Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Bernice got up and stood over him, staring down at him across the small table. How furious she was! Was she going to strike him? What a strange puzzled baffled look in her eyes. Bruce looked up at her impersonally — as he might have looked out a window at a scene in the street. She did not say anything. Had it got beyond speech between them? If it had surely he was to blame. Would she dare strike him? Well, he knew she would not. Why did he keep smiling? That was what made her so furious. Better to go softly through life — let people alone. Did he have any special desire to torture Bernice and if he did, why? Now she wanted to have it out with him, to bite, strike, kick, like a furious little female animal, but it was a handicap Bernice had that when she was thoroughly worked up she could not talk. She just got a little white and that look came into her eyes. Bruce had at idea. Did she, his wife Bernice, hate and fear all men and was she making the hero of her story such a silly fellow because she wanted to make all men sing small? That would certainly make her, the female, loom larger. It might be that was what the whole feminist movement was about. Bernice had already written several stories and in all of them the men were like that chap in the book-shop. It was a little odd. Now she, herself, looked something like the chap in the book-shop.

  “For the sake of art, eh?”

  Bernice went hurriedly out of the room. Had she stayed, there was at least a chance he might have got her, as it was possible men sometimes got their women. “You come off your perch and I’ll come off mine. Loosen up. Function as a woman and let me function as a man, with you.” Was Bruce ready to have that happen? He thought he had always been ready for that — with Bernice or some other woman. When it came to the test why did Bernice always run away? Would she go into her bedroom and cry? Well, no. Bernice wasn’t after all one of the crying sort. She would get out of the house until he had gone and then — when she was alone — would perhaps work on that story — the soft little poet and the wax woman in the window, eh? Bruce was perfectly aware of how malicious were his own thoughts. Once in a long time he had a notion Bernice wanted him to beat her. Could that be possible? If so, why? If a woman got that way in her relations with a man what brought it about?

  Bruce having got himself into deep water by his own thoughts went to sit again by the window looking into the street. Both he and Bernice had left their chops uneaten. Whatever happened now Bernice would not come back into the room to sit while he was there, not on that evening, and the cold chops would lie like that, on the table over there. The couple had no servant. Every morning a woman came in for two hours to clean the place up. That was the way such establishments were run. Well, if she wanted to go out of the apartment it would be necessary for her to pass through the studio before his eyes. To slip out at the back door, through an alleyway, would be beneath her dignity as a woman. It would be a come-down for the female sex — represented by Bernice — and she would never lose her sense of the necessity of dignity — in the sex.

  “For the sake of art.” Why did that phrase stick in Bruce’s mind? It was a silly little refrain. Had he been smiling all evening, making Bernice furious by the smile — because of that phrase? What was art anyway? Did such men as himself and Tom Wills want to laugh at it? Did they incline to think of art as a silly, mawkish sort of exhibitionism on the part of silly people because to do so made them seem to themselves rather grand and noble — above all such nonsense — something of that sort? Once when she was not angry, when she was soberly in earnest, a short time after their marriage, Bernice had said something of that sort. That was before Bruce had succeeded in breaking down something in her, her own self-respect, perhaps. Did all men want to break something down in women — make slaves of them? Bernice said they did and for a long time he had believed her. Then they had seemed to get on all right. Now things had surely gone to pot.

  After all it was evident that, as far as Tom Wills was concerned, he, at bottom, cared more about art than all the other people Bruce had known, certainly more than Bernice or any of her friends. Bruce did not think he knew or understood Bernice or her friends very well but did think he knew Tom Wills. The man was a perfectionist. To him art was something out beyond reality, a fragrance touching the reality of things through the fingers of a humble man filled with love — something like that — a little perhaps like a beautiful mistress to whom the man, the boy within the man, wanted to bring all of the rich, beautiful things of his mind, of his fancy. What he had to bring had seemed to Tom Wills such a meager offering that the thought of trying to make the offering made him ashamed.

