Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  He was obviously a man who lived by his contempt. He had spoken of Ethel’s being Southern with contempt in his voice, contempt that he was careful to keep controlled, as though to say — laughing— “Don’t try to put it over me because you are Southern.

  “That game won’t go with me.

  “But see. I laugh. I am not serious.

  “Ta! Ta!”

  “I wonder if he is like myself,” Ethel thought. “I wonder if I am that way.”

  There are certain people. You do not really like them. You stay near them. They teach you things.

  It was as though he had come to the party only to find her and, having found her, was satisfied. At once, having met her, he wanted to leave. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here. Here we shall have to struggle to get drinks. There’s no place to sit. We can’t talk. We are of no importance here.”

  He wanted to be somewhere, in an atmosphere where he could seem more important to himself.

  “Let’s go on downtown to one of the big hotels. We can dine there. I’ll manage about the drinks. Watch me.” He kept smiling. Ethel didn’t care. She had a queer notion about the-man, had it from the moment when he had first come to her. There was a touch of Mephistopheles. She was amused. “If that is what he is, I’ll find out about him,” she thought. She went with him to get her wraps and getting a cab they went to a big downtown restaurant where he found for her a seat in a quiet corner. He did manage about drinks. A bottle was brought.

  He seemed to want to explain himself and began telling her about his father. “I’m going to talk about myself. Do you mind?” She said she didn’t. He had been born in a county-seat town in Iowa. His father, he explained, was in politics out there and had got to be the county treasurer.

  After all the man had a story of his own. He was giving Ethel his background.

  In Iowa, where he had spent his boyhood, everything had gone all right for a long time, but then his father had used county funds for some sort of speculation of his own and had got caught. There had come a period of depression. Stocks his father had bought on margin had gone tumbling down. He was caught short.

  That, Ethel gathered, was at about the time Fred Wells was through high school. “I didn’t spend any time moping about,” he said, proudly and quickly. “I came to Chicago.”

  He explained that he was smart. “I’m a realist,” he said. “I don’t mince words. I’m smart. I’m as smart as hell.

  “I’ll bet I’m smart enough to see through you,” he said to Ethel. “I know what you are. You are a dissatisfied woman.” He smiled saying that.

  Ethel hadn’t liked him. She had been amused and interested. There was even a way in which she did like him. At least he was a relief after some of the men she had met in Chicago.

  They kept drinking as the man talked and as the dinner he had ordered was served, and Ethel liked drinking, although drink did not affect her much. Drinking was a relief. It made her daring, although getting drunk wasn’t any fun. She had got drunk just once and when she did it she was alone.

  That had been on a night when she was still at the university and just before an examination. Harold Grey had been helping her. He had left her and she went to her room. She had a bottle of whisky there and drank it all. Afterwards she tumbled into bed and was ill. The whisky did not make her drunk. It seemed to excite her nerves, make her mind peculiarly cold and clear. The illness came after that. “I won’t do that again,” she told herself that time.

  In the restaurant Fred Wells continued to explain himself. He seemed to feel it necessary to explain his presence at the literary party, as though to say, “I’m not one of them. I don’t want to be.”

  “There is no danger of my thinking so,” Ethel thought. She did not say so.

  He had come to Chicago, as a young man just out of school, and, after a time, had begun cultivating the artistic and literary crowd. There was no doubt it gave a man, such a man as himself, a certain standing, knowing such people. He bought them dinners. He went about with them.

  Life is a game. Knowing such people is just one hand you hold in the game.

  He had become a collector of first editions. “It’s a good scheme,” he told Ethel. “It seems to put you in a certain class and, besides, if you are shrewd, you can make money at it, that is to say, there’s no reason, if you watch your step, why you should lose money.”

  So he had got in with the literary crowd. They were, he thought, childish, egotistical, sensitive. They amused a man. Most of the women, he thought, were rather soft, they were soft-headed.

  He kept smiling and stroking his mustache. He had gone in for first editions and had already a fine collection. “I’ll take you to see them,” he said.

  “They are in my apartment, but my wife is out of town. Of course, I don’t expect you to go there with me to-night.

  “I know you’re not a fool.”

  “I am not such a fool as to think you can be got so easily, that you can be plucked, like a ripe apple from a tree,” was what he had thought.

  He proposed a party. Ethel could get another woman and he would get another man. It would make a nice small party. They would have dinner at a restaurant and afterwards go to his apartment to see his books. “You aren’t squeamish, are you?” he asked. “You know, there will be another woman and another man there.

  “My wife will be out of town for a month yet.”

  “No,” Ethel had said.

  He had spent all of that first evening in the restaurant explaining himself. “To certain people, the smartest people, life is just a game,” he explained. You get out of it what you can. There were various men who played the game in various ways. Some, he said, went in for being very, very respectable. They were in business, as he was. Well, they didn’t sell patent medicines. They sold coal or iron or machinery. Or they ran factories or mines. It was all one game. The money game.

  “Do you know,” he said to Ethel, “I think you are of the same sort I am.

  “Nothing much takes hold of you either.

  “We are of the same breed.”

  Ethel hadn’t felt flattered. She was amused, but at the same time a little hurt.

