Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Her mother had lived out her life, sunk deep in that life. Ethel and her mother had never really talked. There always had been something, a kind of understanding, as later between her and the blonde step-mother. Ethel’s hatred grew and grew. Was it man hatred? It might well be that. “They are such self-satisfied damn stick-in-the-muds,” she thought. As for her being specially interested in books, being an intellectual, it was a joke. A lot of the other women she met when she had begun studying to be a librarian seemed interested, even absorbed.

  No doubt the people who wrote hooks thought they were up to something. Some of them really were. Her own favorite author was the Irishman, George Moore. “Writers should create, for those of us whose lives are drab, lives not so drab,” she thought. With what joy she had read Moore’s Memoirs of My Dead Life. Love should be like that, she thought.

  There were these lovers of Moore’s at the inn at Orelay, their going out at night into the little French provincial town to find the pajamas, the shop-keeper, the room in the inn that was such a disappointment and then the delightful room they later found. No bothering about each other’s souls, about sin and the consequences of sin. The writer had liked fine lingerie on his ladies; he liked soft delicate clinging gowns slipping gently off the female form. Such lingerie imparted to the women who wore it something of its own elegance, its own rich softness and firmness. The whole matter of earthiness, in most of the books Ethel read, was, she thought, too much overdone. Who wanted it?

  It would be better to be a high-class whore. If a woman could only pick her men, that wouldn’t be so bad. Ethel thought that more women than men would ever guess had thought that. She thought that men were, on the whole, fools. “They are children wanting to be nursed through life,” she thought. In a Chicago newspaper one day she saw the picture and read the account of the adventures of a woman highwayman, and her heart jumped. She imagined herself walking into a bank and holding it up, getting thereby, in a few minutes, thousands of dollars. “If there was a way of meeting a really first-class highwayman and he’d fall for me, I’d fall for him, all right,” she thought. In Ethel’s time, when she, by a mere chance, she thought, got herself connected, always on the outer edge, of course, with the literary world, a great many of the writers who were getting most attention just then... not the really popular ones, the ones she really liked, the ones who had sense enough to write only of the lives of the rich, and the successful... the only really interesting lives... a great many of the writers who, just then, had big names, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and others, concerned themselves with such low-grade people.

  “Damn them, they write of people just like myself, caught as I am.”

  Or they tell stories of working people and their lives... or little farmers on poor little farms in Ohio, Indiana or Iowa, people driving about in Fords, a hired man, in love with some hired girl, going into the woods with her, her sadness and fright afterwards when she discovers she is that way. What difference did it all make?

  “I can imagine just how such a hired man would smell,” she thought. After she had finished at the university and had got a job at a branch of the Chicago public library... it was far out on the West Side... handing out dirty soiled books to dirty soiled people day after day... having to be cheerful about it and act as though you liked it... such tired weary faces most of the working people had... for the most part their women came for the books....

  Or young boys.

  The boys liked to read about crime or about outlaws or cowboys in some vague place known as the “Far West.” Ethel didn’t blame them. She had to ride home at night on a street car. Rainy nights came. The car ran past the grim walls of factories. There were workingmen crowding into the car. How black and dismal seemed the city streets under the street lights, seen through the car windows, and how far, far away were the people of the advertising pictures seen in Vogue, the people with country houses, the sea at the door, the spreading lawns with great avenues of shade trees, those who went, richly gowned, in expensive cars to dine at some big hotel. Some of the workingmen in the car must have been in the same clothes day after day, even month after month. The air was heavy with dampness. The car reeked.

  Ethel sat grimly in the car and sometimes grew pale. A workingman, perhaps a young one, stared at her. None of them dared sit very close. They felt dimly that she must belong to some outside world, far removed from their world. “Who’s the dame? How did she get here, into this part of town?” they asked themselves. Even the poorest paid workingman had, at some time in his life, walked in certain downtown Chicago streets, even on Michigan Avenue. He had walked, feeling perhaps awkward and out of place, past the entrances to great hotels.’

