His wife took it out on him about his age. That was her way. “You have to remember you are getting old,” she said sharply. She said it sometimes with an air of kindliness but he knew and she knew that she was not being kindly. “I am wanting something I guess you are too old to give me,” she was thinking.
“I want to bloom. Here I am a pale woman, not very well. I want to be spread out, thickened and broadened, if you please, made into a real woman. I guess you can’t do it to me, damn you. You aren’t man enough.”
She didn’t say that. The man also wanted something. By his first wife, dead now, he had been made the father of four children, two of whom were sons but both of the sons were now dead. He wanted another son.
He had felt a little frightened when he had brought his new wife home to his house and to his daughter, Ethel’s sister, who was not married then. He had told the daughter at home nothing of his plans and she herself was married during the same year. He and the new woman had driven off together one evening, going to another Georgia town, saying nothing to any one of their plans, and, when they were married, he had brought her home. His house, like the Oliver house, was out at the edge of town at the end of a street. There was a large old Southern frame house and there was a sloping meadow beyond the house that belonged to him. He kept a cow in the meadow.
Ethel had been away from home at school when all of this had happened. Then she came home for the summer vacation. A queer drama had begun to play itself out in the house.
Ethel and her father’s new wife, the blonde young woman with a sharp voice, so few years older than herself, seemed to have become friends.
The friendship was a sham. It was a game they played. Ethel knew and the new wife knew. The four people went about together. The younger sister, the one who was married soon after it began — thus, Ethel thought, getting out of it — didn’t understand. It was as though two factions had been formed in the house: Ethel, the tall sleek-looking, somewhat sophisticated one, and the new pale blonde wife of her father in the one faction and the father and husband, with the younger daughter, in the other.
O love,
Little naked child with the bow and the quiver of rrows.
More than one wise man had laughed at love. “There isn’t any such thing. That is all nonsense.” Wise men had said it, conquerors, emperors, kings, artists.
Sometimes the four walked out together. On Sundays sometimes they all went together to the Presbyterian church, walking there together through the hot Sunday morning streets. The Presbyterian preacher at Langdon was a man with stooped shoulders and big hands. His mind was infinitely dull. When, on week days, he walked through the town streets he thrust his head forward and held his hands clasped behind his back. He seemed like a man pushing forward against a heavy wind. There was no wind. He seemed about to fall forward, to be lost in deep thought. His sermons were long and very dull. Later, when there was labor trouble in Langdon and two of the workers in the mill village at the edge of town were killed by deputy sheriffs, he said, “No Christian minister should perform the burial ceremony for them. They should be buried like dead mules.” When the Long family went to church, Ethel walked with the new step-mother and the younger sister walked with the father. The two women went ahead of the others, talking busily. “You do so love to go. It pleases your father to have you go,” the blonde woman said.
“After your life in school, in the city, in Chicago... to come home here... to be so sweet to all of us.”
Ethel smiled. She half liked the pale thin woman, her father’s new wife. “I wonder why father wanted her?” Her father was still a strong man. He was a big, a tall man.
The new wife was malicious. “What a good little hater she is,” Ethel thought. At any rate, it wasn’t dull for Ethel, being with her. She liked it.
All of this had happened before Red Oliver went off to school, when he was still a high school boy.
There had been three summers after that, after her father’s marriage, followed by the marriage of her younger sister, when Ethel did not come home. During two of the summers she worked, and during the third summer she attended summer school. She had been educated at the University of Chicago.
She had got her A.B. from the university and had then taken a course in library work. A new Carnegie library had been secured for the town of Langdon. There had been an old one but every one said it was too small and unworthy the town.
The blonde wife, named Blanche, had egged her husband on about the library.
