Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  In the street outside the factory as the two men walked across railroad tracks and up along a climbing cobblestone street toward the business part of Old Harbor, in the gathering dusk of the early spring evening, Sponge was smiling. It was the same kind of detached, half-malicious smile Bruce used to wear sometimes in Bernice’s presence and that always drove her half mad. It wasn’t directed at Bruce. Sponge was thinking of the surly workman, strutting like a rooster because he was more the man — more male. Had Bruce been up to some such trick with Bernice? No doubt he had. Lordy, she ought to be glad he wasn’t around any more.

  His thoughts whirling on. His thoughts centered on the surly workman now. Awhile before, but a few minutes before, he had tried to imagine himself Sponge lying on a sawdust pile under the stars, Sponge with his hide full of whisky, and his old woman lying beside him. He had tried to fancy himself, under such circumstances, the stars shining down, the river running silently near at hand, had tried to imagine himself under such circumstances, feeling like a kid and feeling the woman beside him as a kid. It hadn’t worked. What he would do, what such a fellow as himself would do under such circumstances he knew only too well. He would awake in the cold morning light, having thoughts, too many thoughts. What he had succeeded in doing was to make himself feel, at the moment, very ineffectual. He had re-created himself, in the fancy of the moment, not as Sponge, the effectual, the direct, the man who could give himself completely, but himself in some of his own more ineffectual moments. He had remembered times, two or three of them, when he had been with women and had been ineffectual. Perhaps he had been ineffectual with Bernice. Had he been ineffectual or had she?

  Much easier after all to imagine himself the surly workman. That he could really do. He could imagine himself beaten by a woman, afraid of her. He could imagine himself a fellow like that Bloom in the book “Ulysses” and it was evident that Joyce, the writer and dreamer, was in the same boat. He had certainly done his Bloom much better than he had his Stephen, had made him a lot more real — and Bruce, in fancy, could make the surly workman more real than

  Sponge, could enter into him more quickly, understand him better. He could be the surly ineffectual workman, could, in fancy, be the man in bed with the wife — could lie there afraid, angry, hopeful, full of pretense. That is what he had been with Bernice perhaps — partly, anyway. Why hadn’t he told her, when she was writing that story, why hadn’t he told her with an oath what rot it was, what it really meant? Instead he had worn that grin that had so puzzled and angered her. He had fled into the recesses of his own mind where she could not follow and from that vantage-point had grinned out at her.

  Now he was walking up along a street with Sponge and Sponge was grinning the same kind of a grin he himself had so often worn in Bernice’s presence. They had been sitting together, dining perhaps, and she had suddenly got up from a table and had said: “I’ve got to go write now.” Then the grin had come. Often it knocked her off her pins for a whole day. She couldn’t write a word. What a dirty trick, really!

  Sponge, however, was doing it, not to him, Bruce, but to the surly workman. Bruce was reasonably sure of that. He felt safe.

  They had got to the town’s business street and were walking along with crowds of other workmen, all employees of the wheel factory. A car carrying young Grey, the owner of the factory, and his wife, climbed up the hill on second speed, the engine making a sharp whining sound, and passed near them. The woman at the wheel turned to look. It was Sponge told Bruce who was in the car.

  “She’s been coming down there quite often lately. She totes him home. She’s one he got away from here somewhere, when he was in the war. I don’t think he’s really got her. Maybe she’s lonesome, in a strange town where there ain’t many of her kind, and likes to come down to the factory at quitting-time to look ’em over. She’s been looking you over pretty regularly lately. I’ve noticed it.”

  Sponge was smiling. Well, it wasn’t a smile. It was a grin. At the moment Bruce thought he looked like a wise old Chinaman — something of that sort. He became self-conscious. Sponge might be making fun of him as he did of the surly workman at the next bench. In the picture Bruce had made of his fellow workman, and that he liked, Sponge surely did not have many very subtle thoughts. It would have been something of a come-down for Bruce to think of the workman as very sensitive to impressions. There was no doubt he had got rather a jump out of the woman in the car and it had happened three times now. To think of Sponge as being very sensitive would be like thinking of Bernice as better than he would ever be at the very thing he wanted most to be. Bruce wanted to be preeminent in something — in being more sensitive to everything going on about him than others could possibly be.

