As he stood outside the door of his daughter’s room, the farmer felt as he had felt that evening long before when he followed his wife along the road. When on the porch downstairs he had looked up suddenly and had seen the gesture made by the farm hand, he had also looked quickly at his daughter. She looked confused and, he thought, guilty. “Well, it is the same thing over again,” he thought bitterly, “like mother, like daughter — they are both of the same stripe.” Getting quickly out of his chair he had followed the young man into the road and had discharged him. “Go, to-night. I don’t want to see you on the place again,” he said. In the darkness before the girl’s room he thought of many bitter things he wanted to say. He forgot she was a girl and talked to her as he might have talked to a mature, sophisticated, and guilty woman. “Come,” he said, “I want to know the truth. If you have been with that farm hand you are starting young. Has anything happened between you?”
Clara walked to the door and confronted her father. The hatred of him, born in that hour and that never left her, gave her strength. She did not know what he was talking about, but had a keen sense of the fact that he, like the stupid, young man in the shed, was trying to violate something very precious in her nature. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said calmly, “but I know this. I am no longer a child. Within the last week I’ve become a woman. If you don’t want me in your house, if you don’t like me any more, say so and I’ll go away.”
The two people stood in the darkness and tried to look at each other. Clara was amazed by her own strength and by the words that had come to her. The words had clarified something. She felt that if her father would but take her into his arms or say some kindly understanding word, all could be forgotten. Life could be started over again. In the future she would understand much that she had not understood. She and her father could draw close to each other. Tears came into her eyes and a sob trembled in her throat. As her father, however, did not answer her words and turned to go silently away, she shut the door with a loud bang and afterward lay awake all night, white and furious with anger and disappointment.
Clara left home to become a college student that fall, but before she left had another passage at arms with her father. In August a young man who was to teach in the town schools came to Bidwell, and she met him at a supper given in the basement of the church. He walked home with her and came on the following Sunday afternoon to call. She introduced the young man, a slender fellow with black hair, brown eyes, and a serious face, to her father who answered by nodding his head and walking away. She and the young man walked along a country road and went into a wood. He was five years older than herself and had been to college, but she felt much the older and wiser. The thing that happens to so many women had happened to her. She felt older and wiser than all the men she had ever seen. She had decided, as most women finally decide, that there are two kinds of men in the world, those who are kindly, gentle, well-intentioned children, and those who, while they remain children, are obsessed with stupid, male vanity and imagine themselves born to be masters of life. Clara’s thoughts on the matter were not very clear. She was young and her thoughts were indefinite. She had, however, been shocked into an acceptance of life and she was made of the kind of stuff that survives the blows life gives.
In the wood with the young school teacher, Clara began an experiment. Evening came on and it grew dark. She knew her father would be furious that she did not come home but she did not care. She led the school teacher to talk of love and the relationships of men and women. She pretended an innocence that was not hers. School girls know many things that they do not apply to themselves until something happens to them such as had happened to Clara. The farmer’s daughter became conscious. She knew a thousand things she had not known a month before and began to take her revenge upon men for their betrayal of her. In the darkness as they walked home together, she tempted the young man into kissing her, and later lay in his arms for two hours, entirely sure of herself, striving to find out, without risk to herself, the things she wanted to know about life.
That night she again quarreled with her father. He tried to scold her for remaining out late with a man, and she shut the door in his face. On another evening she walked boldly out of the house with the school teacher. The two walked along a road to where a bridge went over a small stream. John May, who was still determined that the farmer’s daughter was in love with him, had on that evening followed the school teacher to the Butterworth house and had been waiting outside intending to frighten his rival with his fists. On the bridge something happened that drove the school teacher away. John May came up to the two people and began to make threats. The bridge had just been repaired and a pile of small, sharp-edged stones lay close at hand. Clara picked one of them up and handed it to the school teacher. “Hit him,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. He’s only a coward. Hit him on the head with the stone.”