  “If it’s true I don’t want it to be.”

  Just the same she was interested, perhaps in his assurance, his boldness.

  He had lived, as a boy and as a young man, in the town in Iowa. He was the one son in the family and there were three daughters. His father had seemed always to have plenty of money. They had lived well, for that town they had lived rather in the grand manner. There had been automobiles, horses, a big house, money spent right and left. Each child in the family had been given an allowance by the father. He never asked how it was spent.

  Then the crash came and the father went to jail. He did not live long. Fortunately there was insurance money. The mother and daughters, by being careful, could get along. “I suppose my sisters will marry. They haven’t yet. Not one of them has succeeded in hooking a man,” Fred Wells said.

  He himself had wanted to be a newspaper man. That had been his passion. He had come to Chicago and had got a job as a reporter on one of the Chicago dailies but presently had given it up. There wasn’t, he said, enough money in it.

  He was sorry about that. “I would have been a crack newspaper man,” he said. “Nothing would have jarred me, nothing would have fazed me.” He kept drinking, eating and talking of himself. Perhaps the liquor he drank made him bolder in talk, more reckless. It did not make him drunk. “It affects him as it does me,” Ethel thought.

  “Suppose there had been a man’s or a woman’s reputation to be destroyed,” he said brightly. “Let’s say over a sex scandal, something of that sort... the kind of thing that is so abhorrent to a lot of these literary men I know, to a lot of so-called high-class people. ‘Aren’t they a lot of clean ones? The damn children.” It had seemed to Ethel that the man before her must hate the people among whom she had found him, the men whose books he collected. There was a t
angle of emotions in him as in her. He continued to talk brightly, smilingly, without outward show of emotion.

  Writers, he said, the higher-ups among writers were also without scruples. Such a one had a love affair with some woman. What happened? It came to an end after a time. “There is no such thing as love really. It’s all a lot of moonshine and bunk,” he declared.

  “With such a man, a great literary figure, ha! Full of words, as I am.

  “But making so many damn pretensions about the words he slings out.

  “As though anything in the world really mattered so much. After it is all over with some woman, what does he do? He makes literary material of it.

  “He fools no one. Every one knows.”

  He returned to his talk of being a newspaper man, dwelling on it. “Suppose a woman, married, let’s say.” He was himself a married man, had married a woman who was the daughter of the man who owned the business he was now in. The man was dead. Now he controlled the business. If his own wife... “She had better not fool with me... I certainly wouldn’t stand anything like that,” he said.

  Suppose a woman, married and all that, were to get into an affair with a man not her husband. He imagined himself a newspaper man handling such a story. They were prominent people. He had been a reporter for a time, but no such case had fallen into his hands. He seemed to regret it.

  “They are prominent people. They are rich, or in the arts, big people in the arts, or in politics or something of that sort.” The man had got himself launched. “And so the woman tries to work me. Let’s say I am the managing editor of the paper. She comes to me. She weeps. ‘For God’s sake, remember I have children.’

  ‘You have, eh? Why didn’t you think of that when you got into this?’ Little children having their lives ruined. Fudge! Was my own life ruined because my father died in jail? It may have hurt my sisters. I don’t know. It may make it hard for them to get respectable husbands. I’d rip her right open. I’d have no mercy.”

  There was a curious kind of bright shining hatred in the man. “Am I like that? God help me, am I like that?” Ethel thought.

  He wanted to hurt some one.

  Fred Wells, coming to Chicago, after his father’s death, hadn’t stayed long in the newspaper game. There hadn’t been, for him, enough money to be made. He had got into advertising, into an advertising agency as a copy writer. “I could have been a writer,” he declared. He had in fact written several short stories. They were mystery stories. He liked writing them and had no trouble getting them published. He wrote for one of the magazines that print that sort of thing. “I also wrote true confessions,” he said. He laughed, telling Ethel about it. He had imagined himself a young wife with a tubercular husband.

  She had always been an innocent woman but hadn’t specially wanted to be. She took her husband out West, to Arizona. The husband was nearly gone but he hung on for two or three years.

  It was during that time the woman, in Fred Wells’ story, was unfaithful to him. There was a man there, a young man she wanted, and so she used to creep out with him at night, into the desert.

  It had given Fred Wells an opportunity, that story, that confession. The magazine publishers had grabbed at it. He had imagined himself the wife of that sick man. There he lay, slowly dying. He had imagined how the young wife was filled with remorse. Fred Wells sat at the table in the Chicago restaurant with Ethel, stroking his mustache and telling about it all. He described quite perfectly what he said were the feelings of the woman. At night she used to wait until darkness came. There were soft desert moonlit nights. The young man she had taken as a lover came creeping toward the house in which she lived with her sick husband, a house sitting at the edge of a town in the desert and she crept out toward him.

  One night she came back and her husband was dead. She never saw the lover again. “I threw in a lot of remorse,” Fred Wells said, laughing again. “I made it thick. I fairly wallowed in it. I suppose about all the real fun that imaginary woman of mine ever had was out there with the other man on the moonlit desert, but afterwards I made remorse fairly ooze out of her.

