Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “No,” she lied. “I want you to stay away from him. Don’t you dare have a thing to do with him.”

  So he knew without knowing. He knew all of the little boys of the town, the bad bold ones and the good gentle ones. Ethel, even as a child, had sharp senses. She knew then, or if not then later, that dogs, when there was a female dog that had desires... the male dog threw his nose into the air. He stood alert, at attention. There was a female dog wanting, perhaps miles away. He ran. Many dogs ran. They gathered in packs, fighting and growling at each other.

  After that night in the field Ethel was malicious. She cried and swore that her father had torn her dress. “He attacked me. I wasn’t doing anything. He tore my dress. He hurt me.”

  “You were up to something, creeping out there like that. What were you up to?”

  “Nothing.”

  She kept crying. She went sobbing into the house. Suddenly her father, that good man, had begun talking about his honor. It sounded so senseless. “Honor. A good man.”

  “I’d rather see a daughter of mine in her grave than not have her be a good girl.”

  “But what is a good girl?”

  Ethel’s mother had remained silent. She had gone a little white, listening to the father talking to the daughter, but she had said nothing. Perhaps she had thought, “That is the way we have to begin. We have to begin to understand men, what they are like.” Ethel’s mother was a good woman. Not the child, listening to a father’s talk about his honor, but the woman the child became, admired and loved the mother. “We women have to learn, too.” Sometime there might be a good life on the earth but the time was a long, long way off. It implied some new kind of understanding between men and women, an understanding grown more general among all men and all women, a sense of the oneness of human beings not realized yet.

  “I would really like to be like mother,” Ethel thought that day after she had come back to Langdon to be the librarian there. She doubted her capacity to be the thing she was thinking of as she rode in the car with her father and afterwards as she sat in the car before a little Negro school, half buried in pine woods. Her father had gone into the school to find out whether or not a woman in there, a Negro woman, had been misbehaving. She wondered whether or not he could ask her, brutally, directly. “Perhaps he can. She is a Negro woman,” Ethel thought.

  3

  THERE WAS A scene in Ethel’s mind.

  It came into her mind after her father had visited the Negro school and they were driving homeward in the warm early spring sunlight, riding over the red Georgia roads, riding past fields newly plowed. She saw little enough of the fields and did not ask her father how he had come out with the Negro woman in the school.

  The woman had perhaps been indiscreet. She had perhaps got caught. Her father had gone in there, into the little Negro school while she remained in the car outside. He would have got the teacher to one side. He couldn’t ask her directly, even though she were a Negro woman. “They say.... Is it true?” The judge was always getting himself into situations. He was presumed to know a lot about handling people. Ethel smiled. She was living in the past. On the ride homeward she got her father back to the subject of his own boyhood. He had hoped to have a serious talk with her, to find out from her, if he could, what was wrong in his own house, but he didn’t succeed.

  Men were plowing in red fields. Red roads went winding over low Georgia hills. A river, with trees growing along its banks and with white dogwood looking out from amid bright new green leaves, followed the road.

  Her father wanted to ask her, “What’s up at home? Tell me. What are you and my wife Blanche up to?”

  “So, you want to know?”

  “Yes. Tell me.”

  “The devil I will. Find out for yourself. You men are so smart. Find out for yourself.”

  A queer old enmity between men and women. Where did it begin? Was it necessary? Would it always go on?

  At one moment that day Ethel wanted to be as her mother had been, patient and kindly with her father, while, in the next moment...

  “If you were my man..

  Her mind occupied itself with the drama of her own life, in Chicago, thinking of it, now that it was a thing of the past, trying to understand it. There was one particular adventure. It had happened, at the end of her days as a student there. One evening she had gone to dine with a man. At that time — it was after her father’s second marriage, when she had been at home on a visit and had returned to Chicago — the scheme to make her the librarian of the new library at Langdon had already been hatched in Blanche’s mind and, falling in with it, Ethel had managed to get a job in the Chicago Public Library.... She went to a library school. Another young woman, also working at the library, had gone to dine with Ethel and a certain man, and with a man of her own. She was a small rather plump woman, young and inexperienced in life, whose people — very respectable people as were Ethel’s people in Langdon — lived in a Chicago suburb.

  The two women were going out to make a night of it, to achieve an adventure, and the men they were with were married men. It had just come about. It had been Ethel who had arranged it. She could not help wondering how much the other woman knew, how innocent she was.

  There was the man Ethel was to spend the evening with. He was a queer one all right, a new sort to her. Ethel had met him one evening at a party. He had interested her. In her curiosity about him there was something of Ethel, the girl-child in the field waiting for the bad little small-town boy.

  She was at a literary party when she first met the man and there were a number of men and women present who were prominent in the Chicago literary world. For one, there was Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg, the famous Chicago poet, also came. There were a lot of younger writers and some painters. A woman, older than Ethel, who also worked in the public library, had taken Ethel. The party was held in a large apartment, near the lake, over on the North Side. A woman who wrote poetry and who had married a rich man gave the party. There were several large rooms filled with people.

