Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  If one lived behind a wall one preferred life behind the wall. Behind the wall the light was dim and did not hurt the eyes. Memories were shut out. The sounds of life grew faint and indistinct in the distance. There was something barbaric and savage in all this business of breaking down walls, making cracks and gaps in the wall of life.

  There was a struggle going on within the woman, Mary Webster, also. A queer sort of new life came and went in her eyes. Had a fourth person at that moment come into the room he might have been more conscious of her than of the others.

  There was something terrible in the way her husband John Webster had set the stage for the battle that was now to go on within her. The man was after all a dramatist. The business of buying the picture of the Virgin and the candles, the making of this little stage upon which a drama was to be played out; there was an unconscious art expression in all this.

  Perhaps he had outwardly intended nothing of the sort, but with what devilish certainty he had worked. The woman now sat in a half-darkness on the floor. Between her and the burning candles was the bed on which the two others sat, one talking, the other listening. All the floor of the room, near where she sat was in heavy black shadows. She had put one hand out against the door-frame to help support herself.

  The candles on their high place flickered as they burned. The light fell only on her shoulders, her head, and her upraised arm and hand.

  She was almost submerged in a sea of darkness. Now and then, from sheer weariness her head fell forward and there was an effect of sinking completely into the sea.

  Still her arm was upraised and her head came back again to the surface of the sea. There was a slight rocking movement to her body. She was like an old boat, half water-logged, lying in the sea. Little fluttering waves of light seemed playing over her heavy white upraised face.

  Breathing was somewhat difficult. Thinking was somewhat difficult. One had gone along for years without thinking. It was better to lie quietly in a sea of silence. The world was quite right in excommunicating those who disturbed the sea of silence. Mary Webster’s body quivered a little. One might kill, but had not the strength to kill, did not know how to kill. Killing was a business one had to learn too.

  It was unbearable, but one had at times to think. Things happened. A woman married a man and then found, quite suddenly, she had not married him. The world was getting strange unacceptable notions about marriage. Daughters should not be told such things as her husband was now telling their daughter. Could the mind of a young virginal girl be raped, by her own father, into consciousness of unspeakable things in life? If such things were permitted what would become of all decent orderly living of lives? Virginal girls should find out nothing about life until the time came to live the things they must, being women, finally accept.

  In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking always going on. Outwardly certain words are said, but there are other words being said at the same time down in the deep hidden places. There is a deposit of thoughts, of unexpressed emotions. How many things thrown down into the deep well, hidden away in the deep well!

  There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well. When the lid is safely in place one gets on all right. One goes about saying words, eating food, meeting people, conducting affairs, accumulating money, wearing clothes, one lives an ordered life.

  Sometimes at night, in dreams, the lid trembles, but no one knows about that.

  Why should there be those who desire to tear the lids off the wells, to break through the walls? Things had better be left as they are. Those who disturb the heavy iron lids should be killed.

  The heavy iron lid over the deep well that was within the body of Mary Webster was trembling violently. It danced up and down. The dancing light from the candles was like the little playful waves on the surface of a calm sea. It met in her eyes another kind of dancing light.

  On the bed John Webster talked freely and easily. If he had set the stage he had also given himself the talking rôle in the drama that was to be played out upon it. His own thought had been that everything that happened on that evening was directed toward his daughter. He had even dared to think he might be able to re-channel her life. Her young life was like a river that was still small and made but a slight murmuring sound as it ran through quiet fields. One might still step across the stream that was later, and when it had taken other streams into itself, to become a river. One might venture to throw a log across the stream, to start it off in a quite different direction. The whole thing was a daring, a quite reckless thing to do, but one could not quite escape some such action.

  Now he had dismissed from his mind the other woman, his former wife, Mary Webster. He had thought when she went out of the bedroom she had finally walked off the stage. There had been satisfaction in seeing her go. He had really, in all their life together, never made a contact with her. When he thought her gone from the field of his own life he felt relieved. One could breathe more deeply, talk more freely.

  He thought of her as having gone off the stage, but she had come back. He still had her to deal with too.

  In Mary Webster’s mind memories were awakening. Her husband was telling the story of his marriage, but she did not hear his words. A story began to tell itself within her, beginning far back on a day in her own young womanhood.

  She had heard the cry of love for a man come out of her daughter’s throat and the cry had stirred something within her so deeply that she had come back into the room where her husband and daughter sat together on the bed. Once there had been that same cry within another young woman, but for some reason it had never got itself out, past her lips. At the moment when it might have come from her, at that moment long ago when she lay naked on a bed and looked into the eyes of a young naked man something, a thing people called shame, had come between her and the getting of that glad cry past her lips.