  Although Bruce sat by the window pretending to look out he was not seeing people in the street outside. Was he waiting for Bernice to pass through the room, wanting to punish her a little more? “Am I becoming a Sadist?” he asked himself. He sat with hands folded, smiling, smoked a cigarette and looked at the floor and the last feeling he was ever to have of the presence of his wife Bernice was when she passed through the room without his looking up.

  And so she had made up her mind that she could pass through the room, snubbing him. It had begun at the meat market where he had been interested in the hands of that meat-cutter cutting meat rather than in what she was saying to him. What had she been talking about, her latest story or an idea for a special article for the Sunday paper? Not having heard what she said he could not remember. At any rate his mind had checked her all right.

  He heard her footsteps crossing the room where he sat looking at the floor, but he was at that moment thinking, not of her but of Tom Wills. He was doing again what had made her angry in the first place, what always made her angry when it happened. Perhaps he was at just that moment smiling the peculiarly exasperating smile that always drove her half mad. What a fate that she should have to remember him thus. She would always be thinking that he was laughing at her — at her aspirations as a writer, at her pretensions to strength of will. There was no doubt she did make some such pretensions but then who didn’t make pretensions of one kind or another?

  Well, he and Bernice had sure got into a jam. She had dressed for the evening and went out saying nothing. Now she would spend the evening with her own friends, perhaps with that chap who worked in the bookstore or with the young painter who had been to Germany and had painted her portrait.

  Bruce got up out of his chair and snapping on an electric light went to stand looking at the portrait. The distortion idea meant something to the European artists who began it no doubt, but he doubted the young man’s knowing quite what it meant. How superior he was! Did he mean to set himself up — to decide offhand that he knew what the young man did not know? He stood thus, looking at the portrait, and then suddenly his fingers, hanging at his side, felt something greasy and unpleasant. It was the cold uneaten chop on his own plate. His fingers touched it, felt it and then with a shrug of his shoulders he took a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and wiped his fingers. “T’witchelty, T’weedlety, T’wadelty, T’wum. Catch a nigger by the thumb.” Suppose it were true that art was the most exacting thing in the world? It true as a general thing that a certain type of men, who did not look physically very strong, almost always went in for the arts. When a fellow like himself went out with his wife among the so-called artists, went into a room where a lot of them had congregated, he so often got an impression, not of masculine strength and virility, but of something on the whole feminine. Huskier men, fellows like Tom Wills, tried to stay as far away from art talk as they could. Tom Wills never discussed the subject with anyone but Bruce and he hadn’t begun doing that until the two men had known each other for several months. There were a lot of other men. Bruce, in his work as a reporter, went about a good deal among gamblers, race-track men, baseball players, prizefighters, thieves, bootleggers, flash men of all sorts. When he first went to work on the paper he was for a time a sporting writer. On the paper he had a reputation, of a sort. He couldn’t write much — never tried. What he could do, Tom Wills thought, was to sense things. It was a faculty of which Bruce did not speak often. L
et him be on the track of a murder. Very well, he went into a room where several men were congregated, a bootlegger’s place up an alleyway, let us say. He would be willing to bet something that in such a case, if the fellow was hanging around, he could spot the man who had done the job. Proving it was another matter. However, he had the faculty, “the nose for news,” it was called among newspaper men. Others had it too.

  Oh, Lordy! If he had it, was so almighty keen, why had he wanted to marry Bernice? He had gone back to his chair by the window, snapping out the light as he went, but now it was quite dark in the street outside. If he had that faculty why had it not worked at a time when surely it was of vital importance to him to have it work?

  Again he smiled in the darkness. Now suppose, just suppose now, that I am as much of a nut as Bernice or any of the rest of them. Suppose I am ten times worse. Suppose Tom Wills is ten times worse, too. It might be that I was only a kid when I married Bernice and that I have grown up a little. She thinks I’m a dead one — that I haven’t kept up with the show, but, just suppose now, it is she who has dropped behind. I might as well think that. It is a lot more flattering to me than just thinking I’m a chump or that I was a chump when I got married.

