What you do when you are pushed off like that, as Aline was by Esther, is to hold your breath and not get rattled or indignant. There isn’t anything to it if you go getting indignant. If you think Esther can’t make a getaway, can’t clear her own skirts, you don’t know much.
After you cut through the surface you think only of coming up again as clear and clean as when you went down. Down below all is cold and wet — death, that road. You know the poets. Come and die with me. Our hands clasped together in death. The white long road together. Man and man, woman and woman. That sort of love — with Esther. What is life about? Who cares about life going on — in new forms, created out of ourselves?
If you’re one sort, it’s white dead fish to you — nothing else. You have to figure it out for yourself, and if you’re the kind no one pushes off the boat, the whole thing will never come your way and you’re safe. Maybe you’re hardly interesting enough ever to be in danger. Most people walk high and safe — all their days.
Americans, eh? You got something out of it anyway, going to Europe with a woman like Esther. After that one time Esther never tried again. She had it all figured out. If Aline wasn’t to be something she wanted for herself she could use her anyway. The Aldridge family stood well in Chicago and there would be other portraits to do out there. Esther had learned, fast enough, how people in general felt about art. If Aldridge Senior had Joe Walker do two portraits and they looked to him when finished as he thought his wife and his son had looked, then he would be likely to boost the Walker game in Chicago, and having paid five thousand each he would value the portraits the more for just that reason. “The greatest painter living. I think,” Esther could imagine his saying to his Chicago friends.
The daughter Aline might get wiser but she wouldn’t be likely to talk. When Esther had her mind made up about Aline she covered up her trail very neatly — did it well enough that evening on the boat and made her position stronger on that other evening, after six weeks in Paris, when she, Aline and Joe walked together over to Rose Frank’s apartment. On that particular evening, when Aline had seen something of the Walkers’ life in Paris and when Esther thought her a good deal more in the know, she kept talking to Aline in low tones, and Joe walked along without hearing, without trying to hear. The evening was very lovely and they walked along the left bank of the Seine, turning away from the river at the Chambre des Députés. People were sitting in little cafés on the rue Voltaire and over the scene hung the clear Parisian evening light — the painter’s light. “Over here you’ve got to look out for both women and men,” Esther said. “We Americans are considered fools by most Europeans just because there are things we don’t want to know. It’s because we are from a new country and have a kind of freshness and health in us.”
Esther had said a lot of things of that sort to Aline. What she was really saying was something quite different. She was really denying that she had meant anything that night on the boat. “If you think I did, it is because you aren’t very nice yourself.” Something of that sort she was saying. Aline let it fly over her head. That night on the boat she had won the battle, she thought. There had been just a moment when she had to fight to get fresh air into her lungs, not to let her hands tremble as Esther held them, not to feel too utterly lonely and sad — leaving childhood — girlhood — behind, like that, but after the one moment she was very quiet and mouselike, so much so that she had Esther a bit afraid of her — and that was really what she was after. It is always best to let the enemy clear away the dead after a battle — no fuss about that.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FRED HAD COME out at the factor}’ door and was a little annoyed at Aline — or pretended to be — because she had been sitting in the car in the half-darkness without letting him know. The advertising man with whom he had been talking inside walked away up the street and Fred did not offer to give him a lift. That was because Aline was there. Fred would have had to introduce him. It would have made a new contact for both Fred and Aline, would have slightly changed the relationship between Fred and the man. Fred offered to drive but Aline laughed at him. She liked the feel of the car, a rather powerful one, as it ground its way up the steep streets. Fred lighted a cigar and before dropping away into his own thoughts made another protest about her sitting in the car in the gathering darkness and waiting there without letting him know. In reality he liked it, liked the notion of Aline, the wife, half servant, waiting for him, the man of affairs. “If I had wanted you I had but to blow the horn. As a matter of fact I could see you talking in there with that man through the window,” Aline said.
The car ground its way up the street on second speed, and there was that man, standing at a corner under a light and still talking to the short broad-shouldered man. Surely he had a face very like that other man, the American she had seen at Rose Frank’s apartment on the very evening she had met Fred. Odd that he should be a working-man in her husband’s factory, and yet she remembered, that evening in Paris — the American in Rose’s apartment had said to someone that he was once a working-man in an American factory. That was during a lull in the conversation and before Rose Frank’s outbreak came. But why was this one so absorbed in the small man he was with? They weren’t much alike — the two men.
