The show people went places. They were in Langdon, Georgia, for a week and then they disappeared. Nell and Fanny and Doris all thought the same thing that day when they first got to the fair and began to look around but they didn’t talk about it. Maybe Grace didn’t feel what the rest felt. She was gentler and more tired. She would have been a home body if some man had married her. Doris didn’t understand why some man hadn’t. It might be that the show girls, at the hoola-hoola tent, weren’t so nice, in their tights and showing their legs, but they weren’t mill hands anyway. Nell in particular was in rebellion. She almost always was. Nell could swear like a man. She didn’t give a damn. “God, I’d like to try it myself,” she was thinking that day when the four first got to the fair.
Before she had her kid, Doris and Ed, her husband, used to go to the movies a lot. It was fun, something to talk about; she liked it, particularly Charlie Chaplin and westerns. She liked movies about crooks and people getting in tight places and fighting and shooting. It made her nerves tingle. There were pictures about rich people, how they lived, etc. They wore wonderful dresses.
They went to parties and dances. There were young girls and they were ruined. You saw a scene, in the movies, in a garden. There was a high stone fence with vines on it. There was a moon.
There were nice grass and flower beds and little houses with vines and with seats inside.
A young girl came out of a house, out at a side door, with a man, older than she was, a lot. She was beautifully dressed. She had on a low-neck dress. That was what you wore at parties among swells. He talked to her. He took her into his arms and kissed her. He had a gray mustache. He led her away to a seat in a little open house in the yard.
There was a young man who wanted to marry her. He didn’t have any money. The rich man got her. He betrayed her. He ruined her. Such plays, in the movies, gave Doris a queer feeling inside She walked home with Ed to the mill house in the mill village where they lived and they didn’t talk. It would be funny if Ed wished, just for awhile, that he was rich and could live in a house like that and ruin such a young girl. if he did, he didn’t say so. Doris was wishing something. After seeing such a show sometimes, she wished some rich wicked man would come and ruin her just once, not for keeps but just once, in such a garden, back of such a house ... so quiet and the moonlight shining... you knowing you didn’t have to get up and get breakfast and hurry off to the mill at half-past five, rain or snow, winter and summer ...if you had swell underwear and were beautiful.
Westerns were nice. There were men always riding horses and they had guns and shot each other. They were always fighting about some woman. “Not my kind,” Doris thought. Even a cowboy wouldn’t be such a fool about a mill girl. Doris was curious, something in her always running out to places and people, alert. “Even if I had the money and the clothes and the underwear and the silk stockings to wear every day I guess I wouldn’t be any swell,” she thought. She was short of body and firm-breasted. Her head was big and so was her mouth. She had a big nose and strong white teeth. Most of the mill girls had bad teeth. If there was always a lurking sense of beauty, following her sturdy little figure like a shadow, going every day to the mill with her, coming home, going with her when she went somewhere with other mill girls, it wasn’t very obvious. Not many people saw it.
Things got suddenly ridiculous and funny to her. It might happen any time. She wanted to scream and dance. She had to hang onto herself. If you get too gay in a mill, out you go. Then where are you?
There was Tom Shaw, who was the president of the Langdon mill, the big gun there. He didn’t come into the mill often — he stayed in the office — but now and then he did come. He walked through, looking, or he brought some visitors through. He was such a funny self-important little man that Doris wanted to laugh at him but she didn’t. When he came past her side, or walked through, or the foreman or the superintendent came, before Grace got laid off, she was always scared. Mostly about Grace. Grace hardly ever had her side up.
If you didn’t keep your side right up, if some one came along and too many of your bobbins were stopped...
