America — far off. Something sweet and fine. You’ve got to believe in that — in the men there — the women there.
Hang on! Grip it with your fingers, your soul! Sweetness and truth! It’s got to be sweet and true. Fields — cities — streets — houses — trees — women.
Specially women. Kill anyone who says anything against our women — fields — cities.
Specially women. They don’t know what’s up to them.
We’re tired — damn tired, aching tired.
Fred Grey talking one night in a little park in Paris. At night on the roof of Notre Dame angels may be seen walking up into the sky — white-clad women — stepping up to God.
It may have been Fred was drunk. Perhaps Rose Frank’s words had made him drunk. What was the matter with Aline? She cried. Fred clung to her. He did not kiss her, did not want that. “I want you to marry me — live with me in America.” When he raised his head he could see the white-stone women — angels — walking up into the sky, on the roof of the cathedral.
Aline — to herself— “Woman? If he wants anything — he is a man hurt, befouled — why should I cling to myself?”
Rose Frank’s words in Aline’s mind, an impulse, Rose Frank’s shame that she had remained — what is called clean.
Fred had begun to sob as he tried to talk to Aline, and she took him into her arms. The French people in the little park did not mind much. They had seen a lot of things — shell-shock — all that sort of thing — modern war. Getting late. Time to go home and sleep. French prostitution during the war. “They never forgot to ask for the money — did they, Ruddy?”
Fred clung to Aline and Aline clung to Fred — that night. “You are a nice girl, I spotted you. That woman you were with told me, Tom Burnside introduced me to her. I’m all right at home — nice people. I’ve got to have you. We’ve got to believe in things — kill people who don’t believe.”
They went to ride in a fiacre — all night — to the Bois in the early morning — as Rose Frank and her American kid had done. After that a marriage — it had seemed inevitable.
Like a train when you are on and it starts. You got to go somewhere.
More talk. “Talk, boy — it helps maybe.” Talk of a man killed — in the darkness. I’m too full of haunts, I don’t want more talk. We Americans were all right. Getting along. Why did I stay here when the war was over? Tom Burnside got me to — for you, maybe. Tom never was in the trenches — lucky dog, I don’t hold it against him.
“I want no more Europe-talk. I want you. You marry me. You got to. All I want is to forget — wade out. Let Europe rot.”
Aline rode all night in the fiacre with Fred. It was such a courtship. He clung to her hand, but did not kiss her, and said nothing tender.
He was like a child, wanting something she stood for — to him — wanting it desperately.
Why not give herself? He was young and handsome.
She had been willing to give —
He had not seemed to want — that.
You get what you reach out your hand and take. Women always do the taking — if they have the courage. You take — a man — or a mood — or a child that has been hurt too much. Esther was as hard as nails, but she knew some things. It had been educational for Aline to go to Europe with her. There wasn’t much doubt that Esther felt the outcome of her having thrown Fred and Aline together was a triumph for her system, for her way of managing things. She knew who Fred was. It would be a feather in her cap, with Aline’s father, when he realized what she had done. Had he had the picking of a husband for his daughter he would have picked — just Fred. Not many of that kind lying about loose. With such a man a woman — like Aline would be when she had grown a little wiser and older — well, she could manage just anything. She also would be grateful to Esther, after a while.
And that was why Esther put the marriage right through, the next day — the same day, to be exact. “If you are going to keep a woman like that out all night — young man.” It had not been very hard to manage Fred and Aline. Aline had seemed in a daze. She had been in a daze. All that night and the next day and for several days afterward she wasn’t herself. What was she? Perhaps she had been for the time, in fancy, that newspaper woman, Rose Frank. The woman had befuddled her — made all life seem strange and topsy-turvy for the time being. Rose had given her the war, the sense of it — all in a heap — like a blow.
She — Rose — had been in something and had escaped. She was ashamed of her escape.
Aline wanted to be in something — up to the hilt — the limit — once, anyway.
She had got into —
A marriage with Fred Grey.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
IN THE GARDEN Aline arose from the bench on which she had been sitting for a half hour, perhaps for an hour. The night was full of the promise of spring. In another hour her husband would be ready to go to bed. It had perhaps been a hard day for him at the factory. She would go into the house. No doubt he would have gone to sleep in his chair and she would arouse him. There would be some talk. “Are things going well at the factory?”
“Yes, dear. I am very busy these days. Now I am trying to decide about advertising. Sometimes I think I will do it, sometimes I think I won’t.”
Aline would be alone in the house with the man, her husband, and outside would be the night of which he seemed so unconscious. When spring had advanced but a few weeks more, tender green growth would be springing up all over the hillside on which the house stood. The soil was rich up there. Fred’s grandfather, still spoken of by old men of the town as Old Wash Grey, had been a horse-dealer on rather a grand scale. It was said he had sold horses to both sides during the Civil War, and had taken something of a hand in several big horse-running raids. He sold horses to Grant’s army, there was a rebel raid, the horses disappeared and presently Old Wash sold them to Grant’s army again. The whole hillside had once been a huge horse corral.
