Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  What she was sorry for — ashamed of — was that she had put the young American to a world of trouble. After she got there and it was going on, everywhere, everything whirled around — she got dizzy, faint.

  And then desire — black, ugly, hungry desire — like a desire to kill everything that ever had been lovely in the world — in herself and others — everyone.

  She danced with a man who tore her dress open. She did not care. The young American came running and snatched her away. It happened three, four, five “A kind of swoon, an orgy, a wild untamable thing. Most of the men there were young fellows who had been in the trenches, for France, for America, for England, you know. France for preservation, England for control of the seas, America for souvenirs. They were getting their souvenirs fast enough. They had got cynical — didn’t care. If you’re here and you are a woman, what you doing here? I’ll show you. Damn your eyes. If you want to fight, all the better. I’ll slug you. That’s a way of making love. Didn’t you know?

  “The kid took me for the ride afterward. It was early morning and up in the Bois the trees were green and the birds were singing. Such thoughts in the head, things the kid with me had seen, things I had seen. The kid with me was fine, laughing. He had been in the trenches two years. ‘Sure we kids can stand a war. What t’ell. We got to stand for people all our lives, ain’t we?’ He thought of the green things, kept getting himself out of the riz-raz that way. ‘You let yourself in for it. I told you, Rose,’ he said. He might have taken me like a sandwich, consumed me, eaten me up, I mean. What he told me was good sense. ‘Don’t try to go to sleep to-day,’ he said.

  “‘I’ve seen this,’ he said. ‘What of it? Let her ride. It doesn’t jar me no more than I’ve been jarred, but now I don’t think you had better see me any more to-day. You might get to hate me. You get to hate all people in war — and in things like this. It doesn’t matter that nothing happened to you, that you slid out. That doesn’t cut any figure. Don’t let it make you ashamed. Count it that you married me and found you didn’t want me or that I didn’t want you, something of that sort.’”

  Rose had stopped talking. She had been walking nervously up and down the room and smoking cigarettes as she talked. When the words stopped coming from her lips she dropped into a chair and sat with the tears running down her plump cheeks, and several of the women in the room went and tried to comfort her. They seemed to want to kiss her. One by one several women went to her and leaning over kissed her hair, but Esther and Aline sat each in her place with her hands gripped. What it meant to the one it did not mean to the other, but they were both upset. “A fool, that woman, for letting anything get her like that, for getting upset and giving herself away,” Esther would have said.

  BOOK SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE GREYS, FRED and Aline, having driven up the hill to their house in Old Harbor, had dined. Was Aline doing to her husband Fred the same little trick Bruce had been in the habit of doing to his wife Bernice in the Chicago apartment? Fred Grey spoke of his affairs, of the plan to advertise in magazines with a national circulation the wheels made in his factory. —

  For him, the wheel factory had become the center of life. There he moved about, a little king in a world of smaller officials, clerks and workers. The factory and his position meant even more to him because of his experience as a private in the army during the war. At the factory something within him seemed to expand. It was, after all, a huge plaything, a world set apart from the town — a walled town within the confines of a town — in which he was ruler. Did the men want a day off because of the celebration of some national holiday — Armistice Day, something of that sort — he was the one to say “Yes” or “No.” One was a bit careful not to get chesty. Often Fred said to Harcourt, who was secretary of the company— “I am, after all, but a servant.” It was good occasionally to say such things, to remind oneself of the responsibility that must be shouldered by the man of affairs, responsibility to property, to other investors, to workmen, to workmen’s families. Fred had a hero — Theodore Roosevelt. What a shame he was not at the helm during the World War. Had not Roosevelt had things to say about men of wealth who did not shoulder the responsibility of position? Had Teddy been in there at the beginning of the World War, we would have got in quicker — smashed ’em.

  The factory was a little kingdom, but what about Fred’s home? He was a little nervous about his position there. That smile his wife wore sometimes when he spoke of his affairs. What did she mean by it?