Thread was wound on bobbins in the spinning-room of a mill. A side was one side of a long narrow hallway between rows of flying bobbins. Thousands of separate threads came down from up above somewhere to be wound, each thread on its own bobbin, and if it broke the bobbin stopped. You could tell how many had stopped at one time by just looking. The bobbin stood still. It was waiting for you to come quickly and tie the broken thread in again. There might be four bobbins stopped at one end of your side, and at the same time, at the other end, a long walk, there might be three more stopped. The thread, coming to feed the bobbins, so they could go to the loom-room, kept coming and coming. “If it would only stop, just for an hour,” Doris thought sometimes, not often. If a girl only didn’t have to see it coming and coming all day long, or if she was on the night shift, all night long. It kept coming all day long, all night long. It was wound onto bobbins that were to go into the loom-room where Ed and Tom Musgrave and Ma Musgrave all worked. When the bobbins on your side were full, a man, who was called a “doffer,” came and took the full bobbins away. He took out the full bobbins and put in empty ones. He pushed a little cart along before him and it was taken away filled with the loaded bobbins.
There were millions and millions of bobbins to be filled.
They never ran out of empty bobbins. It seemed there must be hundreds of millions of them, like stars, or like drops of water in a river or grains of sand in a field. The thing about getting out now and then to a place like that fair, where there were shows and people you had never seen and talking and niggers laughing and hundreds of other mill hands, like herself and Grace and Nell and Fanny, not in the mill now but outside, was a great relief. Thread and bobbins got out of your head for awhile anyway.
They didn’t go on so much in Doris’ head when she was not in the mill at work. They did in Grace’s head. Doris didn’t know so well how it was with Fanny and Nell.
At the fair there was a man performed free on the trapeze. He was funny. Even Grace laughed at him. Nell and Fanny laughed hard and so did Doris. Nell, since Grace had been laid off, had taken Grace’s place in the mill next to Doris. She hadn’t taken Grace’s place purposely. She couldn’t help it. She was a tall girl with yellow hair and long legs. Men fell for her. She could put the bee on men. She was on the square just the same.
Men liked her. The foreman in the spinning-room, a young man but with a bald head and married, would have liked to get Nell. He wasn’t the only one. Even at the fair the show men and others, who didn’t know the four girls, looked at her most. They made cracks at her. They got too smart. Nell could swear like a man. She went to church, but she swore. She didn’t care what she said. When Grace got laid off, when the tight times came, Nell, who was put on her side with Doris, said:
“The dirty skunks, they laid Grace off.” She came in there where Doris was, at work, with her head up. She always carried it up.... “It’s damn lucky she’s got Tom and her mother working,” she said to Doris. “Maybe she can make it go with Tom and her mother working, if they don’t get laid off,” she said.
“She oughtn’t to be at work in here nohow. Don’t you think so?” Doris did think so. She liked and admired Nell but not as she did Grace. She liked the to-hell-with-everything about Nell. “I wish I had it,” she thought sometimes. Nell would goddam the foreman and the super when they weren’t around but when they came around... of course she wasn’t a fool. She gave them the eye. They liked it. Her eyes seemed to be saying to men, “Ain’t you splendid?” She didn’t mean it. Her eyes always seemed to be saying something to men. “All right. Get me if you can,” they said. “I’m getable,” they said. “If you’re man enough.”
Nell wasn’t married but there were a dozen men in the mill, married and unmarried, who had tried to make her. The young unmarried ones meant marriage. Nell said, “You got to work ’em. You got to keep them guessing, but don
’t give in to ’em unless they make you. Make ’em think you think they’re swell,” she said.
“God damn their souls,” she said sometimes.
The young man, unmarried, who was doffer on their side, the side Grace and Doris had been on and then Nell and Doris, after Grace got laid off, used not to say much when he came around when Grace was there. He was sorry for Grace. Grace never could quite keep up her side. Doris was always having to leave her side and work Grace’s side so Grace wouldn’t be shown up. He knew it. He used to whisper sometimes to Doris, “The poor kid,” he said. “If Jim Lewis gets onto her she’ll get laid off.” Jim Lewis was the room foreman. He was the one who was hot on Nell. He was a bald man, about thirty, with a wife and two kids. When Nell took Grace’s side the young fellow who was doffer there changed.
He was always kidding with Nell, trying to date her up. He called her “legs.”
