As though that mattered to Bruce or to Sponge Martin. It seemed to matter a lot to Tom. He was hurt by the fact.
Sponge was the puzzle. He went fishing, drank moon whisky, got satisfaction out of being aware. He and his wife were both fox terriers, not quite human.
Aline had got Bruce. The mechanics of getting him, her move, had been laughable, crude, almost like putting an advertisement in a matrimonial paper. When she had realized fully that she wanted him near her, for a time anyway, wanted his person near her person, she could not think at first of any way to bring it about. She couldn’t very well send a note to his hotel. “You look rather like a man I once saw in Paris, give me the same subtle desires. I missed out on him. A woman named Rose Frank got the better of me the only chance I ever had. Would you mind coming a bit nearer so that I may see what you are like?”
You can’t do a thing like that in a small town. If you are an Aline you can’t do it at all. What can you do?
Aline had taken a long chance. A negro gardener, who worked about the Grey place, was discharged and she put an advertisement in the local newspaper. Four men came and were pronounced unsatisfactory before she got Bruce, but in the end she got him.
It was an embarrassing moment when he came up the path to the door and for the first time she saw him very near, heard his voice.
That was in a way the test. Would he make it easy for her? He at least tried, smiling inwardly. Something was dancing within him as it had since he had seen the advertisement. He had seen it because two laborers at the hotel spoke of it in his hearing. Suppose you play with the idea that a game is going on between you and a very charming woman. Most men spend their lives at just that game. You tell yourself many little lies, but perhaps you are wise to do so. You’ve got to have some illusions, haven’t you? It’s fun, like writing a novel. You make the charming woman more charming if your fancy can be made to help, make her do as you please, have imaginary conversations with her, at night sometimes imagined love-meetings. That is not quite satisfactory. There isn’t, however, always that limitation. Sometimes you win. The book you are writing comes alive. The woman you love wants you.
After all, Bruce did not know. He knew nothing. Anyway he had enough of the wheel-varnishing job and spring was coming. Had he not seen the advertisement he would have quit presently. When he saw it he smiled over the notion of Tom Wills, cursing the newspapers. “Newspapers have some use anyway,” he thought.
Since Bruce had been in Old Harbor he had spent very little money and so he had silver to jingle in his pocket. He wanted to apply for the place personally and so he quit on the day before — he — saw — her. A letter would have spoiled everything. — If — she — were what he thought, what he wanted to think her, the writing of a letter would have settled matters at once. She wouldn’t have bothered with a reply. What puzzled him most was Sponge Martin, who only smiled knowingly when Bruce announced his intention of quitting, flow did the little cuss know? — When — Sponge found out what he was up to — if he — got — the — place — well, a moment of intense satisfaction for Sponge. “I spotted that all right, knew it before he knew it himself. She got him, didn’t she? Well, it’s all right. I like her looks myself.”
Odd how much a man hated giving another man that kind of satisfaction.
With Aline, Bruce was frank enough, although he could not look directly at her during their first conversation. He wondered whether or not she was looking at him and rather thought she was. There was a way in which he felt like a horse or a slave being bought and he liked the feeling. “I’ve been working down at your husband’s factory but I’ve quit,” he said. “You see spring is coming and I want to try working out of doors. As for my being a gardener, it is, of course, absurd, but I would like trying it if you wouldn’t mind helping me. It is a little rash of me to come up here and apply. Spring is coming so fast and I want to work out of doors. As a matter of fact I am quite stupid with my hands and if you take me you will have to tell me everything.”
How badly Bruce was playing his game. His note, for a time at least, was to be a laborer. The words he had been saying did not sound like words that would come from the lips of any laborer he had known. If you are going to dramatize yourself, play a certain role, you should at least play it well. His mind danced about seeking something more crude he might say.
