Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under a stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the room. She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam’s presence, raised her skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the stockinged foot and the other on the bare one, she turned to him. “We will go back to your house. I think you are right. You need a woman there.”

  In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam. He felt he had accomplished something — something he had set out to accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith’s, began planning the evening he would spend with her.

  “I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I will do when I go to the city,” he thought.

  At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below the grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she could see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and shouted as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went through the gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon getting to his mother’s bedside.

  In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the kitchen stove. The daughter had gone.

  Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside his mother’s bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. “She must be asleep,” he thought.

  At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour woman still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his mother’s bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little stand beside the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a tall, aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung upon the wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a portrait of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam and his sister.

  Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the great lady who looked down at her.

  “It is a fraud,” he had declared, irritated by what he believed his sister’s devotion to one of the father’s pretensions. “It is a fraud he has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people believe he is something big.”

  The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a spasm of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the floor with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon her knees before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook with anger and grief.

  Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister had seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy’s outbreaks.

  “She likes it,” he had thought, dismissing the incident. “She likes believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them than not.”

  Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer’s house and beat on the door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp above her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through the streets to the front of Sam’s house thinking of the terrible choked and disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to Telfer’s arm as she had clung to Sam’s, unconscious of her bare head and scanty attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the stable.

  In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.

  Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.

  “What a muddle-headed old fool I am!” he cried. “I am getting old and addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old war horse! He was in at Wildman’s grocery after nine o’clock to-night covered with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman. Poor Sam and you — to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass! Fool! Fool! What a fool I have become!”

  In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by the stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the false teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his head upon the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand of Jane McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped over and kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the doorway bearing the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to his lips, commanded silence.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE FUNERAL OF Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He thought that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened — she looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house. They were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour; and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were massed. When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister would have talked in the same way — blatantly and without knowledge — of the virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his trade.

  During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor at Sam’s feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy. The note was from John Telfer.

  “I will not come to your mother’s funeral,” he wrote. “I respected your mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in Wildman’s, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore’s shop, I will go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the dead.”

  The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something that had slipped from him.

  “It is good sense, after all,” he thought, and realised that even in the days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact that Jane McPherson’s long, hard role was just being played out to the end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish. He arose, interrupting the minister’s discourse. Mary Underwood had come in just as the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the door leading into the street. Sam crowded past the women who stared and the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking and listening with breathless curiosity, “It is from John Telfer. Read it. Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door.”

  In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their heads t
ogether and their hands before their faces, nodded toward the school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had created, went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting until the talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the streets should be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.

  “I have become older than all of these people here,” thought the youth. “They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of my hand.”

  Mary Underwood, lacking Sam’s unconsciousness of the people, looked about with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their heads together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been thrust the face of an old enemy to her — the scandal of a small town. Picking up the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along the street. The old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and ennobled by the terror through which she had passed with him that night in the rain. Going to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out along a country road. At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat down on a log, and read Telfer’s note. From the soft ground into which her feet sank there came the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears came into her eyes. She thought that in a few days much had come to her. She had got a boy upon whom she could pour out the mother love in her heart, and she had made a friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded with fear and doubt.

  For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman’s, and walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the country roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating horses, ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and in the evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom window. Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground. In his mind was the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store wearied him and when he went alone into the country he found himself accompanied by the voices of all of those he had come out of town to escape. On the street corner the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister stopped him and talked of the future life as he had stopped and talked to a bare-legged newsboy.

  “Your mother,” he said, “has but gone before. It is for you to get into the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning to you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to join her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ. Find truth.”

  Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The minister’s talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of which he got but one thought.

  “Find truth,” he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his mind play with the idea. “The best men are all trying to do that. They spend their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth.”

  He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the interpretation he had put upon the minister’s words. The terrible moments in the kitchen followed by his mother’s death had put a new look of seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public affairs.

  “He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour’s wife,” said John Telfer.

  Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken him to its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had encouraged him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father, and patronised him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a Saturday night, there was always some one to speak a word to him of his morals and to shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected to remain there, with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the Savings Bank — built to that during his years with Freedom Smith — he might soon become one of the town’s solid men.

  He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the train and be off.

  One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken on a new meaning to him since any day might see him on such a train bound into his new life.

  A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed by two women.

  “Here, watch these,” he said to the women, setting the bags upon the platform; “I will go for the tickets,” and disappeared into the darkness.

  The two women resumed their interrupted talk.

  “Ed’s wife has been poorly these ten years,” said one of them. “It will be better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long ride. I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to be train-sick.”

  Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John Telfer’s old talks with him.

  “They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away from here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain.”

  He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending shoes on a side street back of Geiger’s drug store and the two women, one short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery shop and were Eleanor Telfer’s only competitors.

  “Well, the town knows her now for what she is,” said the tall woman. “Milly Peters says she won’t rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and it was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane McPherson working all these years and then having such goings-on in her house when she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the evening and came home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed, hanging on his arm. Milly’s mother looked out of the window and saw them. Then she ran out by the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep. She wanted to see what was up. And the bold hussy came right into the house with Sam. Then she went away, and after a while back she came with that John Telfer. Milly is going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it out. I guess it will bring her down, too. And there is no telling how many other men in this town Mary Underwood is running with. Milly says — —”

  The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring and swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.

  “Stop it!” growled Sam, beating the two heads together, “stop your dirty lies! — you ugly she-beasts!”

  Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin. Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.

  “They were telling lies about Mary Underwood,” he shouted. “She tried to save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her.”

  The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along the station platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and confronted the surprised and frightened shoemaker.

  “What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?” he growled.

  Hurrying through the streets Sam’s mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut it off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.

  “To be saying that of her, of that white soul!” he exclaimed aloud in the empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman who had put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning in him.


  He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a swinging blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to his own house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and quiet. He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane McPherson’s funeral.

  “It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another,” he thought.

  For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy he saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They were the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers. He remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the papers and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational murder cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on their tongues.

  In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes — only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.