“I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your offer. This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my life. I want you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain things more than I want you or any other man.”
There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he wanted something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed through his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger idea than he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man who stood on the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of a purpose in life, the dreams of the last few weeks — all of these were a part of the eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals waiting to be fed. “We must have it all out here and now,” he told himself. “I must not let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I must not let her be.
“Do not think,” he said, “that I haven’t tenderness for you. I am filled with it. But I want to have our talk. I want to know what you expect me to believe and how you want me to live.”
He felt her hand stiffen in his.
“Whether or not we are worth while to each other,” she added.
“Yes,” he said.
And then she began to talk, telling him in a quiet steady voice that steadied something in him what she wanted to make out of her life. Her idea was one of service to mankind through children. She had seen girl friends of hers, with whom she had gone to school, grow up and marry. They had wealth and education, fine well-trained bodies, and they had been married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or two who had married poor men had only done so to satisfy a passion in themselves, and after marriage had joined the others in the hungry pursuit of pleasure.
“They do nothing at all,” she said, “to repay the world for the things given them, the wealth and well-trained bodies and the disciplined minds. They go through life day after day and year after year wasting themselves and come in the end to nothing but indolent, slovenly vanity.”
She had thought it all out and had tried to plan for herself a life with other ends, and wanted a husband in accord with her ideas.
“That isn’t so difficult,” she said, “I can find a man whom I can control and who will believe as I believe. My money gives me that power. But I want him to be a real man, a man of ability, a man who does things for himself, one fitted by his life and his achievements to be the father of children who do things. And so I began thinking about you. I got the men who come to the house to talk of you.”
She hung her head and laughed like a bashful boy.
“I know much of the story of your early life out in that Iowa town,” she said. “I got the story of your life and your achievements out there from some one who knew you well.”
The idea seemed wonderfully simple and beautiful to Sam. It seemed to add tremendously to the dignity and nobility of his feeling for her. He stopped in the path and swung her about facing him. They were alone in that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night had settled over them. In the grass at their feet a cricket sang loudly. He made a movement to take her into his arms.
“It is wonderful,” he said.
“Wait,” she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. “It isn’t so simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying energy in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to children — our children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving up your dreams of power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after two or three have come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to make a mother of me and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be a new kind of father with something maternal in you. You will have to be patient and studious and kind. You will have to think of these things at night instead of thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live wholly for me because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength and courage and your good sane outlook on things. And then when they come you will have to give all these things to them day after day in a thousand little ways.”
Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot tears stood in his eyes.
The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down the path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two happy children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by a park policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking up.
“I’ll tell the colonel in the morning,” he said.
“What will he say?” she murmured, musingly.
“Damned ingrate,” Sam mimicked the colonel’s blustering throat tones.
She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.
“How soon?” he asked.
She put her head down near his.
“We’ll waste no time,” she said, blushing.
And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his first kiss from Sue Rainey’s lips.
After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time, wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. “I will live for this! I will live for this!” he kept saying over and over to himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue’s arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.
At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
“I must go to her — I must go to her at her house — now — tonight — and tell her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me,” he thought.
And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
“It cleanses me! this cleanses me!” he said to himself.
He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman’s grocery when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing from the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how strangely perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been. “Sex is a solution, not a menace — it is wonderful,” he told himself without knowing fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his lips.
When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of the sleeping houses was striking three.
CHAPTER VI
ONE EVENING, SIX weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in Jackson Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake Michigan steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the distance. They had been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom’s big house on the south side; and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being carried out into darkness, vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each more or less afraid of the other. They sat in silence, looking at the blinking lights and listening to the low voices of their fellow passengers, also sitting in the chairs along the deck or strolling leisurely about, and to the wash of the water along the sides of the boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the solemnity of the marriage ser
vice had built up between them.
A picture floated in Sam’s mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this hour when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from her the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being able to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy in his mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had been half overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame that had swept over him that night when she had given her word and he had walked hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him that from among the guests standing about should arise a voice crying, “Stop! Do not go on! Let me tell you of this fellow — this McPherson!” And then he had seen her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious Colonel Tom and he had taken her hand to become one with her, two curious, feverish, strangely different human beings, taking a vow in the name of their God, with the flowers banked about them and the eyes of people upon them.
When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in Jackson Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered and roared and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam remained cool and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming the door and shouting, “Upstart! Damned upstart!” and Sam had gone smiling back to his desk, mildly disappointed. “I told Sue he would say ‘Ingrate,’” he thought, “I am losing my skill at guessing just what he will do and say.”
The colonel’s rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting of Sam to chance callers as “the best business man in America,” and in the face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the approaching marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected him of secretly calling on the telephone those newspapers whose representatives had not crossed his trail.
During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making between Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country or to the parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious eager passion of suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew in Sam’s brain. To live for the young things that would presently come to them, to be simple, direct, and natural, like the trees or the beasts of the field, and then to have the native honesty of such a life illuminated and ennobled by a mutual intelligent purpose to make their young something finer and better than the things in Nature by the intelligent use of their own good minds and bodies. In the shops and on the streets the hurrying men and women took on a new significance to him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose might be in their lives, and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a marriage with a little jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material, as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in the great workshop of the universe. “Marriage is a port, a beginning, a point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage of life,” he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. “All that goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage.” Or, again, one night when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about them in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of excited girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in against the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel, with his head in her lap and whisper, “It is not the love of a woman that grips me, Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the great mystery. This — this is why we are here — this justifies us.”
Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love for her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down upon his shoulder.
“Not yet, Sam,” she whispered, “not with these hundreds of people sleeping and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost within touch of our hands.”
They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the clean wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the darkness in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently, speechless with happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between them.
At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets, and camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods passing the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a sawmill that stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean sweet smell of the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of the water tumbling over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen working among the floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air, and above the song of the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting song, the song of love and of life singing in the hearts of husband and wife.
In a little roughly-built lumberman’s hotel they ate breakfast in a room overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing the door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold swiftly-flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages wrapped in blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little wharf beside the hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two strange boys, saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his breast.
On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the current. During the six weeks’ waiting in Chicago she had taught him the essentials of the canoeist’s art and, now, as he shot the canoe under the bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the prow of the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the shore.
At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill and on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they made their first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like feathers in the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while Sue, at the foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared their first cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out her rifle and gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness making the lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the young night, with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold wind blowing into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under the trees to where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the stormy waters of a great sea before their eyes, and lay down together for their first long tender embrace.
There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one’s first knowledge of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves and to have that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life, adds point and flavour to the experience. In his busy striving, nickel-seeking boyhood in the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in his young manhood of scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not thought of vacations and resting places. He had walked on country roads with John Telfer and Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing their ideas, blind and deaf to the little life in the grass, in the leafy branches of the trees and in the air about him. In clubs, and about hotels and barrooms in the city, he had heard men talk of life in the open, and had said to himself, “When my time comes I will taste these things.”
And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the river, floating down quiet little side streams in the m
oonlight, listening to the night call of birds, or watching the flight of frightened wild things as he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of the great forest about them.
At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the blankets under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at Sue lying beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across her face and her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just the quiet of her expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he turned reluctantly to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure, go on looking at her all night.
For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and lay looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that when he awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that she knew these secret love passages gave to both.
They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind of people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away to the woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open. He discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay did not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it did, nodding his head and laughing.
“But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it,” he said, “the danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real fun with them.”
Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always as one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and he came to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making because she admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of the out-of-doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out of the solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they called to her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show her husband, and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the inroads of the lumber men upon their paradise. “The Burnhams were this year on the shores of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from Pittsburgh would come early in August, the Detroit man with the crippled son was building a cabin on the shores of Bone River.”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 18