  They came to the corner where Bruce turned upward to go toward his hotel, Sponge still wearing that smile. He kept urging Bruce to come to his house to dinner on Sunday. “All right,” Bruce said, “and I’ll manage to get a bottle. There’s a young doc living at the hotel. I’ll tackle him for a prescription. I guess he’ll come across all right.”

  Sponge kept smiling, having a good time with his own thoughts. “It would be a jolt. You ain’t exactly like the rest of us. Maybe you make her think of someone she’s been stuck on before. I wouldn’t so much mind seeing a Grey get a jolt like that.”

  As though not wanting Bruce to comment on what he had said the old workman changed the subject quickly. “There’s something I been wanting to tell you. You better look a little out. Sometimes you get a look on your face exactly like that Smedley,” he said, laughing. Smedley was the surly workman.

  Still smiling Sponge walked away along the street, Bruce standing to watch him go. As though conscious of being watched he strutted a little, straightening his old shoulders as though to say— “He don’t think I know as much as I do.” The sight made Bruce also grin.

  “I guess I know what he means but there’s small chance of that. I didn’t leave Bernice, looking for some other woman. I’ve got another bee in my bonnet although I don’t just know what it is,” he thought as he climbed the hill toward the hotel. Thinking that Sponge had shot and missed he felt relieved and rather happy. “It wouldn’t do to have the little cuss know more about me than I have been able to find out myself,” he thought again.

  BOOK SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PERHAPS SHE HAD figured it all out from the beginning and didn’t quite dare tell herself. She saw him first, walking with a small man, heavily mustached, up a cobblestone street that led from her husband’s factory, and the impression she had of her own feelings was just that she would like to stop him some evening as he came out at the factory door. It was the same feeling she had about that man in Paris, the one she saw at Rose Frank’s apartment, and he had eluded her. She had never succeeded in getting near him, in hearing a word from his lips. Perhaps he had belonged to Rose and Rose had managed to keep him out of the way. Still Rose didn’t seem that sort. She had seemed like one woman who would take a chance. It might be that this man and the one in Paris were alike unconscious of her. Aline did not want to do anything crude. She thought of herself as a lady. And then, too, there was nothing in life at all if you could not get at things in some subtle way. Plenty of women went after men openly — drove straight at them — but what did they get? No use getting a man as a man and in no other way. She had Fred, her husband, that way — had, she thought, all he had to offer.

  It wasn’t so much — a kind of sweet childlike faith in her, hardly justified, she thought. He had a fixed notion of what a woman, the wife of a man in his position, should be and he took it for granted she was what he thought. Fred took too much for granted.

  Outwardly she was all he expected. That was hardly the point. One couldn’t prevent oneself having thoughts. There might be nothing to life but just that — living — seeing the days pass — being a wife and perhaps presently a mother — dreaming — keeping the thing, down inside, in order. If one couldn’t always keep it in order at least one c
ould keep it out of sight. You walked in a certain way — wore the right clothes — knew how to talk — kept up a kind of touch with the arts, with music, painting, the new moods in house furnishings — read the latest novels. You and your husband had together a certain position to maintain and you did your share. He looked to you for certain things, the keeping-up of a certain style — appearances. In a town like Old Harbor, Indiana, it wasn’t so hard.

  And anyway a man who worked in a factory was likely to be a factory-hand — nothing more. You couldn’t be thinking of him. His resemblance to that other man she had seen in Rose’s apartment was no doubt a physical accident. There was about the two men the same air, a kind of readiness to give and not ask much. One thought of such a man going along, quite casually, becoming absorbed in something, burning himself out in it, then dropping it — as casually perhaps. Burning himself out in what? Well, say in some kind of work, or in the love of a woman. Did she want to be loved like that, by that sort of a man?