“Don’t worry about the wages, ma’am,” he said, and had a hard time suppressing a laugh. He kept looking at the ground and smiling. That was better. It was the note. What fun it was going to be, playing the game out with her, if she were willing. It might last a long time, no let-down. There might even be a contest. Who would let down first?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HE WAS HAPPY as he had never been before, absurdly happy. Sometimes in the evening when his day’s work was done, as he sat on the bench in the small building back of the house further up the hill where he had been given a cot on which to sleep, he thought he was consciously rather overdoing the thing. On several Sunday mornings he had gone to see Sponge and his wife and they had been very nice. Just a little inward laugh on Sponge’s part. He did not like the Greys much. Once, long ago, he had asserted his own manhood over old Grey, had told him where to get off, and now Bruce, his friend — At night sometimes, when Sponge was in bed beside his wife, he played with the idea of being himself in Bruce’s present position. He imagined things had already happened that might not happen at all, tried out his own figure in Bruce’s position. It would not work. In such a house as the Greys’ — The truth was that in Bruce’s position, as he imagined it, he would have been confused by the house itself, by the furniture of the house, by the grounds about the house. That time he had got Fred Grey’s father at a disadvantage he had him in his own shop, on his own dung-hill. It was really Sponge’s wife who most enjoyed the thoughts of what was going on. At night while Sponge was having his own thoughts she lay beside him thinking of delicate lingerie, soft colorful bed-hangings. Having Bruce drop in on them on Sunday was like having in the house the hero of a French novel. Or, something by Laura Jean Libbey — books she used to read when she was younger and her eyes were better. Her thoughts did not frighten her as her husband’s thoughts did him, and when Bruce came she had an inclination to give him delicate things to eat. She wanted very much to have him remain well, young-looking and handsome, that she might the better use him in her night-thoughts. That he had once worked in the shop beside Sponge seemed to her a desecration of something almost holy. It was like the Prince of Wales doing something of the sort, a kind of joke. Like the pictures you see sometimes in the Sunday papers — the President of the United States pitching hay on a Vermont farm, the Prince of Wales holding a horse for a jockey to mount, the Mayor of New York throwing out the first baseball at the beginning of the baseball season. Great men being common in order to make common men happy. Bruce had at any rate made life happier for Mrs. Sponge Martin, and when he went to see them and had come away walking along the little-used river-road, to climb, by a path through the bushes, the hill to the Grey place, he got it all and was both amused and pleased. He felt like an actor who had been rehearsing a part before friends. They were uncritical, kindly. Easy enough to play the part for them. Could he play it successfully for Aline?
His own thoughts when he sat on the bench in the shed in which he now slept at night were complex.
“I’m in love. That’s what it must he. As for her, it perhaps does not matter. She is at least willing to play with the thought of it.”
One tried to escape love only when it was not love. Very skillful men — skillful in life — pretend not to believe in it at all. Writers of books who believe in love, who make love the background of their books, are always strangely silly fellows. They make a mess of it trying to write of it. No intelligent person wants such love. It may be good enough for antiquated unmarried women or something for tired stenographers to read on the subway or elevated, going home from the office in the evening. It is the sort of th
ing that has to be kept within the confines of a cheap book. If you try bringing it into life — bah!
In a book you make the simple statement— “they loved” — and the reader must believe or throw the book away. Easy enough to make statements— “John stood with his back turned and Sylvester crept from behind a tree. He raised his revolver and fired. John tumbled forward, dead.” Such things happen, to be sure, but they do not happen to anyone you know. Killing a man with words scrawled on a sheet of paper is a quite different matter than killing him in life.
Words to make people lovers. You say they are. Bruce did not so much want to be loved. He wanted to love. When the flesh comes in, that is something different. In him there was none of the vanity that makes men so ready to believe themselves lovable.
