Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  In a class in the University Clara had met, during that her third year there, a woman named Kate Chanceller, who had come to Columbus with her brother from a town in Missouri, and it was this woman who had given her thoughts form, who had indeed started her thinking of the inadequacy of her life. The brother, a studious, quiet man, worked as a chemist in a manufacturing plant somewhere at the edge of town. He was a musician and wanted to become a composer. One evening during the winter his sister Kate had brought Clara to the apartment where the two lived, and the three had become friends. Clara had learned something there that she did not yet understand and never did get clearly into her consciousness. The truth was that the brother was like a woman and Kate Chanceller, who wore skirts and had the body of a woman, was in her nature a man. Kate and Clara spent many evenings together later and talked of many things not usually touched on by girl students. Kate was a bold, vigorous thinker and was striving to grope her way through her own problem in life and many times, as they walked along the street or sat together in the evening, she forgot her companion and talked of herself and the difficulties of her position in life. “It’s absurd the way things are arranged,” she said. “Because my body is made in a certain way I’m supposed to accept certain rules for living. The rules were not made for me. Men manufactured them as they manufacture can-openers, on the wholesale plan.” She looked at Clara and laughed. “Try to imagine me in a little lace cap, such as your aunt wears about the house, and spending my days knitting baby stockings,” she said.

  The two women had spent hours talking of their lives and in speculating on the differences in their natures. The experience had been tremendously educational for Clara. As Kate was a socialist and Columbus was rapidly becoming an industrial city, she talked of the meaning of capital and labor and the effect of changing conditions on the lives of men and women. To Kate, Clara could talk as to a man, but the antagonism that so often exists between men and women did not come into and spoil their companionship. In the evening when Clara went to Kate’s house her aunt sent a carriage to bring her home at nine. Kate rode home with her. They got to the Woodburn house and went in. Kate was bold and free with the Woodburns, as with her brother and Clara. “Come,” she said laughing, “put away your figures and your knitting. Let’s talk.” She sat in a large chair with her legs crossed and talked with Henderson Woodburn of the affairs of the plow company. The two got into a discussion of the relative merits of the free trade and protection ideas. Then the two older people went to bed and Kate talked to Clara. “Your uncle is an old duffer,” she said. “He knows nothing about the meaning of what he’s doing in life.” When she started home afoot across the city, Clara was alarmed for her safety. “You must get a cab or let me wake up uncle’s man; something may happen,” she said. Kate laughed and went off, striding along the street like a man. Sometimes she thrust her hands into her skirt pockets, that were like the trouser pockets of a man, and it was difficult for Clara to remember that she was a woman. In Kate’s presence she became bolder than she had ever been with any one. One evening she told the story of the thing that had happened to her that afternoon long before on the farm, the afternoon when, her mind having been inflamed by the words of Jim Priest regarding the sap that goes up the tree and by the warm sensuous beauty of the day, she had wanted so keenly to draw close to some one. She explained to Kate how she had been so brutally jarred out of the feeling in herself that she felt was at bottom all right. “It was like a blow in the face at the hand of God,” she said.

  Kate Chanceller was excited as Clara told the tale and listened with a fiery light burning in her eyes. Something in her manner encouraged Clara to tell also of her experiments with the school teacher and for the first time she got a sense of justice toward men by talking to the woman who was half a man. “I know that wasn’t square,” she said. “I know now, when I talk to you, but I didn’t know then. With the school teacher I was as unfair as John May and my father were with me. Why do men and women have to fight each other? Why does the battle between them have to go on?”

  Kate walked up and down before Clara and swore like a man. “Oh, hell,” she exclaimed, “men are such fools and I suppose women are as bad. They are both too much one thing. I fall in between. I’ve got my problem too, but I’m not going to talk about it. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to find some kind of work and do it.” She began to talk of the stupidity of men in their approach to women. “Men hate such women as myself,” she said. “They can’t use us, they think. What fools! They should watch and study us. Many of us spend our lives loving other women, but we have skill. Being part women, we know how to approach women. We are not blundering and crude. Men want a certain thing from you. It is delicate and easy to kill. Love is the most sensitive thing in the world. It’s like an orchid. Men try to pluck orchids with ice tongs, the fools.”

