Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  He smiled at the thought of himself lolling there on the park bench like a public idler or a tramp. On other benches in the little park sat other men and that was the kind of men they were. Well, they were the kind of fellows who didn’t fit into things, who hadn’t jobs. One could tell that by looking at them. There was a kind of hang-dog air about them and although two of the men on a nearby bench talked to each other they did it in a dull listless way that showed they were not really interested in what they were saying. Were men, when they talked, ever really interested in what they said to each other?

  John Webster put his arms above his head and stretched. He was more aware of himself, of his own body, than he had been for years. “There’s something going on like the breaking up of a long hard winter. Spring is coming in me,” he thought and the thought pleased him like a caress from the hand of someone he loved.

  Weary tired moments had been coming to him all day long and now another came. He was like a train running through a mountainous country and occasionally passing through tunnels. In one moment the world about him was all alive and then it was just a dull dreary place that frightened him. The thought that came to him was something like this— “Well, here I am. There is no use denying it, something unusual has happened to me. Yesterday I was one thing. Now I am something else. About me everywhere are these people I have always known, here in this town. Down that street there before me, at the corner there, in that stone building, is the bank where I do the banking business for my factory. It happens that just at this particular time I do not owe them any money, but a year from now I may be in debt to that institution up to my eyebrows. There have been times, in the years I have lived and worked as a manufacturer, when I was altogether in the power of the men who now sit at desks behind those stone walls. Why they didn’t close me up and take my business away from me I don’t know. Perhaps they did not think it worth while and then, perhaps, they felt, if they left me on there I would be working for them anyway. At any rate now, it doesn’t seem to matter much what such an institution as a bank may decide to do.

  “One can’t quite make out what other men think. Perhaps they do not think at all.

  “If I come right down to it I suppose I’ve never done much thinking myself. Perhaps the whole business of life, here in this town and everywhere else, is just a kind of accidental affair. Things happen. People are swept along, eh? That’s the way it must be.”

  It was incomprehensible to him and his mind soon grew weary of trying to think further along that road.

  It went back to the matter of people and houses. Perhaps one could speak of that matter to Natalie. There was something simple and clear about her. “She has been working for me for three years now and it is strange I’ve never thought much about her before. She has a way of keeping things clear and straight. Everything has gone better since she has been with me.”

  It would be a thing to think about if all the time, since she had been with him, Natalie had understood the things that were just now becoming a little plain to him. Suppose, from the very beginning, she had been ready to have him go within herself. One could get quite romantic about the matter if one allowed oneself to think about it.

  There she would be, you see, that Natalie. She got out of bed in the morning and while she was there, in her own room, in the little frame house out at the edge of town, she said a little prayer. Then she walked along the streets and down along the railroad tracks to her work and to sit all day in the presence of a man.

  It was an interesting thought, just to suppose, as a kind of playful diversion let us say, that she, that Natalie, was pure and clean.

  In that case she wouldn’t be thinking much of herself. She loved, that is to say she had opened the doors of herself.

  One had a picture of her standing with the doors of her body open. Something constantly went out of her and into the man in whose presence she spent the day. He was unaware, was in fact too much absorbed in his own trivial affairs to be aware.

  Her own self also began to be absorbed with his affairs, to take the load of small and unimportant details of business off his mind in order that he in turn become aware of her, standing thus, with the doors of her body opened. How clean, sweet, and fragrant the house within which she lived! Before one went within such a house one would have to cleanse oneself too. That was clear. Natalie had done it with prayers and devotion, single-minded devotion to the interests of another. Could one cleanse one’s own house that way? Could one be as much the man as Natalie was the woman? It was a test.

  As for the matter of houses — if one got thinking of one’s own body in that way where would it all end? One might go further and think of one’s own body as a town, a city, as the world.

  It was a road to madness too. One might think of people constantly passing in and out of each other. In all the world there would be no more secrecy. Something like a great wind would sweep through the world.

  “A people drunk with life. A people drunk and joyous with life.”

  The sentences rang through John Webster like great bells ringing. He sat upright on the park bench. Had the listless fellows sitting about him on other benches heard the words? For just a moment he thought the words might be running like living things through the streets of his town, stopping people on the streets, making people look up from their work in offices and factories.

  “One had better go a little slow and not get oneself out of hand,” he told himself.

  He began trying to think along another road. Across a little stretch of grass and a roadway before him there was a store with trays of fruit, oranges, apples, grapefruit, and pears arranged on the sidewalk and now a wagon stopped at the store door and began to unload other things. He looked long and hard at the wagon and at the store front.

  His mind slipped off at a new tangent. There he was, himself, John Webster, sitting on that bench in a park in the very heart of a town in the state of Wisconsin. It was fall and nearly time for frost to come, but there was still new life in the grass. How green the grass was in the little park! The trees were alive too. Soon now they would flame with color and then sleep for a period. To all the world of living green things there would come the flame of evening and then the night of winter.