  “You see I wanted to sell it. I wanted it published,” he said.

  Fred Wells got Ethel Long into a mess. It wasn’t nice. It was, she knew afterwards, her own fault. One day, a week after she had dined with him, he had called her on the phone. “I’ve got something swell on,” he said. There was a man in town, a famous Englishman, a writer, and Fred had got in with him. He proposed a party. Ethel was to get another woman and Fred would get the Englishman. “He is in America on a lecture tour and all the highbrows have had him in hand,” Fred explained. “We’ll give him another kind of a party.” Did Ethel know of another woman she could get. “Yes,” she said.

  “Get a live one,” he said. “You know.”

  What did he mean by that? She was sure of herself. “If a man like that... if he can put anything over on me.”

  She was bored. Why not? There was a woman, working in the library with her who might do. She was a year younger than Ethel, a little slip of a woman who had a passion for writers. The idea of meeting a famous man like that Englishman would be exciting to her. She was rather pale, the daughter of a respectable family in one of the Chicago suburbs and had herself a vague desire to be a writer.

  “Yes, I’ll go,” she said, when Ethel spoke to her. She was one of the kind of women that always had admired Ethel. The women out at the university that had got crushes on her had been of this sort. She admired Ethel’s style and what she thought her boldness.

  “Do you want to go?”

  “O, yeees.” The woman’s voice trembled with excitement.

  “The men are married. You understand that?”

  The woman, whose name was Helen, hesitated for a moment; this was something new to her. Her lips trembled. Evidently she thought...

  Perhaps she thought... “A woman can’t always go on, never having adventures.” She thought... “One has to accept such things in a sophisticated world.”

  Fred Wells as an example of the sophisticated man.

  Ethel had tried to make it all quite clear. She didn’t. The woman was testing her. She was being excited about the idea of meeting a well-known writer, an English one.

  There was no way for her to fathom Ethel’s real attitude, just at that time, the don’t-give-a-damn feeling she had, the desire she had to take risks, test herself perhaps. “We’ll dine,” she said, “and then we’ll go to Mr. Wells’ apartment. His wife will not be there. There will be drinks.”

  “There will be only the two men. You are not afraid?” Helen asked.

  “No.” Ethel was in an amused cynical mood. “I can take care of myself.”

  “Very well, I’ll go.”

  Ethel would never forget that evening with the three people. It was one of the adventures in her own life that had made her what she was. “I’m not so damn nice.” Thoughts drifting through her head on an afternoon later, when she drove over Georgia roads with her father. He was another one, puzzled by his own life. She was not being frank and open with him, and had not been with that naïve woman Helen she had taken to the party with the two men, that night in Chicago.

  The English writer, who had come to the party with Fred Wells was a big-shouldered, rather crumpled man. He seemed curious and interested in what was going on. Such Englishmen coming to America where their books sold in quantities, where they came to lecture and gather in money...

  There was something in the attitude of such men, toward all Americans. “The Americans are such strange children. My dear fellow, they are amazing.”

  Something amazing, always a bit patronizing. “The lion’s whelps.” You felt like saying, “Damn your eyes. You go to hell.” With him, that night in Fred Wells’ apartment in Chicago, it might just have been a satisfaction of curiosity. “I’ll see what this sort of Americans are like.”

  Fred Wells was a spender. He took the others to an expensive restaurant to dine and then to his apartment. Tha
t also was expensive. He was proud of it. The Englishman was very attentive to the woman Helen. Was Ethel jealous? “I wish I had him,” Ethel thought. She would have liked the Englishman to pay more attention to her. She fancied herself saying things to him, trying to upset his composure.

  Helen was obviously too naïve. She worshipped. When they had all got to Fred’s apartment Fred kept serving drinks and almost at once Helen got half drunk and as she got more and more drunk, and, Ethel thought, more and more foolish, the Englishman grew alarmed.

  He even got noble... the noble Englishman. Blood will tell. “My dear fellow, one has to be a gentleman.” Was Ethel sore because the man was linking her, in his mind, with Fred Wells? “To hell with you,” she kept wanting to say. He was like a grown man left suddenly in a room with children who were misbehaving... “God knows what he expects to happen here,” Ethel thought.

  Helen had got up out of her chair after several drinks and had walked uncertainly across a room in which they were all sitting and had thrown herself on a couch. Her dress was disarranged. There was too much leg showing. She kept throwing her legs about and laughing foolishly. Fred Wells kept giving her drinks. “Well, she has good legs, hasn’t she?” Fred said. Fred Wells was too coarse. He was really rotten. Ethel knew it. What she resented was the thought that the Englishman did not know she knew.

  The Englishman began speaking to Ethel. “What is all this about? Why is he intent on getting this woman drunk?” He was getting nervous and evidently wished he hadn’t accepted Fred Wells’ invitation. He and Ethel sat for a time by a little table with drinks before them. The Englishman kept asking her questions about herself, what part of the country she had come from and what she was doing in Chicago. He had found out she was a university woman. There was still... in his manner... something... that air of being outside it all... an English gentleman in America... “too damn impersonal,” Ethel thought. Ethel was becoming aroused.