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT WAS WHILE thinking some such thoughts that John Stockton, who later became Bruce Dudley, left his wife on a certain fall evening. He sat in the darkness for an hour or two and then got his hat and went out of the house. His physical connection with the apartment in which he had lived with Bernice was slight, a few half-worn neckties hanging on a hook in a closet — three pipes and some shirts and collars in a drawer, two or three suits of clothes, a winter overcoat. Later when he was a workman in the factory at Old Harbor, Indiana, working beside Sponge Martin, hearing Sponge talk, hearing something of the story of Sponge’s relations with “his old woman,” he hadn’t much regret for the way in which he had left. “If you’re leaving, one way is as good as another and the less fuss about the matter the better,” he told himself. Most of the things Sponge said he had heard before but it was pleasant to hear good talk. The story about that time when Sponge threw the banker out of his carriage-painting shop — let Sponge tell it a thousand times and it would be pleasant to hear. Maybe there was art in that, the grasping of the real dramatic moment of a life, eh? He shrugged his shoulders — thinking. “Sponge, the sawdust pile, the drinks. Sponge coming home drunk in the early morning and finding Bugs, lying on the new rag carpet asleep, her arms about the shoulders of a young man. Bugs, a little live thing, filled with passion — made ugly later — living in a house in Cincinnati now. Sponge in relation to the town, the Ohio River Valley, sleeping on an old sawdust pile — his relation to the ground beneath him, the stars overhead, the brush in his hand as he painted automobile wheels, the caress in the hand that held the brush, profanity, crudeness — love of an old woman — alive like a fox terrier.”

  What a floating disconnected thing Bruce felt himself. He was a strong man physically. Why had he never taken hold of life with his hands? Words — the beginning of poetry, perhaps. The poetry of seed hunger. “I am a seed, floating on a wind. Why have I not planted myself? Why have I not found ground in which I can take root?”

  Suppose I had come home some evening and walking up to Bernice had struck her a blow. Farmers before planting seed plowed the ground, ripped out old roots, old weeds. Suppose I had thrown Bernice’s typewriter through a window. “Damn you — no more driveling words here. Words are tender things, leading to poetry — or lies. Leave craftsmanship to me. I’m going towards it slowly, carefully, humbly. I’m a working-man. You get in line and be a workingman’s wife. I’ll plow you like a field. I’ll harrow you.”

  When Sponge Martin talked, telling that story, Bruce could hear every word said and at the same time go on having his own thoughts.

  That evening when he left Bernice — all his life now he would be thinking of her vaguely as a thing heard far off — faint determined footsteps crossing a room while he sat looking at the floor and thinking of Tom Wills and of what do you think — oh, Lord, of words. If one couldn’t smile at oneself, take a laugh for oneself as one went along, what was the use living at all? Suppose he had gone to Tom Wills that night when he left Bernice. He tried to fancy himself going on a car to the suburbs where Tom lived and knocking on the door. For all he knew Tom had a wife a good deal like Bernice. She might not write stories but at the same time she might be a nut on something — on respectability say.

  Suppose, on the night when he left Bernice, Bruce had gone out to Tom Wills’ place. Tom’s wife coming to the door. “Come in.” Then Tom coming in bedroom slippers. Bruce shown into the front room. Bruce remembered that someone down at the newspaper office had once said to him, “Tom Wills’ wife is a Methodist.”

  Just imagine Bruce in that house sitting in the front room with Tom and his wife. “Do you know, I’ve a notion to leave my wife. Well, you see, she’s more interested in other things than in being a woman.

  “I just thought I’d come out and tell you folks because I won’t be showing up down at the office in the morning. I’m cutting out. To tell the truth I haven’t thought much about where I’m going. I’m setting out on a little voyage of discovery. I’ve a notion that Myself is a land few men know about. I thought I’d take a little trip into myself, look around a little there. God knows what I’ll find. The idea excites me, that’s all. I’m thirty-four and my wife and I have no kids. I guess I’m a primitive man, a voyager, eh?

