Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  He went to the shop door and then came back to the bench. Before him lay an iron wheel on which he had been at work. It was intended to drive some intricate part of the hay-loading machine. Hugh took it in his hand and carried it to the back of the shop where there was an anvil. Without consciousness and scarcely realizing what he did he laid it on the anvil and taking a great sledge in his hand swung it over his head.

  The blow struck was terrific. Into it Hugh put all of his protest against the grotesque position into which he had been thrown by his marriage to Clara.

  The blow accomplished nothing. The sledge descended and the comparatively delicate metal wheel was twisted, knocked out of shape. It spurted from under the head of the sledge and shot past Hugh’s head and out through a window, breaking a pane of glass. Fragments of the broken glass fell with a sharp little tinkling sound upon a heap of twisted pieces of iron and steel lying beside the anvil....

  Hugh did not eat lunch that day nor did he go to the farmhouse or return to work at the shop. He walked, but this time did not walk in country roads where male and female birds dart in and out of bushes. An intense desire to know something intimate and personal concerning men and women and the lives they led in their houses had taken possession of him. He walked in the daylight up and down in the streets of Bidwell.

  To the right, over the bridge leading out of Turner’s Road, the main street of Bidwell ran along a river bank. In that direction the hills out of the country to the south came down to the river’s edge and there was a high bluff. On the bluff and back of it on a sloping hillside many of the more pretentious new houses of the prosperous Bidwell citizens had been built. Facing the river were the largest houses, with grounds in which trees and shrubs had been planted and in the streets along the hill, less and less pretentious as they receded from the river, were other houses built and being built, long rows of houses, long streets of houses, houses in brick, stone, and wood.

  Hugh went from the river front back into this maze of streets and houses. Some instinct led him there. It was where the men and women of Bidwell who had prospered and had married went to live, to make themselves houses. His father-in-law had offered to buy him a river front place and already that meant much in Bidwell.

  He wanted to see women who, like Clara, had got themselves husbands, what they were like. “I’ve seen enough of men,” he thought half resentfully as he went along.

  All afternoon he walked in streets, going up and down before houses in which women lived with their men. A detached mood had possession of him. For an hour he stood under a tree idly watching workmen engaged in building another house. When one of the workmen spoke to him he walked away and went into a street where men were laying a cement pavement before a completed house.

  In a furtive way he kept looking about for women, hungering to see their faces. “What are they up to? I’d like to find out,” his mind seemed to be saying.

  The women came out of the doors of the houses and passed him as he went slowly along. Other women in carriages drove in the streets. They were well-dressed women and seemed sure of themselves. “Things are all right with me. For me things are settled and arranged,” they seemed to say. All the streets in which he walked seemed to be telling the story of things settled and arranged. The houses spoke of the same things. “I am a house. I am not built until things are settled and arranged. I mean that,” they said.

  Hugh grew very tired. In the later afternoon a small bright-eyed woman — no doubt she had been one of the guests at his wedding feast — stopped him. “Are you planning to buy or build up our way, Mr. McVey?” she asked. He shook his head. “I’m looking around,” he said and hurried away.

  Anger took the place of perplexity in him. The women he saw in the streets and in the doors of the houses were such women as his own woman Clara. They had married men— “no better than myself,” he told himself, growing bold.

  They had married men and something had happened to them. Something was settled. They could live in streets and in houses. Their marriages had been real marriages and he had a right to a real marriage. It was not too much to expect out of life.

  “Clara has a right to that also,” he thought and his mind began to idealize the marriages of men and women. “On every hand here I see them, the neat, well-dressed, handsome women like Clara. How happy they are!

  “Their feathers have been ruffled though,” he thought angrily. “It was with them as with that bird I saw being pursued through the trees. There has been pursuit and a pretense of trying to escape. There has been an effort made that was not an effort, but feathers have been ruffled here.”

  When his thoughts had driven him into a half desperate mood Hugh went out of the streets of bright, ugly, freshly built, freshly painted and furnished houses, and down into the town. Several men homeward bound at the end of their day of work called to him. “I hope you are thinking of buying or building up our way,” they said heartily.

  It began to rain and darkness came, but Hugh did not go home to Clara. It did not seem to him that he could spend another night in the house with her, lying awake, hearing the little noises of the night, waiting — for courage. He could not sit under the lamp through another evening pretending to read. He could not go with Clara up the stairs only to leave her with a cold “good-night” at the top of the stairs.

  Hugh went up the Medina Road almost to the house and then retraced his steps and got into a field. There was a low swampy place in which the water came up over his shoetops, and after he had crossed that there was a field overgrown with a tangle of vines. The night became so dark that he could see nothing and darkness reigned over his spirit. For hours he walked blindly, but it did not occur to him that as he waited, hating the waiting, Clara also waited; that for her also it was a time of trial and uncertainty. To him it seemed her course was simple and easy. She was a white pure thing — waiting — for what? for courage to come in to him in order that an assault be made upon her whiteness and purity.