  He had seen such women as Ethel seemed, coming out of such places. The pictures they had in their minds of the lives led by the rich and the successful were somewhat different from the picture in Ethel’s mind. An older Chicago had expressed that. There had been great saloons, all built of marble, with silver dollars set in the floor. A workingman told another of a certain Chicago house of prostitution he had heard of. A friend had been there once. “You sank in silken carpets to your knees. The women in the place were dressed like queens.”

  Ethel’s picture wasn’t that. She wanted elegance, style, a world of color and of movement. A passage read in a book, that afternoon rang in her head. It described a house in London....

  “One passed through a drawing-room in gold and ruby, filled with beautiful amber vases which had belonged to the Empress Josephine, to enter the long narrow library with its white walls on which mirrors alternated with panels of richly bound books. Through the tall window at the end could be seen the trees of Hyde Park. Round the room were sofas, ottomans, tables of enamel, covered with bibelots, and in a yellow satin fauteuil Lady Marrow, dressed in a gown of blue satin, cut extremely low....”

  “The American writers, who call themselves real writers, writing about this kind of people,” Ethel thought, looking up and down the street car, her eyes surveying a street car filled with Chicago factory hands, homeward bound as she was after a day’s work... to God only knew what kind of dreary little crowded apartments... squalling dirty little children playing on the floor... herself alas going to a place not so much better... no money in her pockets half the time... she had often to dine at cheap little cafeterias... herself having to skimp and grub to get a little money... the writers concerning themselves with such lives, the loves, the hopes of such people.

  Not that she hated them, the workingmen and the workingwomen she saw in Chicago. She tried not to have them exist for her. They were like the white people of the mill village at the edge of her home town of Langdon, they were as the Negroes had always been to the people of the South, that is to say, at any rate as the field Negroes had been.

  She did in a way have to read the books of the writers who wrote of such people. She had to keep up. People were always asking questions. After all, she was planning to be a librarian.

  She picked up such a book sometimes and read it through to the end. “Well,” she said, putting it down, “what of it? What does it matter about such people?”

  *

  As for the men who had interested themselves directly in Ethel, who had thought they wanted her.

  The instructor out at the university, Harold Grey, would do as an example. He wrote letters. That seemed to be his passion. Several men with whom she had had passing flirtations had been of that sort. They were all intellectuals. She had something in her attractive, apparently to that sort, and yet, when she got one, she hated him. They were always trying to delve into her soul or they were fussing about with their own souls. Harold Grey was just the type. He tried to psychoanalyze her and had rather watery blue eyes, hidden behind thick glasses, rather thin hair carefully combed, narrow shoulders, not too strong legs. He went absent-mindedly along the street, hurrying along. He always had books under his arm.

  If you married such a man... she tried to imagine herself living with H
arold. The truth was, probably, that she was on the look-out for a particular kind of man. It might even be all nonsense about her wanting fine clothes and a certain elegant position in life.

  Being one who did not warm easily to others, she was a good deal alone, was alone often even in the presence of others. Her mind was always leaping forward. There was in her a touch of the masculine, meaning only, in her case, a kind of boldness, not very womanly, quick flights of fancy. She could laugh at herself. She was thankful for that. She saw Harold Grey hurrying along the street. He had a room near the university, and to get to his classes did not need to go through the street where, during her university days, she had a room but, after he had begun paying attention to her, he often did. “It’s funny, his falling for me,” she thought. “If he, in his physical self, were a bit more of a man, if he were a tough brow-beating man, or big, an athlete or something of that sort... or if he were rich.”

  There was something very meek and hopeful and at the same time boyishly sad about Harold. He was always delving about among the poets, finding little verses for her.

