Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  But now!

  Now Fred could go home and tell Aline everything. He told her about his plans for advertising, took advertisements home to show her, told her of little things that happened during the day. “We got three big orders from Detroit. We have got a new press down in the shop. It’s half as big as a house. Let me tell you about how it works. Have you a pencil? I’ll make a drawing for you.” Often when Fred went up the hill now he thought of nothing but things to tell her. He even told her stories picked up from salesmen — if they weren’t too raw. When they were too raw he changed them. It was fun being alive and having such a woman for a wife.

  She listened, smiled, seemed never to weary of his talk. There was something in the very air of the house nowadays. Well, it was tenderness. Often she came and put her arms about him.

  Fred walked up the hill thinking. Flashes of happiness came, followed by occasional little flashes of anger. It was queer about the feeling of anger. It always concerned the man who had been first an employee in his factory and then the Greys’ gardener, and who had suddenly disappeared. Why did the fellow keep coming back into his mind? He had disappeared at just the time when the change had come to Aline, had walked off without giving notice, without even waiting to get his wages. Such fellows were like that, fly-bynights, unreliable, no good. A negro, an old man, worked in the garden now. That was better. Everything was better now at the Grey house.

  It was walking up the hill that had made Fred think of that fellow. He could not help remembering another evening when he had walked up the hill with Bruce at his heels. Naturally a man who works out of doors, does common labor, has better wind than a man who works indoors.

  I’d like to know though, what would happen if there weren’t other kinds of men too? Fred remembered, with satisfaction, what the Chicago advertising man had said. The men who wrote advertisements, who wrote for newspapers, all that sort of fellows were really working-men, of a sort, and when it came right down to the scratch, could they be depended on? They could not. They hadn’t judgment, that was the reason. No ship would ever get anywhere without a pilot. It would just flounder and drift around and after a while sink. Society was made like that. Certain men had always to keep their hands on the wheel, and Fred was one of that sort. From the beginning he had been intended to be that sort.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  FRED DID NOT want to think of Bruce. To do so always made him a little uncomfortable. Why? There are people like that, who get into the mind and won’t get out. They work their way in where they aren’t wanted. You are going along, attending to your own affairs, and there they are. Sometimes you meet a man who crosses you in some way and then disappears. You have made up your mind to forget him, but you don’t.

  Fred was in his office down at the factory, dictating letters perhaps, or he was taking a turn through the shop. Suddenly everything stopped. You know how it is. On certain days everything is like that. Everything in nature seems to stop and stand still. On such days men speak with subdued voices, go more quietly about their affairs. All reality seems to drop away, and there is something, a kind of mystic connection with a world outside the real world in which you move. On such days the figures of half-forgotten people troop back. There are men you want more than anything else in the world to forget and you can’t forget.

  Fred was in his office down at the factory, and someone came to the door. There was a knock on the door. He jumped. Why was he always thinking, when something of that sort happened, that it was Bruce come back? What had he to do with the man or the man with him? Had there been a challenge issued and as yet unmet? The devil! When you begin thinking such thoughts there is no telling where you will end. Better let all such thoughts alone.

  Bruce went away, disappeared, on the very day when the change came in Aline. That was the day when Fred was in the parade and when the two servants went down to see the parade. All afternoon Aline and Bruce had been alone together on the hill. Later when Fred got home the man was gone and after that Fred never saw him again. He had asked Aline about it several times but she had seemed annoyed, hadn’t wanted to talk of the matter. “I don’t know where he is,” she had said. That was all. If a man were to let himself go he might think. After all, Aline had met Fred through the fact of his having been a soldier. It was odd she hadn’t wanted to see the parade. If a man let his fancy go he might think.

  Fred had begun to get angry, walking up the hill in the darkness. Down at the shop, he was always, nowdays, seeing the old workman, Sponge Martin, and whenever he saw him he thought of Bruce. “I’d like to fire the old scoundrel,” he thought. Once the man had been downright impudent to Fred’s father. Why did Fred keep him around? Well, he’s a good workman. For a man to think that, just because he owns a factory, he is master, is foolishness. Fred tried to say over to himself certain things, certain little pat phrases he was always repeating aloud in the presence of other men, phrases about the obligations of wealth. Suppose he faced the real truth, that he did not dare dismiss the old workman, Sponge Martin, that he had not dared dismiss Bruce when he worked on the hill in the garden, that he did not dare inquire too closely into the fact of Bruce’s sudden disappearance.

  What Fred did was to fight down within himself all doubts, all questions. If a man started on that road where would he end? He might end by beginning to doubt the parentage of his own unborn child.

  The thought was maddening. “What’s the matter with me?” Fred asked himself sharply. He had got almost to the top of the hill. Aline was there, asleep now, no doubt. He tried to think of the plans for advertising Grey wheels in the magazines. Everything was coming Fred’s way. His wife loved him, the factory was successful, he was a big man in his town. Now there was something to work for. Aline would have a son and another and another. He threw back his shoulders, and, as he walked slowly and had not got out of breath, he walked for some distance with head erect and shoulders thrown back, as a soldier walks.

