Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  And while the girl fought her battle with the strangeness of life and tried to break through the imaginary walls that shut her off from the opportunity to live, her father also rode through the night. With a shrewd eye he watched the face of Steve Hunter. It had already begun to get a little fat, but Tom realized suddenly that it was the face of a man of ability. There was something about the jowls that made Tom, who had dealt much in live stock, think of the face of a pig. “The man goes after what he wants. He’s greedy,” the farmer thought. “Now he’s up to something. To get what he wants he’ll give me a chance to get something I want. He’s going to make some kind of proposal to me in connection with the factory. He’s hatched up a scheme to shut Gordon Hart and John Clark out because he doesn’t want too many partners. All right, I’ll go in with him. Either one of them would have done the same thing had they had the chance.”

  Steve smoked a black cigar and talked. As he grew more sure of himself and the affairs that absorbed him, he also became more smooth and persuasive in the matter of words. He talked for a time of the necessity of certain men’s surviving and growing constantly stronger and stronger in the industrial world. “It’s necessary for the good of the community,” he said. “A few fairly strong men are a good thing for a town, but if they are fewer and relatively stronger it’s better.” He turned to look sharply at his companion. “Well,” he exclaimed, “we talked there in the bank of what we would do when things went to pieces down at the factory, but there were too many men in the scheme. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now.” He knocked the ashes off his cigar and laughed. “You know what they did, don’t you?” he asked. “I asked you all not to sell any of your stock. I didn’t want to get the whole town bitter. They wouldn’t have lost anything. I promised to see them through, to get the plant for them at a low price, to put them in the way to make some real money. They played the game in a small-town way. Some men can think of thousands of dollars, others have to think of hundreds. It’s all their minds are big enough to comprehend. They snatch at a little measly advantage and miss the big one. That’s what these men have done.”

  For a long time the two rode in silence. Tom, who had also sold his stock, wondered if Steve knew. He decided he did. “However, he’s decided to deal with me. He needs some one and has chosen me,” he thought. He made up his mind to be bold. After all, Steve was young. Only a year or two before he was nothing but a young upstart and the very boys in the street laughed at him. Tom grew a little indignant, but was careful to take thought before he spoke. “Perhaps, although he’s young and don’t look like much, he’s a faster and shrewder thinker than any of us,” he told himself.

  “You do talk like a fellow who has something up his sleeve,” he said laughing. “If you want to know, I sold my stock the same as the others. I wasn’t going to take a chance of being a loser if I could help it. It may be the small-town way, but you know things maybe I don’t know. You can’t blame me for living up to my lights. I always did believe in the survival of the fittest and I got a daughter to support and put through college. I want to make a lady of her. You ain’t got any kids yet and you’re younger. Maybe you want to take chances I don’t want to take. How do I know what you’re up to?”

  Again the two rode in silence. Steve had prepared himself for the talk. He knew there was a chance that, in its turn, the corn-cutting machine Hugh had invented might not prove practical and that in the end he might be left with a factory on his hands and with nothing to manufacture in it. He did not, however, hesitate. Again, as on the day in the bank when he was confronted by the two older men, he made a bluff. “Well, you can come in or stay out, just as you wish,” he said a little sharply. “I’m going to get hold of that factory, if I can, and I’m going to manufacture corn-cutting machines. Already I have promises of orders enough to keep running for a year. I can’t take you in with me and have it said around town you were one of the fellows who sold out the small investors. I’ve got a hundred thousand dollars of stock in the company. You can have half of it. I’ll take your note for the fifty thousand. You won’t ever have to pay it. The earnings of the new factory will clean you up. You got to come clean, though. Of course you can go get John Clark and come out and make an open fight to get the factory yourselves, if you want to. I own the rights to the corn-cutting machine and will take it somewhere else and manufacture it. I don’t mind telling you that, if we split up, I will pretty well advertise what you three fellows did to the small investors after I asked you not to do it. You can all stay here and own your empty factory and get what satisfaction you can out of the love and respect you’ll get from the people. You can do what you please. I don’t care. My hands are clean. I ain’t done anything I’m ashamed of, and if you want to come in with me, you and I together will pull off something in this town we don’t neither one of us have to be ashamed of.”