  Walking to where Clara stood by a table, and taking her by the shoulder, the excited woman stood for a long time looking at her. Then she picked up her hat, put it on her head, and with a flourish of her hand started for the door. “You can depend on my friendship,” she said. “I’ll do nothing to confuse you. You’ll be in luck if you can get that kind of love or friendship from a man.”

  Clara kept thinking of the words of Kate Chanceller on the evening when she walked through the streets of the suburban village with Frank Metcalf, and later as the two sat on the car that took them back to the city. With the exception of another student named Phillip Grimes, who had come to see her a dozen times during her second year in the University, young Metcalf was the only one of perhaps a dozen men she had met since leaving the farm who had been attracted to her. Phillip Grimes was a slender young fellow with blue eyes, yellow hair and a not very vigorous mustache. He was from a small town in the northern end of the State, where his father published a weekly newspaper. When he came to see Clara he sat on the edge of his chair and talked rapidly. Some person he had seen in the street had interested him. “I saw an old woman on the car,” he began. “She had a basket on her arm. It was filled with groceries. She sat beside me and talked aloud to herself.” Clara’s visitor repeated the words of the old woman on the car. He speculated about her, wondered what her life was like. When he had talked of the old woman for ten or fifteen minutes, he dropped the subject and began telling of another experience, this time with a man who sold fruit at a street crossing. It was impossible to be personal with Phillip Grimes. Nothing but his eyes were personal. Sometimes he looked at Clara in a way that I made her feel that her clothes were being stripped from her body, and that she was being made to stand naked in the room before her visitor. The experience, when it came, was not entirely a physical one. It was only in part that. When the thing happened Clara saw her whole life being stripped bare. “Don’t look at me like that,” she once said somewhat sharply, when his eyes had made her so uncomfortable she could no longer remain silent. Her remark had frightened Phillip Grimes away. He got up at once, blushed, stammered something about having another engagement, and hurried away.

  In the street car, homeward bound beside Frank Metcalf, Clara thought of Phillip Grimes and wondered whether or not he would have stood the test of Kate Chanceller’s speech regarding love and friendship. He had confused her, but that was perhaps her own fault. He had not insisted on himself at all. Frank Metcalf had done nothing else. “One should be able,” she thought, “to find somewhere a man who respects himself and his own desires but can understand also the desires and fears of a woman.” The street car went bouncing along over railroad crossings and along residence streets. Clara looked at her companion, who stared straight ahead, and then turned to look out of the car window. The window was open and she could see the interiors of the laborers’ houses along the streets. In the evening with the lamps lighted they seemed cosy and comfortable. Her mind ran back to the life in her father’s house and its loneliness. For two summers she had escaped going home. At the end of her first year in school she had made an illness of her un
cle’s an excuse for spending the summer in Columbus, and at the end of the second year she had found another excuse for not going. This year she felt she would have to go home. She would have to sit day after day at the farm table with the farm hands. Nothing would happen. Her father would remain silent in her presence. She would become bored and weary of the endless small talk of the town girls. If one of the town boys began to pay her special attention, her father would become suspicious and that would lead to resentment in herself. She would do something she did not want to do. In the houses along the streets through which the car passed, she saw women moving about. Babies cried and men came out of the doors and stood talking to one another on the sidewalks. She decided suddenly that she was taking the problem of her own life too seriously. “The thing to do is to get married and then work things out afterward,” she told herself. She made up her mind that the puzzling, insistent antagonism that existed between men and women was altogether due to the fact that they were not married and had not the married people’s way of solving such problems as Frank Metcalf had been talking about all afternoon. She wished she were with Kate Chancellor so that she could discuss with her this new viewpoint. When she and Frank Metcalf got off the car she was no longer in a hurry to go home to her uncle’s house. Knowing she did not want to marry him, she thought that in her turn she would talk, that she would try to make him see her point of view as all the afternoon he had been trying to make her see his.

