In a moment McGregor’s heart stopped pounding and the dry unpleasant taste went out of his mouth. He felt relieved and glad at this sudden turn to the affair.
With a quick upward snap of his knees into the stomach of the man who had held him McGregor freed himself. A swinging blow to the neck sent his assailant groaning to the floor. McGregor sprang across the room. In the corner by the bed he caught the woman. Clutching her by the hair he whirled her about. “Hand over that money,” he said fiercely.
The woman put up her hands and plead with him. The grip of his hands in her hair brought the tears to her eyes. She thrust the roll of bills into his hands and waited, trembling, thinking he intended to kill her.
A new feeling swept over McGregor. The thought of having come into the house at the invitation of this woman was revolting to him. He wondered how he could have been such a beast. As he stood in the dim light thinking of this and looking at the woman he became lost in thought and wondered why the idea given him by the barber, that had seemed so clear and sensible, now seemed so foolish. His eyes stared at the woman as his mind returned to the black-bearded barber talking on the park bench and he was seized with a blind fury, a fury not directed at the people in the foul little room but at himself and his own blindness. Again a great hatred of the disorder of life took hold of him and as though all of the disorderly people of the world were personified in her he swore and shook the woman as a dog might have shaken a foul rag.
“Sneak. Dodger. Mussy fool,” he muttered, thinking of himself as a giant attacked by some nauseous beast. The woman screamed with terror. Seeing the look on her assailant’s face and mistaking the meaning of his words she trembled and thought again of death. Reaching under the pillow on the bed she got another roll of bills and thrust that also into McGregor’s hands. “Please go,” she plead. “We were mistaken. We thought you were some one else.”
McGregor strode to the door past the man on the floor who groaned and rolled about. He walked around the corner to Madison Street and boarded a car for the night school. Sitting in the car he counted the money in the roll thrust into his hand by the kneeling woman and laughed so that the people in the car looked at him in amazement. “Turner has spent eleven dollars among them in two years and I have got twenty-seven dollars in one night,” he thought. He jumped off the car and walked along under the street lights striving to think things out. “I can’t depend on any one,” he muttered. “I have to make my own way. The barber is as confused as the rest of them and he doesn’t know it. There is a way out of the confusion and I’m going to find it, but I’ll have to do it alone. I can’t take any one’s word for anything.”
CHAPTER V
THE MATTER OF McGregor’s attitude toward women and the call of sex was not of course settled by the fight in the house in Lake Street. He was a man who, even in the days of his great crudeness, appealed strongly to the mating instinct in women and more than once his purpose was to be shaken and his mind disturbed by the forms, the faces and the eyes of women.
McGregor thought he had settled the matter. He forgot the black-eyed girl in the hallway and thought only of advancement in the warehouse and of study in his room at night. Now and then he took an evening off and went for a walk through the streets or in one of the parks.
In the streets of Chicago, under the night lights, among the restless moving people he was a figure to be remembered. Sometimes he did not see the people at all but went swinging along in the same spirit in which he had walked in the Pennsylvania hills. He was striving to get a hold of some elusive quality in life that seemed to be forever out of reach. He did not want to be a lawyer or a warehouseman. What did he want? Along the street he went trying to make up his mind and because his was not a gentle nature his perplexity drove him to anger and he swore.
Up and down Madison Street he went striding along, his lips muttering words. In a corner saloon some one played a piano. Groups of girls passed laughing and talking. He came to the bridge that led over the river into the loop district and then turned restlessly back. On the sidewalks along Canal Street he saw strong-bodied men loitering before cheap lodging houses. Their clothing was filthy with long wear and there was no light of determination in their faces. In the little fine interstices of the cloth of which their clothes were made was gathered the filth of the city in which they lived and in the stuff of their natures the filth and disorder of modern civilisation had also found lodging.
On walked McGregor looking at man-made things and the flame of anger within burned stronger and stronger. He saw the drifting clouds of people of all nations that wander at night in Halstead Street and turning into a side street saw also the Italians, Poles and Russians that at evening gather on the sidewalks before tenements in that district.
The desire in McGregor for some kind of activity became a madness. His body shook with the strength of his desire to end the vast disorder of life. With all the ardour of youth he wanted to see if with the strength of his arm he could shake mankind out of its sloth. A drunken man passed and following him came a large man with a pipe in his mouth. The large man did not walk with any suggestion of power in his legs. He shambled along. He was like a huge child with fat cheeks and great untrained body, a child without muscles and hardness, clinging to the skirts of life.
McGregor could not bear the sight of the big ungainly figure. The man seemed to personify all of the things against which his soul was in revolt and he stopped and stood crouched, a ferocious light burning in his eyes.
Into the gutter rolled the man stunned by the force of the blow dealt him by the miner’s son. He crawled on his hands and knees and cried for help. His pipe had rolled away into the darkness. McGregor stood on the sidewalk and waited. A crowd of men standing before a tenement house started to run toward him. Again he crouched. He prayed that they would come on and let him fight them also. In anticipation of a great struggle joy shone in his eyes and his muscles twitched.