  It was easy enough to tell which were the famous ones. The others gathered about, asking questions and listening. The famous ones were nearly all men. A poet named Bodenheim came, smoking a corn-cob pipe. It stank. People kept arriving and presently the large rooms were filled with people.

  So this was the higher life, the cultural life.

  At the party, Ethel, who was at once forgotten by the woman who had brought her, had wandered rather aimlessly about. She saw several people sitting apart in a small room. They were obviously unknown people like herself and she went in among them and sat down. After all, she couldn’t help thinking, “I’m the best-dressed woman here.” She had pride in that fact. There were women present wearing more expensive gowns but almost without exception they had missed something. She knew that. She had kept her eyes open since she had come into the apartment. “What a lot of frumps there are among the literary ladies,” she thought. That night, although she was out of it, not being known as a writer or painter, being a mere employee in the Chicago Public Library, a student, she was filled with self-confidence. If no one paid her any attention, it was all right. People kept coming, crowding into the apartment. They were being addressed by their given names. “Hello, Carl.”

  “Why, Jim, here you are.”

  “Hello, Sarah.” The little room into which Ethel had got faced a hallway by which people entered a larger room, crowded with people. The smaller room began also to fill.

  She had, however, got into a little side-current out of the main stream. She watched and listened. A woman seated near her was informing a friend, “There’s Mrs. Will Brownlee. She writes poetry. She has had poems in Scribner’s and in Harper’s and in a lot of other magazines. She is to publish a book soon. The tall woman with red hair is a sculptress. The little frumpy-looking one writes a column of literary criticism for one of the Chicago dailies.”

  There were the women and the men. Most of the people at the party were evidentl
y of importance in the Chicago literary world. If they hadn’t yet risen to national fame, they had hopes.

  There was something a bit queer about the position of such people, the writers, painters, sculptors and musicians in American life. Ethel sensed the position of such people, particularly in Chicago, and was amused and puzzled. So many people wanted to be writers. Why? The writers were always writing books that were reviewed in the newspapers. There was a little flare of enthusiasm or of condemnation that died very quickly. There was really very little intellectual life. The great city sprawled itself out. Distances within the city were immense. For the people who were on the inside, in the intellectual circles of the city, there was both admiration and contempt.

  They were in a great commercial city, lost in it. It was an undisciplined city, magnificent but unformed. It was a changing city, always growing, changing, always getting bigger.

  On the side of the city, facing Lake Michigan, there was a street on which the main building of the public library stood. It was a street lined with great office buildings and hotels, the lake on one side and there was a long narrow park.

  It was a wind-blown street, a glorious street. Some one had told Ethel that it was the most magnificent street in America and she believed it. On many days it was a sun-washed, a wind-swept street. A river of motors flowed along. There were smart shops and great hotels, and smartly dressed people walked up and down. Ethel loved the street. She liked to put on a smart dress and walk there.

  Beyond this street, to the west, there was a network of dark tunnel-like streets, not taking queer and unexpected turns as in New York, Boston, Baltimore and other older American cities, cities which Ethel had visited when she had taken a trip for just that purpose, but streets laid out in a grill, going straight away to the west, going north and south.

  Ethel in doing her work had to go out west, to a branch of the Chicago public library. She lived, after she had finished her university life and was studying to be a librarian, in a small room on lower Michigan Avenue, below the Loop, and every day walked up Michigan Avenue to Madison where she took her car.

  On the evening when she went to the party and there met the man with whom she afterwards went to dine, and with whom she later had an adventure that had a deep influence upon her outlook on life, she was in a period of revolt. She was always having such periods. They came and went, and after she had passed through one of them she was rather amused at herself. The truth was that she had been in revolt ever since she came to Chicago.

  There she was, a tall straight figure of a woman, a trifle mannish. She might so easily grow more or less mannish. She had been in the university for four years and, when not in the university, had been working in the city or had been at home. Her father was far from a rich man. He had inherited some money from his father and his first marriage had brought him some and he owned Southern farm lands but the land did not bring in much income. His salary wasn’t large and he had, besides Ethel, other children to take care of.

  Ethel was in one of her periods of revolt against men.

  At the literary party that night, as she sat rather to one side... not feeling neglected... she knew only the older woman who had brought her to the party... why should that woman bother about her, having got her in there... “having done me that great favor,” she thought... at the party she realized also that she might long since have had a man of her own, even an intellectual man.

  There had been a man out at the university, a young instructor, who also wrote and published poetry, an eager intense young man who had courted her. What a queer performance his courtship had been! She had cared nothing for him, but she had used him.

  At the beginning, having met her, he had begun asking her if he could come to see her and if he could take her places and then he had begun helping her with her work. The help had been needed. Ethel had cared little enough about some of her studies. They were a bother to her.