  That was the only answer to the question Hugh could find within himself. The destruction of what was white and pure was a necessary thing in life. It was a thing men must do in order that life go on. As for women, they must be white and pure — and wait.

  Filled with inward resentment Hugh at last did go to the farmhouse. Wet and with dragging, heavy feet he turned out of the Medina Road to find the house dark and apparently deserted.

  Then a new and puzzling situation arose. When he stepped over the threshold and into the house he knew Clara was there.

  On that day she had not driven him to work in the morning or gone for him at noon hour because she did not want to look at him in the light of day, did not want again to see the puzzled, frightened look in his eyes. She had wanted him in the darkness alone, had waited for darkness. Now it was dark in the house and she waited for him.

  How simple it was! Hugh came into the living-room, stumbled forward into the darkness, and found the hat-rack against the wall near the stairway leading to the bedrooms above. Again he had surrendered what he would no doubt have called the manhood in himself, and hoped only to be able to escape the presence he felt in the room, to creep off upstairs to his bed, to lie awake listening to noises, waiting miserably for another day to come. But when he had put his dripping hat on one of the pegs of the rack and had found the lower step with his foot thrust into darkness, a voice called to him.

  “Come here, Hugh,” Clara said softly and firmly, and like a boy caught doing a forbidden act he went toward her. “We have been very silly, Hugh,” he heard her voice saying softly.

  Hugh went to where Clara sat in a chair by a window. From him there was no protest and no attempt to escape the love-making that followed. For a moment he stood in silence and could see her white figure below him in the chair. It was like something still far away, but coming swiftly as a bird flies to him — upward to him. Her hand crept up and lay in his hand. It seemed unbelievably large. It was not soft, but hard and firm. When her hand had rest
ed in his for a moment she arose and stood beside him. Then the hand went out of his and touched, caressed his wet coat, his wet hair, his cheeks. “My flesh must be white and cold,” he thought, and then he did not think any more.

  Gladness took hold of him, a gladness that came up out of the inner parts of himself as she had come up to him out of the chair. For days, weeks, he had been thinking of his problem as a man’s problem, his defeat had been a man’s defeat.

  Now there was no defeat, no problem, no victory. In himself he did not exist. Within himself something new had been born or another something that had always lived with him had stirred to life. It was not awkward. It was not afraid. It was a thing as swift and sure as the flight of the male bird through the branches of trees and it was in pursuit of something light and swift in her, something that would fly through light and darkness but fly not too swiftly, something of which he need not be afraid, something that without the need of understanding he could understand as one understands the need of breath in a close place.

  With a laugh as soft and sure as her own Hugh took Clara into his arms. A few minutes later they went up stairs and twice Hugh stumbled on the stairway. It did not matter. His long awkward body was a thing outside himself. It might stumble and fall many times but the new thing he had found, the thing inside himself that responded to the thing inside the shell that was Clara his wife, did not stumble. It flew like a bird out of darkness into the light. At the moment he thought the sweeping flight of life thus begun would run on forever.

  BOOK FIVE

  CHAPTER XXI

  IT WAS A summer night in Ohio and the wheat in the long, flat fields that stretched away to the north from the town of Bidwell was ripe for the cutting. Between the wheat fields lay corn and cabbage fields. In the corn fields the green stalks stood up like young trees. Facing the fields lay the white roads, once the silent roads, hushed and empty through the nights and often during many hours of the day, the night silence broken only at long intervals by the clattering hoofs of homeward bound horses and the silence of days by creaking wagons. Along the roads on a summer evening went the young farm hand in his buggy for which he had spent a summer’s wage, a long summer of sweaty toil in hot fields. The hoofs of his horse beat a soft tattoo on the roads. His sweetheart sat beside him and he was in no hurry. All day he had been at work in the harvest and on the morrow he would work again. It did not matter. For him the night would last until the cocks in isolated farmyards began to hail the dawn. He forgot the horse and did not care what turning he took. All roads led to happiness for him.

  Beside the long roads was an endless procession of fields broken now and then by a strip of woodland, where the shadows of trees fell upon the roads and made pools of an inky blackness. In the long, dry grass in fence corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran, flitting away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields were beautiful too.

  Who has written or sung of the beauties of corn fields in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or of the vast Ohio cabbage fields? In the cabbage fields the broad outer leaves fall down to make a background for the shifting, delicate colors of soils. The leaves are themselves riotous with color. As the season advances they change from light to dark greens, a thousand shades of purples, blues and reds appear and disappear.

  In silence the cabbage fields slept beside the roads in Ohio. Not yet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashing lights — beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summer night — had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities. Akron, the terrible town, had not yet begun to roll forth its countless millions of rubber hoops, filled each with its portion of God’s air compressed and in prison at last like the farm hands who have gone to the cities. Detroit and Toledo had not begun to send forth their hundreds of thousands of motor cars to shriek and scream the nights away on country roads. Willis was still a mechanic in an Indiana town, and Ford still worked in a bicycle repair shop in Detroit.

