Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  He was trying to explain something, that he thought the religion the Greeks and Romans had, before Christianity came, was nicer than Christianity because it was more earthy.

  He was telling something he himself did. He had taken a little house out in the country, at a place called Palos Park. It was at the edge of a forest.

  “When out of Palos came the gold To storm the gates of Hercules Was that right?

  He tried to imagine gods there. He tried to be a Greek. “I fail,” he said, “but it’s fun trying.”

  There was a long tale told. The man was describing to two women, trying to describe, how he lived. He painted and then he couldn’t paint, he said. He went to walk.

  There was a small creek and bushes growing at the edge of the creek. He went there and stood. “I close my eyes,” he said. He laughed. “There may be a wind blowing. It blows in bushes.

  “I try to convince myself it isn’t a wind. It is a god or a goddess.

  “It is a goddess. She has come out of the creek. The creek is nice just there. There is a deep hole.

  “There is a low hill.

  “She comes out of the creek, dripping wet. She comes up out of the creek. I have to imagine it. I stand with my eyes closed. The water makes shining spots on her skin.

  “Her skin is lovely. Every painter wants to paint a nude... against trees, against bushes, against grass. She comes up and pushes through the bushes. It isn’t she. It’s a wind blowing.

  “It is she. There you are.”

  That was all Ethel remembered. The man might just have been playing with the two women. He might have been drunk. She went with Harold Grey, that time, to the house of the historian. Some one came and spoke to her and she did not hear any more.

  The morning, after the strange mixed-up night in Langdon, Georgia, it might just have come back to her because the man had spoken of bushes. On that morning, when she stood by a window and looked out she saw a field. She saw bushes growing by a creek. The rain of the night had made the bushes bright green.

  *

  IT was early morning, a hot still morning in Langdon. Already Negro men and women, with their children, were at work in the cotton fields near town. The factory workers of the day shift, in the Langdon cotton mill, had been at work for an hour. A wagon with two mules hitched to it went along the road past Judge Long’s house. The wagon creaked dismally. Three Negro men and two women rode a wagon. The street was not paved. The feet of the mules went softly, nicely in the dust.

  That morning, at work in the cotton mill, Red Oliver was distraught and upset. Something had happened to him. He had thought he was in love. For many nights he had been lying in his own bed in the Oliver house dreaming of a certain event. “If that would happen, if it could happen. If she...

  “It won’t, it can’t happen.

  “I am too young for her. She doesn’t want me.

  “There isn’t any use my thinking of it.” He had thought of the woman, Ethel Long, as older, wiser, more sophisticated than any woman he had ever seen. She must have liked him. Why had she done what she had done?

  She had let it happen there, in the library in the dark. He had never thought it would happen. Even then, at the moment... if she had not been bold. It hadn’t been anything she said. She had let him know, in some quick subtle way, that it could happen. He had been afraid. “I was awkward. If I hadn’t been so damned awkward. I acted as though I didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it.”

  Afterwards he had felt more restless than before. He hadn’t been able to sleep. The way in which, after it happened, she had dismissed him. She had made him feel, not like a man but like a boy. He had been angry, hurt, perplexed.

  After he had left her he had walked about alone for a long time, wanting to curse. There were the letters he had been receiving from his friend Neil Bradley, the Western farmer’s son, who was now in love with a school teacher out there, the things that happened to them. The letters had kept coming that summer. They might have had something to do with the state into which Red had got.

  A man tells another man, “I’ve got me something nice.”

  He starts thoughts.

  Thoughts get started.

  Could a woman do such a thing to a man, even to a man so much younger than herself, taking him and not taking him, even using him...

  As though to try out something for herself. “I’ll see if this suits me, if this is what I want.”

  Could a person live like that, thinking only, “Do I want it? Will it be good for me?”

  Another person involved in it.

  Red Oliver had tramped about alone in the dark of the hot Southern night after the rain. He went out past the Long house. The house was away out, near the edge of town. There were no pavements out there. He had got off the sidewalk, not wanting to make any noise and had walked in the road, in the mud of the road. He had stood before the house. A stray dog came along. The dog approached and then ran away. There was a street light, nearly a block away. The dog ran to the street light and then, turning, stood and barked.

  “If a man had guts.”

  Suppose he could go to the door and knock. “I want to see Ethel Long.

  “You come out here. I’m not through with you yet.

  “If a man could be a man.”

  Red had stood there in the road thinking of the woman he had been with, with whom he had been so intimate without being at all intimate. Could it be that the woman had come home and had gone quietly to sleep, after that, after she had dismissed him? The thought had angered him and he walked away swearing. All that night and all the next day as he tried to do his work he swung back and forth. He blamed himself for what had happened and then his mood changed. He blamed the woman. “She is older than I am. She should have known what she wanted.” In the early morning, just at daybreak, he had got out of bed. He wrote Ethel a long letter that was never sent and in it he expressed the queer feeling of defeat she had given him. He wrote the letter and then tore it up and wrote another. The second letter expressed nothing but love and longing. He took all the blame on himself. “It was in some way not nice. It was my fault. Please let me come to you again. Please. Please. Let’s try once more.”

