How absurd to be pretending that you are reading a book. The band, down in the town, that had been silent for a time, began to play again. How long since Fred had gone? How long since the two negro women had gone? Did the two negro women, as they walked down the path — prancing — did they know that while they were gone — on that day —
Aline’s hands were trembling now. She arose from the bench. When she raised her eyes Bruce was looking directly at her. She went a little white.
The challenge was to come from him then? She hadn’t known that. The thought made her a little dizzy. Now that the test had come he did not look afraid and she was horribly frightened.
Of him? Well, no. Of herself, perhaps.
She went with trembling legs along the path toward the house and could hear his footsteps on the gravel walk behind. The footsteps sounded firm and sure. That day when Fred had walked up the hill, pursued by the same footsteps — She had had a sense of that, looking from her window upstairs in the house, and had been ashamed for Fred. Now she was ashamed for herself.
When she had got to the door of the house and had stepped inside, her hand reached out as though to close the door behind herself. If she did that he would not of course persist. He would come to the door, and when it closed he would turn and walk away. She would see no more of him.
Her hand reached twice for the door-knob but could not find it. She turned and walked across the room towards the stairs that led up into her own room.
He had not hesitated at the door. What was to happen now would happen.
There was nothing to be done about it. She was glad of that.
CHAPTER THIRTY
ALINE WAS LYING on her bed upstairs in the Grey house. Her eyes were like the eyes of a sleepy cat. No good thinking now of what had happened. She had wanted to have it happen, had brought it about. It was evident Mrs. Willmott was not coming to call on her. Perhaps she had been asleep. The sky was very clear and blue, but already the tone was deepening. Soon it would be evening, the negro women come home, Fred come home.... One would have to face Fred. About the negro women it did not matter. They would think as their natures led them to think, feel as their natures led them to feel. You can’t ever tell what a negro woman thinks or feels. They are like children looking at you with their strangely soft innocent eyes. White eyes, white teeth in a brown face — laughter. It is a laughter that does not hurt too much.
Mrs. Willmott gone, out of sight. No more bad thoughts. Peace to the body, to the spirit too.
How very gentle and strong he was! At least she had made no mistake. Would he go away now?
The thought frightened Aline. She did not want to think of it. Better to think of Fred.
Another thought came. In reality she loved her husband, Fred. Women have more than one way of loving. If he came to her now, perplexed, upset —
More than likely he would come feeling happy. If Bruce had disappeared from the place for good, that would make him happy too.
How comfortable the bed felt. What made her so sure she would have a child now? She pictured her husband Fred holding the child in his arms and the thought pleased her. Afterwards she would have other children. There was no reason why Fred should be left in the position in which she had placed him. If she had to lead the rest of her life living with Fred, bearing children by him, life would not be bad. She had been a child and now she was a woman. Things changed in nature. That writer, the man who wrote the book she was trying to read when she went into the garden. The thing had not been too well said. A dry mind, thinking things out dryly.
“A multitude of semblance invite us to believe that something equal to our loftiest thoughts issues at times from a common source.”
There was a sound below-stairs. The two negro women had come home from having seen the parade and the ceremony for the unveiling of the statue. How good that Fred had not been killed in the war! At any moment now he might be coming home, he might come directly upstairs to his room, the next one to her own, he might come to her.
She did not move and presently she heard his footsteps on the stairs. Memories of Bruce’s footsteps, going away. Fred’s footsteps coming, coming to her perhaps. She did not mind. If he came she would be rather glad.
He did come, pushing the door open rather timidly, and when her eyes invited he came to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Well,” he said.
He spoke of the necessity of her preparing for dinner and then of the parade. It had all gone very well. He had not felt self-conscious. Although he did not say so she understood that he had been pleased with his own figure marching along with the workingmen, a common man for the day. Nothing had happened to disturb his sense of the figure such a one as himself should cut in the life of his town. Now perhaps, also, he would no longer be disturbed by the presence of Bruce, but that he did not as yet know.
One is a child and then one becomes a woman, a mother, perhaps. That may be one’s real function.
Aline, with her eyes, invited Fred, and he leaned over and kissed her. Her lips were warm. A thrill ran through his body. What had happened? What a day it had been for him! If he got Aline, really got her! There was something he had always wanted from her, some recognition of his own manhood.
If he got that — fully, deeply, as he had never quite....
He took her into his arms, held her hard against his body.
Downstairs the negro women were preparing the evening meal. Something had happened downtown during the parade that had amused one of them and she told the other.
A high-pitched negro laugh rang through the house.
BOOK ELEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
LATE IN THE evening of an early fall day Fred was walking up the Old Harbor hill, having just made a contract for a national advertising campaign on Grey Automobile Wheels in the magazines. In a few weeks now it would begin. American people did read advertising. There wasn’t any doubt of it. One time Kipling wrote to the editor of an American magazine. The editor had sent him a copy of the magazine without the advertising. “But I want to see the advertising. It’s the most interesting thing in the magazine,” Kipling said.
