Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Fellows making a mess at words, writing the newspaper jargon. Every year it got worse and worse.

  Deep in him perhaps Bruce had always had buried away a kind of inner tenderness about words, ideas, moods. He had wanted to experiment, slowly, going carefully, handling words as you might precious stones, giving them a setting.

  It was a thing you didn’t talk about too much. Too many people going into such things in a flashy way, getting cheap acclaim — Bernice, his wife, for example.

  And then the war, “bunk-shooting” worse than ever — the very Government going into “bunk-shooting” on the grand scale.

  Lord, what a time! Bruce had managed to keep himself on local stuff — murders, the capture of bootleggers, fires, labor rows, but all the time he had got more and more bored, tired of it all.

  As for his wife Bernice — he hadn’t seemed to her to be getting anywhere either. She had both despised and in an odd way feared him. She had called him “flighty.” Had he but succeeded, after ten years, in building up within himself a contempt for life?

  In the factory at Old Harbor, where he was now working, automobile wheels were made and he had got a job in the varnishing room. He had been compelled to do something, being broke. There was a long room in a great brick building near the river-bank and the window that looked out into the factory yard. A boy brought the wheels in a truck and dumped them down beside a peg on which he put them one by one to lay on the varnish.

  It had been lucky for him he had got the place beside Sponge Martin. He thought of him often enough in relation to the men with whom he had been associated ever since he had grown to manhood, intellectual men, newspaper reporters who wanted to write novels, women feminists, illustrators who drew pictures for the newspapers and for advertisements but who liked to have what they called a studio and to sit about talking of art and life.

  Next to Sponge Martin, on the other side, was a surly fellow who hardly spoke all day long. Often Sponge winked and whispered to Bruce about him. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong. He thinks his wife is fooling around with another man here in town and she is, too, but he doesn’t dare inquire into the matter too closely. He might find out that what he suspects is a fact so he just glums around,” Sponge said.

  As for Sponge himself, he had been a carriage-painter in the town of Old Harbor before anyone ever thought of building any such thing as a wheel factory there, before anyone had ever thought of any such thing as an automobile. On some days he talked altogether of the earlier days when he had owned his own shop. There was a kind of pride in him when he got on that subject and for his present job, varnishing wheels, only contempt. “Anyone could do it,” he said. “Look at you. You ain’t got no special hand for it but if you would pep up you could turn out almost as many wheels as I can and do ’em just as well.”

  But what was a fellow to do? Sponge could have been foreman of the factory finishing room if he had wanted to lick boots a little. One had to smile and kowtow a little when young Mr. Grey came around, which he only did about once a month.

  The trouble with Sponge was that he had known the Greys too long. Maybe young Grey had got it into his head that he, Sponge, was too much of a booze-hoister. He had known the Greys when this young one, that was now such a big bug, was just a kid. Once he had finished a carriage for old Grey. He used to come around to Sponge Martin’s shop bringing his kid with him.

  The carriage he was having built was sure a darby. It had been built by old Sil Mooney, who had a carriagebuilding shop right near Sponge Martin’s finishing shop.

  The description of the carriage built for Grey, the banker of Old Harbor, when Bruce was himself a boy and when Sponge had his own shop, took a whole afternoon. The old workman was so deft and quick with his brush that he could finish a wheel, catching every corner, without looking at it. Most of the men in the room worked in silence, but Sponge never stopped talking. In the room at Bruce Dudley’s back, behind a brick wall, there was a constant low rumble of machines but Sponge had got a trick of making his voice ride just above the racket. He pitched it in a certain key and every word came distinct and clear to the ears of his fellow workman.

  Bruce watched Sponge’s hands, tried to imitate the movement of his hands. The brush was held just so. There was a quick, soft movement. Sponge could fill his brush very full and yet handle it in such a way that the varnish did not drip down and he left no ugly thick places on the wheels he did. The stroke of the brush was like a caress.

  Sponge talked of the days when he had a shop of his own and told the story of the carriage built for old Grey the banker. As he talked Bruce got a notion. He kept thinking of his having left his wife so lightly. There had been a sort of wordless quarrel — one of the sort they had often got into. Bernice did special articles for the Sunday paper and she had written a story that had been accepted by a magazine. Then she joined a writers’ club in Chicago. All this had been going on and Bruce had not tried to do anything special on his own job. He had done just what he had to do, nothing more, and gradually Bernice had come to respect him less and less. It was evident she had a career before her. Writing special articles for Sunday newspapers, becoming a successful writer of magazine stories, eh? For a long time Bruce had gone along with her, going with her to meetings of the writers’ club, going to studios where men and women sat talking. There was a place in Chicago, out near Forty-seventh Street near the park, where a lot of writers and painters lived, some low small building that had been put there during the World’s Fair and Bernice had wanted him to go out there to live. She had wanted to associate more and more with people who wrote, made pictures, read books, talked of books and pictures. Now and then she spoke to Bruce in a certain way. Had she begun to patronize him a little?