“Hello, legs,” he said. “What about it? What about a date? What about the movies to-night?” The nerve of him.
“Come on,” he said, “I’ll take you.”
“Not to-night,” she said. “We’ll think it over,” she said.
She kept giving him the eye, keeping him on it.
“Not to-night. I’m busy to-night.” You’d have thought she had a man dated up for almost every night in the week. She didn’t. She never went out alone with men, didn’t walk with them or talk with them outside the mill. She stuck to the other girls. “I like ’em better,” she told Doris. “Some of ’em, a lot of ’em, are cats but they got more spunk in ’em than the men.” She talked rough enough about the young doffer when he had to leave their side and go to the next side. “The damn little skate,” she said. “He thinks he can date me up.” She laughed, but it wasn’t a very pleasant laugh.
At the fair there was an open space, right in the center of the field, where all the ten-cent side shows were and there was a free show. There was a man and woman who danced on roller skates and did tricks and a little girl in tights who danced and two men who tumbled over each other and over chairs and tables and everything. There was a man kept; coming out on the platform. He had a megaphone. “Professor Mathews. Where’s Professor Mathews?” he kept calling through the megaphone.
“Professor Mathews. Professor Mathews.”
Professor Mathews was to be the trapeze performer. He was to be the best thing in the free show. The hand-bills they had put out said so.
There was a long wait. It was Saturday and there weren’t many town people from Langdon at the fair, hardly any, maybe none... Doris didn’t think she saw any that looked like that. If they had been there, they had come earlier in the week. It was niggers’ day. It was a day for mill hands and for a lot of poor farmers with mules and their families.
The niggers kept pretty much off to themselves. They generally did. There were separate stands for them to eat at. You could hear them laughing and talking everywhere. There were fat old Negro women with their Negro men and young Negro girls in bright-colored dresses and the young bucks after them.
It was a hot day in the fall. There was a jam of people. The four girls kept off by themselves. It was a hot day.
The field had been all overgrown with weeds and with tall grass, but now it was all trampled down. There was hardly any. There was mostly dust and bare places coming and it was all red. Doris had got into one of her moods. She was in a “don’t-touch-me” mood. She had got silent.
Grace clung to her. She stayed right close. She didn’t much like Nell and Fanny being there. Fanny was short and fat and had little short fat fingers.
Nell said of her — not at the fair but before that, in the mill — she said, “Fanny’s lucky. She’s got a man and no kids.” Doris didn’t know exactly how she did feel about her own kid. It was at home with her mother-in-law, Ed’s mother.
Ed was lying up. He would lie up the whole afternoon. “You go on,” he had said to Doris, when the girls came for her. He would get a newspaper or a book and lie up all afternoon on the bed. He would take his shirt and shoes off. The Hoffmans didn’t have any books except a Bible and some children’s books Ed had left over from his boyhood, but he could get books from the library. There was a branch of the Langdon town library in the mill village.
There was a man called, “a welfare worker,” employed by the Langdon mills. He had a house on the best street of houses in the village, the street in which the day superintendent and some of the other higher-ups lived. Some of the foremen lived over there. The foreman of the spinning-room did.
The night superintendent was a young man from the North and unmarried. He lived in a hotel up in Langdon. Doris had never seen him.
The welfare worker’s name was Mr. Smith. The front room of his house had been made into a branch library. His wife kept it. Ed would put on his good clothes, after Doris left, and go get a book. He would take back the book he got the week before and get another. The welfare worker’s wife would be nice to him. She’d think, “He’s nice. He cares for higher things.” He liked stories about men, men who had actually lived and had been big men. He had read about big men like Napoleon Bonaparte and General Lee and Lord Wellington and Disraeli. He read in the books in the afternoon all week, after he woke up. He had told Doris about them.
After Doris got in the don’t-touch-me mood that day at the fair and was that way a little while, the others noticed how she was. Grace noticed first but didn’t say anything. “What the hell’s the matter?” Nell said. “I got the woozies,” Doris said. She didn’t have any woozies at all. She didn’t have the blues. It wasn’t that.