  For an hour the two people walked about and Clara talked. She forgot about the passage of time and the fact that she had not dined. Not wishing to talk of marriage, she talked instead of the possibility of friendship between men and women. As she talked her own mind seemed to her to have become clearer. “It’s all foolishness your going on as you have,” she declared. “I know how dissatisfied and unhappy you sometimes are. I often feel that way myself. Sometimes I think it’s marriage I want. I really think I want to draw close to some one. I believe every one is hungry for that experience. We all want something we are not willing to pay for. We want to steal it or have it given us. That’s what’s the matter with me, and that’s what’s the matter with you.”

  They came to the Woodburn house, and turning in stood on a porch in the darkness by the front door. At the back of the house Clara could see a light burning. Her aunt and uncle were at the eternal figuring and knitting. They were finding a substitute for living. It was the thing Frank Metcalf was protesting against and was the real reason for her own constant secret protest. She took hold of the lapel of his coat, intending to make a plea, to urge upon him the idea of a friendship that would mean something to them both. In the darkness she could not see his rather heavy, sullen face. The maternal instinct became strong in her and she thought of him as a wayward, dissatisfied boy, wanting love and understanding as she had wanted to be loved and understood by her father when life in the moment of the awakening of her womanhood seemed ugly and brutal. With her free hand she stroked the sleeve of his coat. Her gesture was misunderstood by the man who was not thinking of her words but of her body and of his hunger to possess it. He took her into his arms and held her tightly against his breast. She tried to struggle, to tear herself away but, although she was strong and muscular, she found herself unable to move. As he held her uncle, who had heard the two people come up the steps to the door, threw it open. Both he and his wife had on several occasions warned Clara to have nothing to do with young Metcalf. One day when he had sent flowers to the house, her aunt had urged her to refuse to receive them. “He’s a bad, dissipated, wicked man,” she had said. “Have nothing to do with him.” When he saw his niece in the arms of the man who had been the subject of so much discussion in his own house and in every respectable house in Columbus, Henderson Woodburn was furious. He forgot the fact that young Metcalf was the son of the president of the company of which he was treasurer. It seemed to him that some sort of a personal insult had been thrown at him by a common ruffian. “Get out of here,” he screamed. “What do you mean, you nasty villain? Get out of here.”

  Frank Metcalf went off along the street laughing defiantly, and Clara went into the house. The sliding doors that led into the living room had been thrown open and the light from a hanging lamp streamed in upon her. Her hair was disheveled and her hat twisted to one side. The man and woman stared at her. The knitting needles and a sheet of paper held in their hands suggested what they had been doing while Clara was getting another lesson from life. Her aunt’s hands trembled and the knitting needles clicked together. Nothing was said and the confused and angry girl ran up a stairway to her own room. She locked herself in and knelt on the floor by the bed. She did not pray. Her association with Kate Chanceller had given her another outlet for her feelings. Pounding with her fists on the bed coverings, she swore. “Fools, damned fools, the world is filled with nothing but a lot of damned fools.”

  CHAPTER X

  CLARA BUTTERWORTH LEFT Bidwell, Ohio, in September of the year in which Steve Hunter’s plant-setting machine company went into the hands of a receiver, and in January of the next year that enterprising young man, together with Tom Butterworth, bought the plant. In March a new company was organized and at once began making Hugh’s corn-cutting machine, a success from the beginning. The failure of the first company and the sale of the plant had created a furor in the town. Both Steve and Tom Butterworth could, however, point to the fact that they had held on to their stock and lost their money in common with every one else. Tom had indeed sold his stock because he needed ready money, as he explained, but had shown his good faith by buying again just before the failure. “Do you suppose I would have done that had I known what was up?” he asked the men assembled in the stores. “Go look at the books of the company. Let’s have an investigation here. You will find that Steve and I stuck to the rest of the stockholders. We lost our money with the rest. If any one was crooked and when they saw a failure coming went and got out from under at the expense of some one else, it wasn’t Steve and me. The books of the company will show we were game. It wasn’t our fault the plant-setting machine wouldn’t work.”

  In the back room of the bank, John Clark and young Gordon Hart cursed Steve and Tom, who, they declared, had sold them out. They had lost no money by the failure, but on the other hand they had gained nothing. The four men had sent in a bid for the plant when it was put up for sale, but as they expected no competition, they had not bid very much. It had gone to a firm of Cleveland lawyers who bid a little more, and later had been resold at private sale to Steve and Tom. An investigation was started and it was found that Steve and Tom held large blocks of stock in the defunct company, while the bankers held practically none. Steve openly said that he had known of the possibility of failure for some time and had warned the larger stock-holders and asked them not to sell their stock. “While I was working my head off trying to save the company, what were they up to?” he asked sharply, and his question was repeated in the stores and in the homes of the people.