  “Well, I do! Every woman does. We don’t get it though, and if it were offered, most of us would be afraid. We are pretty practical and hard-headed, at bottom, all of us, we’re made that way. It’s what a woman is, that sort of thing.

  “I wonder why we are always trying to create the other illusion, feeding on it ourselves?”

  One has to think. The days pass. They are too much alike — the days. An imagined experience is not the same as one actually gone through, but it is something. When a woman has been married things change for her. She has to try to keep up the illusion that everything is as it was before. It can’t be, of course. We know too much.

  Aline used to go for Fred quite often in the evening and when he was a little delayed the men came pouring out at the factory door and passed her as she sat at the wheel of the car. What did she mean to them? What did they mean to her? Dark figures in overalls, tall men, short men, old men, young men. She had got the one man quite fixed in her mind. That was Bruce as he came from the shop with Sponge Martin, the little old man with the black mustache. She did not know who Sponge was, had never heard of him, but he talked and the man beside him listened. Did he listen? At any rate he had only looked at her once or twice — a fleeting self-conscious glance.

  How many men in the world! She had got herself a man who had money and position. That had been a lucky chance, maybe. She wasn’t very young any more when Fred asked her to marry him, and sometimes she wondered dimly if she would have consented if marriage with him hadn’t seemed such a perfect solution. You had to take chances in life and it was a good chance. By such a marriage you got a house, position, clothes, an automobile. If you were stuck off in a little Indiana town, eleven months out of the year, at least you were on top of the heap in the town. Cæsar riding through a miserable little town, going to join his army, Cæsar addressing a comrade, “Better be king on a dung-heap than a beggar in Rome.” Something of that sort. Aline wasn’t very accurate about quotations and it is sure she did not think the word “dung-heap.” It wasn’t the kind of word such women as herself knew anything about — wasn’t in their vocabularies.

  She thought about men a good deal, wondered about them. In Fred’s notion of things everything was settled for her, but was it? When things got settled you were through, might as well sit rocking in a chair waiting for death. Death, before life came.

  Aline hadn’t any children yet. She wondered why. Hadn’t Fred touched her deeply enough? Was there something in her still to be aroused, awakened from sleep?

  Her thoughts drifted into a new channel and she became what she herself would have called cynical. It was, after all, rather amusing how she managed to impress people in Fred’s town, how she managed to impress him. It might be that was because she had lived in Chicago and in New York and had been to Paris, because her husband Fred had become, since his father’s death, the chief man of the town, because she had a knack for dress and a certain air.

  When the women of the town came to call on her, the Judge’s wife, the wife of Striker, the cashier of the bank in which Fred was by far the largest stockholder — the doctor’s wife — when they came to her house they thought it up to them to talk of cultural things, of books, music and painting. Everyone knew she had been an art student. That confused and bothered them. It was quite sure she wasn’t a favorite in the town but the women did not dare pay her out for snubbing them a little. If one of them could get something on her they might make mince-meat of her, but how were they to do anything of that sort? Even to think of such a thing was a little vulgar. Aline did not like such thoughts.

  There was nothing to be got on her, never would be.

  Aline at the wheel of an expensive automobile watched Bruce Dudley and Sponge Martin going up a cobblestone street among many other working-men. They were the only two of all the men she had seen come out at the factory door who seemed much interested in each other, and what an odd-looking pair they were. The younger man did not look much like a laborer. Well, what did a laborer look like? What differentiated a laborer from another man, from the kind of men who were Fred’s friends, from the kind of men she had known at her father’s house in Chicago when she was a young girl? One might fancy that a laborer would naturally look humble, but it was certain that the little broad-backed man had nothing humble about him, and as for Fred, her own husband, there had been when she first saw him nothing to mark him as anything special. Perhaps she was only attracted to the two men because they seemed interested in each other. The little old man was so cocky. He went along up the cobblestone street like a banty rooster. If Aline had been more like Rose Frank and that crowd of hers in Paris she would have thought of Sponge Martin as a man always liking to strut before women as a rooster struts before hens, and such a thought, put in somewhat different terms, did in fact cross her mind. Smiling, she thought that Sponge might very well have been a Napoleon Bonaparte walking along like that, stroking a black mustache with stubby fingers. The mustache was a bit too black for such an old man. It was shiny — coal-black. Perhaps he dyed it, the cocky little old thing. One had to get amusement somehow, had to think about something.

