pronunciation of even the one simple English word, a slight shade of something he thought colored the word, made it extraordinarily nice. For a moment he just stood, looking at her as she did at him. She was a rather large woman, strong in the shoulders, big breasted, in every way, he said, physically full and rich. She had, he said, something very full and strong about her head. He spoke particularly of the upper part of her face, the way the eyes were set in the head, the broad white forehead, the shape of the head. “It is odd,” he said, “now that she is gone, that I do not remember the lower part of her face.” He began to speak of woman’s beauty. “All this nonsense you writers write, concerning beauty in women,
” he said. “You know yourself that the extraordinary beauty of my own wife is not in the color of her eyes, the shape of her mouth . . . this rosebud mouth business, Cupid’s bow, eyes of blue, or, damn it man, of red or pink or lavender for that matter.” I remember thinking, as the man talked, that he might have made a fine sculptor. He was emphasizing form, what he felt in the Polish woman as great beauty of line. “In my wife beauty comes at rare intervals but then how glorious it is. It comes, as I think you may have noted, with her rare and significant smile.”
He was standing in that room, with the little crippled girl and the Polish woman.
“For a time, I do not know how long, I couldn’t move, could not take my eyes from her.
“My God, how crazy it now seems,” the doctor said.
“There she was. Voices I had never heard before were calling in me and, as I later found out, in her also. The strangeness of it. ‘Why there you are, at last, at last, there you are.’
“You have to keep it all in mind,” said the doctor, “my love of my wife, what my wife and I had been through, our suffering together over the loss of our two sons, our one child, our daughter, a cripple as you know.
“And then our daily life together for years. My wife had done something very fine for me. You know how I am. But for her I might have starved. I could not remember to send bills, was always getting into debt, spending too freely. She had taken my affairs in hand. She attended to everything for me.
“And there I was, you see, suddenly stricken like that . . . by love, ha! What does any sensible man know of this love?
“Why, it was pure lust in me and nothing else. I did not know that woman, had never seen her until that moment, did not know her name. As it was with me so it turned out it was with her. In some way I knew that. Afterwards she told me, and I believed her, that, as the Bible likes to put it, she had never known man.
“I stood there, you understand, looking at her and she at me.” He spoke of all this happening, as he presently realized, when with an effort he got himself in hand, in the presence of the little crippled girl in her bed. “It was almost as though I had, in that moment, in the child’s presence, actually taken the woman. It seemed to me that she was something I had all of my life been wanting with a kind of terrible force, you understand, with my entire being.”
The doctor’s mind went off at a tangent. The reader is not to think that he told me all this in a high excited voice. Quite the contrary. His voice was very low and quiet and I remember the scene before us as we sat on the flat rock above the mountain stream . . . we had driven a hundred miles to get to that stream . . . the soft hills in the distance beyond the stream, which just there went dashing down over the rocks, the deepening light over distant hills and distant forests. Later we got some very nice trout out of a pool below the rapids above which we sat.
It may have been the stream that sent him off into a side tale of a fishing trip taken alone, on a moonlight night, in a very wild mountain stream, on the night after he had buried his second son, the strangeness of that night, himself wading in a rushing stream, feeling his way sometimes in the half darkness, touches of moonlight on occasional pools, the casts made into such pools, often dark forests coming down to the stream’s edge, the cast and, now and then, the strike, himself standing in the swift running water.
Himself fighting, all that night, not to be overcome by the loss of the second and last of his sons, the utter strangeness of what seemed to him that night a perfectly primitive world. “As though,” he said, “I had stepped off into a world never before known to man, untouched by any man.”
And then the strike, perhaps of a fine big trout . . . the sudden sharp feeling of life out there at the end of a slender cord running between it and him . . . the fight for life out there and, at the other end of the cord, in him.
The fight to save himself from despair.
Was it the same thing between him and the Polish woman? He said he did manage at last to free himself from the immediate thing. The city doctor had written him a letter. “I am told you have yourself a daughter, a sufferer from infantile paralysis.” My friend had thought of the city doctor. “He must have been a man of sense.”
“We know so very little,” the city doctor had said. “There is perhaps nothing we can do. I do not quite know why it is but the foolish people seem to like to have one of us about, within call.” My friend, the country doctor, made on that day of his first visit a passing examination of the child and went on his way.