Bruce was quite sure he had not yet begun to think or to feel Aline as flesh. If that came it would be another problem than the one he had now undertaken. He wanted most of all to get outside himself, to center his life upon something outside himself. He had tried physical labor, but had found no work in which he could absorb himself, and also he realized, after he saw Aline, that for him Bernice had not offered enough of the possibilities of loveliness in herself — in her person. She was one who had thrown aside the possibilities of personal loveliness, of womanhood. In truth she was too much like Bruce himself.
And what an absurdity — really! If one could but be a lovely woman, if one could achieve loveliness in one’s own person, was it not enough, was it not all one could ask? Bruce, at the moment anyway, thought it was. He thought Aline lovely — so lovely that he hesitated about coming too near. If his own fancy was helping to make her more lovely — in his own sight — was it not an achievement? “Gently. Don’t move. Just be,” he wanted to whisper to Aline.
Spring was coming on fast in southern Indiana. It was middle April, and in middle April, in the Ohio River Valley — at least many seasons — the spring is well advanced. The winter flood-waters had already receded from most of the flat lands in the river valley about and below Old Harbor, and as Bruce went about his new work in the Greys’ garden, directed by Aline, wheeling barrows of dirt, digging in the ground, planting seed, transplanting, he occasionally straightened his body, and standing at attention looked out over the land.
Although the flood-waters, that in winter covered all the lowlands in that country, were just receding, leaving everywhere wide shallow pools — pools the southern Indiana sun would soon drink up — although the receding flood-waters had left everywhere a thin coating of gray river-mud, the gray was now fast receding.
Everywhere the green of growing things crept out over the gray land. As the shallow pools dried, the green advanced. On some of the warm spring days, he could almost see the green creeping forward, and now that he had become a gardener, a digger in the earth, he had occasionally the exciting feeling of being a part of what was going on. He was a painter at work on a vast canvas on which others were also at work. In the ground where he was digging, red, blue and yellow blossoms would presently appear. A little corner of the vast earth’s surface belonged to Aline and to himself. There was an unspoken contrast. His own hands, that had always been so awkward and useless, directed now by her mind, might well become less useless. Now and then, as she sat on a bench near him or walked about the garden, he stole shy looks at her hands. They were very dainty and quick. Well, they were not strong, but his own hands were strong enough. Tough, rather thick fingers, broad palms. When he worked in the shop beside Sponge he had watched Sponge’s hands. There was a caress in them. There was a caress in Aline’s hands when, as occasionally happened, she touched one of the plants Bruce had been handling awkwardly. “You do it like this,” the quick deft fingers seemed to be saying to his fingers. “Keep yourself out of it. Let the rest of your person sleep. Center everything now upon the fingers that are being directed by her fingers,” Bruce whispered to himself.
Soon now the farmers who owned the flat lands in the river valley far below the hill on which Bruce worked, but who lived also back among the hills, would be going out upon the flat lands with their teams and tractors for the spring plowing. The low hills, lying back from the river, were like hunting-dogs crouched near the river’s edge. One of the dogs had crept near and had thrust a tongue into the water. That was the hill upon which Old Harbor stood. On the flat lands down below, Bruce had already seen men walking about. They were like flies walking across a distant window-pane. Dark gray men walking across a vast light grayness, looking, waiting the time of the coming of the spring green, waiting to help the spring green come.
Bruce had seen the same thing when he was a boy and had walked up the Old Harbor hill with his mother, and now he was seeing it with Aline.
They did not speak of it. As yet they spoke of nothing but the work to be done in the garden. When Bruce was a boy and came up the hill with his mother, the older woman had been unable to tell her son what she felt. The son had been unable to tell the mother what he felt.
Often he felt like shouting to the tiny gray figures flown below’. “Come on! Come on! Start plowing! Plow! Plow!”
He was himself a gray man like the tiny gray men below. He was a crazy man like the crazy man he had once seen sitting with dried blood on his cheek beside the river. “Keep afloat!” the crazy man had called to a steamboat plowing its way up river.