  What was keeping Fred? Since his father had died and he had come into his money Fred certainly took life pretty seriously. He seemed to feel the weight of things on his shoulders, was always talking as though everything would go to pieces at the factory if he did not stay on the job all the time. She wondered how much of his talk about the importance of the things he did was true?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A LINE HAD met her husband Fred at Rose Frank’s apartment in Paris. That was during the summer after the so-called World War came to an end and it was an evening to be remembered. Funny, too, about this World business. The Anglo-Saxons, the Nordics, were always using the word — best in the world — biggest in the world, world wars, champions of the world.

  You go along in life, not thinking very much, not feeling very much, not knowing very much — about yourself or anyone else — thinking life is so and so, and then — bang! Something happens. You aren’t at all what you had thought you were. A lot of people found that out during the war.

  Under certain circumstances you had thought you knew just about what you would do, but all of your thoughts were, as likely as not, lies. After all, it might be, you never knew anything really until it had touched your own life, your own body. There is a tree growing in a field. Is it really a tree? What is a tree? Go touch it with your fingers. Stand back several feet and hurl your body against it. It is unyielding — like a rock. How rough the bark is! Your shoulder hurts. There is blood on your cheek.

  A tree is something to you but what is it to another?

  Suppose it were your job to cut the tree down. You lay an ax to its body, to its sturdy trunk. Some trees bleed when injured, others weep bitter tears. Once when Aline Aldridge was a child, her father — who had an interest in turpentine forests somewhere in the South — came home from a trip down there and was talking with another man in the living-room of th
e Aldridge house. He told how they cut and maimed the trees to get the sap for the turpentine. Aline had been sitting in the room, on a stool by her father’s knee, and had heard it all — the story of a vast forest of trees all cut and maimed. For what? To get turpentine. What was turpentine? Was it some strange golden elixir of life?

  What a tale! When it was told, Aline grew a little pale, but her father and his friend did not notice. Her father had been giving a technical description of the process of producing turpentine. The men were not thinking her thoughts, did not sense her thoughts. Later in her bed that night she cried. What did they want to do it for? Why did they want their blamed old turpentine?

  Trees crying out — bleeding. Men going about, hurting them, cutting them with axes. Some of the trees fell down groaning, while others stood up, the blood running from them, crying out to the child in the bed. The trees had eyes, they had arms, legs and bodies. A forest of injured trees, staggering about, bleeding. The ground under the trees was red with blood.

  When the World War came on and Aline had become a woman she remembered her father’s story of the turpentine-trees, how they got their turpentine. Her brother George, three years older than herself, was killed in France, and Teddy Copeland, the young man she was engaged to marry, died of the “flu” in an American camp; and in her consciousness of them they did not remain as dead men, but as men injured and bleeding, far off, in some strange place. Neither the brother nor Ted Copeland had seemed very near to her, no nearer perhaps than the trees of the forest of the story. She had not touched them closely. She had said she would marry Copeland because he was going off to war and had asked her. It had seemed the right thing to do. Could you say “no” to a young man at such a time — going off to be killed perhaps? It would have seemed like saying “no” to one of the trees. Suppose you were asked to bind up one of the trees’ wounds and said “no.” Well, Teddy Copeland had not been exactly a tree. He had been a young man and a very handsome one. Had she married him Aline’s father and brother would have been pleased.