The three people stood in silence waiting for something to happen. John May was disconcerted by Clara’s words. He had thought she wanted him to pursue her. He stepped toward the school teacher, who dropped the stone that had been put into his hand and ran away. Clara went back along the road toward her own house followed by the muttering farm hand who, after her speech at the bridge, did not dare approach. “Maybe she was making a bluff. Maybe she didn’t want that young fellow to get on to what is between us,” he muttered, as he stumbled along in the darkness.
In the house Clara sat for a half hour at a table in the lighted living room beside her father, pretending to read a book. She half hoped he would say something that would permit her to attack him. When nothing happened she went upstairs and to bed, only again to spend the night awake and white with anger at the thought of the cruel and unexplainable things life seemed trying to do to her.
In September Clara left the farm to attend the State University at Columbus. She was sent there because Tom Butterworth had a sister who was married to a manufacturer of plows and lived at the State Capital. After the incident with the farm hand and the misunderstanding that had sprung up between himself and his daughter, he was uncomfortable with her in the house and was glad to have her away. He did not want to frighten his sister by telling of what had happened, and when he wrote, tried to be diplomatic. “Clara has been too much among the rough men who work on my farms and had become a little rough,” he wrote. “Take her in hand. I want her to become more of a lady. Get her acquainted with the right kind of people.” In secret he hoped she would meet and marry some young man while she was away. Two of his sisters had gone away to school and it had turned out that way.
During the month before his daughter left home the farmer tried to be somewhat more human and gentle in his attitude toward her, but did not succeed in dispelling the dislike of himself that had taken deep root in her nature. At table he made jokes at which the farm hands laughed boisterously. Then he looked at his daughter who did not appear to have been listening. Clara ate quickly and hurried out of the room. She did not go to visit her girl friends in town and the young school teacher came no more to see her. During the long summer afternoons she walked in the orchard among the beehives or climbed over fences and went into a wood, where she sat for hours on a fallen log staring at the trees and the sky. Tom Butterworth also hurried out of his house. He pretended to be busy and every day drove far and wide over the country. Sometimes he thought he had been brutal and crude in his treatment of his daughter, and decided he would speak to her regarding the matter and ask her to forgive him. Then his suspicion returned. He struck the horse with the whip and drove furiously along the lonely roads. “Well, there’s something wrong,” he muttered aloud. “Men don’t just look at women and approach them boldly, as that young fellow did with Clara. He did it before my very eyes. He’s been given some encouragement.” An old suspicion awoke in him. “There was something wrong with her mother, and there’s something wrong with her. I’ll be glad when the time comes for her to marry and settle down, so I can get her off my h
ands,” he thought bitterly.
On the evening when Clara left the farm to go to the train that was to take her away, her father said he had a headache, a thing he had never been known to complain of before, and told Jim Priest to drive her to the station. Jim took the girl to the station, saw to the checking of her baggage, and waited about until her train came in. Then he boldly kissed her on the cheek. “Good-by, little girl,” he said gruffly. Clara was so grateful she could not reply. On the train she spent an hour weeping softly. The rough gentleness of the old farm hand had done much to take the growing bitterness out of her heart. She felt that she was ready to begin life anew, and wished she had not left the farm without coming to a better understanding with her father.
CHAPTER IX
THE WOODBURNS OF Columbus were wealthy by the standards of their day. They lived in a large house and kept two carriages and four servants, but had no children. Henderson Woodburn was small of stature, wore a gray beard, and was neat and precise about his person. He was treasurer of the plow manufacturing company and was also treasurer of the church he and his wife attended. In his youth he had been called “Hen” Woodburn and had been bullied by larger boys, and when he grew to be a man and after his persistent shrewdness and patience had carried him into a position of some power in the business life of his native city he in turn became something of a bully to the men beneath him. He thought his wife Priscilla had come from a better family than his own and was a little afraid of her. When they did not agree on any subject, she expressed her opinion gently but firmly, while he blustered for a time and then gave in. After a misunderstanding his wife put her arms about his neck and kissed the bald spot on the top of his head. Then the subject was forgotten.
