“A queer sort, these American university women if this is a sample, if this is the way they spend their evenings,” the Englishman was thinking.
He said nothing of the sort. He kept trying to keep the conversation going. He had got into something, into a situation he didn’t like. Ethel was glad. “How am I to get gracefully out of this place and away from these people?” He got up, intending no doubt to excuse himself, to leave.
But there was Helen, drunk now. The Englishman’s sense of chivalry had been awakened.
At that moment Fred Wells appeared and took the Englishman into his library. After all, Fred was a business man. “I have him here. I have some of his books here. I might as well get him to autograph them,” Fred was thinking.
Fred was also thinking of something else. Perhaps the Englishman did not understand what Fred had in mind. Ethel did not hear what was said. The two men went together into the library and there was talk in there. Afterwards, after what happened to herself later that evening, Ethel could pretty well guess what was said.
Fred had simply taken it for granted the Englishman was another like himself.
The whole tone of that evening had suddenly changed. Ethel had become frightened. Because she had been bored and wanting excitement she had got herself into a mess. She imagined the conversation between the two men in the nearby room. Fred Wells speaking... he was no such man as Harold Grey, the university instructor... “Here I have got this woman for you”... meaning the woman Helen. Fred, in there in that room, speaking to the other man. Ethel wasn’t thinking of Helen now. She was thinking of herself. There was Helen, lying half helpless on a couch. Would a man want a woman in that state, a woman made half helpless by drink?
It would be an assault. There might be men who liked to get their women in that way. She was trembling with fear now. She had been a fool to allow herself to get into the power of a man like Fred Wells. There were the two men in the nearby room talking. She could hear their voices. Fred Wells had a sharp voice. He said something to his guest, the Englishman, and then there was silence.
Already, without a doubt, he had attended to the matter of having the man sign his books. He would have got them signed. He was making a proposal.
“Well, you see I have got a woman for you. There is one for you and one for me. You may take the one who is lying out there on the couch.
“I have, you see, got her quite helpless. There won’t be much of a struggle.
“You may take her into a bedroom. You will not be disturbed. You may leave the other woman to me.”
There must have been something of that sort that night.
The Englishman was in the room with Fred Wells and then came suddenly out. He did not look at Fred Wells, did not speak to him again, although he did look sharply at Ethel. He was judging her. “So you are into it, too?” A hot wave of resentment was running through Ethel. The English writer said nothing but went into a hallway where his coat was hanging and getting it and a wrap that had been worn by the woman Helen, came back into the room.
He had gone a little pale. He was trying to be composed. He was angry and excited. Fred Wells had come back into the room and stood in a doorway.
Perhaps the English writer had said something nasty to Fred. “I’ll not let him, because he is a fool, spoil my own party,” Fred was thinking. Fred’s own party was to be Ethel herself. She knew that now. Evidently the Englishman thought Ethel was one of Fred’s kind. He wasn’t concerned with what happened to her. Ethel’s fear was passing and she was growing angry, ready for fight.
It would be amusing, Ethel thought swiftly, if the Englishman had made a mistake. He is going to save the one who does not want to be saved. “She’s the easy one to get, not me,” she thought proudly. “So he is that sort of a man. He is one of the virtuous ones.
“To hell with him. I have given him this chance. If he doesn’t want to take it, it’s all right with me.” She meant she had given the man the chance to know her, had he really wanted to. “How silly,” she thought afterwards. She had given the man no chance at all.
The Englishman evidently felt responsibility for the woman Helen. She wasn’t, after all, quite helpless, wasn’t quite gone. He got her to her feet and helped her put on her coat. She clung to him. She began to cry. She put up a hand and caressed his cheek. It was evident to Ethel that she was ready to surrender and that the Englishman didn’t want her. “It’s all right. I’ll get a cab and we’ll drive. Presently you’ll be all right,” he said. Earlier in the evening he had found out certain facts about Helen, as he had about Ethel. He knew she was an unmarried woman living somewhere in a suburb with her father and mother. She wasn’t so far gone but that she would know the address of her house. Half holding the woman in his arms he led her out of the apartment and down a flight of stairs.
*
ETHEL was as a person who had been struck a blow. What happened in the apartment that evening happened suddenly. She sat nervously fingering a glass. She was pale. Fred Wells didn’t hesitate. He stood silently, waiting until the other man with the other woman had gone and then came straight at her. “And you.” Partly now he was taking out his wrath at the other man on her. Ethel stood up facing him. Now there was no smile on his face. He was obviously some sort of perverted man, a sadist perhaps. She faced him. In some odd way she rather liked the situation she had got herself into. It was to be a fight. “I’ll see that you do not run out on me,” Fred Wells said. “If you go out of here to-night you will go naked.” He put out his hand swiftly and got a grip on her dress at the neck. With a quick movement he tore the dress. “You’ll have to go naked if you go out of here before I have what I want.”
“You think so?”