  Out before the world of animal life the fruits of the earth would be poured. Out of the ground they would come, off trees and bushes, out of the seas, lakes, and rivers, the things that were to maintain animal life during the period when the world of vegetable life slept the sweet sleep of winter.

  It was a thing to think about too. Everywhere, all about him must be men and women who lived altogether unaware of such things. To tell the truth he had himself been, all his life, unaware. He had just eaten food, stuffed it into his body through his mouth. There had been no joy. He had not really tasted things, smelled things. How filled with fragrant suggestive smells life might be!

  It must have come about that as men and women went out of the fields and hills to live in cities, as factories grew and as the railroads and steamboats came to pass the fruits of the earth back and forth a kind of dreadful unawareness must have grown in people. Not touching things with their hands people lost the sense of them. That was it, perhaps.

  John Webster remembered that, when he was a boy, such matters were differently arranged. He lived in the town and knew nothing much of country life, but at that time town and country were more closely wed.

  In the fall, at just this time of the year, farmers used to drive into town and deliver things at his father’s house. At that time everyone had great cellars under his house and in the cellars were bins that were to be filled with potatoes, apples, turnips. There was a trick man had learned. Straw was brought in from fields near the town and pumpkins, squashes, heads of cabbage, and other solid vegetables were wrapped in straw and put into a cool part of the cellar. He remembered that his mother wrapped pears in bits of paper and kept them sweet and fresh for months.

  As for himself, although he did not live in th
e country he was, at that time, aware of something quite tremendous going on. Wagons arrived at his father’s house. On Saturdays a farm woman, who drove an old gray horse, came to the front door and knocked. She was bringing the Websters their weekly supply of butter and eggs and often a chicken for the Sunday dinner. John Webster’s mother went to the door to meet her and the child ran along, clinging to his mother’s skirts.

  The farm woman came into the house and sat up stiffly in a chair in the parlor while her basket was being emptied and while the butter was being taken out of its stone jar. The boy stood with his back to the wall in a corner and studied her. Nothing was said. What strange hands she had, so unlike his mother’s hands, that were soft and white. The farm woman’s hands were brown and the knuckles were like the bark-covered knobs that sometimes grew on the trunks of trees. They were hands to take hold of things, to take hold of things firmly.

  After the men from the country had come and had put the things in the bins in the cellar it was fine to go down there in the afternoon when one had come home from school. Outside the leaves were all coming off the trees and everything looked bare. One felt a little sad and almost frightened at times and the visits to the cellar were reassuring. The rich smell of things, fragrant and strong smells! One got an apple out of one of the bins and stood eating it. In a far corner there were the dark bins where the pumpkins and squashes were buried in straw and everywhere, along the walls, were the glass jars of fruit his mother had put up. How many of them, what a plenitude of everything. One could eat and eat and still there would be plenty.

  At night sometimes, when one had gone upstairs and had got into bed, one thought of the cellar and of the farm woman and the farm men. Outside the house it was dark and a wind was blowing. Soon there would be winter and snow and skating. The farm woman with the strange, strong-looking hands had driven the gray horse off along the street on which the Webster house stood, and around a corner. One had stood at a window down stairs and had watched her out of sight. She had gone off into some mysterious place, spoken of as the country. How big was the country and how far away was it? Had she got there yet? It was night now and very dark. The wind was blowing. Was she still driving the gray horse on and on, the reins held in her strong brown hands?

  The boy had got into bed and had pulled the covers up about him. His mother came into the room and after kissing him went away taking his lamp. He was safe in the house. Near him, in another room, his father and mother slept. Only the country woman, with the strong hands, was now out there alone in the night. She was driving the gray horse on and on into the darkness, into the strange place from which came all the good, rich smelling things, now stored away in the cellar under the house.

  IV

  “WELL, HELLO YOU, Mr. Webster. This is a fine place for you to be day-dreaming. I’ve been standing here and looking at you for several minutes and you haven’t even seen me.”

  John Webster jumped to his feet. The afternoon was passing and already there was a kind of grayness falling over the trees and the grass in the little park. The late afternoon sun was shining on the figure of the man who stood before him and, although the man was short of stature and slight, his shadow on the stone walk was grotesquely long. The man was evidently amused at the thought of the prosperous manufacturer day-dreaming there in the park and laughed softly, his body swaying a little back and forth. The shadow also swayed. It was like a thing hung on a pendulum, swinging back and forth, and even as John Webster sprang to his feet a sentence went through his mind. “He takes life with a long slow easy swing. How does that happen? He takes life with a long slow easy swing,” his mind said. It seemed like a fragment of a thought snatched out of nowhere, a fragmentary dancing little thought.

  The man who stood before him owned a small second-hand book store on a side street along which John Webster was in the habit of walking as he went back and forth to his factory. On summer evenings the man sat in a chair before his shop and made comments on the weather and on passing events to the people going up and down the sidewalk. Once when John Webster was with his banker, a gray dignified looking man, he had been somewhat embarrassed because the bookseller called out his name. He had never done it until that day and never did it afterward. The manufacturer had become self-conscious and had explained the matter to the banker. “I really don’t know the man. I was never in his shop,” he said.