  Fred had got almost to the top of the hill when he stopped again. A large tree grew near the hilltop and he stood leaning against it. What a night!

  Joy, gladness in life, in the possibilities of life, all mixed up in the mind with strange fears. It was like being in the war again, something like the nights before a battle. Hopes and fears fighting within. I don’t believe it’s going to happen. I won’t believe it’s going to happen.

  If Fred ever got the chance to wipe things out for good. The war to end war, to get peace at last.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  FRED WENT ACROSS a little stretch of dirt road at the top of the hill and reached his own gate. His footsteps made no sound in the dust of the road. Inside the Grey garden Bruce Dudley and Aline sat talking. Bruce Dudley had come back to the Greys’ house at eight that evening, expecting that Fred would be there. He had become somewhat desperate. Was Aline his woman or did she belong to Fred? He would see Aline, find out if he could. He would go boldly back to the house, march up to the door — himself not a servant now. In any event, he would see Aline again. There would be a moment of looking into each other’s eyes. If it had been with her as with him, during the weeks since he had seen her, then the fat would be in the fire, something would be decided. After all, men are men and women are women — a life is a life. Is a whole life to be spent hungering because someone will be hurt? And there was Aline. Perhaps she had only wanted Bruce for the moment, a matter of the flesh only, a woman bored with life reaching out for a little momentary excitement, and then, perhaps, it might be that she felt as he did. Flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. Our thoughts running together in the silence of nights. Something like that. Bruce had wandered for weeks, having thoughts — taking a job now and then, thinking, thinking, thinking — of Aline. Disturbing thoughts came. “I have no money. She would have to live with me as Sponge’s old woman lives with Sponge.” He remembered something that had existed between Sponge and his old woman, an old salty knowledge of each other. A man and woman on a sawdust pile under a s
ummer moon. Fish-lines out. The soft night, the river flowing silently in the darkness, youth past, old age coming, two unmoral, unchristian people, lying on a sawdust pile and enjoying the moment, enjoying each other, being part of the night, of the sky sprinkled with stars, of the earth. Many men and women lie together all their lives, each hungering away from the other. Bruce had done just that with Bernice, and then he had cut out. To stay would have been to betray, day after day, both himself and Bernice. Was Aline doing just that with her husband and did she know? Would she be glad, as he had been glad, for the opportunity to bring it to an end? Would her heart jump with gladness when she saw him again? He had thought he would know when he had come again to the door of her house.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  AND SO BRUCE had come that evening and had found Aline shocked, frightened and infinitely glad. She took him into the house, touched his coat-sleeve with her fingers, laughed, cried a little, told him of the child, his child that would be born after a few months. In the kitchen of the house the two negro women looked at each other and laughed. When a negro woman wants to go live with another man she does. Negro men and women “takes up” with each other. Often they stay “took up” all the rest of their lives. White women furnish negro women with endless hours of amusement.

  Aline and Bruce went out into the garden. As they stood there in the darkness, saying nothing, the two negro women — it was their evening off — went down the path laughing. What were they laughing about? Aline and Bruce went back into the house. A feverish excitement had hold of them. Aline laughed and cried, “I thought it did not matter enough to you. I thought it was only a momentary thing with you.” They talked little. That Aline would go with Bruce was, in some queer silent way, taken for granted. Bruce took a deep breath and then accepted the fact. “Oh, Lord, I’ll have to work now. I’ll have to be definite.” Every thought Bruce had been having had also gone through Aline’s head. After Bruce had been with her for a half-hour, Aline went into the house and hurriedly packed two bags, which she brought out of the house and left in the garden. In her mind, in Bruce’s mind, there was, all evening, the one figure — Fred. They were but waiting for him — for his coming. What would happen then? They did not discuss the matter. What would happen would happen. They tried to make tentative plans — a life of some kind together. “I would be a fool if I said I did not need money. I need it terribly, but what is to be done? I need you more,” Aline said. To her it seemed that at last she also was to become something definite. “I have really just been another Esther, living here with Fred. The test came once for Esther and she did not dare take it. She became what she is,” Aline thought. She did not dare think of Fred, of what she had done to him, what she was about to do. She would wait until he came up the hill to the house.

  Fred had reached the gate leading into the garden before he heard the voices, a woman’s voice, Aline’s voice, and then the voice of a man. He had been having such unquiet thoughts as he came up the hill, that already he was a little distraught. All evening, and in spite of the sense of triumph and well-being he had got from his talk with the Chicago advertising men, there had been something threatening him. For him then the night was to be a beginning and an end. A man gets himself placed in life, all is settled, everything is going well, unpleasant things of the past are forgotten, the future is rosy — and then — What a man wants is to be let alone. If life would only flow straight on, like a river.

  I am building me a house, slowly, A house in which I may live.

  It is evening and my house is in ruins, Weeds and vines have grown in the broken walls.