  Fred thought he ought to talk.

  We have a market for all the wheels we can make now, but things may change. The question is — does the average man who runs an automobile know or care where the wheels come from? It’s a thing to think about. It costs a lot of money to advertise nationally, but if we don’t do it we will have to pay a lot more taxes —— surplus earnings, you know. The government lets you deduct what you spend for advertising. What I mean is, that they let you count it as legitimate expense. The newspapers and magazines have a lot of power, I tell you. They weren’t going to let the government take that snap away. Well, I suppose I might as well do it.

  Aline sat smiling. Fred always thought she looked more like a European woman than an American. When she smiled like that and did not say anything, was she laughing at him? Damn it all, the whole matter of whether the wheel company made money or not was as important to her as to himself. She had always been used to nice things, as a child and after her marriage. Lucky for her the man she had married had plenty of money. Aline spent thirty dollars a pair for shoes. Her feet were long and narrow, and it was difficult to get custom-made shoes that did not hurt her feet, so she ordered them made. There must be twenty pairs in the closet of her room upstairs, and they had cost her thirty to forty dollars a pair. Two times three is six. Six hundred dollars for shoes alone. Good Lord!

  Maybe she didn’t mean anything special by that smile. Fred suspected that his affairs, the affairs of the factory, were a little over Aline’s head. Women didn’t care for or understand such things. It took a man’s brain for that. Everyone had thought he, Fred Grey, would make a mess of his father’s affairs when he was suddenly called upon to take charge, but he hadn’t. As for woman, he didn’t want one of the smart-managing sort, one of the kind who try to tell you how to run things. Aline suited him all right. He wondered why he hadn’t any children. Was it her fault or his? Well, she was in one of her moods. When she was that way you might as well let her alone. She would come out of it after a while.

  When the Greys had dined, Fred rather insistently keeping up the conversation about national advertising of automobile wheels, he wandered into the living-room of the house to sit in an easy chair under a lamp and read the evening paper while he smoked a cigar and Aline slipped unseen away. There had come a stretch of unusually warm days for that time of the year, and she put a cloak about her and walked out into the garden. Nothing growing yet. The trees still bare. She sat on a bench and lighted a cigarette. Fred, her husband, liked her smoking. He thought it gave her rather an air — of Europe perhaps — of class, anyway.

  In the garden the soft dampness of a late winter — or early spring night. Which was it? The seasons hung balanced. How very quiet everything in the garden on the hilltop! There was no doubt the Middle West was isolated from the world. In Paris, London, New York — now at this hour — people getting ready to drive out to the theater. Wine, lights, the swirl of people, talk. You get caught up, carried along. No time to get immeshed in a whirlpool of your own thoughts — thoughts driving through you like raindrops, wind-driven.

  Too many thoughts!

  That night when Rose talked — the intensity of it, that had caught Fred and Aline, that had played with them as a wind plays with dry, dead leaves — the war — the ugliness of it — men drenched with ugliness like rain — years of that.

  The Armistice — release — the attempt at naked joy.

  Rose Frank talking — the flood of nak
ed words —— — dancing. After all, most of the women at the ball in Paris were what? Whores? An attempt to throw off pretense, fakiness. So much fake talk during the war. The war for righteousness — to make the world Free. The young men sick, sick, and sick of it. Laughing, though — dark laughter. Taking it standing up — the men. The words Rose Frank had said — about her shame — that she had not gone the limit — in ugliness. Queer, disconnected thoughts, women’s thoughts. You want a man, but you want the best of the lot — if you can get him.