She kept at her husband, making him go to speak before meetings of the town’s civic clubs. Although he no longer read books he had still the reputation of being an intellectual. There was a Kiwanis Club and a Rotary Club. She herself went to see the editor of the town’s weekly newspaper and wrote articles for the paper. Her husband was puzzled. “Why is she so set on it?” he asked himself. He didn’t understand and was even ashamed. He knew what she was up to, getting the job as librarian of the new library for his daughter Ethel and her interest in his daughter, almost of her own age, puzzled him. It seemed to him a little strange, even unnatural. Had he dreamed of some sort of quiet home life with his new woman, his old age comforted by her? He had been under the illusion that they would be intellectual companions, that she would understand all of his thoughts, all of his impulses. “We can’t do it,” he said to her, with a note almost of desperation in his voice.
“We can’t do what?” The pale eyes of Blanche could be absolutely impersonal. She spoke to him as to a stranger, or as to a servant.
He had always a way of saying things with an air of finality that wasn’t final. It was a bluff at finality, a hope for finality, never achieved with her. “We can’t work like this, so openly, so obviously, to get this library put in, asking the town to do its share, asking the tax-payers to pay money to have this larger library and all the time — you understand... you yourself have suggested the idea of turning the job of running it over to Ethel.
“It will look too much like a fixed-up thing.”
He wished he had never got into the fight for the new library. “What does it matter to me?” he asked himself. He had been led, pushed into it, by his new wife. It was the first time, since he had married her, that she had shown any interest in the cultural life of the town.
“We can’t do it. It will look like a fixed-up thing.”
“Why, my dear, it is fixed up.” Blanche was laughing at her husband. Her voice had grown sharper after her marriage. She had always been a woman without much color in her face, but before her marriage she used rouge.
After marriage she didn’t bother. “What’s the use?” she seemed to be saying. She had had a rather sweet mouth, like the mouth of a child, but, after marriage, her lips seemed to go dry. There was something, after her marriage, about her whole being that suggested... it was as though she belonged not to the animal but to the vegetable kingdom. She had been plucked. She had been laid carelessly aside, in the sun and wind. She was drying up. You felt it.
She also felt it. She did not want to be what she was, what she was becoming. She did not want to be disagreeable to her husband. “Do I hate him?” she asked herself. Her husband was a good man with an honorable position in the town and county. He was scrupulously honest, went regularly to church, was a devout believer in God. She had watched other women who had married. She had been a school teacher in Langdon, had come there from another Georgia town to be a teacher. Some of the other school teachers had got husbands. She had gone to visit some of them in their houses after marriage, and had kept in touch with them. They had children and then, after that, their husbands called them “mother.” It was a kind of relationship, mother and child, a grown child who slept with you. The man went out and hustled. He made money.
She couldn’t do it, couldn’t take that attitude toward her husband. He was so much older than herself. She kept declaring her devotion to her husband’s daughter, Ethel. She was becoming all the time more and more determined, cold and
determined. “What do you think I have been up to about this library, getting this library?” she asked her husband. Her tone frightened and disconcerted him. When she took on that tone, his world always seemed tumbling about his ears. “Oh, I know of what you are thinking,” she said. “You are thinking of your honor, of your standing in the eyes of the respectable people of this town. It is because you are Judge Long.” He had been thinking of just that.
She grew bitter. “To hell with the town.” Before he married her, she would never have used such a word in his presence. Before marriage she had always been very respectful toward him. He had thought her demure, a quiet gentle little thing. Before marriage he had worried a good deal although he had said nothing to her of what was in his mind. He had been anxious about his own dignity. He had felt that his marriage to a woman so much younger than himself would cause talk. Often he had shivered thinking of it. Men standing before the drug store in Langdon and talking. He thought of men of the town, of Ed Graves, Tom McKnight, Will Fellowcraft. Some one of them might break loose at a meeting of the Rotary Club, say something publicly. They were always trying to be jolly, hail-fellows at the club. For weeks before his marriage he had not dared to go to a meeting of the club.