  In the park John Webster stood before the little man deeply embarrassed. He told a harmless lie. “I’ve had a headache all day and sat down here for a moment,” he said sheepishly. It was annoying that he felt like apologizing. The little man smiled knowingly. “You ought to take something for that. It might get a man like you into a hell of a mess,” he said and walked away, his long shadow dancing behind him.

  With a shrug of his shoulders John Webster went rapidly through a crowded business street. He was quite sure now that he knew what he wanted to do. He did not loiter and give way to vague thoughts, but walked briskly along the street. “I’ll keep my mind occupied,” he decided. “I’ll think about my business and how to develop it.” During the week before, an advertising man from Chicago had come into his office and had talked to him about advertising his washing machine in the big national magazines. It would cost a good deal of money, but the advertising man had said that he could raise his selling price and sell many more machines. That sounded possible. It would make the business a big one, an institution of national prominence, and himself a big figure in the industrial world. Other men had got into a position like that through the power of advertising. Why shouldn’t he do something of the sort?

  He tried to think about the matter, but his mind didn’t work very well. It was a blank. What happened was that he walked along with his shoulders thrown back and felt childishly important about nothing. He had to be careful or he would begin laughing at himself. There was within him a lurking fear that in a few minutes he would begin laughing at the figure of John Webster as a man of national importance in the industrial world and the fear made him hurry faster than ever. When he got to the railroad tracks that ran down to his factory he was almost running. It was amazing. The advertising man from Chicago could use big words, apparently without being in any danger of suddenly beginning to laugh. When John Webster was a young fellow and had just come out of college, that was when he read a great many books and sometimes thought he would like to become a writer of books, at that time he had often thought he wasn’t cut out to be a business man at all. Perhaps he was right. A man who hadn’t any more sense than to laugh at himself had better not try to become a figure of national importance in the industrial world, that was sure. It wanted serious fellows to carry off such positions successfully.

  Well now he had begun to be a little sorry for himself, that he was not cut out to be a big figure in the industrial world. What a childish fellow he was. He began to scold himself, “Won’t I ever grow up?”

  As he hurried along the railroad tracks, trying to think, trying not to think, he kept his eyes turned to the ground and something attracted his attention. To the west, over the tops of distant trees and across the shallow river beside which his factory stood, the sun was just going down and its rays were suddenly caught by something that looked like a piece of glass lying among the stones on the railroad roadbed.

  He stopped his rush along the tracks and leaned over to pick it up. It was something, perhaps a jewel of some sort, perhaps just a cheap little plaything some child had lost. The stone was about the size and shape of a small bean and was dark green. When the rays of the sun fell on it, as he held it in his hand, the color changed. After all it might be a valuable thing. “Perhaps some woman, riding on a train through the town, has lost it out of her ring or out of a brooch she wears at her throat,” he thought and had a momentary picture floating in his mind. In the picture there was a tall strong fair woman, standing, not on a train but on a hill above a river. The river was wide and as it was winter was covered with ice. The woman had one hand raise
d and was pointing. A ring was on her finger and the small green stone was set in the ring. He could see everything very minutely. The woman stood on the hill and the sun shone on her and the stone in the ring was now pale, now dark like the waters of a sea, and beside the woman stood a man, a rather heavy-looking man with gray hair, with whom the woman was in love. The woman was saying something to the man about the stone set in the ring and John Webster could hear the words very distinctly. What strange words she was saying. “My father gave it to me and told me to wear it for all my loves. He called it, ‘the jewel of life,’” she said.

  Hearing the rumble of a train, far away somewhere in the distance, John Webster got off the tracks. There was at just that place a high embankment beside the river along which he could walk. “I don’t intend to come near being killed by a train as I was this morning when that young negro saved me,” he thought. He looked away to the west and to the evening sun and then down at the bed of the river. Now the river was low and only a narrow channel of water ran through wide banks of caked mud. He put the little green stone in his vest pocket.

  “I know what I am going to do,” he told himself resolutely. Quickly a plan formed itself in his mind. He would go to his office and hurry through any letters that had come in. Then, without looking at Natalie Swartz, he would get up and go away. There was a train for Chicago at eight o’clock and he would tell his wife he had business in the city and would take the train. What a man had to do in life was to face facts and then act. He would go to Chicago and find himself a woman. When it came right down to the truth he would go on a regular bat. He would find himself a woman and he would get drunk and if he felt like doing it would stay drunk for several days.

  There were times when it was perhaps necessary to be a down-right rotter. He would do that too. While he was in Chicago and with the woman he had found he would write a letter to his bookkeeper at the factory and tell him to discharge Natalie Swartz. Then he would write Natalie a letter and send her a large check. He would send her six months’ pay. The whole thing might cost him a pretty sum, but anything was better than this going on as he was, a regular crazy kind of man.