  He also tore that letter up.

  In the Long house there was no formal breakfast. The judge’s new wife had done away with that. In the morning, breakfast was taken about to the rooms on trays. A colored woman, a tall woman with big hands and feet and with thick lips, brought Ethel’s breakfast that morning. There was fruit juice in a glass and coffee and toast. Ethel’s father would have had hot bread. He would have demanded hot bread. He took a sincere interest in food, was always talking about it, as though to say, “I take my stand. Here I take my stand. I’m Southern. Here I take my stand.”

  He kept talking about the coffee. “It isn’t good. Why can’t I have good coffee?” When he went out to dinner, to the Rotary Club, he came home and spoke of it. “We had good coffee,” he said. “We had wonderful coffee.”

  The bathroom in the Long house was on the ground floor, near Ethel’s room, and that morning she had been up and in the bath at six. She took it cold. It was nice. She plunged in. It wasn’t cold enough.

  Her father was already up. He was one of the sort of men who cannot sleep after daylight comes. It comes very early in Georgia in summer. “I have to have the early morning air,” he said. “It’s the best time of the day to get out and breathe.” He got out of bed and tiptoed about the house. He went out of the house. He still kept a cow and went to see the cow milked. A colored man came at an early hour. He got the cow out of the field, the field near the house, the field to which the judge had once gone in anger seeking his daughter Ethel, that time she went there to meet the boy. He hadn’t seen the boy but was sure he was there. He had always thought that.

  “But what’s the use thinking? What’s the use trying to make anything out of women?”

  He could talk to the man who had brought the cow. A cow he had owned two or th
ree years before had got a disease called “hollow tail.” There wasn’t any veterinary in Langdon and the colored man said the tail would have to be cut open. He explained. “You cut the tail open lengthwise. Then you put in salt and pepper.” Judge Long laughed but he let the man do it. The cow died.

  Now he had got another cow, a half Jersey. She had a broken horn. When her time came, would it be better to breed her to a Jersey bull or to some other sort? There was a man, a half mile in the country, who had a fine Holstein bull. The colored man thought he would be a better bull. “The Holsteins give more milk,” he said. It made something to talk about. It was homey and nice talking to the colored man about something of the sort in the morning.

  A boy came bringing the Atlanta Constitution and threw it on the porch. He ran across the judge’s lawn, having left his bicycle at the fence, and then he threw the paper. It had been folded and fell with a thump. The judge went to get it and, putting on his glasses, sat on the porch reading.

  It was nice in the yard thus, in the early morning, neither of the judge’s perplexing women about, only the colored man there. The colored man, who milked and cared for the cow, also did other jobs about the house and yard. In the winter he brought wood for the fireplaces in the house and in the summer he mowed and sprinkled the lawn and the flower beds.

  He worked about the flower beds in the yard, the judge watching and giving directions. Judge Long was passionately devoted to flowers and to flowering bushes. He knew about such things. When he had been a younger man he had made a study of birds and knew hundreds of birds by sight and by their songs. Only one of his children had been interested. It was the son who was killed in the World War.

  His wife Blanche never seemed to see birds and she did not seem to see flowers. She wouldn’t have noticed if they had all been suddenly destroyed.

  He had manure brought and put about the roots of the bushes. He got the hose and watered the bushes, the flowers and the grass as the colored man pottered about. They talked. It was nice. The judge had no men friends. If the colored man had not been a colored man...

  The judge never thought of that. The two men saw and felt things in the same way. To the judge the bushes and flowers and the grass were living things. “He wants a drink, too,” the colored man said, pointing at a particular bush. He made some of the bushes masculine, some feminine, as the fancy struck him. “Give her a little drop, Judge.” The judge laughed. He liked it. “A little for him now.”

  The judge’s wife, Blanche, never got out of bed before noon. After she had married the judge, she got the habit of lying in bed in the morning and smoking cigarettes. The habit shocked him. She told Ethel that, before she married, she had smoked in secret. “I used to sit in my room smoking late at night and I blew the smoke out the window,” she said. “In the winter I blew it into the fireplace. I used to lie on my belly on the floor smoking. I didn’t dare let any one know, least of all your father, who was on the school board. Every one thought I was a nice woman then.”

  Blanche had burned any number of holes in the bed cover of her bed. She didn’t care. “To hell with the bed covers,” she thought. She did not read. In the morning she stayed in bed, smoking cigarettes and staring out a window at the sky. After marriage and after her husband found out about her smoking, she made a concession. She quit smoking in his presence. “I wouldn’t do that, Blanche,” he had said, rather pleadingly.

  “Why?”

  “People will talk. They won’t understand.”

  “Won’t understand what?”

  “Won’t understand that you are a nice woman.”

  “I’m not,” she had said brusquely.