  He smiled at the thought of it, smiled at the thought of himself, now working in the factory beside Sponge Martin. One day he had gone with Bernice to a meat market — they were getting chops for dinner and he had noted the way an old fat meat-cutter in the place handled his tools. The sight had fascinated him and as he had stood in the place beside his wife, waiting her turn to be served, she began talking to him and he did not hear. What he was thinking about was the old meat-cutter, the deft quick hands of the old meat-cutter. They represented something to him. What was it? The man’s hands had handled a quarter of beef with a sure quiet touch that represented to Bruce perhaps a way in which he would like to handle words. Well now, it might be that he did not want to handle words at all. He was a little afraid of words. They were such tricky, elusive things. It might be that he did not know what he wanted to handle. That might be what was the matter with him. Why not go and find out?

  With his wife Bruce had come out of the place and had walked along a street, she still talking. Of what was she talking? Suddenly Bruce had realized he did not know, — did not care. When they got to their apartment she went to cook the chops and he sat by a window, looking into a city street. The building stood near a corner where men coming out from the downtown district got off north-and south-bound cars to take other cars going east or west and the evening rush hour had begun. Bruce worked on an evening paper and so would be free until early morning, but as soon as he and Bernice had consumed the chops she would go into a back room of the apartment and begin to write. Lord, what a lot of stuff she wrote! When she was not at work on her Sunday special stuff she worked on a story. She was at work on one just at that moment. It concerned a very lonely man in the city who while walking one evening saw in a shop window the wax dummy of what in the darkness he took to be a very beautiful woman. Something had happened to the street light at the corner where the shop stood and the man had for the moment thought the woman in the window alive. He had stood looking at her and she had looked back at him. It had been an exciting experience.

  And then, you see, later, the man in Bernice’s story had found out his absurd mistake, but he was as lonely as ever and kept going back to the shop window night after night. Sometimes the dummy woman was there and som
etimes she had been taken away. She appeared now in one gown — now in another. She was in rich furs and was walking along a winter street. Now she had been arrayed in a summer frock and was standing on the shore of a sea or she was in a bathing costume and was about to plunge off into the sea.

  The whole thing was a whimsical notion and Bernice had been excited about it. How would she make it turn out? One night after the street lamp at the corner had been fixed the light was so strong that the man could not help seeing that the woman he had come to love was made of wax. How would it be to have him take a cobblestone and break the street lamp? Then he might press his lips against the cold window-glass and run off down a side street never to be seen again.

  T’wichelty, T’weedlety, T’wadelty, T’wum.

  Bruce’s wife Bernice would be a great writer some day, eh? Was he, Bruce, jealous of her? When they went together to one of the places where other newspaper men, illustrators, poets and young musicians gathered the people were inclined to look at Bernice, address their remarks to her rather than to him. She had a way of doing things for people. A young girl got out of college and wanted to be a journalist, or a young musician wanted to meet some man of power in the musical field and Bernice managed things for them. Gradually she had come to have a following in Chicago and was already planning to move on to New York. A New York paper had made her an offer and she was considering it. “You can get a job there as well as here,” she had said to her husband.

  As he stood beside his bench in the factory at Old Harbor, varnishing an automobile wheel, Bruce listened to the words of Sponge Martin, boasting of the days when he had a shop of his own and was finishing the carriage that had been built for the elder Grey. He described the wood that had been used, told how straight and fine the grain was, how every part had been carefully fitted into other parts. In the afternoon old Grey sometimes came to the shop after the bank was closed for the day and sometimes he brought his son with him. He was in a hurry for the job to be finished. Well, there was to be some kind of a special affair in the town on a certain day. The Governor of the State was to come and the banker was to entertain him. He wanted the new carriage to haul him up from the railroad station.

  Sponge talked and talked, enjoying his own words, and Bruce listened, hearing every word while he kept right on having his own thoughts, too. How many times had he heard Sponge’s story and how delightful it was to keep on hearing it. The moment had been the big one in Sponge Martin’s life. The carriage couldn’t be finished in the way it should be and be ready for the Governor’s coming. That was all to it. In those days, when a man had his own shop, a man like old Grey might rave and rave, but what good did it do him? Silas Mooney, when he had built the carriage, had done a good job and did old Grey think that Sponge was going to turn round and do a bum, hurried job? They had it out one day, old Grey’s kid, young Fred Grey, who now owned the wheel factory where Sponge worked as a common laborer, standing and listening. What Sponge thought was that young Grey got an earful that day. No doubt he thought, just because he owned a bank and because people like governors of states came to visit at his house, that his dad was a kind of God Almighty, but if he did he got his eyes opened that time anyway.

  Old Grey got mad and began to swear. “It’s my carriage and if I tell you to put on a few less coats and not to let each coat set so long before you rub it down and put on another you got to do what I say,” he had declared, shaking his fist at Sponge.