  The two men drove back to the Butterworth farm house and Tom got out of the buggy. He intended to tell Steve to go to the devil, but as they drove along the road, he changed his mind. The young school teacher from Bidwell, who had come on several occasions to call on his daughter Clara, was on that night abroad with another young woman. He sat in a buggy with his arm around her waist and drove slowly through the hill country. Tom and Steve drove past them and the farmer, seeing in the moonlight the woman in the arms of the man, imagined his daughter in her place. The thought made him furious. “I’m losing the chance to be a big man in the town here in order to play safe and be sure of money to leave to Clara, and all she cares about is to galavant around with some young squirt,” he thought bitterly. He began to see himself as a wronged and unappreciated father. When he got out of the buggy, he stood for a moment by the wheel and looked hard at Steve. “I’m as good a sport as you are,” he said finally. “Bring around your stock and I’ll give you the note. That’s all it will be, you understand: just my note. I don’t promise to back it up with any collateral and I don’t expect you to offer it for sale.” Steve leaned out of the buggy and took him by the hand. “I won’t sell your note, Tom,” he said. “I’ll put it away. I want a partner to help me. You and I are going to do things together.”

  The young promoter drove off along the road, and Tom went into the house and to bed. Like his daughter he did not sleep. For a time he thought of her and in imagination saw her again in the buggy with the school teacher who had her in his arms. The thought made him stir restlessly about beneath the sheets. “Damn women anyway,” he muttered. To relieve his mind he thought of other things. “I’ll make out a deed and turn three of my farms over to Clara,” he decided shrewdly. “If things go wrong we won’t be entirely broke. I know Charlie Jacobs in the court-house over at the county seat. I ought to be able to get a deed recorded without any one knowing it if I oil Charlie’s hand a little.”

  Clara’s last two weeks in the Woodburn household were spent in the midst of a struggle, no less intense because no words were said. Both Henderson Wood, burn and his wife felt that Clara owed them an explanation of the scene at the front door with Frank Metcalf. When she did not offer it they were offended. When he threw open the door and confronted the two people, the plow manufacturer had got an impression that Clara was trying to escape Frank Metcalf’s embraces. He told his wife that he did not think she was to blame for the scene on the front porch. Not being the girl’s father he could look at the matter coldly. “She’s a good girl,” he declared. “That beast of a Frank Metcalf is all to blame. I daresay he followed her home. She’s upset now, but in the morning she’ll tell us the story of what happened.”

  The days went past and Clara said nothing. During her last week in the house she and the two older people scarcely spoke. The young woman was in an odd way relieved. Every evening she went to dine with Kate Chanceller who, when she heard the story of the afternoon in the suburb and the incident on the porch, went off without Clara’s knowing of it and had a talk with Henderson Woodburn in his office. After the talk the manufacturer was puzzled and ju
st a little afraid of both Clara and her friend. He tried to tell his wife about it, but was not very clear. “I can’t make it out,” he said. “She is the kind of woman I can’t understand, that Kate. She says Clara wasn’t to blame for what happened between her and Frank Metcalf, but don’t want to tell us the story, because she thinks young Metcalf wasn’t to blame either.” Although he had been respectful and courteous as he listened to Kate’s talk, he grew angry when he tried to tell his wife what she had said. “I’m afraid it was just a lot of mixed up nonsense,” he declared. “It makes me glad we haven’t a daughter. If neither of them were to blame what were they up to? What’s getting the matter with the women of the new generation? When you come down to it what’s the matter with Kate Chanceller?”

  The plow manufacturer advised his wife to say nothing to Clara. “Let’s wash our hands of it,” he suggested. “She’ll go home in a few days now and we will say nothing about her coming back next year. Let’s be polite, but act as though she didn’t exist.”