He wanted a son. There had been two sons and they were both dead. It might have been the death of his younger son and the long illness of the older one, an illness that had begun in childhood that had led to his own deep interest in children. He had developed a passion for children, particularly for young boys. That had led to his accepting a place on the county school board. The children of the town, that is to say, the children of the more respectable whites, and in particular the sons of such families, all knew and admired him. He knew dozens of young boys by their first names. More than one older man, who had been a schoolboy in Langdon, who had grown up and had gone somewhere else to live, came back to Langdon. Such a man almost always came to see the judge. They called him “Judge.”
“Why, hello, Judge.” There was such heartiness, such good will in the voices. Such a one said to him, “Look here,” he said, “I want to tell you something.”
He spoke perhaps of what the judge had done for him. “After all, a man wants to be an honorable man.”
The man spoke of something that had happened, when he was a schoolboy. “You said so and so to me. I tell you it stuck in my mind.”
The judge had perhaps taken an interest in the boy, had, in a time of boyish trouble, sought him out, trying to help. It had been the judge’s best side.
“You wouldn’t let me be a fool. Do you remember? I was angry with my father and had decided to run away from home. You got it out of me. Do you remember how you talked?” —
The judge didn’t remember. He had always been interested in boys, had made boys his hobby. The fathers of the town knew it. He had that reputation. When he was a young lawyer, before he became a judge, he had organized a troop of boy scouts. He had been the scout master. He had always been more patient and kind with other men’s sons than with his own, had been rather severe with his own sons. He had thought it best.
“Do you remember when George Grey, Tom Eckles and I got drunk? It was night and I stole my father’s horse and buggy and we went to Taylorville.
“We had got into a mess. It makes me ashamed yet, thinking of it. We came near getting arrested. We were going to get us some nigger girls. We had got arrested, being drunk and noisy. What young beasts we were!
“Knowing about it all, you didn’t go talk to our fathers, as most men would have done. You talked to us. You had us into your office, one by one, and talked to us. For one, I will never forget what you said.”
So, he had got them out of it, had hushed it up.
“You made me feel the seriousness of life. I can almost say you were more to me than my father.”
*
THE judge had been profoundly bothered and annoyed about the matter of the new library. “What will the town think?”
The question was never off his mind. It had been a point of honor with him never to push himself or his own family. “After all,” he had thought, “I’m a Southern gentleman and a Southern gentleman doesn’t do such things. These women!” He thought of his younger daughter, married now, and of his dead wife. The younger daughter had been a quiet serious-seeming woman, like his first wife. She was pretty. After the first wife’s death and until he re-married she had been her father’s housekeeper. She had married a man of the town who had known her in high school and who had now gone to Atlanta where he had a job in a mercantile house.
For some reason and although he often looked regretfully back to the days with her in his house, the second daughter had never made much impression on her father. She was pretty. She was nice. She never got into trouble. When the judge thought of women he thought of his older daughter Ethel and of his wife Blanche. Were most women like that? Were all women at bottom alike? “Here I have worked and worked, trying to get a library for this town and now the whole thing has taken this turn.” He hadn’t thought of Ethel in connection with the library. That had been his wife’s notion. The whole impulse in himself... he had been thinking about it for years....
There wasn’t enough reading done in the South. He had known that since he was a young man. He had said so. There was little intellectual curiosity among most of the young men and women. In intellectual development the North seemed far ahead of the South. The judge, although he no longer read, had faith in books and in reading. “Reading broadens a man’s culture,” he kept saying. When the drive for the new library became more definite he went about talking to merchants and to the professional men of the town. He spoke at the Rotary Club and got an invitation to speak also at the Kiwanis Club. The president of the Langdon Mills, Tom Shaw, helped a lot. There was to be a branch at the mill village.
The whole matter was arranged and the building, a fine old Southern residence, was bought and remodeled. There was Mr. Andrew Carnegie’s name over the door.
And there was his own daughter Ethel appointed to be the town librarian. The committee had voted for her. It had been Blanche’s idea. Blanche had been the one who had kept at Ethel to prepare herself.