Working-men, men coming out at the door of a factory, her husband’s factory. Tall men, short men, broad men, slender men, lame men, men blind in one eye, a one-handed man, men in sweaty clothes. They went along, shuffle, shuffle — on the cobblestones in the roadway before a factory door, crossed railroad tracks, disappeared into a town. Her own house was at the top of a hill above the town, looking down on the town, looking down on the Ohio River where it made a great bend about the town, looking down on miles of low country where the valley of the river broadened out above and below town. In the winter all was gray in the valley. The river spreading out over the lowlands, becoming a vast gray sea. When he was a banker, Fred’s father— “Old Grey” he was called by everyone in the town — had managed to get his hands on a lot of the valley land. In the early days they did not know how to work it profitably and because they couldn’t build farm-houses and barns down there they thought the land was no good. As a matter of fact it was the richest land in the state. Every year the river overflowing left a fine gray silt on the land and that was marvelously enriching. The first farmers had tried to build levees, but when they broke, houses and barns were swept away in the floods.
Old Grey had waited like a spider. Farmers came to the bank and borrowed a little money on the cheap land and then let it go, let him foreclose. Had he been wise or had it all been an accident? Later it was found that, if you just let the water flow in and cover the land, it would run off again in the spring and leave that fine rich silt that made the corn grow almost like trees. What you did was to move out onto the land in the late spring with an army of hired men who lived in tents and in shacks set high up on stilts. You plowed and planted and the corn grew rank. Then you picked the corn and stored it in cribs, also built high up on stilts, and when the floods came again you sent barges out over the flooded lands to bring in the corn. You made money hand over fist. Fred had told Aline all about it. Fred thought that his father had been one of the shrewdest men that ever lived. He spoke of him, sometimes, as the Bible spoke of Father Abraham. “The Nestor of the house of Grey,” something of that sort. What did Fred think about the fact that his wife had brought him no children? No doubt he had many queer thoughts about her when he was alone. That was why he sometimes acted so half frightened when she looked at him. Perhaps he was afraid she knew his thoughts. Did she?
“Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people.
“And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Manre.
“The field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth; there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.
&
nbsp; “And it came to pass after the death of Abraham, that God blessed his son Isaac; and Isaac dwelt by the well of Lahairoi.”
It was a little odd that, in spite of all the things Fred had told her Aline couldn’t get the figure of Old Grey, the banker, fixed in her mind. He had died just after Fred had married her, in Paris, and while Fred was hurrying home to him, leaving his new wife behind. It might have been that Fred did not want her to see the father, did not want the father to see her. He had just made a boat on the evening of the day he got the word of his father’s illness and Aline did not sail until a month later.
He remained then, for Aline— “Old Grey” — a myth. Fred said he had lifted things up, had lifted the town up. It had been a mere mudhole village before his time, Fred said. “Now look at it.” He had made the valley produce, he had made the town produce. Fred had been a fool not to see things clearer. He had stayed on in Paris after the war was over, hanging around, had even thought for a time he might go in for one of the arts, something of that sort. “In all France there never was such a man as father,” Fred had once declared to his wife Aline. He was a bit too emphatic when he made such declarations. If he had not stayed on in Paris he would not have met Aline, would never have married her. When he made such statements Aline smiled, a soft knowing smile, and Fred changed his tone — a little.
There was that fellow he roomed with at college. The fellow was always talking and giving Fred books to read, books by George Moore, James Joyce— “The Artist as a Young Man.” He had got Fred all balled up and he had even gone so far as to half defy his father about coming home; and then, when he saw his son’s mind was made up, Old Grey had done what he had thought a shrewd thing. “You take a year in Paris, studying art, doing whatever you choose, and then you come home and have a year here with me,” Old Grey had written. The son was to have whatever monies he wanted. Now Fred wished he had taken the first year at home. “I might have been some comfort to him. I was shallow and thoughtless. I might have met you, Aline, in Chicago, or in New York,” Fred said.
What Fred had got out of the year in Paris was Aline. Was it worth the price? The old man living alone at home, waiting. He never even saw his son’s wife, never even heard of her. A man with but one son, and that son in Paris, fooling around after the war was over, after he had done his share of the job, over there. Fred had a little knack for drawing, just as Aline had, but what of that? He never even knew what he was after. Did Aline know what she was after? It would be nice if he could talk to Aline about it all. Why couldn’t he? She was sweet and fine, very quiet most of the time. With such a woman you had to be careful.
The car was grinding its way up the hillside now. There was one short street, very steep and crooked, where you had to shift into low.
Men, working-men, advertising solicitors, business men. Fred’s friend in Paris, the fellow who worked him up to defy his father and to try his hand at becoming a painter. He was a man who might very well turn out to be just such another fellow as Joe Walker. Already he was working Fred. Fred thought that he, Tom Burnside, his college friend, was everything a painter should be. He knew how to sit in a café, knew the names of wines, spoke French with an almost perfect Parisian accent. Pretty soon now he would begin to make trips to America to sell paintings and do portraits. Already he had sold Fred a painting for eight hundred dollars. “It’s the best thing I’ve done so far and a man here wants to buy it for two thousand, but I don’t want to quite have it pass out of my hands just yet. I would rather have it in your hands. My one true friend.” Fred had fallen for that. Another Joe Walker. If he managed to pick himself up an Esther somewhere he would do well. Nothing like making a friend of some rich man while you are both young. When Fred showed the painting to some of his friends in the town of Old Harbor, Aline had a kind of shaky feeling of being, not in the presence of a husband, but at home in the presence of her father — her father showing some fellow lawyer or a client the portraits Joe Walker had done.