Ethel had gone chalky white. There was, as has been suggested, a way in which she rather liked the situation. In the struggle that followed she did not cry out. Her dress got terribly torn. Once during the struggle Fred Wells hit her in the face with his fist and knocked her down. She sprang quickly up. Understanding had come to her quickly. The man before her would not have dared carry on the struggle had she cried out in a loud voice.
There were other people living in the same apartment building. He wanted to conquer her. He did not want her as a normal man wanted a woman. He got them drunk and assaulted them when they were helpless or he got them through terror.
The two people in the apartment struggled silently. Once during the struggle he threw her across a couch in the room in which the four people had been sitting. It hurt her back. She did not feel the hurt much at the moment. That came later. Afterwards for several days, her back was lame.
For just a moment Fred Wells thought he had her. There was a smile of triumph on his face. His eyes were cunning, like the eyes of an animal. She thought — the thought came to her — she was for the moment lying quite passively on the couch his hands holding her there. “I wonder if he got his wife this way,” she thought.
Probably not.
He would, such a man would, with the woman he intended to marry, a woman who had money he wanted, her own kind of power, with such a one he would try to create an impression of manliness in himself.
He might even have talked to her of love. Ethel wanted to laugh. “I love you. You are my darling. You are everything to me.” She remembered that the man had children, he had a small son and a daughter.
He would have tried to create, in his wife’s mind, the impression of being something he knew he couldn’t be and perhaps didn’t want to be, a man of the type of the Englishman who had just left the apartment, “an honorable man,” a man of a sort he was always courting and at the same time despising. He would have tried to create that impression in the one woman’s mind, hating her viciously at the same time.
Taking it out on other women. During the early evening, while they were all dining together at a downtown restaurant, he had kept talking to the Englishman about American women. He had been trying subtly to destroy the man’s respect for American women. He had ke
pt the conversation on a certain low plane, ready to retreat, smiling as he talked. The Englishman had remained curious and puzzled.
The struggle in the apartment did not last long and Ethel thought it was a good thing it didn’t. The man was stronger than she was. At the last perhaps she would have cried out. The man would not have dared hurt her too seriously. He wanted to break her down, to tame her. He was depending on her not wanting it known she was alone with him in his apartment at night.
If he succeeded with her he might even pay her money to keep quiet.
“You are not a fool. You knew what I wanted when you came here.”
There was a sense in which it would be quite true. She had been a fool.
She managed by a quick movement to get free. There was a door into a hallway and she ran along the hallway and into the kitchen of the apartment. Earlier in the evening Fred Wells had been slicing oranges to put into drinks. There was a large knife lying on a table. She threw the kitchen door closed behind her, but she herself opened it for Fred Wells’ entrance, slashing at his face with the knife, just missing his face.
He backed away. She was backing him down a hallway. The hallway was brightly lighted. He could see the look in her eyes. “You bitch,” he said as he backed away from her. “You damn bitch.”
He wasn’t afraid. He was cautious, watching her. His eyes were shining. “I guess you would, you damn bitch,” he said and smiled. He was the sort of man who, if he met her the next week on the street, would raise his hat and smile. “You got the best of me but I may have another chance at you,” his smile would say.
She got her coat and got away, going out of the apartment at a back door. There was a door leading out onto a small balcony at the back and she got through that. He did not try to follow. Afterwards she went down a little iron stairway to a small grass plot at the back of the building.
She did not go at once. For a time she sat on the stairs. There were people sitting in the apartment below the one occupied by Fred Wells. Men and women were sitting quietly in there. There was a baby somewhere in that apartment. She heard it cry.
Men and women were sitting at a card table and one of the women got up and went to the baby.
She heard voices and laughter. Fred Wells would not dare follow her there. “It is one kind of man,” she told herself that night; “perhaps there are not many of that sort.”
She had got out through the yard and a gate and into an alleyway and finally into a street. It was a quiet residential street. She had some money in her coat pocket. The coat partially covered the torn places in her dress. She had lost her hat. There was a car, evidently a private car, with a Negro chauffeur, standing before an apartment building. She went up to the man and thrust a bill into his hand. “I’m in trouble,” she said. “Run get me a cab. You may keep that,” she said, holding out the bill.
She was amused, angry, hurt. It wasn’t the man Fred Wells who had hurt her most.
“I was too sure of myself. I thought the other woman Helen was the naïve one.
“I am myself naïve. I’m a fool.”
“Are you hurt?” the Negro had asked. He was a large man of middle age. There was blood on her cheeks and he could see it in the light from the apartment entrance. One of her eyes was swollen. Afterwards it became black.
Already she was thinking of the tale she would tell when she had got to the place where she had a room. An attempt at robbery, two men had attacked her in the street.
Knocking her down, being quite brutal with her. “They snatched my purse and ran. I don’t want to report it. I don’t want to get my name in the papers.” It would be understood and believed in Chicago.
She told the colored man a tale. She had been fighting with her husband. He laughed. He understood that. He left his car and ran to get her a cab. While he was gone Ethel stood with her back against the wall of a building, standing where the heavier shadows were. Fortunately no one passed to see her, battered and bruised, standing and waiting.