  Or he read nature books. He was in the philosophy department at the university but said to her that he really had wanted to be a naturalist. He brought her a book by a man named Fabre, something about caterpillars. They, the caterpillars, went creeping along the ground or they ate the leaves of a tree. “Let them,” Ethel thought. She grew angry. “Damn. They aren’t my trees. Let them strip the trees bare.”

  For a time she had hung onto the little instructor. He hadn’t much money and was working for his Ph.D. She went for walks with him. He hadn’t a car but he took her to several dinners at the houses of professors. She let him hire a taxi.

  He took her, sometimes in the evening, for long drives. They went west and south. It would be so and so many dollars and dimes for every hour they were out together. “I’m not giving him much for his money,” she thought. “I wonder if he would have the nerve to try to collect if he knew how easy I would be for the right sort of man.” She made the drives as long as possible, “Let’s go down this road,” dragging the time out. “He could live a week on what I am making him blow in,” she thought.

  She let him buy books for her she did not want to read. A man, perhaps sitting all day and watching the actions of caterpillars or ants or even dung beetles, day after day, month after month — that was what he admired. “If he really wants me he’d better be up to something. If he’d knock me down. If he were able. I guess that is what I need.”

  Ridiculous moments remembered. Once on Sunday she was with him on a long drive in a hired car. They went to a place called Palos Park. He needed to do something. It began to bother him. “Really now,” she asked herself that day, “why have I such contempt for him?” He was trying hard to be nice to her. He was always writing her letters. In the letters he was much bolder than when he was with her.

  He wanted to stop by a wood, at the side of the road. He needed to. He moved nervously about on the car seat. “He must really be suffering terribly,” she thought. She was pleased. Maliciousness had taken possession of her. “Why doesn’t he say what he wants?”

  If it was a matter of his being too shy to use certain words surely there was some way he could let her know what he wanted. “Look here, I’ve got to go into the woods alone. Nature calls.”

  He was so damned hot on nature... bringing her books about caterpillars and dung beetles. Even when he was that way that day, shifting nervously about on the seat, he tried to pass it off as enthusiasm for nature. He wiggled and squirmed. “Look,” he cried. He pointed out a tree growing beside the road. “Isn’t it magnificent?”

  “You are rather magnificent yourself,” she thought. It was a day of light floating clouds and he called attention to them. “They look like camels crossing a desert.”

  “You would like to be alone on a desert yourself,” she thought. All he needed was a lonely desert or a tree between himself and her.

  It was his way, talking as he did about nature, going on and on about it, about trees and fields and rivers and flowers.

  And ants and caterpillars...

  And then being so damned modest about a simple matter.

  She let him suffer. Two or three times he almost escaped. She got out of the car with him and they walked in a wood. He pretended to see something at a distance, off among the trees. “You wait here,” he said, but she ran after him. “I want to see, too,” she said. The joke of it was that the man who was driving the car that day, the chauffeur... he was rather of the tough city type... he chewed tobacco and spat....

  He had a little snub nose that looked as though it had been broken in a fight and there was a scar on his cheek, as though from a knife cut.

  He knew what was going on. He knew Ethel knew that he knew.

  Ethel had finally let the instructor get away. She turned and walked away along a path toward the car, having tired of the game. Harold would wait a few minutes before joining her. Very likely he would look about, to see if he couldn’t find a flower to pluck....

  To pretend that was what he was up to, trying to find a flower for her. The joke was that the chauffeur knew. He might have been Irish. When she got to where the car waited beside the road, he had got out of his driver’s seat and was standing there. “Did you let him get lost?” he asked. He knew she knew what he meant. He spat on the ground and grinned as she got into the car.

  *

  ETHEL was at the literary party in Chicago. Men and women went about smoking cigarettes. There was a little chattering stream of talk. People disappeared into the kitchen of the apartment. Cocktails were being served out there. Ethel sat in the little room off the hallway and a man came to her. He had spotted her, picked her out. There was an empty chair beside her and he came and sat down. He was direct. “There doesn’t seem to be any one doing any introducing here. I’m Fred Wells,” he said.