If you are a woman why can’t you get the man you have married as a child and be satisfied with that? Was it because a woman wanted her own children, did not want to adopt them, or marry them? Men, working-men, in her husband’s factory, tall men, short men. Men walking along a Parisian boulevard at night. Frenchmen with a certain air. They were onto the women, the French. The idea was to stay on top of the heap, when women were concerned, use them, make them serve. Americans were sentimental fools about women. They wanted them to do for a man what he hadn’t strength to try to do for himself.
The man at Rose Frank’s apartment, that evening when she first met Fred. Why was he in some odd way different? Why had he stayed so sharply in Aline’s mind all these months? Just seeing, on the streets of an Indiana town, a man who made the same sort of impression on the mind, had stirred her all up, set her mind and her fancy whirling. It had happened two or three times, in the evening when she drove down for Fred.
It might be that, on the night in Paris when she got Fred, she had wanted the other man instead.
He, the other man, she found at Rose’s apartment, when she went there with Esther and Joe, had paid no attention to her, hadn’t even spoken to her.
The working-man she had just seen, walking up the hillside street with the short, broad-shouldered cocky-looking man, was like that other in some indefinable way. How absurd that she could not speak to him, find out something about him. She asked Fred who the short man was and he laughed. “That’s Sponge Martin. He’s a card,” Fred said. He might have said more but he wanted to think of what the Chicago advertising man had told him. He was smart, that advertising man. Up to a game of his own all right, but if it fell in with Fred’s game, what of it?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AT ROSE FRANK’S apartment in Paris, that evening, after the half-experience with Esther on the boat coming over and after some weeks among Esther’s and Joe’s acquaintances in Paris. The painter and his wife knew a good many rich Americans in Paris looking for an exciting time and Esther so managed it that she and Joe got in on a good many parties without spending much money. They added an artistic touch and also they were discreet — when discretion was wise.
And after the evening on the boat Esther felt more or less free with Aline. She gave Aline credit for more knowledge of life than she had.
That was something gained, for Aline, at least she thought it a gain. She had begun to move more freely within the circle of her own thoughts and impulses. Sometimes she thought— “Life is but a dramatization. You decide on your part in life and then try to play it skillfully.” To play it badly, bunglingly, was the great sin. Americans in general, young men and women like herself who had money enough and social position enough to be secure, could do about as they pleased if they were careful about covering their trails. At home, in America, there was something in the very air you breathed that made you feel secure while at the same time it limited you terribly. Good and bad were definite things, morality and immorality were definite things. You moved in a well-defined circle of thoughts, ideas and emotions. Being a good woman you got from men the respect they thought due a good woman. Given money and a respectable position in life you had to do openly something that defied openly the social laws before you could step into a free world, and the free world into which you stepped by any such action was not free at all. It was dreadfully limited, ugly in fact, the kind of world inhabited by — well, say, by movie actresses.
In Paris, and rather in spite of Esther and Joe, Aline had got a sharp sense of something in French life that fascinated her. Little incidental things about life, the men’s comfort-stalls in the open streets, the stallions hitched to dust-carts and trumpeting to mares, lovers kissing each other openly in the streets in the late afternoons — a kind of matter-of-fact acceptance of life that the English and Americans seemed unable to come to, rather charmed her. Sometimes she went with Esther and Joe to the Place Vendôme and spent the day with their American friends, but more and more she got into the habit of
going off alone.
A woman unaccompanied in Paris always had to be ready for annoyances. Men spoke to her, made suggestive movements with their hands, their mouths, followed her along the street. There was always going on, whenever she went forth alone, a kind of attack against herself, as a woman, as a being with woman’s flesh, woman’s secret desires. If something was gained by the frankness of Continental life there was also much lost.
She went to the Louvre. At home she had taken drawing and painting lessons at the Institute and had been called clever. Joe Walker had praised her work. Others had praised it. Then she had thought Joe must be a real painter. “I got caught by the American trick of thinking that what succeeded, was, for that reason, fine,” she thought, and the thought, coming as her own and not having been forced upon her by another, was a revelation. Of a sudden she, the American, began walking in the presence of men’s work feeling really humble. Joe Walker, all of his type of men, the successful painters, writers, musicians, who were America’s heroes, got smaller and smaller in her eyes. Her own clever little imitative art seemed in the presence of work by El Greco, Cezanne, Fra Angelico and other Latins but child’s prattling, and the American men who stood high in the history of America’s attempts at the cultural life — ?
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 111