Life in the Woodburn house was lived without words. After the stir and bustle of the farm, the silence of the house for a long time frightened Clara. Even when she was alone in her own room she walked about on tiptoe. Henderson Woodburn was absorbed in his work, and when he came home in the evening, ate his dinner in silence and then worked again. He brought home account books and papers from the office and spread them out on a table in the living room. His wife Priscilla sat in a large chair under a lamp and knitted children’s stockings. They were, she told Clara, for the children of the poor. As a matter of fact the stockings never left her house. In a large trunk in her room upstairs lay hundreds of pairs knitted during the twenty-five years of her family life.
Clara was not very happy in the Woodburn household, but on the other hand, was not very unhappy. She attended to her studies at the University passably well and in the late afternoons took a walk with a girl classmate, attended a matinee at the theater, or read a book. In the evening she sat with her aunt and uncle until she could no longer bear the silence, and then went to her own room, where she studied until it was time to go to bed. Now and then she went with the two older people to a social affair at the church, of which Henderson Woodburn was treasurer, or accompanied them to dinners at the homes of other well-to-do and respectable business men. On several occasions young men, sons of the people with whom the Woodburns dined, or students at the university, came in the evening to call. On such an occasion Clara and the young man sat in the parlor of the house and talked. After a time they grew silent and embarrassed in each other’s presence. From the next room Clara could hear the rustling of the papers containing the columns of figures over which her uncle was at work. Her aunt’s knitting needles clicked loudly. The young man told a tale of some football game, or if he had already gone out into the world, talked of his experiences as a traveler selling the wares manufactured or merchandized by his father. Such visits all began at the same hour, eight o’clock, and the young man left the house promptly at ten. Clara grew to feel that she was being merchandized and that they had come to look at the goods. One evening one of the men, a fellow with laughing blue eyes and kinky yellow hair, unconsciously disturbed her profoundly. All the evening he talked just as the others had talked and got out of his chair to go away at the prescribed hour. Clara walked with him to the door. She put out her hand, which he shook cordially. Then he looked at her and his eyes twinkled. “I’ve had a good time,” he said. Clara had a sudden and almost overpowering desire to embrace him. She wanted to disturb his assurance, to startle him by kissing him on the lips or holding him tightly in her arms. Shutting the door quickly, she stood with her hand on the door-knob, her whole body trembling. The trivial by-products of her age’s industrial madness went on in the next room. The sheets of paper rustled and the knitting needles clicked. Clara thought she would like to call the young man back into the house, lead him to the room where the meaningless industry went endlessly on and there do something that would shock them and him as they had never been shocked before. She ran quickly upstairs. “What is getting to be the matter with me?” she asked herself anxiously.
One evening in the month of May, during her third year at the University, Clara sat on the bank of a tiny stream by a grove of trees, far out on the edge of a suburban village north of Columbus. Beside her sat a young man named Frank Metcalf whom she had known for a year and who had once been a student in the same classes with herself. He was the son of the president of the plow manufacturing company of which her uncle was treasurer. As they sat together by the stream the afternoon light began to fade and darkness came on. Before them across an open field stood a factory, and Clara remembered that the whistle had long since blown and the men from the factory had gone home. She grew restless and sprang to her feet. Young Metcalf who had been talking very earnestly arose and stood beside her. “I can’t marry for two years, but we can be engaged and that will be all the same thing as far as the right and wrong of what I want and need is concerned. It isn’t my fault I can’t ask you to marry me now,” he declared. “In two years now, I’ll inherit eleven thousand dollars. My aunt left it to me and the old fool went and fixed it so I don’t get it if I marry before I’m twenty-four. I want that money. I’ve got to have it, but I got to have you too.”