  It was a summer night in the Ohio country and the moon shone. A country doctor’s horse went at a humdrum pace along the roads. Softly and at long intervals men afoot stumbled along. A farm hand whose horse was lame walked toward town. An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads, hurried toward the lights of the distant town. In Bidwell, the place that had been on other summer nights a sleepy town filled with gossiping berry pickers, things were astir.

  Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in its own way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell that quiet summer night something happened that startled men. Something happened, and then in a few minutes it happened again. Heads wagged, special editions of daily newspapers were printed, the great hive of men was disturbed, under the invisible roof of the town that had so suddenly become a city, the seeds of self-consciousness were planted in new soil, in American soil.

  Before all this began, however, something else happened. The first motor car ran through the streets of Bidwell and out upon the moonlit roads. The motor car was driven by Tom Butterworth and in it sat his daughter Clara with her husband Hugh McVey. During the week before, Tom had brought the car from Cleveland, and the mechanic who rode with him had taught him the art of driving. Now he drove alone and boldly. Early in the evening he had run out to the farmhouse to take his daughter and son-in-law for their first ride. Hugh sat in the seat beside him and after they had started and were clear of the town, Tom turned to him. “Now watch me step on her tail,” he said proudly, using for the first time the motor slang he had picked up from the Cleveland mechanic.

  As Tom sent the car hurling over the roads, Clara sat alone in the back seat unimpressed by her father’s new acquisition. For three years she had been married and she felt that she did not yet know the man she had married. Always the story had been the same, moments of light and then darkness again. A new machine that went along roads at a startlingly increased rate of speed might change the whole face of the world, as her father declared it would, but it did not change certain facts of her life. “Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh impossible as a husband?” she asked herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, having got into a long stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sail through the air like a bird. “At any rate I have married me a husband and yet I have no husband, I have been in a man’s arms but I have no lover, I have taken hold of life, but life has slipped through my fingers.”

  Like her father, Hugh seemed to Clara absorbed in only the things outside himself, the outer crust of life. He was like and yet unlike her father. She was baffled by him. There was something in the man she wanted and could not find. “The fault must be in me,” she told herself. “He’s all right, but what’s the matter with me?”

  After that night when he ran away from her bridal bed, Clara had more than once thought the miracle had happened. It did sometimes. On that night when he came to her out of the rain it had happened. There was a wall a blow could shatter, and she raised her hand to strike the blow. The wall was shattered and then builded itself again. Even as she lay at night in her husband’s arms the wall reared itself up in the darkness of the sleeping room.

  Over the farmhouse on such nights dense silence brooded and she and Hugh, as had become their habit together, were silent. In the darkness she put up her hand to touch her husband’s face and hair. He lay still and she had the impression of some great force holding him back, holding her back. A sharp sense of struggle filled the room. The air was heavy with it.

  When words came they did not break the silence. The wall remained.

  The words that came were empty, meaningless words. Hugh suddenly broke forth into speech. He spoke of his work at the shop and of his progress toward the solution of some difficult, mechanical problem. If it were evening when the thing happened the two people got out of the lighted house where they had been sitting together, each feeling darkness would help the effort th
ey were both making to tear away the wall. They walked along a lane, past the barns and over the little wooden bridge across the stream that ran down through the barnyard. Hugh did not want to talk of the work at the shop, but could find words for no other talk. They came to a fence where the lane turned and from where they could look down the hillside and into the town. He did not look at Clara but stared down the hillside and the words, in regard to the mechanical difficulties that had occupied his mind all day, ran on and on. When later they went back to the house he felt a little relieved. “I’ve said words. There is something achieved,” he thought.

  And now after the three years as a married woman Clara sat in the motor with her father and husband and with them was sent whirling swiftly through the summer night. The car ran down the hill road from the Butterworth farm, through a dozen residence streets in town and then out upon the long, straight roads in the rich, flat country to the north. It had skirted the town as a hungry wolf might have encircled silently and swiftly the fire-lit camp of a hunter. To Clara the machine seemed like a wolf, bold and cunning and yet afraid. Its great nose pushed through the troubled air of the quiet roads, frightening horses, breaking the silence with its persistent purring, drowning the song of insects. The headlights also disturbed the slumbers of the night. They flashed into barnyards where fowls slept on the lower branches of trees, played on the sides of barns sent the cattle in fields galloping away into darkness, and frightened horribly the wild things, the red squirrels and chipmunks that live in wayside fences in the Ohio country. Clara hated the machine and began to hate all machines. Thinking of machinery and the making of machines had, she decided, been at the bottom of her husband’s inability to talk with her. Revolt against the whole mechanical impulse of her generation began to take possession of her.