In a few weeks now the name of the Grey Wheel Company spread over the pages of all the national magazines. People out in California, in Iowa, in New York City, up in little New England towns, reading about Grey Wheels. “Grey Wheels are Go-Getters,”
“Road Samsons,”
“Road Gulls.” What was wanted was just the right catch-line, something to stop the eye of the reader, make him think of Grey Wheels, want Grey Wheels. The advertising men from Chicago hadn’t got just the right line yet, but they would do it all right. Advertising men were pretty smart. Some of the advertising writers got fifteen, twenty, even forty or fifty thousand dollars a year. They wrote down advertising catch-lines. I tell you what, this is a country. All Fred had to do was to “pass” on what the advertising men wrote. They made designs, wrote out the advertisements. All he had to do was to sit in his office and look them over. Then his brain decided what was good and what wasn’t. Young fellows who were studying art made the designs. Sometimes they got well-known painters, fellows like Tom Burnside over in Paris. When American business men started after a thing they got it.
Nowdays Fred kept his car in a garage down in town. If he wanted to ride home, after an evening at the office, he just phoned and a man came for him.
This, however, was a good night to walk. A man had to keep himself in condition. As he passed up through the business streets of Old Harbor, one of the big men from the Chicago Advertising Agency walking with him. (They had sent down their best men. The Grey Wheel matter was important to them.) As he walked along Fred looked up and down the business streets of his town. Already he had helped more than any other man to make the little river town half a city and now he would do a lot more. Look what happened to Akron after they started making tires there, look what happened to Detroit because of Ford and a few others. As the Chicago man had poi
nted out, every car that ran had to have four wheels. If Ford can do that, why can’t you? All Ford did was to see his opportunity and take it. Wasn’t that just the test of a good American — come right down to it?
Fred left the advertising man at his hotel. There were really four advertising men but the other three were writers. They walked by themselves, behind Fred and their boss. “Of course bigger men, like you and me, have really to give them their ideas. It takes a cool head to know what to do and when to do it and to avoid mistakes. A writer is always a little nutty at bottom,” the advertising man said to Fred, laughing.
When they got to the hotel door, Fred, however, stopped and waited for the others. He shook hands all round. If a man at the head of a big enterprise gets chesty, begins to think too well of himself —
Fred walked on up the hill alone. The night was fine and he was in no hurry. When you climbed like that and when your breath began to come with difficulty you stopped and stood for a while, looking back down into the town. Away down there was the factory. Then the Ohio River, flowing on and on. When you got a big thing started it did not stop. There are fortunes in this country that can’t be hurt. Suppose a few bad years come and you lose two or three hundred thousand. What of it? You sit tight and wait Your chance will come. The country is too big and rich for depression to last very long. What happens is that the little fellows get weeded out. The thing to do is to be one of the big fellows, to dominate in your own field. Already many of the things the Chicago man had said to Fred had become a part of his own thinking. In the past he had been Fred Grey, of the Grey Wheel Company, of Old Harbor, Indiana, but now he was to become something national.
How fine that night was! At a street corner where there was a light he looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. He passed on into a darker space between lights. By looking straight ahead up the hill he could see the blue-black sky sprinkled with brilliant stars. When he turned to look back, and although he could not see it, he had a consciousness of the great river down there, the river on the banks of which he had always lived. It would be something now if he could make the river alive again as it was in his grandfather’s time. Barges steaming up to the docks of the Grey Wheel Company. Men shouting, clouds of gray smoke from factory chimneys rolling down the river valley.
Fred felt oddly like a happy bridegroom and a happy bridegroom likes the night.
Nights in the army — Fred, a private marching along a road in France. You get an odd feeling of being little, insignificant, when you are fool enough to go in for being a private in the army. Still there was that day in the spring when he marched through the Old Harbor streets, wearing his private’s uniform. How the people had cheered! Too bad Aline hadn’t heard it. He had sure made a hit with the town that day. Someone had told him, “If you ever want to be mayor or to go to Congress or to the United States Senate even—”
In France, going along the roads in the darkness — the men being placed for an advance on the enemy — intense nights, awaiting death. A fellow had to admit to himself that it would have made some difference to the town of Old Harbor if he had been killed in one of the battles he had been in.
Other nights, after an advance — the horrible job done at last. A lot of fools who never were in a battle were always prancing to get in. A shame they weren’t given a chance to see what it was like — the fools.
The nights after battles, intense nights, too. You lay down on the ground maybe, trying to relax, every nerve jumping. Lord, if a man only had a lot of real booze now! What about, say, two quarts of good old Kentucky Bourbon Whisky. They don’t make anything better than Bourbon, do you think? A fellow can drink a lot of it and it won’t hurt him afterwards. You ought to see some of the old fellows in our town Been drinking the stuff since they were boys and some of them live to be almost a hundred.
After a battle, and in spite of the throbbing nerves and the weariness, intense joy. I’m alive! I’m alive! Others are dead now or torn to pieces and lying back somewhere in a hospital waiting to die, but I’m alive.
Fred walking up the Old Harbor hill thinking. He walked a block or two and then stopped and stood by a tree and looked back at the town. There were a good many vacant lots still on the hillside. Once he stood for a long time by a fence built around a vacant lot. In the houses along the climbing streets nearly all the people had gone to bed.