  Off again, On again, Gone again, Finnegan.

  “Maybe I’ll turn out to be a poet.”

  After Bruce left Chicago, while he wandered southward for some months and later when he worked in the factory beside Sponge Martin, striving to get from Sponge something of the workman’s quick facility with his hands, thinking the beginning of education might lie in a man’s relations with his own hands, what he could do with them, what he could feel with them, what message they could carry up through his fingers to his brain, about things, about steel, iron, earth, fire, and water — while all of this was going on, he amused himself trying to think how he would go at it to tell his purpose to Tom Wills and his wife — to anyone for that matter. He thought how amusing it might be to try to tell Tom and his Methodist wife just all the thoughts in his head.

  He never did go out to Tom and his wife, of course, and in truth what he actually did had become of minor importance to Bruce. He had a vague notion that he, in common with almost all American men, had got out of touch with things — stones lying in fields, the fields themselves, houses, trees, rivers, factory walls, tools, women’s bodies, sidewalks, people on sidewalks, men in overalls, men and women in automobiles. The whole business of the visit to Tom Wills was imagined, an amusing idea to play with as he varnished wheels and Tom Wills had himself become a sort of phantom. He had been replaced by Sponge Martin, by the man actually working beside him. “Perhaps I am a lover of men. That may be why I couldn’t stand for the presence of Bernice any more,” he thought, smiling at the idea.

  There was a certain sum in the bank, some three hundred and fifty dollars, that had been there in his name for a year or two and that he had never told Bernice about. Perhaps he had really intended, from the time he had married her, to do to Bernice some such thing as he finally did. When, as a young man, he left his grandmother’s house to go live in Chicago, she had given him five hundred dollars and he had kept three hundred and fifty of it intact. Mighty lucky he did, too, he thought, as he walked about the streets of Chicago that evening after the silent quarrel with the woman. After he left the apartment he went for a walk in Jackson Park and then walked downtown to a cheap hotel and paid two dollars for a room for the night. He slept well enough, and in the morning when he got into the bank at ten he had already found out that there was a train for a town named La Salle, Illinois, at eleven. It was an odd and amusing notion he thought, that one about to go to a town named La Salle, there to buy a seco
nd-hand rowboat and start rowing quite casually down a river, leaving a puzzled wife somewhere in the wake of his boat, that such a one should spend the morning playing with the notion of a visit to Tom Wills and his Methodist wife in a house in a suburb.

  “And wouldn’t his wife have been sore, wouldn’t she have given poor Tom a razzing for being the friend of any such casual chap as myself? After all, you see, life is a very serious affair, at least it is when you get it related to somebody else,” was what he had thought as he sat on the train — that morning when he left

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FIRST ONE THING and then another. A liar, an honest man, a thief abruptly slipping out of the service of a daily newspaper in an American city. Newspapers are a necessary part of modern life. They weave the loose ends of life into a pattern. Everyone interested in Leopold and Loeb, the young murderers. All people thinking alike. Leopold and Loeb become the nation’s pets. The nation horror-struck about what Leopold and Loeb did. What is Harry Thaw doing now, who is divorced, who fled with the bishop’s daughter? Dance life! Awake and dance!

  A sneak leaving Chicago on a train at eleven o’clock in the morning, having told his wife nothing of his plans. A woman who has been married misses a man. Living loosely is dangerous — to women. A habit once established is hard to break. Better keep a man around the house. He comes in handy. And then too, for Bernice, the unannounced disappearance of Bruce would be hard to explain. First she would lie. “He had to go out of town for a few days.”

  Everywhere men trying to explain the actions of their wives, women trying to explain the actions of their husbands. People didn’t have to break up homes to get into a position where explanations had to be made. Life should not be as it is. If life were not so complex it would be more simple. I’m sure you would like that kind of a man — if you happen to like that kind of a man, eh?