A place of green things growing rank in the spring — trees putting forth leaves, grasses springing up, the early spring flowers coming, flowering bushes everywhere.
In the house, after the few remarks, silence. Aline and her husband would go up a flight of stairs. Always, when they had got to the top of the steps, there was a moment when something was to be decided. “Shall I come to you to-night?”
“No, dear; I’m a little tired.” Something hung fire between the man and woman, a wall separated them. It had always been there — except once, for an hour, one night in Paris. Did Fred really want to tear it away? To do so would involve something. Really living with a woman is not living alone. Life takes on a new aspect. There are new problems. You must feel things, face things. Aline wondered if she wanted the wall destroyed. Sometimes she made an effort. At the top of the stairs she turned and smiled at her husband. Then she took his head in her two hands and kissed him, and when she had done that went quickly into her own room, where later, in the darkness, he came to her. It was odd, amazing, how close another could come and yet remain far away. Could Aline, if she willed it so, knock the wall down and really come close to the man she had married? Did she want that?
It was so good to be out alone on such an evening as the one during which we have crept into Aline’s thoughts. In the garden, that had been terraced over the crown of the hill on which the house stood, there were several trees with benches beneath, and a low wall that separated the garden from the street that went past the house over the hill and down again. In the summer when the trees were in leaf and when tall bushes grew thick upon the terraces one could not see the other houses of the street, but now they stood distinctly forth. In a neighboring house, where lived Mr and Mrs. Willmott, there were guests in for the evening, and two or three motors stood before the door. The people sat at tables in a brightly lighted room playing cards. They laughed, talked, occasionally got up from one table and went to another. Aline had been invited to come with her husband, but had managed to get out of it by saying she had a hea
dache. Slowly, surely, ever since she had been in Old Harbor, she had been restricting her own and her husband’s social life. Fred said he liked it so and complimented her upon her ability to get out of things. In the evening after dinner he read the newspaper or a book. He preferred detective stories, saying he got a kick out of them and that they did not take his mind off business, as reading so-called serious books did. Sometimes he and Aline went for a drive in the evening, but not often. She had managed to restrict the mutual use of the car also. It threw her too much with Fred. There was nothing to talk about.
When Aline got up from her seat on the bench, she walked slowly and softly about the garden. She was dressed in white and there was a little childish game she loved playing with herself. She went to stand near a tree and, folding her arms, turned her face demurely toward the ground, or, plucking a branch from a bush, stood holding it against her breast as though it were a cross. In old gardens in Europe and in some old American places, where there are trees and thick bushes, a certain effect is achieved by setting small white figures on columns among the deep foliage, and Aline in fancy metamorphosed herself into such a white, dainty figure. She was a stone woman leaning over to raise to her arms a small child who stood with upraised hands, or she was a nun in the garden of a convent pressing a cross against her breast. As such a tiny stone figure she had no thoughts, no feelings. What she achieved was a kind of occasional loveliness among the dark night foliage of the garden. She became a part of the loveliness of the trees and of thick bushes growing out of the ground. Although she did not know it, her husband Fred had once in fancy seen her just so — on the night when he had asked her to marry him. For years, for days and nights, forever perhaps, she could stand with outstretched arms about to take a child into her arms, or as a nun holding to her body the symbol of the cross on which had died her spiritual lover. It was a dramatization, childish, meaningless, and full of a kind of comforting satisfaction to one who in the actuality of life remains unfulfilled. Sometimes when she stood thus in the garden, her husband within the house reading his paper or asleep in his chair, minutes passed when she did no thinking, felt nothing. She had become a part of the sky, of the ground, of passing winds. When it rained, she was the rain. When thunder rolled down the Ohio River Valley, her body trembled slightly. As a small, lovely stone figure, she had achieved Nirvana. Now was the time for her lover to come — to spring out of the ground — to drop from the branches of a tree — to take her, laughing at the very notion of asking consent. Such a figure as Aline had become, placed in an exhibition in a museum would have seemed absurd; but in a garden among trees and bushes, and caressed by the low color-tones of the night, it became strangely lovely, and all of Aline’s relations with her husband had made her want, above everything else, to be strange and lovely in her own sight. Was she saving herself for something, and, if so, for what?
When she had posed herself thus, several times, she grew weary of the childishness of the game and was compelled to smile at her own foolishness. She went back along the path toward the house and, looking through a window, saw her husband asleep in his chair. The newspaper had fallen from his hand and his body had slumped into the chair’s generous depths so that only his rather boyish-looking head was visible, and after looking at him for a moment Aline moved again along a path toward the gate leading to the street. Where the Grey place faced the street there were no houses. Two roads, coming up from the town below, became a street near the corner of the garden, and on the street were several houses, in one of which she could, by raising her eyes, see the people still at their card game.
Near the gate there was a large walnut-tree, and she stood with her body pressed against it looking out into the street. At the corner, where the two roads joined, there was a street light, but at the entrance to the Grey place the light was dim.
Something happened.