In France, after a battle, the men used to stand looking at each other. “My buddy got his. I got to find me a new buddy now.”
“Hello, and so you’re still alive?”
One thought mostly of oneself. “My arms are still here, my hands, my eyes, my legs. My body is still whole. I’d like to be with a woman now.” Sitting on the ground was good. It was good to feel the ground, under the nether cheeks.
Fred remembered a night of stars, sitting by a roadside in France with another man he had never seen before. The man was evidently a Jew, a large man with curly hair and a big nose. How Fred knew the man was a Jew he couldn’t have said. You can almost always tell. Odd notion, eh, a Jew going to war and fighting for his country? I guess they made him go. What would have happened had he protested? “But I’m a Jew. I haven’t any country.” Doesn’t the Bible say the Jew is to be the man without a country, something of that sort? Swell chance! When Fred was a boy in Old Harbor there was but one family of Jews. The man owned a cheap little store down by the river and the sons used to go to the public school. Once Fred joined several other boys who were ragging one of the Jewish boys. They followed him along a street shouting, “Christ-killer! Christ-killer!”
Odd how a fellow felt after a battle. Fred had been seated by a roadside in France saying over and over to himself the malicious words, “Christ-killer, Christ-killer.” Not saying them aloud, because they would hurt the strange man sitting beside him. Rather fun to fancy hurting a man like that, any man, thinking thoughts that burn and sting like bullets, without saying them aloud.
The Jew, a quiet sensitive-looking man, sat beside a road in France with Fred after a battle in which a great many men had been killed. The dead men did not matter. What mattered was that you were alive. It was just such another night as the one on which he walked up the hill in Old Flarbor. The young stranger in France looked at him and smiled, a hurt smile. He put up a hand toward the blue-black sky sprinkled with stars. “I’d like to reach up and get a handful. I d like to eat ’em, they look so good,” he had said. When he said it an intense passion drifted across his face. His fingers were gripped. It was as though he wanted to tear the stars out of the sky, to eat them, or throw them away in disgust,
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
ALREADY FRED THOUGHT of himself as the father of children. He went along thinking. Since he had got out of the war he had done well. If the advertising plans did not all work out it would not break him. A fellow had to take chances. Aline was to have a child and now that she had started in that direction she might have several. You don’t want to raise one child alone. He — or she — ought to have someone to play with. Each child ought to have his own start in life. They might not all be money-makers. You can’t tell whether or not a child will be gifted.
There was the house on the hill, toward which he was going slowly up-hill. He imagined the garden about the house filled with the laughter of children, little white-clad figures running among the flower-beds — swings hung from the lower branches of the larger trees. He would build a children’s playhouse at the back of the garden.
No need now to think, as a fellow was going home, what he was to say to his wife when he got there. Since Aline had been expecting her child, how she had changed!
She had, in fact, been a changed woman ever since that afternoon in the summer when Fred marched in the parade. He had come home on that afternoon and had found her just awakened from sleep, and what a real awakening! Women are very strange. No man ever finds out much about them. A woman may be one thing in the morning and then in the afternoon she may lie down to take a nap and awaken something quit
e different, something infinitely better, finer and sweeter — or something worse. That’s what makes marriage such an uncertain, really such a risky thing.
On that evening in the summer after Fred was in the parade he and Aline did not come downstairs to dinner until nearly eight o’clock and the dinner had to be prepared a second time, but what did they care? If Aline had seen the parade and the part Fred took in it her new attitude might have been more understandable.
He had told her all about it, but that wasn’t until after he felt the change in her. How tender she was! Again she was as she had been that night in Paris when he asked her to marry him. Then, to be sure, he had just got out of the war and had been upset by hearing a woman talk, the horrors of the war had come back on him with a rush and had temporarily unmanned him, but later, on that other evening, nothing like that had happened at all. His part in the parade had been very successful. He had expected to feel a little selfconscious, out of place, marching as a private with a lot of laboring-men and clerks from stores, but everyone had treated him as though he were a general leading the parade. It was only when he came along that the cheers really broke forth. The richest man in town marching afoot, as a common private. He had sure made himself strong in the town.
And then he had come home and Aline was as he had never seen her since their marriage. Such tenderness! It was as though he had been ill or hurt or something of that sort.
Talk, a stream of talk from his lips. It was as though he, Fred Grey, had at last, after long waiting, got himself a wife. She was so tender and thoughtful, like a mother.
And then — two months later — when she told him she was to have a child.
When he and Aline were first married, that afternoon in the hotel room in Paris, when he was packing to hurry home and someone went out of the room and left them alone together. Later in Old Harbor, in the evenings when he came home from the factory. She did not want to go out to the neighbors or for a ride in the car, and what was to be done? In the evening after dinner he looked at her and she looked at him. What was to be said? There was nothing to talk about. Often the minutes passed with infinite slowness. In desperation he read a newspaper and she went out to walk about in the garden in the darkness. Almost every evening he went to sleep in his chair. How could they talk? There wasn’t anything special to be said.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 118