  Clara accepted the new attitude of her uncle and aunt without comment. In the afternoon she did not come home from the University but went to Kate’s apartment. The brother came home and after dinner played on the piano. At ten o’clock Clara started home afoot and Kate accompanied her. The two women went out of their way to sit on a bench in a park. They talked of a thousand hidden phases of life Clara had hardly dared think of before. During all the rest of her life she thought of those last weeks in Columbus as the most deeply satisfactory time she ever lived through. In the Woodburn house she was uncomfortable because of the silence and the hurt, offended look on her aunt’s face, but she did not spend much time there. In the morning Henderson Woodburn ate his breakfast alone at seven, and clutching his ever present portfolio of papers, was driven off to the plow factory. Clara and her aunt had a silent breakfast at eight, and then Clara also hurried away. “I’ll be out for lunch and will go to Kate’s for dinner,” she said as she went out of her aunt’s presence, and she said it, not with the air of one asking permission as had been her custom before the Frank Metcalf incident, but as one having the right to dispose of her own time. Only once did her aunt break the frigid air of offended dignity she had assumed. One morning she followed Clara to the front door, and as she watched her go down the steps from the front porch to the walk that led to the street, called to her. Some faint recollection of a time of revolt in her own youth perhaps came to her. Tears came into her eyes. To her the world was a place of terror, where wolf-like men prowled about seeking women to devour, and she was afraid something dreadful would happen to her niece. “If you don’t want to tell me anything, it’s all right,” she said bravely, “but I wish you felt you could.” When Clara turned to look at her, she hastened to explain. “Mr. Woodburn said I wasn’t to bother you about it and I won’t,” she added quickly. Nervously folding and unfolding her arms, she turned to stare up the street with the air of a frightened child that looks into a den of beasts. “O Clara, be a good girl,” she said. “I know you’re grown up now, but, O Clara, do be careful! Don’t get into trouble.”

  The Woodburn house in Columbus, like the Butterworth house in the country south of Bidwell, sat on a hill. The street fell away rather sharply as one went toward the business portion of the city and the street car line, and on the morning when her aunt spoke to her and tried with her feeble hands to tear some stones out of the wall that was being built between them, Clara hurried along the street under the trees, feeling as though she would like also to weep. She saw no possibility of explaining to her aunt the new thoughts she was beginning to have about life and did not want to hurt her by trying. “How can I explain my thoughts when they’re not clear in my own mind, when I am myself just groping blindly about?” she asked herself. “She wants me to be good,” she thought. “What would she think if I told her that I had come to the conclusion that, judging by her standards, I have been altogether too good? What’s the use trying to talk to her when I would only hurt her and make things harder than ever?” She got to a street crossing and looked back. Her aunt was still standing at the door of her house and looking at her. There was something soft, small, round, insistent, both terribly weak and terribly strong about the completely feminine thing she had made of herself or that life had made of her. Clara shuddered. She did not make a symbol of the figure of her aunt and her mind did not form a connection between her aunt’s life and what she had become, as Kate Chanceller’s mind would have done. She saw the little, round, weeping woman as a boy, walking in the tree-lined streets of a town, sees suddenly the pale face and staring eyes of a prisoner that looks out at him through the iron bars of a town jail. Clara was startled as the boy would be startled and, like the boy, she wanted to run quickly away. “I must think of something else and of other kinds of women or I’ll get things terribly distorted,” she told herself. “If I think of her and women like her I’ll grow afraid of marriage, and I want to be married as soon as I can find the right man. It’s the only thing I can do. What else is there a woman can do?”

  As Clara and Kate walked about in the evening, they talked continually of the new position Kate believed women were on the point of achieving in the world. The woman who was so essentially a man wanted to talk of marriage and to condemn it, but continually fought the impulse in herself. She knew that were she to let herself go she would say many things that, while they might be true enough as regards herself, would not necessarily be true of Clara. “Because I do not want to live with a man or be his wife is not very good proof that the institution is wrong. It may be that I want to keep Clara for myself. I think more of her than of any one else I’ve ever met. How can I think straight about her marrying some man and becoming dulled to the things that mean most to me?” she asked herself. One evening, when the women were walking from Kate’s apartment to the Woodburn house, they were accosted by two men who wanted to walk with them. There was a small park nearby and Kate led the men to it. “Come,” she said, “we won’t walk with you, but you may sit with us here on a bench.” The men sat down beside them and the older one, a man with a small black mustache, made some remark about the fineness of the night. The younger man who sat beside Clara looked at her and laughed. Kate at once got down to business. “Well, you wanted to walk with us: what for?” she asked sharply. She explained what they had been doing. “We were walking and talking of women and what they were to do with their lives,” she explained. “We were expressing opinions, you see. I don’t say either of us had said anything that was very wise, but we were having a good time and trying to learn something from each other. Now what have you to say to us? You interrupted our talk and wanted to walk with us: what for? You wanted to be in our company: now tell us what you’ve got to contribute. You can’t just come and walk with us like dumb things. What have you got to offer that you think will make it worth while for us to break up our conversation with each other and spend the time talking with you?”