  The truth of the matter, and the thing the town never found out, was that from the beginning Steve had intended to get the plant for himself, but at the last had decided it would be better to take some one in with him. He was afraid of John Clark. For two or three days he thought about the matter and decided that the banker was not to be trusted. “He’s too good a friend to Tom Butterworth,” he told himself. “If I tell him my scheme, he’ll tell Tom. I’ll go to Tom myself. He’s a money maker and a man who knows the difference between a bicycle and a wheelbarrow when you put one of them into bed with him.”

  Steve drove out to Tom’s house late one evening in September. He hated to go but was convinced it would be better to do so. “I don’t want to burn all my bridges behind me,” he told himself. “I’ve got to have at least one friend among the solid men here in town. I’ve got to do business with these rubes, maybe all my life. I can’t shut myself off too much, at least not yet a while.”

  When Steve got to the farm he asked Tom to get into his bugg
y, and the two men went for a long drive. The horse, a gray gelding with one blind eye hired for the occasion from liveryman Neighbors, went slowly along through the hill country south of Bidwell. He had hauled hundreds of young men with their sweethearts. Ambling slowly along, thinking perhaps of his own youth and of the tyranny of man that had made him a gelding, he knew that as long as the moon shone and the intense voiceless quiet continued to reign over the two people in the buggy, the whip would not come out of its socket and he would not be expected to hurry.

  On the September evening, however, the gray gelding had behind him such a load as he had never carried before. The two people in the buggy on that evening were not foolish, meandering sweethearts, thinking only of love, and allowing themselves to be influenced in their mood by the beauty of the night, the softness of the black shadows in the road, and the gentle night winds that crept down over the crests of hills. They were solid business men, mentors of the new age, the kind of men who, in the future of America and perhaps of the whole world, were to be the makers of governments, the molders of public opinion, the owners of the press, the publishers of books, buyers of pictures, and in the goodness of their hearts, the feeders of an occasional starving and improvident poet, lost on other roads. In any event the two men sat in the buggy and the gray gelding meandered along through the hills. Great splashes of moonlight lay in the road. By chance it was on the same evening that Clara Butterworth left home to become a student in the State University. Remembering the kindness and tenderness of the rough old farm hand, Jim Priest, who had brought her to the station, she lay in her berth in the sleeping car and looked out at the roads, washed with moonlight, that slid away into the distance like ghosts. She thought of her father on that night and of the misunderstanding that had grown up between them. For the moment she was tender with regrets. “After all, Jim Priest and my father must be a good deal alike,” she thought. “They have lived on the same farm, eaten the same food; they both love horses. There can’t be any great difference between them.” All night she thought of the matter. An obsession, that the whole world was aboard the moving train and that, as it ran swiftly along, it was carrying the people of the world into some strange maze of misunderstanding, took possession of her. So strong was it that it affected her deeply buried unconscious self and made her terribly afraid. It seemed to her that the walls of the sleeping-car berth were like the walls of a prison that had shut her away from the beauty of life. The walls seemed to close in upon her. The walls, like life itself, were shutting in upon her youth and her youthful desire to reach a hand out of the beauty in herself to the buried beauty in others. She sat up in the berth and forced down a desire in herself to break the car window and leap out of the swiftly moving train into the quiet night bathed with moonlight. With girlish generosity she took upon her own shoulders the responsibility for the misunderstanding that had grown up between herself and her father. Later she lost the impulse that led her to come to that decision, but during that night it persisted. It was, in spite of the terror caused by the hallucination regarding the moving walls of the berth that seemed about to crush her and that came back time after time, the most beautiful night she had ever lived through, and it remained in her memory throughout her life. She in fact came to think later of that night as the time when, most of all, it would have been beautiful and right for her to have been able to give herself to a lover. Although she did not know it, the kiss on the cheek from the bewhiskered lips of Jim Priest had no doubt something to do with that thought when it came.