There had, to be sure, been certain whispers about town. “No wonder he was so hot on having a library. It broadens a man’s culture, eh? It broadens his pocketbook. Pretty soft, eh? A foxy scheme.”
But Judge Willard Long was not foxy. He hated it all and had even begun to hate the library. “I wish I had let the whole matter alone.” When his daughter was appointed he wanted to protest. He spoke to Blanche. “I think she had better withdraw her name.” Blanche laughed. “You can’t be such a fool.”
“I won’t let her name be put up.”
“Yes, you will. If necessary I will go down there and put it up myself.”
The queer thing about the whole affair was that he could not think that his daughter Ethel and his new wife Blanche were really fond of each other. Had they simply entered into a conspiracy against himself, to hurt his standing in the town, make him seem to the town something he wasn’t, did not want to be?
He grew petulant.
You bring what you hope and think is going to be love into your house and it turns out to be some new queer kind of hate you can’t understand. There is something brought into the house that poisons the air. He wanted to speak of the whole matter to his daughter Ethel when she came home to take the new position but she also seemed to have drawn herself away. He wanted to take her aside and plead with her. He couldn’t. Nothing was very clear in his head. He could not say to her, “Look here, Ethel, I don’t want you here.” There was a queer notion in his head. It frightened and alarmed him. While in one moment it seemed the two had conspired against himself, in the next moment they seemed preparing for a kind of battle with each other. Perhaps they sought it. Ethel, although she had never had much money to go on, was a dresser. In spite of Mrs. Tom Shaw, wife of the town’s rich mill owner, with all her money... she had grown fat... Ethe
l was obviously the best-dressed, the most up-to-date and stylish-looking woman in town.
She was twenty-nine, and her father’s new wife, Blanche, was thirty-two. Blanche had let herself become a good deal of a frump. She didn’t seem to care, wanted perhaps to be a frump. She wasn’t even very particular about bathing and when she came to table, sometimes, even her nails were not clean. There were little black streaks under her untrimmed nails.
*
THE father asked the daughter to go with him on a trip into the country. He had long been on the county school board and had to go visit a Negro school, had said he would go.
There was trouble about a Negro woman school teacher. Some one had reported that the woman, who was unmarried, was pregnant. He had to go and find out. It was a good chance for a real talk with his daughter. He might find out something about her and about his wife.
“What has gone wrong? You weren’t, formerly, as you are now... so tight... so strange.” Perhaps she hadn’t i changed. He hadn’t thought much about Ethel when his first wife and his sons were alive.
Ethel sat beside her father in his car, a cheap roadster. He kept it clean and neat-looking. The daughter was slender j and rather finely drawn and she was well groomed. Her eyes told him nothing. Where had she got the money to buy such clothes as she wore? He had sent her off to the city, to the North, to be educated. She must have changed. There she sat beside him now, looking cool and impersonal. “These women,” he kept thinking, as they drove along. It was just after the completion of the new library. She had come home to help select the books and to take charge. At once he had felt something wrong in his house. “I am shut out,” he thought. “Out of what?” Even if there was a war in his house, it would be better if he knew what it was all about. A man wanted to keep his own dignity. Did a man do wrong, trying to have, living in one house, a daughter and a wife, both so nearly of the same age? If it was wrong why had Blanche been so anxious to have Ethel at home? Although he was almost an old man there was in his eyes the troubled look of a troubled boy, and his daughter was ashamed. “We ought to chuck it,” she thought. Something had to be settled between Blanche and herself. “What has he, poor man, to do with it?” Most men were very tiresome. They understood so little. The man sitting beside her in the car that day, driving the car as they rode along red Georgia roads, through clumps of pine trees, over low hills... it was spring and men were in the fields plowing for the next year’s cotton crop, white men and brown men driving mules... there was a smell of new-plowed ground and of pine trees... the man sitting beside her, her father, was obviously the one who had done it to the other woman... that woman her mother now... how absurd... that woman taking Ethel’s mother’s place.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 153