Sometimes with a person it’s this way: the place you are in is there, but it isn’t there. If you are at a fair it’s that way. If you are at work in the mill it’s that way.
You hear things. You touch things. You don’t.
You do and you don’t. You can’t explain. Doris might even be in bed with Ed. They liked to lie awake a long time on Saturday night. It was the only night they had. They could sleep in the morning. You were there and you weren’t there. Doris wasn’t the only one who was that way sometimes. Ed was sometimes. You spoke to him and he answered but he was away off somewhere. It might have been the books with Ed. He might be somewhere with Napoleon Bonaparte or with Lord Wellington or some one like that. He might be a big-bug himself instead of just a mill hand. You couldn’t tell what he was being.
You could smell it; you could taste it; you could see it. It didn’t touch you.
There was a ferris wheel at the fair... ten cents. There was a merry-go-round... ten cents. Stands were selling hot dogs and Coca Cola and lemonade and “Milky Ways” at the fair.
There were little wheels you could gamble on. A mill hand from the Langdon mill, that day Doris went with Grace and Nell and Fanny, lost twenty-seven dollars. He had saved it up. The girls didn’t hear about it until Monday at the mill. “The damn fool,” Nell said to Doris, “don’t the damn fool know you can’t beat them at their own game? If they weren’t out to get you what would they be there for?” she asked. There was a little bright shining wheel with an arrow that went around. It stopped on numbers. The mill hand lost a dollar and then another. He got excited. He plunked down ten dollars. He thought, “I’ll keep up till I get even.”
“The damn fool,” Nell said to Doris.
Nell felt about a game like that, she felt: “You can’t beat it.” She felt about men: “You can’t beat it.” Doris liked Nell. She thought about her. “If she ever gives up she’ll give up hard,” she thought. It wouldn’t be exactly like herself and her husband Ed, she thought. Ed asking her. Her thinking, “I might as well, I guess. A woman might as well have herself a man.” If Nell ever gave in to a man it would be a cave-in.
*
“PROFESSOR MATHEWS. Professor Mathews. Professor Mathews.”
He wasn’t there. They couldn’t find him. It was Saturday. Perhaps he had got drunk. “I’ll bet he’s off somewhere drunk,” Fanny said to Nell. Fanny was standing beside Nell. Grac
e stayed right close to Doris all that day. Not saying a word hardly. She was little and pale. As Nell and Fanny walked toward the place where the free show was to be, a man laughed at them. He laughed at Nell and Fanny walking together. He was a showman. “Hello,” he said to another man, “there’s the long and short of it.” The other man laughed. “Go to hell,” Nell said. The four girls stood close together to watch the trapeze performance. “They advertise a trapeze performance free and then they don’t have it,” Nell said. “He’s off drunk,” Fanny said. There was a man who was tanked up. He came forward out of the crowd. He was a man who looked like a farmer. He had red hair and no hat. He came forward out of the crowd. He reeled. He could hardly stand up. He had on blue overalls. He had a big Adam’s apple. “Ain’t your Professor Mathews here?” he managed to ask the man on the platform, the one who had the megaphone. “I’m a trapeze performer,” he said. The man who was on the platform laughed. He put the megaphone under his arm.
The sky above the fair grounds at Langdon, Georgia, that day was blue. It was a clear light blue. It was hot. All the girls in Doris’ gang had on thin dresses. The sky that day was the bluest she had ever seen, Doris thought.
The drunken man said, “If you can’t find your Professor Mathews, I can do it.”
“You can?” The eyes of the man on the platform registered surprise, amusement, doubt.
“You’re damn right I can. I’m a Yank, I am.”
The man had to hold onto the edge of the platform. He almost fell. He fell back and fell forward. He could just stand.
“You can?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Where’d you learn?”
“I learned up North. I’m a Yank. I learned on an apple tree limb up North.”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 149