  Her mind now wearily went back over the details of the scene. An old railroad journey was retravelled.

  Things were tangled. First she lived in one place and then, as though pushed into the act by a hand she could not see, she went on a visit to another place.

  The journey there was taken in the middle of the night and, as there were no sleeping cars on the train, she had to sit in a day-coach through several hours of darkness.

  Outside the car window there was darkness, broken now and then when the train stopped for a few minutes at some town in Western Illinois or Southern Wisconsin. There was a station building with a lamp fastened to the outer wall and sometimes but a solitary man, bundled in a coat and perhaps pushing a truck piled with trunks and boxes along a station platform. At some of the towns people got aboard the train and at others people got off and went away into the darkness.

  An old woman who carried a basket in which there was a black and white cat came to sit in the seat with her and after she had got off at one of the stations an old man took her place.

  The old man did not look at her, but kept muttering words she could not catch. He had a ragged gray moustache that hung down over his shrunken lips and he continually stroked it with a bony old hand. The words he said in an undertone were muttered behind the hand.

  The young woman of that railroad journey, taken long ago, had, after a time, fallen into a half-waking, half-sleeping state. Her mind had run ahead of her body to her journey’s end. A girl she had known at school had invited her for a visit and there had been several letters written back and forth. Two young men would be in the house all during the time of the visit.

  One of the young men she had already seen. He was her friend’s brother and had once come on a visit to the school where the two girls were students.

  What would the other young man be like? It was curious how many times she had already asked herself that question. Now her mind was making fanciful pictures of him. The train ran through a country of low hills. Dawn was coming. It would be a day of gray cold clouds. Snow threatened. The muttering old man of the gray moustache and the
bony hand had got off the train.

  The half-awake eyes of the tall slender young woman looked out over low hills and long stretches of flat land. The train crossed a bridge over a river. She slipped into sleep and was jerked out again by the starting or stopping of the train. Across a distant field a young man was walking in the gray morning light.

  Had she dreamed there was a young man going across a field beside the train or had she actually seen such a man? In what way was he connected with the young man she was to meet at her journey’s end?

  It was a little absurd to think the young man in the field could be of flesh and blood. He walked at the same pace the train was going stepping lightly over fences, going swiftly through the streets of towns, passing like a shadow through strips of dark woodland.

  When the train stopped he also stopped and stood looking at her and smiling. One almost felt he could go into one’s body and come out smiling thus. The idea was strangely sweet too. Now he walked for a long time on the surface of the waters of a river alongside which the train was running.

  And all the time he looked into her eyes, darkly, when the train passed through a forest and it was dark inside the train, with a smile in his eyes when they came out again into the open country. There was something in his eyes that invited, called to her. Her body grew warm and she stirred uneasily in the car seat.

  The trainmen had built a fire in a stove at the end of the car and all the doors and windows were closed. Evidently it was not going to be such a cold day after all. It was unbearably hot in the car.

  She got out of her seat and, clutching at the edges of other seats, made her way to the end of the car where she opened a door and stood for a time looking at the flying landscape.

  The train came to the station where she was to get off and there, on the station platform, was her girl friend, come to the station on the odd chance she would come on that train.

  And then she had gone with her friend into the strange house and her friend’s mother had insisted she go to bed and sleep until evening. The two women kept asking how it had happened she had come on that train and as she could not explain she became a little embarrassed. It was true there was another and faster train she might have taken and had the entire ride in the day-time.

  There had just been a kind of feverish desire to get out of her own town and her mother’s house. She had been unable to explain that to her own people. One couldn’t tell one’s mother and father she just wanted to get out. In her own home there had been a confusion of questions about the whole matter. Well, there she was, being driven into a corner and asked questions that couldn’t be answered. She had a hope that her girl friend would understand and kept hopefully saying to her what she had said over and over rather senselessly at home. “I just wanted to do it. I don’t know, I just wanted to do it.”

  In the strange house she had got into bed to sleep, glad to escape the annoying question. When she awoke they would have forgotten the whole matter. Her friend had come into the room with her and she wanted to dismiss her quickly, to be alone for a time. “I’ll not unpack my bag now. I think I’ll just undress and crawl in between the sheets. It’s going to be warm anyway,” she explained. It was absurd. Well she had looked forward to something quite different on her arrival, laughter, young men standing about and looking a little self-conscious. Now she only felt uncomfortable. Why did people keep asking why she had got up at midnight and taken a slow train instead of waiting until morning? One wanted sometimes, just to be a fool about little things, and not to have to give explanations. When her friend went out of the room she threw off all her clothes and got quickly into bed and closed her eyes. It was another foolish notion she had, her wanting to be naked. Had she not taken the slow uncomfortable train she would not have had the fancy about the young man walking beside the train in the fields, through the streets of towns, through forests.