  You had to select a certain number of studies. The examinations at the university were stiff. If you got behind, you were thrown out. If she were thrown out, her father would be angry and she would have to return to Langdon, Georgia, to live. The young instructor was a help. “Look here,” he said, when there was to be an examination, “these will be about the sort of questions the man will ask.” He knew. He prepared answers. “You answer them in this way. You’ll get through all right.” Before an examination he worked with her for hours. What a joke the four years at the university had been! What a waste of time and money for such a one as herself!

  It was a thing her father had wanted her to do. He had made sacrifices, had gone without things and had saved money to enable her to do it. She did not want specially to be educated, an intellectual woman. More than anything else, she thought she would have liked being a rich woman. “God,” she thought, “if I only had a lot of money.”

  She had an idea... it might very well be absurd... she might have got it from novel reading... there seemed to be rather a fixed idea in most Americans that happiness was to be got through wealth... there might be a life in which she could really function. There might be, for a woman like herself, with a certain undoubted swank, a place. She even dreamed sometimes, her dreams influenced by her reading, of a kind of glorious life. In a book about English life she read of a certain Lady Blessington, in Peel’s time in England. That was when Queen Victoria was still a young girl. Lady Blessington began life as the daughter of an obscure Irishman who married her off to a rich and disagreeable man.

  Then the miracle. She was seen by Lord Blessington, who was very rich, an English nobleman. There she was, a real beauty, and no doubt, like Ethel, a woman of style, hidden away like that. The noble Englishman took her to England, got her a divorce and married her. They set off for Italy accompanied by a young French nobleman who became Lady Blessington’s lover. Her noble lord didn’t seem to mind. The young man was brilliant. What the old lord wanted no doubt was some real decoration to his own life. She gave him that.

  The great difficulty with Ethel was that she was not quite poor. “I’m middle class,” she thought. She had picked up that word somewhere, perhaps from her admirer, the college instructor. His name was Harold Grey.

  There she was, just a middle-class young American woman, lost in the crowd at an American university, later lost in the Chicago crowds. She was a woman always wanting clothes, wanting jewels to wear, wanting to ride in a fine automobile. No doubt all women were like that, although a good many would never admit it. That was because they knew they hadn’t a chance. She took Vogue and other women’s magazines, filled with pictures of the latest Paris gowns, gowns draped over the bodies of tall slender women, much like herself. There were pictures of country houses, people driving up to the doors of country houses in very elegant-looking automobiles... perhaps in the advertising pages of the magazines. How clean and nice and first-class everything seemed! In the pictures she saw in the magazines, lying alone sometimes in her bed in a little room... it being Sunday morning... pictures meaning to suggest a kind of life quite possible to all Americans... that is to say, if they were real Americans, not foreign trash... if they were earnest and hard-working... if they had brains enough to make money....

  “God, but I’d like to marry a rich man,” Ethel thought. “If I had the chance. I wouldn’t give a damn what he was.” She didn’t quite mean that.

  She was always getting into debt, having to scheme and scheme to get the clothes she thought she needed. “I haven’t a thing to cover my nakedness,” she said sometimes to other women she met at the university. She had even had to bother to learn to sew and was always having to think about money. It had resulted in her always living in rather shabby quarters, doing without many simple little luxuries other women had. She did so much want to make a swank appearance before the world and in the university, while she was a student. She was a good deal admired. None of the other women students ever got very close to her.

  There had been two or three... rather soft lit
tle feminine things they were... who had got crushes on her. They wrote little notes and sent flowers to her room.

  She had a dim notion what they meant. “Not for me,” she told herself.

  There were the magazines she saw, talk she heard, books she read. Out of occasional fits of boredom she had become a novel reader and that had been mistaken for an interest in literature. In the summer, when she went home to Langdon she took a dozen novels with her. Her reading had put the idea of her being the town librarian into Blanche’s head.

  There were these pictures of people, always on glorious summer days, in places to which only the rich went. There was the sea to be seen in the distance and a golf course by the sea. There were handsomely dressed young men walking about. “God, I might have been born into such a life.” It was always spring or summer in the pictures or, if winter came, tall women in expensive furs were engaged in winter sports, accompanied by handsome young men.

  Although Ethel was a born Southerner, she had few illusions about life in the American South. “It’s shabby,” she thought. Chicago people she met asked her about Southern life. “Isn’t there great charm to your life down there? I have always heard about the charm of life in the South.”

  “Charm, hell!” Ethel did not say that, although she thought it. “There’s no use making yourself unnecessarily unpopular,” she thought. The life might be quite charming to some people... people of a certain sort... not fools by any means, she knew that... she thought her own mother had found life in the South, with her lawyer husband, who understood so little... so full he was of his middle-class virtues, believing in his own honesty of mind, his honor, his deeply religious nature... her mother had managed not to be unhappy.

  Her mother would have got some of the charm of Southern life, people of the North like so to prattle about, Negroes always about the house and in the streets... Negroes usually pretty slick, telling lies, working the whites... the long hot dull Southern summer days.