  There was that young Jewish man who talked to Aline one evening in Paris after she married Fred. He had for an hour got into the same mood Rose had been in and that Fred got into — just once — that time he asked Aline to marry him. She smiled at the thought. The young American Jew, who was a connoisseur of prints and had a valuable collection, had escaped going down into the trenches. “What I did was to dig latrines — it seemed to me thousands of miles of latrines. Digging, digging, digging in a rocky soil — trenches — latrines. They got the habit of making me do that. I was trying to write music when the war began; that is to say, when they raked me in. I thought— ‘Well, a sensitive man, a neurotic,’ I thought. I thought they would pass me up. Every man, not a silly blind fool, thought that, hoped that, whether he said it or not. Anyway, he hoped. For once it was grand to be a cripple, or blind, or have diabetes. There was such a lot of it, drilling, the ugly shacks we lived in, no privacy, finding out too much about your fellow men too fast. Latrines. Then it was over, and I did not try to write music any more. I had some money, and I started to buy prints. I wanted things delicate — delicacy of line and feeling — something outside myself more delicate and sensitive than I could ever be — after what I had been through.”

  Rose Frank went to that ball where things blew off.

  No one afterward in Aline’s presence talked much about it. Rose was an American and she escaped. She escaped getting clear into it, up to the limit, slid through — thanks to that kid who took care of her — an American kid.

  Had Aline slipped through, too? Had Fred, her husband, slipped through untouched? Was Fred the same thing he would have been if the war had never come, thinking the same thoughts, taking life the same way?

  That night, after they all got out of Rose Frank’s place, Fred had been drawn to Aline — as by instinct. He had come out of the place with Esther, Joe and herself. Perhaps, after all, Esther had gathered him in, having something in mind. “All is grist that comes to mill” — something like that. That young man who sat near Fred and said that about working in a factory in America before Rose began talking. He had stayed when the others got out. Being in Rose’s apartment that night was, for all the people who had been there, a good deal like walking into a bedroom in which a woman lies naked. They had all felt that.

  Fred had walked with Aline when they left the apartment. What had happened had drawn him to her, had drawn her to him. There was never any doubt of their closeness to each other — for that one night, anyway. He was to her, that evening, like the American kid who went with Rose to the ball, only nothing happened between them that was anything like what Rose had described.

  Why hadn’t something happened? If Fred had wanted — that night. He hadn’t. They had just walked along through the streets, Esther and Joe ahead somewhere, and then presently they lost Esther and Joe. If Esther felt any responsibility for Aline, she wasn’t worried. She knew who Fred was if Aline did not. Trust Esther to know about a young man who had as much money as Fred. She was a regular hound-dog at spotting that kind. And Fred had also known who she was, that she was the respectable daughter of, oh, such a respectable Chicago attorney! Was that the reason — ? How many things to ask Fred that she never had asked, couldn’t — now that she was his wife — in Old Harbor, Indiana.

  Both Fred and Aline had been shaken by what they had heard. They went along the left bank of the Seine and found a little café where they stopped and had a drink. When they had taken the drink, Fred looked at Aline. He was rather pale. “I don’t want to appear greedy, but I want several stiff drinks — brandy — one right on top of the other. Do you mind if I take them?” he asked. Then they wandered along the Quai Voltaire, and crossed the Seine at the Pont Neuf. Presently they had got into the little park in the rear of Notre Dame de Paris. That she had never before seen the man she was with had seemed good to Aline that night and she had kept thinking: “If he wants anything, I can—” He had been a soldier — a private in the trenches for two years. Rose had made Aline feel so vividly the shame of escape when the world is plunged — into mud. That he had never before seen the woman he was with seemed good to Fred Grey that night. He had a notion about her. Esther had told him something. Just what Fred’s notion had been, Aline had not understood — not then.

  In the little park-like place into which they had wandered, French people of the neighborhood, young lovers, old men with their wives, fat middle-class men and women with children sitting about. Babies lying on the grass, their little fat legs kicking, women nursing babies, babies crying, a stream of talk, French talk. There was something Aline had once heard a man say concerning the French — when she was out for an evening with Esther and Joe. “They may be killing men in a battle, bringing in the dead from a battlefield, making love — it doesn’t matter. When it comes time to sleep, they sleep. When it comes time to eat, they eat.”