  Aha! And hadn’t that been a moment for Sponge? Did Bruce want to know what he told old Grey? It had just happened that he had about four good shots in him that day and when he was a little lit up the Lord Almighty couldn’t tell him how to do no job. He had walked up close to old Grey and had doubled up his fist. “Look here,” he had said, “you’re not so young any more and you’re a little fat. You want to keep in mind you been sitting up there in that bank of yours too much. Suppose now you get gay with me and because you want that carriage in a hurry you come down here and try to take the job away from me or something like that. Do you know what will happen to you? You’ll get kicked out, that’s what will happen. I’ll cave your fat face in with my fist, that’s what will happen and if you get foxy and send anyone else down here I’ll come up to your bank and maul you there, that’s what I’ll do.”

  Sponge had told the banker that. He wasn’t going to be hurried into doing no bum job, not by him or anyone else. He had told the banker that and then when the banker had walked out of his shop, saying nothing, he had gone over to a corner saloon and had got a bottle of good whisky. Just to show old Grey something he had locked up his shop and knocked off for the day. “Let him haul his Governor in a livery hack.” That’s what he had said to himself. He had got the bottle of whisky and he and his old woman had gone fishing together. It had been one of the best parties they had ever been on. He had told the old woman about it and she had been tickled to death at what he had done. “You done just right,” she had said. Then she had told Sponge that he was worth a dozen such men as old Grey. That might have been exaggerating a little but Sponge had liked to hear it all right. Bruce ought to have seen his old woman in them days. She was young then and as good-looking a skirt as there was in the state.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WORDS FLITTING ACROSS the mind of Bruce Dudley, varnishing wheels in the factory of the Grey Wheel Company of Old Harbor, Indiana. Thoughts flitting across his mind. Drifting images. He had begun to get a little skill with his fingers. Could one in time get a little skill with thoughts, too? Could thoughts and images be laid on paper some day as Sponge Martin laid on varnish, never too thick, never too thin, never lumpy?

  Sponge the workman telling old Grey to go to hell, offering to kick him out of his shop. The governor of a state riding in a livery hack because a workman wouldn’t be hurried into doing a bum job. Bernice, his wife, at her typewriter in Chicago, doing special articles for the Sunday papers, writing that story about the man and the dummy wax figure of a woman in a shop window. Sponge Martin and his woman going off to celebrate because Sponge had told the local prince, the banker, to go to hell. The picture of a man and woman on a sawdust pile with a bottle beside them. A bonfire down near the river’s edge. Catfish lines out. Bruce thought of the scene as taking place on a soft summer night. There were wonderful soft summer nights in the valley of the Ohio. Up and down river, above and below the hill on which Old Harbor stood, the land was low and in the winter the floods came up and covered the land. The floods left a soft silt on the land and it was rich, rank with richness. Wherever the land was not cultivated, weeds, flowers and tall flowering berry bushes grew thick.

  They would be lying there on the sawdust pile, Sponge Martin and his wife, a little lit up, the fire blazing between them and the river, the catfish lines out, the air filled with smells, the soft fishy river smell, smells of blossoms, smells of things growing. It might be there would be a moon hanging over them.

  The words Bruce had heard Sponge say —

  “When she is a little lit up she acts like a kid and makes me feel like a kid too.”

  Lovers lying on an old sawdust pile under a summer moon on the banks of the Ohio.

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THAT STORY BERNICE was writing about the man who saw the wax figure in a shop window and thought it was a woman.

  Did Bruce really wonder how it had come out, what sort of an ending she had given it? To tell the truth he did not. There was something malicious in his thoughts of the story. It seemed to him absurd and childish and he was glad that it was so. Had Bernice really succeeded in the thing she had undertaken — so casually, in such an offhand way — the whole problem of their relation would have been somewhat different. “I would have had to look to my self-respect then,” he thought. That grin would not have come so easily.

  Sometimes Bernice used to talk — she and her friends talked a good deal. They all, the young illustrators and the writers who gathered in the rooms in the evenings to ta
lk — well, they all worked in newspaper offices or in advertising offices just as Bruce did. They pretended to despise what they were doing but kept on doing it just the same. “We have to eat,” they said. What a lot of talk there had been about the necessity of eating.

  In Bruce Dudley’s mind, as he listened to Sponge Martin’s story of the defiance of the banker, was the memory of that evening when he had cut out from the apartment where he had lived with Bernice and from Chicago. He had been sitting by the front window of the apartment and looking out, and at the back of the apartment Bernice was cooking the chops. She would have potatoes and a salad. It would take her twenty minutes to cook the things and put them on the table. Then the two would sit down at the table to eat. How many evenings sitting down together like that — within two or three feet of each other physically and yet miles apart. They hadn’t any children because Bernice had never wanted them. “I’ve got my work to do,” she had said on the two or three occasions when he had spoken of the matter as they lay in bed together. She had said that but what she had meant was something else. She hadn’t wanted to tie herself down, not to him, not to the man she had married. When she spoke of him to others she always laughed good-naturedly. “He’s all right but he’s flighty and he won’t work. He isn’t very ambitious,” she sometimes said. Bernice and her friends had a way of speaking openly of their loves. They compared notes. Perhaps they used every little emotion they had as material for stories.

  In the street before the window at which Bruce sat waiting for the chops and the potatoes a lot of men and women getting off street cars and waiting for other cars. Gray figures in a gray street. “If a man and a woman are so and so together — well, then they are so and so.”