And then the man in the gutter got to his feet and ran away. The men who had started to run toward him stopped and turned back. McGregor walked on, his heart heavy with the sense of defeat. He was a little sorry for the man he had struck and who had made so ridiculous a figure crawling about on his hands and knees and he was more perplexed than ever.
McGregor tried again to solve the problem of women. He had been much pleased by the outcome of the affair in the little frame house and the next day bought law books with the twenty-seven dollars thrust into his hand by the frightened woman. Later he stood in his room stretching his great body like a lion returned from the kill and thought of the little black-bearded barber in the room at the end of the hall stooping over his violin, his mind busy with the attempt to justify himself because he would not face one of life’s problems. The feeling of resentment against the man had gone. He thought of the course laid out for himself by that philosopher and laughed. “There is something about it to avoid, like giving yourself up to digging in the dirt under the ground,” he told himself.
McGregor’s second adventure began on a Saturday night and again he let himself be led into it by the barber. The night was hot and the younger man sat in his room filled with a desire to go forth and explore the city. The quiet of the house, the distant rumble of street cars, the sound of a band playing far down the street disturbed and diverted his mind. He wished that he might take a stick in his hands and go forth to prowl among the hills as he had gone on such nights in his youth in the Pennsylvania town.
The door to his room opened and the barber came in. In his hand he held two tickets. He sat on the window sill to explain.
“There is a dance in a hall on Monroe Street,” said the barber excitedly. “I have two tickets here. A politician sold them to the boss in the shop where I work.” The barber threw back his head and laughed. To his mind there was something delicious in the thought of the boss barber being forced by the politicians to buy dance tickets. “They cost two dollars each,” he cried and shook with laughter “You should hav
e seen my boss squirm. He didn’t want the tickets but was afraid not to take them. The politician could make trouble for him and he knew it. You see we make a hand-book on the races in the shop and that is against the law. The politician could make trouble for us. The boss paid out the four dollars swearing under his breath and when the politician had gone out he threw them at me. ‘There, take them,’ he shouted, ‘I don’t want the rotten things. Is a man a horse trough at which every beast can stop to drink?’”
McGregor and the barber sat in the room laughing at the boss barber who had smilingly bought the tickets while consumed with inward wrath. The barber urged McGregor to go with him to the dance. “We will make a night of it,” he said. “We will see women there — two that I know. They live upstairs over a grocery store. I have been with them. They will open your eyes. They are a kind of women you haven’t known, bold and clever and good fellows too.”
McGregor got up and pulled his shirt over his head. A wave of feverish excitement ran over his body. “We shall see about this,” he said, “we shall see if this is another wrong trail you are starting me on. You go to your room and get ready. I am going to fix myself up.”
In the dance hall McGregor sat on a seat by the wall with one of the two women lauded by the barber and a third one who was frail and bloodless. To him the adventure had been a failure. The swing of the dance music struck no answering chord in him. He saw the couples on the floor clasped in each other’s arms, writhing and turning, swaying back and forth, looking into each other’s eyes and turned aside wishing himself back in his room among the law books.
The barber talked to two of the women, bantering them. McGregor thought the conversation inane and trivial. It skirted the edge of things and ran off into vague references to other times and adventures of which he knew nothing.
The barber danced away with one of the women. She was tall and the head of the barber barely Passed her shoulder. His black beard shone against her white dress. The two women sat beside him and talked. McGregor gathered that the frail woman was a maker of hats. Something about her attracted him and he leaned against the wall and looked at her, not hearing the talk.
A youth came up and took the other woman away. From across the hall the barber beckoned to him.
A thought flashed into his mind. This woman beside him was frail and thin and bloodless like the women of Coal Creek. A feeling of intimacy with her came over him. He felt as he had felt concerning the tall pale girl of Coal Creek when they together had climbed the hill to the eminence that looked down into the valley of farms.
CHAPTER VI
EDITH CARSON THE milliner, whom fate had thrown into the company of McGregor, was a frail woman of thirty-four and lived alone in two rooms at the back of her millinery store. Her life was almost devoid of colour. On Sunday morning she wrote a long letter to her family on an Indiana farm and then put on a hat from among the samples in the show case along the wall and went to church, sitting by herself in the same seat Sunday after Sunday and afterward remembering nothing of the sermon.
On Sunday afternoon Edith went by street-car to a park and walked alone under the trees. If it threatened rain she sat in the larger of the two rooms back of the shop sewing on new dresses for herself or for a sister who had married a blacksmith in the Indiana town and who had four children.
Edith had soft mouse-coloured hair and grey eyes with small brown spots on the iris. She was so slender that she wore pads about her body under her dress to fill it out. In her youth she had had a sweetheart — a fat round-cheeked boy who lived on the next farm. Once they had gone together to the fair at the county seat and coming home in the buggy at night he had put his arm about her and kissed her. “You ain’t very big,” he had said.