“Plow! Plow! Begin plowing! Tear up the soil! Turn it over. The soil is growing warm! Begin plowing! Plow and plant!” was what Bruce wanted to shout now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BRUCE HAD BECOME a part of the life of the Grey household on the hill above the river. Inside himself something was being built. A hundred imaginary conversations with Aline, that were never to take place in fact, went on in his mind. Sometimes when she came into the garden and talked to him of his work, he half waited, as though for her to pick up, where it had been dropped, a fancied talk had with her as he lay on his cot the night before. If Aline should become absorbed in him, as he was in her, a break would be inevitable, and after a break of any kind the whole tone of life in the garden would be changed. Bruce thought he had suddenly got an old wisdom. Sweet moments in life are rare. The poet has his moment of ecstasy and then it must be put aside. He works in a bank or is a professor in a college. Keats singing to the nightingale, Shelley to the skylark or to the moon. Both men going home afterwards to wives. Keats sitting at table with Fanny Brawne — a little fat, growing a little coarse — using words that jarred on the eardrums. Shelley and that father-in-law of his. Lord help the good, the true and the beautiful! The household arrangements to be discussed. What shall we have for dinner to-night, dear? Little wonder Tom Wills was always swearing at life. “Good morning, Life. Do you think the day beautiful? Well, you see I have an attack of indigestion. I should not have eaten the shrimps. Sea-food hardly ever agrees with me.”
Because moments are hard to come at, because everything fades quickly away, is that any reason for becoming second-rate, cheap, a cynic? Any little smart newspaper scribbler can turn you out a cynic. Anyone can show how rotten life is, how silly love is — it’s easy. Take it and laugh. Then take also what comes later as cheerfully as you can. It might be that Aline felt nothing that Bruce felt, that what to him was the experience, the high spot perhaps of a lifetime, was to her but a passing fancy. Boredom perhaps with life, as the wife of a rather commonplace manufacturer in an Indiana town. Perhaps physical desire alone — a new experience in life. Bruce thought it might be to him what he made it and he was proud and glad of what he thought of as his own sophistication.
On his cot at night moments of intense sadness. He could not sleep and arose to creep out into the garden to sit on a bench. One night it rained and the cold rain wet him to the skin but he did not mind. Already the number of years he had lived had passed into the thirties and he felt himself at a turning-point. Today I am young and can be foolish, but to-morrow I shall become old and wise. If I do not love fully now I shall never love. Old men do n
ot walk or sit in the cold rain in a garden, looking at a dark house drenched by the rain. They take such feelings as I now have and turn them into poems which they publish to enhance their fame. A man enamored of a woman, his physical being all aroused, is a common enough sight. Spring comes, and men and women walk in city parks or along country roads. They sit together on the grass under a tree. They will do it next spring and in the spring of the year two thousand and ten. They did it in the evening of the day Cæsar crossed the Rubicon. Does it matter? Men who have passed the age of thirty and who have intelligence understand such things. A German scientist can explain perfectly. If there is anything you do not understand in human life consult the works of Dr. Freud.
The rain was cold and the house dark. Did Aline sleep beside the husband she had found in France, the man she had found upset, torn because he had been in battles, made hysterical because he had seen men in the raw, because once in a moment of hysteria he had killed a man? Well, it would not do to have Aline in just that situation. The picture did not fit into the scheme. If I were her accepted lover, if I possessed her, I would have to accept the husband as a necessary fact. Later when I have left here, when this spring has passed, I will accept him, but not now. Bruce went softly through the rain and touched with his fingers the wall of the house in which Aline slept. Something had been decided for him. Both he and Aline were in a hushed silent place midway between events. Yesterday there was nothing. To-morrow or the day after, when the breach came, there would be nothing. Well, there would be something. There would be a thing called knowledge of life. When he had touched the wall of the house with his wet fingers he crept back to his cot and lay down, but after a time arose to light a light. After all, he could not quite escape the desire to put down something of the feelings of the moment, to preserve them.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 115