  It was good to be naked sometimes. There was the feel of things against one’s skin. If one could only have the joyful feeling of that more often. One could sink into a clean bed, sometimes, when one was tired and sleepy and it was like getting into the firm warm arms of some one who could love and understand one’s foolish impulses.

  The young woman in the bed slept and in her sleep was again being carried swiftly along through the darkness. The woman with the cat and the old man who muttered words did not appear again, but many other people came and went through her dream-world. There was a swift tangled march of strange events. She went forward, always forward toward something she wanted. Now it approached. A great eagerness took possession of her.

  It was strange that she wore no clothes. The young man who walked so swiftly through fields had reappeared, but she had not noticed before that he also did not wear clothes.

  The world had grown dark. There was a dusky darkness.

  And now the young man had stopped going swiftly forward and like herself was silent. They both hung suspended in a sea of silence. He was standing and looking directly into her eyes. He could go within her and come out again. The thought was infinitely sweet.

  She lay in a soft warm darkness and her flesh was hot, too hot. “Some one has foolishly built a fire and has forgotten to open the doors and windows,” she thought vaguely.

  The young man, who was now so close to her, who was standing silently so close to her and looking directly into her eyes, could make everything all right. His hands were within a few inches of her body. In a moment they would touch, bring cool peace into her body, into herself too.

  There was a sweet peace to be got by looking directly into the young man’s eyes. They were glowing in the darkness like little pools into which one could cast oneself. A final and infinite peace and joy could be got by casting oneself into the pools.

  Could one stay thus, lying quietly in the soft warm dark pools? One had got into a secret place, behind a high wall. Outside voices cried— “Shame! Shame!” When one listened to the voices the pools became foul loathsome places. Should one listen to the voices or should one close the ears, close the eyes? The voices beyond the wall became louder and louder — crying, “Shame! Be ashamed!” To listen to the voices brought death. Did closing one’s ears to the voices bring death too?

  VII

  JOHN WEBSTER WAS telling a story. There was a thing he himself wanted to understand. Wanting to understand things was a new passion, come to him. What a world he had lived in always and how little he had wanted to understand it. Children were being born in towns and on farms. They grew up to be men and women. Some of them went to colleges, others, after a few years in the town or country schools, got out into life, married perhaps, got jobs in factories or shops, went to church on Sundays or to a ball game, became parents of children.

  People everywhere told things, talked of things they thought interested them, but no one told truths. At school there was no attention paid to truth. What a tangle of other and unimportant things. “Two and two make four. If a merchant sell three oranges and two apples to a man and oranges are to be sold at twenty-four cents per dozen and apples at sixteen, how much does the man owe the merchant?”

  An important matter indeed. Where is the fellow going with the three oranges and two apples? He is a small man in brown boots and has his cap stuck on the side of his head. There is a peculiar smile playing around his mouth. The sleeve of his coat is torn. What did that? The cuss is singing a song under his breath. Listen:

  “Diddle de di do,

  Diddle de di do,

  Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree.

  Diddle de di do.”

  What in the name of the bearded men, who came into the queen’s bed-chamber when the king of Rome was born, does he mean by that? What is a Chinaberry tree?

  John Webster talked to his daughter, sat with his arm about her talking, and back of him, and unseen, his wife struggled and fought to put back into its place the iron lid one should always keep tightly clamped down on the opening of the well of unexpressed thoughts within oneself.


  There was a man who had come naked into her naked presence in the dusk of the late afternoon of a day long ago. He had come in to her and had done a thing to her. There had been a rape of the unconscious self. That had been in time forgotten or forgiven, but now he was doing it again. He was talking now. Of what was he talking? Were there not things of which one never talked? For what purpose the deep well within oneself except that it be a place into which one could put the things that must not be talked about?

  Now John Webster was trying to tell the whole story of his attempt at love-making with the woman he had married.

  The writing of letters containing the word “love,” had come to something. After a time, and when he had sent off several such letters written in the hotel writing-rooms, and just when he was beginning to think he would never get an answer to one of them and might as well give the whole matter up, an answer had come. Then there had burst from him a flood of letters.

  He was still then going about from town to town trying to sell washing machines to merchants, but that only took a part of each day. There was left the late afternoons, mornings when he arose early and sometimes went for a walk along the streets of one of the towns before breakfast, the long evenings and the Sundays.

  He was full of unaccountable energy all through that time. It must have been because he was in love. If one were not in love one could not feel so alive. In the early mornings, and in the evenings as he walked about, looking at houses and people, every one suddenly seemed close to him. Men and women came out of houses and went along the streets, factory whistles blew, men and boys went in and out at the doors of factories.