Edith sent to a mail order house in Chicago and bought the padding which she wore under her dress With it came an oil which she rubbed on herself. The label on the bottle spoke of the contents with great respect as a wonderful developer. The heavy pads wore raw places on her side against which her clothes rubbed but she bore the pain with grim stoicism, remembering what the fat boy had said.
After Edith came to Chicago and opened a shop of her own she had a letter from her former admirer. “It pleases me to think that the same wind that blows over me blows also over you,” it said. After that one letter she did not hear from him again. He had the phrase out of a book he had read and had written the letter to Edith that he might use it. After the letter had gone he thought of her frail figure and repented of the impulse that had tricked him into writing. Half in alarm he began courting and soon married another girl.
Sometimes on her rare visits home Edith had seen her former lover driving along the road. The sister who had married the blacksmith said that he was stingy, that his wife had nothing to wear but a cheap calico dress and that on Saturday he drove off to town alone, leaving her to milk the cows and feed the pigs and horses. Once he encountered Edith on the road and tried to get her into the wagon to ride with him. Although she had walked along the road ignoring him she took the letter about the wind that blew over them both out of a drawer on spring evenings or after a walk in the park and read it over. After she had read it she sat in the darkness at the front of the store looking through the screen door at people in the street and wondered what life would mean to her if she had a man on whom she could bestow her love. In her heart she believed that, unlike the wife of the fat youth, she would have borne children.
In Chicago Edith Carson had made money. She had a genius for economy in the management of her business. In six years she had cleared a large debt from the shop and had a comfortable balance in the bank. Girls who worked in factories or in stores came and left most of their meagre surplus in her shop and other girls who didn’t work came in, throwing dollars about and talking about “gentlemen friends.” Edith hated the bargaining but attended to it with shrewdness and with a quiet disarming little smile on her face. What she liked was to sit quietly in the room and trim hats. When the business grew she had a woman to tend the shop and a girl to sit beside her and help with the hats. She had a friend, the wife of a motorman on the street-car line, who sometimes came to see her in the evening. The friend was a plump little woman, dissatisfied with her marriage, and she got Edith to make her several new hats a year for which she paid nothing.
Edith went to the dance at which she met McGregor with the motorman’s wife and a girl who lived upstairs over a bakery next door to the shop, The dance was held in a hall over a saloon and was given for the benefit of a political organisation in which the baker was a leader. The wife of the baker came in and sold Edith two tickets, one for herself and one for the wife of the motorman who happened to be sitting with her at the time.
That evening after the motorman’s wife had gone home Edith decided to go to the dance and the decision was something like an adventure in itself. The night was hot and sultry, lightning flashed in the sky and clouds of dust swept down the street. Edith sat in the darkness behind the bolted screen door and looked at the people who hurried homeward down the street. A wave of revolt at the narrowness and emptiness of her life ran through her. Tears sprang to her eyes. She closed the shop door and going into the room at the back lighted the gas and stood looking at herself in the mirror. “I’ll go to the dance,” she thought. “Perhaps I shall get a man. If he won’t marry me he can have what he wants of me anyway.”
In the dance hall Edith sat demurely by the wall near a window and watched the couples whirl about on the floor. Through an open door she could see couples sitting in another room around tables and drinking beer. A tall young man in white trousers and white slippers went about on the dance floor. He smiled and bowed to the women. Once he started across the floor toward Edith and her heart beat rapidly, but just when she thought he intended to speak to her and to the motorman’s wife he turned and went to another part of the room. Edith followed him with her eyes, admiring his white trousers and his shining white teeth.
The wife of the motorman went
away with a small straight man with a grey moustache whom Edith thought had unpleasant eyes and two girls came and sat beside her. They were customers of her store and lived together in a flat over a grocery on Monroe Street. Edith had heard the girl who sat in the workroom with her speak slightingly of them. The three sat together along the wall and talked of hats.
And then across the floor of the dance hall came two men, a huge red-haired fellow and a little man with a black beard. The two women hailed them and the five sat together making a party by the wall, the little man keeping up a running stream of comments about the people on the floor with Edith’s two companions. A dance struck up and taking one of the women the black-bearded man danced away. Edith and the other woman again talked of hats. The huge fellow beside her said nothing but followed the women about the dance hall with his eyes. Edith thought she had never seen so homely a fellow.
At the end of the dance the black-bearded man went through the door into the room filled with little tables and made a sign to the red-haired man to follow. A boyish looking fellow appeared and went away with the other woman and Edith sat alone on the bench by the wall beside McGregor.
“This place doesn’t interest me,” said McGregor quickly. “I don’t like to sit watching people hop about on their toes. If you want to come with me we’ll get out of here and go to some place where we can talk and get acquainted.”
The little milliner walked across the floor on the arm of McGregor, her heart jumping with excitement. “I’ve got a man,” she thought, exulting. That the man had deliberately chosen her she knew. She had heard the introductions and the bantering talk of the black-bearded man and had noted the indifference of the big man to the other women.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 39