  It had really been Aline’s first night in Paris. “I want to stay out all night. I want to think and feel things. Maybe I want to get drunk,” she had said to Fred.

  Fred had laughed. As soon as he got alone with Aline he had begun to feel strong and manly, and it was, he thought, a good feeling. The shakiness inside had begun to go away. She was an American woman, one of the sort he would marry when he got back to America — which would be soon now. To have stayed on in Paris had been a mistake. There were too many things to remind you of what life was like when you saw it raw.

  What one wanted from woman was not a conscious participation in the facts of life — its vulgarities. Plenty of that sort of women about — in Paris, anyway — Americans, a lot of them — Rose Frank and her sort. Fred had only gone to Rose Frank’s apartment because Tom Burnside took him there. Tom came from good people in America, but thought — because he was in Paris and because he was a painter — well, he thought he ought to stick around with a lot of looseliving people — Bohemians.

  The thing was to explain to Aline, make her understand. What? Well, that nice people — women, anyway — know nothing of the sort of things Rose had talked about.

  The three or four shots of brandy Fred had taken had steadied him. In the dim light in the little park back of the cathedral he kept looking at Aline — at her sharp, delicate, small features, her slender feet, clad in expensive shoes, the slender hands lying in her lap. In Old Harbor, where the Greys had the brick house in the garden set on the very top of the hill above the river, how exquisite she would be — like one of the small, old-fashioned white marble statues people used to set on pedestals among green foliage in a garden.

  The thing was to tell her — an American woman — pure and fine — what? What an American, such an American as himself, who had seen what he had seen in Europe, what such a man wanted. Why, on the very night before the one when he sat with Aline he had seen — Tom Burnside had taken him to a place on Montmartre to see Parisian life. Such women! Ugly women, ugly men — pandering to American men, English men.

  That Rose Frank! Her outbreak — such sentiments, to come from a woman’s lips.

  “I’ve something to say to you,” Fred had finally managed to speak.

  “What?” Aline asked.

  Fred tried to explain. Something he felt. “I’ve seen too many things like that Rose blowout,” he said. “I’ve been up front.”

  In reality it had been Fred’s intention to say something about America and the life at home — to remind her. There was something he felt needed reasserting to a young woman like Aline — to himself, too �
�� something not to be forgotten. The brandy made him a bit loquacious. Names floated before his mind — names of men who stood for something in American life. Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, W. D. Howells— “The better aspects of our American life” — Roosevelt, the poet Longfellow.

  “Truth, liberty — the freedom of man. America, mankind’s great experiment in Liberty.”

  Was Fred drunk? He thought certain words and said other words. That fool woman — hysterical — talking back there in that apartment.

  Thoughts dancing in the brain — horror. One night, in the time of the fighting, he went out on patrol in No Man’s Land and saw another man stumbling along in darkness and shot him. The man pitched forward dead. It had been the only time Fred consciously killed a man. You don’t kill men in war much. They just die. The act was rather hysterical on his part. He and the men with him might have made the fellow surrender. They had all got the jimjams. After it happened, they all ran away together.

  A man killed. They rot sometimes, lying like that in shell-holes. You go out to gather them up, and they fall to pieces.

  Once later Fred crawled out during an advance and got into a shell-hole. A fellow lying there, face down. Fred had crawled in close beside him and had asked him to move over a little. Move, hell! The man was dead — rotten with death.

  Might have been the very fellow he shot that night when he was hysterical. How could he tell whether the fellow was a German or not — in darkness that way? He had got hysterical, that time.

  Other times, before an advance. The men praying, speaking of God.

  Then it was over and he and others were still alive. Other men living — as he was — rotten with life.

  The strange desire for nastiness — on the tongue. To say words that reeked and stank as trenches stank — a madness for that — after such an escape — an escape with life — precious life — life to be nasty with, ugly with. Swear — curse God — go the limit.