Clara looked away into the evening darkness and waited for him to finish his speech. All afternoon he had been making practically the same speech, over and over. “Well, I can’t help it, I’m a man,” he said doggedly. “I can’t help it, I want you. I can’t help it, my aunt was an old fool.” He began to explain the necessity of remaining unmarried in order that he could receive the eleven thousand dollars. “If I don’t get that money I’ll be just the same as I am now,” he declared. “I won’t be any good.” He grew angry and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, stared also across the field into the darkness. “Nothing keeps me satisfied,” he said. “I hate being in my father’s business and I hate going to school. In only two years I’ll get the money. Father can’t keep it from me. I’ll take it and light out. I don’t know just what I’ll do. I’m going maybe to Europe, that’s what I’m going to do. Father wants me to stay here and work in his office. To hell with that. I want to travel. I’ll be a soldier or something. Anyway I’ll get out of here and go somewhere and do something exciting, something alive. You can go with me. We’ll cut out together. Haven’t you got the nerve? Why don’t you be my woman?”
Young Metcalf took hold of Clara’s shoulder and tried to take her into his arms. For a moment they struggled and then, in disgust, he stepped away from her and again began to scold.
Clara walked away across two or three vacant lots and got into a street of workingmen’s houses, the man following at her heels. Night had come and the people in the street facing the factory had already disposed of the evening meal. Children and dogs played in the road and a strong smell of food hung in the air. To the west across the fields, a passenger train ran past going toward the city. Its light made wavering yellow patches against the bluish black sky. Clara wondered why she had come to the out of the way place with Frank Metcalf. She did not like him, but there was a restlessness in him that was like the restless thing in herself. He did not want stupidly to accept life, and that fact made him brother to herself
. Although he was but twenty-two years old, he had already achieved an evil reputation. A servant in his father’s house had given birth to a child by him, and it had cost a good deal of money to get her to take the child and go away without making an open scandal. During the year before he had been expelled from the University for throwing another young man down a flight of stairs, and it was whispered about among the girl students that he often got violently drunk. For a year he had been trying to ingratiate himself with Clara, had written her letters, sent flowers to her house, and when he met her on the street had stopped to urge that she accept his friendship. On the day in May she had met him on the street and he had begged that she give him one chance to talk things out with her. They had met at a street crossing where cars went past into the suburban villages that lay about the city. “Come on,” he had urged, “let’s take a street car ride, let’s get out of the crowds, I want to talk to you.” He had taken hold of her arm and fairly dragged her to a car. “Come and hear what I have to say,” he had urged, “then if you don’t want to have anything to do with me, all right. You can say so and I’ll let you alone.” After she had accompanied him to the suburb of workingmen’s houses, in the vicinity of which they had spent the afternoon in the fields, Clara had found he had nothing to urge upon her except the needs of his body. Still she felt there was something he wanted to say that had not been said. He was restless and dissatisfied with his life, and at bottom she felt that way about her own life. During the last three years she had often wondered why she had come to the school and what she was to gain by learning things out of books. The days and months went past and she knew certain rather uninteresting facts she had not known before. How the facts were to help her to live, she couldn’t make out. They had nothing to do with such problems as her attitude toward men like John May the farm hand, the school teacher who had taught her something by holding her in his arms and kissing her, and the dark sullen young man who now walked beside her and talked of the needs of his body. It seemed to Clara that every additional year spent at the University but served to emphasize its inadequacy. It was so also with the books she read and the thoughts and actions of the older people about her. Her aunt and uncle did not talk much, but seemed to take it for granted she wanted to live such another life as they were living. She thought with horror of the probability of marrying a maker of plows or of some other dull necessity of life and then spending her days in the making of stockings for babies that did not come, or in some other equally futile manifestation of her dissatisfaction. She realized with a shudder that men like her uncle, who spent their lives in adding up rows of figures or doing over and over some tremendously trivial thing, had no conception of any outlook for their women beyond living in a house, serving them physically, wearing perhaps good enough clothes to help them make a show of prosperity and success, and drifting finally into a stupid acceptance of dullness — an acceptance that both she and the passionate, twisted man beside her were fighting against.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 65