  She had enjoyed telling Ethel how she had fooled the town and her husband, Ethel’s father. Ethel tried to think of her as she must have been then, as a younger woman, or as a young girl. “It’s all a lie, the picture she makes of herself as she was,” Ethel thought. She might even have been nice, quite nice, quite jolly and alive. Ethel saw, in fancy, a young blonde woman, slender and pretty, alive, rather daring and unscrupulous. “She would have been then terribly eager, as I was myself, ready to take a chance. Nothing offered that she wanted.” She had got her eye on the judge. “What am I to do, go on forever being a school teacher?” she would have asked herself. The judge was on the county school board. She had met him at some function. Once a year one of the civic clubs of the town, either the Rotary or the Kiwanis Club, gave a dinner for all the white school teachers. She would have got her eye on the judge. His wife was dead.

  After all a man is a man. What works on one will work on another. You keep telling an older man how young he looks... not too often but you slip it in. “You are nothing but a boy. You need some one to care for you.” It works all right.

  She had written the judge a very sympathetic letter when his son died. They began seeing each other in secret. He was lonely.

  Without a doubt there was something between Ethel and Blanche. It concerned men. It is between all women.

  Blanche had gone too far. She had been a fool. Just the same there had been something about the scene in the room, on the night before Ethel left her father’s house for good, that was pathetic. It had been Blanche’s determination, a kind of insane determination. “I am going to have something. I am not going to be absolutely robbed.

  “I am going to have you.”

  *

  IF Ethel’s father had come into the room at that moment, when Blanche was clinging to Ethel.. Ethel could imagine the scene. Blanche getting to her feet. She wouldn’t have cared. Even though daylight came very early in the summer in Langdon, Ethel had plenty of time to think before daylight came, that night when she decided to leave that house.

  Her father, as usual, had got up early. He was sitting on the front porch of his house, reading his newspaper. There was a colored cook in the house, the wife of the yard man. She carried the judge’s breakfast around the house and put it on a little table beside him. This was his time of the day. The two colored people hung about. The judge made little comments on the news. It was the year 1930. The paper was full of the industrial depression that had come on during the fall before. “I never bought a share of any kind of stock in my life,” Ethel’s father said aloud. “Nor I,” the Negro yard man said, and the judge laughed. There was that yard man, that Negro, talking about buying stocks. “Nor I.” It was a joke. The judge gave the Negro man advice. “Well, you let it alone.” His tone was serious... mockingly serious. “Don’t you go buying stocks on margin, now will you?”

  “No sah, no sah, I jes won’ do dat, Jedge.”

  There was the little chuckling laughter of Ethel’s father, playing with the colored man, his friend really. The two old colored people were sorry for the judge. He had got caught. There was no way for him to escape. They knew that. Negroes might be naive but they weren’t fools. The Negro man knew well enough he was amusing the judge.

  Ethel knew something, too. She ate her breakfast slowly that morning and dressed slowly. There was a huge closet in the room she occupied, and her trunks were in there. They had been put in the closet when she came home from Chicago. She packed them. “I’ll send for them later in the day,” she thought.

  There was no use saying anything to her father. She had made up her mind what she was going to do. She was going to try a marriage with Tom Riddle. “I guess I will. If he is still willing, I guess I will.”

  It was a queer comfortable feeling. “I don’t care,” she told herself. “I’ll even tell him about last night in the library. I’ll see if he’ll stand that. If he won’t... I’ll attend to that when I come to it.

  “That’s the way. ‘Tend to things as you come to them.’

  “I may, and I may not.”

  She went about her room being very particular about her costume.

  “What about this hat? It’s a bit out of shape.” She put it on and studied herself in the glass. “I look pretty good. I don’t look very tired.” She decided on a red summer dress. It wa
s rather flaming but it did something nice to her face. It emphasized the dark olive tones in her skin. “The cheeks want a bit of color,” she thought.

  Ordinarily, after such a night as she had been through, she would have looked worn-out, but that morning she didn’t.

  The fact surprised her. She kept being surprised at herself.

  “What queer moods I have been in,” she told herself as she went about her room. After the cook came in with her breakfast on a tray, she bolted the door. Would the woman Blanche be fool enough to come downstairs and say something about the occurrence of the night before, try to explain or apologize? Suppose Blanche should try to do that. It would spoil everything. “No,” Ethel told herself. “She has too much sense, too much real nerve for that. She isn’t that sort.” It was a nice feeling, almost liking Blanche. “She has a right to be what she is,” Ethel thought. She elaborated the thought a little. It explained a lot in life. “Let every one be what he is. If a man wants to think he is good (she was thinking of her father), let him think so. People may even think they are Christians, if it does them any good, if it comforts them any.”

  The thought was a comfort. She arranged and rearranged her hair. There was a little, tight-fitting red hat that went with the dress she had put on. She heightened the color in her cheeks a bit and then her lips.

  “If it can’t be the feeling I had for that boy, that kind of hungry longing, rather senseless, such as animals have, perhaps it can be something else.”

  Tom Riddle was a true realist, even a courageous one. “We are a good deal alike at bottom.” How nice it had been of him to keep his self-respect all during his courtship! He hadn’t tried to touch her, to work on her senses. He had been frank. “We might be able to hit it off,” Ethel thought. It would be a gamble. He would know it was a gamble. She remembered with gratitude the older man’s words...

  “You may not be able to love me. I don’t know what love is. I am no youngster. No one ever called me a handsome man.”