  Fred stepped silently inside his own garden and stopped by the tree where, on another evening, Aline had stood silently looking at Bruce. That was the first time Bruce had come up the hill.

  Had Bruce come again? He had. Without being able, as yet, to see anything in the darkness, Fred knew. He knew all, everything. Deep down within himself he had known from the very beginning. An appalling thought came. Since that day in France when he had married Aline, he had been waiting for something terrible to happen to him, and now it was about to happen. When he had asked Aline to marry him, that night in Paris, he sat with her behind the cathedral of Notre Dame. Angels, white, pure women, walking off the cathedral roof into the sky. They had just come from that other woman, the hysterical one, the woman who had cursed herself for her pretense, for her own cheating in life. And all the time Fred had wanted women to cheat, had wanted his wife Aline to cheat, if that were necessary. It isn’t what you do that counts. You do what you can. What counts is what you seem to do, what others think you do — come right down to it. “I am trying to be a civilized man.

  Help me, woman! We men are what we are, what we must be. White, pure women, walking off a cathedral roof into the sky. Help us to believe in that. We later-day men are not the men of antiquity. We cannot accept Venus. Leave us the Virgin. We must have something or perish.”

  Since he had married Aline, Fred had been waiting for a certain hour to come, dreading its coming, putting the thoughts of its coming away from him. Now it had come. Suppose at any time during the last year — Aline had asked him a question— “Do you love me?” Suppose he had been compelled to ask Aline that question. What a fearful question! What does it mean? What is love? At bottom Fred was modest. His belief in himself, in his own power to awaken love, was weak and wavering. He was an American man. For him woman meant at once too much and too little. Now he shook with fear. Now all of the vague fears he had kept concealed within himself since that day in Paris, when he had managed to fly away from Paris leaving Aline behind, were to become realities. There was no doubt in his mind as to who was with Aline. The man and the woman were sitting on a bench somewhere near him. He could hear their voices very distinctly. They were waiting for his coming to tell him something, something terrible.

  On that other day, when he went down the hill to the parade, and the servants also went.... A change had come over Aline after that day and he had been fool enough to think it was because she had begun to love and admire him — her husband. “I have been a fool, a fool.” Fred’s thoughts were making him ill. On the day when he had gone down to the parade, when the whole town had proclaimed him the chief man of the town, Aline had stayed at home. On that day she had been busy getting what she wanted, what she had always wanted — a lover. For a moment Fred faced everything, the possibility of losing Aline, what it would mean to him. What a disgrace, a Grey of Old Harbor — his wife, running away with a common laborer — men turning to look at him on the street, down at the office — Harcourt — afraid to speak of the matter, afraid not to speak of it.

  Women looking at him, too. Women being more bold, expressing sympathy.

  Fred stood leaning against a tree. In a moment now something would take control of his body. Would it be anger or fear? How did he know that the horrible things he was now engaged in telling himself were true? Well, he did know. He knew everything. Aline had never loved him, he had been unable to awaken love in her. Why? Hadn’t he been bold enough? He would be bold. Perhaps it was not yet too late.

  He became furiously angry. What trickery! No doubt the man Bruce he had thought well gone out of his life, had never left Old Harbor at all. On the very day when he was down in the town at the parade, when he was doing his duty as a citizen and a soldier, while they were becoming lovers, a scheme had been concocted. The man would get out of sight, stay out of sight, and then, when Fred was busy with his affairs, when he was down at the factory making money for her, the fellow would come creeping around. All during the weeks when he had been so happy and proud, thinking he had won Aline for himself, she had only changed her demeanor towards him because, in secret, she was meeting this other man, her lover. The very child whose promised coming had so filled him with pride was then not his child. All of the servants in his house were negroes. Such people! A negro had no sense of pride, no morality. “You can’t trust a nigger.” It might well be that Aline was keepin
g the man Bruce. Women in Europe did that sort of thing. They married some man, a hard-working, respectable citizen like himself, who wore himself out, became old before his time, making money for his woman, buying her fine clothes, a fine house in which to live, and then? What did she do? She kept another man hidden away, a younger, stronger, handsomer man — a lover.

  Had not Fred found Aline in France? Well, she was an American girl. He had found her in France, at a place, in the presence of such people.... He remembered vividly the evening in Rose Frank’s apartment in Paris, the woman talking — such talk — the tension in the air of the room — the men and women sitting about — the women smoking cigarettes — words from a woman’s lips — such words. That other woman — an American also — had been at a place, at a performance of some sort called the “Quat’z Arts Ball.” What was that? A place evidently where ugly sensuality had cut loose.

  And bred had thought — Aline —

  In one moment Fred felt coldly, furiously angry, and in the next moment he felt so weak that he thought he could not continue to stand upright on his legs.

  A sharp hurtful memory came. On another evening, but a few weeks earlier, Fred and Aline had been seated in the garden. The night was very dark and he was happy. He had been talking to Aline of something — telling her, no doubt, of his plans for the factory — and for a long time she sat as though not hearing.