4
IT WAS A summer night and Ethel was lying in bed in her father’s house in Langdon. It was late, long past midnight and the night was hot. She could not sleep. There were words in her, little flocks of words, like birds flying... “a person has to decide, to decide.” What? Thoughts became words. Ethel’s lips moved. “It hurts. It hurts. What you do hurts. What you don’t do hurts.” She had come in late and, being tired from much thinking and feeling, had simply slipped off her clothes in the darkness of her room. Her clothes fell from her, leaving her there naked — what she was. She knew that when she had come in, her father’s wife Blanche had been awake. Ethel and her father both slept in rooms downstairs but Blanche had moved herself upstairs. It was as though she had wanted to get as far away from her husband as possible. Escape from man... for the woman... to escape that.
Ethel had thrown herself, quite naked, on her bed. She felt the house, the room. At times a room in a house becomes a prison. Its walls push against you. Now and then she stirred restlessly. Little waves of feeling ran through her. She had had the feeling, when she had crept into the house, that night, half ashamed, annoyed with herself for what had happened during the evening, that Blanche was awake and had been watching for her return to the house. When Ethel entered, Blanche might even have come softly to the head of the stairs to look down. There was a little light burning in the hallway downstairs and the stairs went up out of the hallway. If Blanche had been up there, looking down, Ethel would have been unable to see her in the darkness above.
Blanche would have waited, perhaps to laugh, and Ethel felt like laughing at herself. It takes a woman to laugh at a woman. Women can really love each other. They dare. Women can hate each other; they can hurt and laugh. They dare. “I might have known it wouldn’t do,” she kept thinking. She was thinking of her evening. There had been another adventure, with another man. “I have done it again.” This had been her third one. Three tries at something with men. Letting them try something — to see if they could. Like the others, it hadn’t worked. She didn’t quite know why.
“He didn’t get me. He didn’t get me.”
What did she mean by that?
What was it to be got? What was it she wanted?
She had thought she wanted this one. It was the young man, Red Oliver, she had been seeing in the library. She had looked at him in there. He kept coming in. The library was open on three evenings a week and he always appeared.
He spoke to her more and more. The library closed at ten and, after eight they were often alone. People had gone to the movies. He helped close for the night. There were windows to be closed, sometimes books to be put away.
If he had really got her. He hadn’t dared. She had got him.
It was because he was too shy, too young, too inexperienced.
She herself hadn’t been patient enough. She didn’t know him.
She might just have used him to find out whether or not she wanted him.
“It was unfair, unfair.”
To find out about another and older man, whether or not she wanted him.
At first the younger one, young Red Oliver, who began coming to the library, looking at her with his young eyes, stirring her, hadn’t dared offer to walk home with her but had left her at the library door. Later he grew a little bolder. He wanted to touch her, ached to touch her. She knew that. “May I walk along with you?” he had asked, awkwardly enough. “Yes. Why not? It will be very pleasant.” She had been quite formal with him. He began walking home with her sometimes at night. The Georgia summer evenings were long. They were hot. When they got to the house there was the judge, her father, sitting on the porch. Blanche was there. Often the judge had gone to sleep in his chair. The nights were hot. There was a swinging couch and Blanche had curled herself up in that. She lay there wide awake, watching.
When Ethel came in, she spoke, having seen young Oliver leave Ethel at the gate. He lingered there, hating to go. He wanted to be Ethel’s lover. She knew that. It was i
n his eyes now, in his shy hesitating speech... a young man in love, with an older woman, suddenly, passionately in love. She could do as she pleased with him.
She could open the gates for him, let him into what he thought would be paradise. It was tempting. “I will have to do it if it is done. I will have to say the word, let him know the gates have opened. He is too shy to push forward,” Ethel thought.
She didn’t think it definitely. She thought it. There was a feeling of being superior to the young man. It was nice. It wasn’t so nice.
“Well,” Blanche said. Her voice was small, sharp and inquiring. “Well,” she said. And “Well,” Ethel replied. The two women looked at each other and Blanche laughed. Ethel did not laugh. She smiled. There was love between the two women. There was hatred.
There was something man seldom understands. When the judge was awake, both women remained silent and Ethel went at once to her room. She got a book and, lying in bed, tried to read. The nights that summer were almost too hot for sleep. The judge had got a radio and on some nights he turned it on. It was in the living-room of the house downstairs. When he had turned it on and had filled the house with voices, he sat beside it and slept. He snored when he slept. Presently Blanche arose and went upstairs. The two women left the judge sitting there, asleep in the chair near the radio. The noises, coming from distant cities, from Chicago where Ethel had lived, from Cincinnati, from St. Louis, did not awaken him. There were men talking about tooth paste, bands played, men made speeches, Negro voices sang. Northern white singers were trying hard, valiantly, to sing like Negroes. The noises went on a long time. “WRYK... CK... coming to you through the courtesy of... change your underwear... get some new underwear....
“Brush your teeth. Go to your dentist.
“Courtesy of.”
Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Langdon, Georgia.
What do you suppose is going on in Chicago to-night? Is it hot up there?
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 158