A man came up the road from below, passed under the light and, turning, walked toward the Grey gate. It was Bruce Dudley, the man she had seen walking away from the factory with the small, broad-shouldered workman. Aline’s heart jumped and then seemed to stop beating. If the man, inside himself, had been occupied with thoughts of her as she had with thoughts of him, then already they were something to each other. They were something to each other that presently would have to be taken into account.
The man in Paris, the one she had seen in Rose Frank’s apartment that night when she got Fred. She had made a faint little try for him, but had been unsuccessful. Rose had got him. If the chance came again, would she be more bold? There was one thing sure — if such a thing did happen, her husband Fred would not be taken into account. “When such a thing happens between a woman and a man, it happens between a woman and a man. No one else really gets into it at all,” she thought, smiling in spite of the fear that had taken hold of her.
The man she now stood watching was coming along the street directly toward her, and when he had got to the gate leading up into the Grey garden he stopped. Aline moved slightly, but a bush growing near the tree hid her body. Did the man see her? An idea came.
She would try, to some purpose now, being one of the small stone statues people place in gardens. The man worked in her husband’s factory and it might well be that he was coming to the house to see Fred about business. Aline’s notions of the relation between employee and employer in a factory were very vague. If the man actually came along the path toward the house, he would pass near enough to touch her, and the situation might well become absurd. It would have been better for Aline to walk quite nonchalantly along the path away from the gate at which the man now stood. That she realized, but she did not move. If the man saw her and spoke to her, the tenseness of the moment would be broken. He would ask something about her husband and she would answer. The whole childish game she had been playing inside herself would end. As a bird crouches in the grass when a hunting dog runs through a field so Aline crouched.
The man stood some ten feet away, looking first at the lighted house above and then calmly at her. Did he see her? Was he aware of her awareness? When the hunting dog has found his bird he does not dash in, but stands rigid and waiting.
How absurd that Aline could not speak to the man in the road. She had been thinking of him for days. Perhaps he had been thinking of her.
She wanted him.
For what?
She did not know.
He stood for three or four minutes, and it seemed to Aline one of those strange pauses in life that are so absurdly unimportant and at the same time all-important. Had she the courage to step out of the shelter of the tree and the bush and speak to him? “Something would then begin. Something would then begin.” The words danced in her head.
He turned and walked away reluctantly. Twice he stopped to look back. First his legs, then his body, and at the last his head disappeared into the darkness of the hillside beyond the circle of light cast by the street-lamp overhead. There was an effect of sinking into the ground out of which he had suddenly appeared but a few moments before.
The man had stood as close to Aline as the other man in Paris, the man she had met coming out of Rose’s apartment, the man on whom she had once tried with so little success to exert her womanly charms.
The new man’s coming, in just that way, was a challenge.
Would she take it?
With a smile playing about her lips Aline walked along the path toward the house and toward her husband, who was still sound asleep in his chair with the evening newspaper lying beside him on the floor.
BOOK EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SHE HAD GOT him. There remained little doubt in his mind; but because it gave him a kind of pleasure to think of himself as the devoted one, and of her as indifferent, he did not tell himself the exact truth. However, it had happened. When he saw it all fully he smiled and was rather happy. “That is settled anyway,” he told himself. It was flattering to think that he could do it, that he could surrender like that. One of the thin
gs Bruce said to himself at that time went something like this— “A man must at some time in his life focus all the strength of his being upon some one thing, the doing of some job of work, utter absorption in that or in some other human being, for a time anyway.” All his life Bruce had been rather like that. When he felt closest to people they seemed more removed than when he felt — as rarely happened — sufficient unto himself. It needed then a grand effort, an outgoing toward someone.
As for work Bruce did not feel himself artist enough to think he would find an outlet in the arts. Now and then, when he was deeply moved, he wrote what might have been called poems, but the idea of being a poet, of being known as a poet, was rather dreadful to him. “Something like being widely known as a lover, a professional lover,” he thought.
Ordinary work, varnishing wheels in a factory, scribbling news for a newspaper, that sort of thing. Not much chance for an outpouring of the emotional nature at least. Men like Tom Wills and Sponge Martin had puzzled him. They were shrewd, moved about within a certain limited circle of life with an air of ease. Perhaps they did not want or need what Bruce wanted and thought he needed — periods of rather intense emotional outpourings. Tom Wills at least had consciousness of futility, impotence. He used to talk with Bruce sometimes about the newspaper on which they both worked. “Think of it, man,” he said, “three hundred thousand readers. Think what that means. Three hundred thousand pairs of eyes fixed on the same page at practically the same hour every day, three hundred thousand minds supposed to be at work absorbing the contents of a page. And such a page, such stuff. If they were really minds what would happen? Great God! An explosion that would shake the world, eh? If the eyes saw! If the fingers felt, if the ears heard! Man is dumb, blind, deaf. Could Chicago or Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Youngstown or Akron — modern war, the modern factory, the modern college, Reno, Los Angeles, movies, art schools, music-teachers, the radio, governments — could such things go on blandly if the three hundred thousand, all the three hundred thousands, were not intellectual and emotional morons?”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 114