  “It doesn’t mean anything to you. No, I do not write novels or essays. I don’t paint or sculp. I’m no poet.” He laughed. He was a new sort to Ethel. He looked at her boldly. His eyes were grayish blue, cold eyes as were her own at times. “At least,” she thought, “he’s a bold one.”

  He had marked her down. “You’ll do for me,” he had perhaps thought. He was looking for a woman to entertain him.

  He was at the old game. A man wanted to talk about himself. He wanted a woman to listen, to be impressed, to seem absorbed as he spoke of himself.

  It was a man’s game but women were no better. The woman wanted to be admired. She wanted beauty of person and she wanted a man aware of her beauty. “I can stand for almost any man if he thinks I’m beautiful,” Ethel thought sometimes.

  “Look here,” the man she saw at the party, the man named Fred Wells said, “you aren’t one of these, are you?” He made a quick movement with his hand toward the others sitting in the small room and toward those in the large room near by. “I’ll bet you aren’t. You don’t look like that,” he said smiling. “Not that I’ve anything against these people, particularly the male ones. They are people of distinction, I suppose, at least some of them are.”

  The man laughed. He was alive like a fox terrier.

  “I myself pulled some strings to get here,” he said, laughing. “I don’t really belong. What about you? Do you sculp? A lot of women do. They take it out that way. I bet you don’t.” He was a man of perhaps thirty-five, very slender and alive. He kept smiling but his smile did not go very deep. Little smiles chased each other across his sharp face. He had very clear-cut features, such features as might have been seen in a cigarette or clothing advertisement. For some reason he made Ethel think of a fine, highly bred dog. An advertisement... “the best dressed man at Princeton”... “the man at Harvard, most likely to succeed in life, selected by his class.” He had been to a good tailor. His clothes were not showy. They were without a doubt faultlessly correct.

  He leaned over to whisper to Ethel, putting his face quite close to hers. “I didn’t think y
ou were one of these,” he said. She had told him nothing of herself. It was evident that there was in him a kind of sharp antagonism to the celebrities at the party.

  “Look at them. They think they are great shucks, now don’t they?

  “Damn their eyes. Strutting about here, the men celebrities being fawned on by women, the women celebrities showing off too.”

  He did not say that at once. It was implied in his manner. He had devoted the evening to her, taking her about and introducing her to the celebrities. He seemed to know them all. He took things for granted. “Here Carl, come here,” he commanded. That was a command to Carl Sandburg, a large broad-shouldered man with gray hair. There was something in Fred Wells’ manner. He was impressing Ethel. “See, I call him by his first name. I say, ‘come here,’ and he comes.” He called various men to him, Ben and Joe and Frank. “I want you to meet this woman.”

  “She’s Southern,” he said. He had caught that from Ethel’s speech.

  “She’s the best-looking woman here. You don’t need to worry. She isn’t any kind of an artist. She won’t be asking any favors of you.”

  He grew familiar and confidential.

  “She won’t be asking you to write an introduction to any little book of poems, nothing of that sort.”

  “I’m not in this game,” he said aside to Ethel, “and yet I am too.” He had taken her into the kitchen of the apartment and had got her a cocktail. He lit a cigarette for her.

  They stood a little to one side, out of the jam of people, Ethel amused. He explained to her what he was, still smiling. “I suppose I’m the lowest of human beings,” he said cheerfully, but as he said it he smiled blandly. He wore a tiny little black mustache and, as he talked, kept stroking it. His talk was oddly like the barking of a little dog in a road, a dog barking determinedly at an automobile in a road, at an automobile that has passed around a turn in the road.

  He was a man who made his money in the patent-medicine business and explained it all to Ethel at a rush as they stood together. “I dare say you are a woman of family, being Southern. Well, I’m not. I’ve noticed that almost all Southerners have a family. I’m from Iowa.”