“So she is the nurse they have brought here,” he thought that time when he first saw her. He said he had a terrible week, a time of intense jealousy. “Would you believe it, it did not seem possible to me that any man could resist that woman,” he said. He suspected the child’s father. “That man, that manufacturer . . . he is her lover. It cannot be otherwise.” The doctor laughed. “As for my wife, she was, for the time, utterly out of my life.
“Why, I do not mean to say I did not respect her. What a word, eh, that respect. I even told myself that I loved her. For the rest of the week I was in a muddle, could not remember what patients needed my services. I kept missing calls, and of course my wife, who, as I have told you, attends to all the details of my life, was disturbed.
“And, at that, she may well have been deeply aware. I do not think that people ever successfully lie to each other.”
It was during that week he saw and talked briefly to the manufacturer from the city, the father of the crippled child, going there, to that house, he said, hoping again to see the woman. He did not see her and as for the man . . . “I had been having such silly suspicions . . . I wonder yet whether or not, at the time, I knew how silly they were.
“The manufacturer was a man in terrible trouble. Afterwards I learned that at just that time his affairs were going to pieces. He stood to lose all he had gained by a lifetime of work. He was thinking of his wife and of his crippled daughter. He might have to begin life again, perhaps as a workman, with a workman’s pay. His daughter would perhaps, all her life, be needing the care of physicians.”
I gathered that the city man had tried to take the country doctor into his confidence. They had gone into the yard of the country house and had stood together, the doctor’s heart beating heavily. “I am near her. She is there in the house. If I were a real man I would go to her at once, tell her how I feel. In some way I know that this terrible hunger in me is in her also.” The man, the manufacturer, was trying to tell him.
“Yes, yes, of course, it is all right.”
There were certain words said. The man in trouble was trying to explain to him.
“Doctor, I will be very grateful if you can feel that you can come here, that we can depend upon you. I am a stranger to you. It may be you will get no pay for your trouble.”
“Aha! What, in God’s name, could keep me away?”
He did not say the words. “It is all right. I understand. It is all right.”
The doctor waited a few days and then he went again. He said he was asleep in his own house, or rather was lying in his bed. Of a sudden he determined upon something. He arose. To leave the house he had to pass through his wife’s room. “It is,” he said, “a great mistake for a man and wife to give up sleeping together. There is something in the perfectly natural and healthy fact of being nightly so close physically to the other, your sworn companion in life. It should not be given up.” The doctor and his wife had, however, I gathered, given it up. He went through her room and she was awake. “It is you, Harry?” she asked.
Yes, it was he.
“And you are going out? I have not heard any call. I have been wide awake.”
It was a white moonlit night, just such a night as the one when he went in his desperation over the loss of his second son to wade in the mountain stream.
It was a moonlit night and the moonlight was streaming into his wife’s room and fell upon her face. It was one of the times when she was, for some perverse reason, most beautiful to hi
m.
“And I had got out of bed to go to that woman, had thought out a plan.”
He would go to that house, would arouse and speak to the mistress of the house. “There has been an accident. I need a nurse for the night. There is no one available.”
He would get the Polish woman into his car.
“I was sure . . . I don’t know why . . . that she felt as I did. As I had been lying so profoundly disturbed in my bed, so she in her bed had been lying.”
She was almost a stranger to him. “She wants me. I know she does.”
He had got into his wife’s room. “Well, you see, when at night I had to go out, to answer a call, it was my custom to go to her, to kiss her before I left. It was a simple enough thing. I could not do it.
“I know that the Polish woman is waiting for me, that she also aches, that she hungers for me. I will take her into my car. We will turn into a wood, and there, in the moonlight . . .
“A man cannot help what he is. When I have been with her this one time it may be that things will get clear.”
He was hurrying thus through his wife’s room.
“No, my dear, I have had no call.
“There is a feeling has come to me,” he said. “It is that girl, the crippled one, crippled as is our Katie.” Katie was the name of his daughter. “I have told you of her. It is, my dear, as though a voice has been calling me.
“And what a lie, what a terrible lie, and to that woman, my own wife.
“All right. I accepted that. There was a voice calling to me. It was the voice of that strange woman, the woman I scarcely knew, who had never spoken but the one word to me.”
The doctor was hurrying through his wife’s room. There was a stairway that led directly down out of the room. His crippled daughter slept in another room on the same floor and a servant, a colored woman who had been in the household for years, slept in the daughter’s room on a cot. The doctor had got through his wife’s room and was on the stairs when his wife spoke to him.
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 88