He had to give her some explanation. They wouldn’t know him. They might even think he was some sort of a spy. “Wait until morning,” he had said to her. “You leave me here,” he whispered, when they came silently to the place where he afterwards tried to sleep. “I’ll go and tell them after awhile.” He had thought vaguely, “I’ll go to them. I will ask them to give me something dangerous to do here.” He felt brave. He wanted to serve or, at least, at the moment when he was with Molly at the edge of the camp, he thought he wanted to serve.
“What?
“Well, maybe.”
Something a little vague in him. She had been very, very nice. She went and got him a blanket, perhaps her own blanket, the only one she had. She went away to a little tent where she was to spend the night with some other working-women. “She’s nice,” he thought, “damn, she’s nice.
“I wish I could be something real,” he thought.
7
THE NIGHT WAS passing. Red Oliver was alone. He was in a state of feverish uncertainty. He had got to the place toward which he had been going for a long time. It wasn’t just a place. Was it a chance, at last, to motivate his own life? Men wanting pregnancy as well as women, eh? Something like that. Since he had left Langdon, Georgia, he had been like a moth flying about a flame. He wanted to approach — what? “This communism — is that the answer?”
Could it be made a kind of religion?
The religion the Western world had given itself to wouldn’t do. It had got, in some queer way, corrupt — no good now. Even the preachers knew it. “Look at them — do they walk with fine dignity?
“You can’t bargain like that — promise of immortality — after this life you shall live again. The truly religious man wants to throw away everything — he asks no promise from God.
“Wouldn’t it be better — if you could do it — if you could find some way to do it, to throw away your life for the sake of a better life here — not over there?” A flourish — a gesture. “Live as a bird flies. Die as a male bee dies — in nuptial flight with life, eh?
“There’s something somewhere that’s worth living for — dying for. Is it this thing called communism?”
Red wanted to approach, to try giving himself to that. He was afraid to approach. He was there at the edge of the camp. There was still a chance to leave — to light out. He could creep away unobserved. No one but Molly Seabright would know. Even his friend Neil Bradley wouldn’t know. He and Neil had talked pretty big sometimes. He wouldn’t have to say even to Neil, “I tried but I failed.” He could just lie low, keep numb.
Things kept happening, inside himself, outside himself. When he had given up trying to sleep, he sat listening. All his senses on that night seemed extraordinarily alive. He could hear the low voices of people talking in the small rudely constructed hut in the midst of the camp. He knew nothing of what was going on. Now and then he could see shadowy figures in a narrow little street of the camp.
He was alive. The tree against which his back rested was outside the circle of the camp. Within the camp the small trees and bushes had been cut away, but at the camp’s edge they began again. He sat on one of the boards he had found and on which earlier he had tried to sleep. The blanket Molly had brought was wrapped about his shoulders.
The seeing of the woman Molly, his being with her, the feelings that had come, being in her woman’s presence, all of this was but an incident, but at the same time it was important. He felt the night, still hanging over the camp, pregnant like a woman. A man went toward a certain thing — like communism. He was uncertain. He ran forward a little, stopped, turned back, then went forward again. Until he had crossed a certain line, that committed him, he could always turn back.
“Cæsar crossed the Rubicon.
“O, mighty Cæsar.
“Oh, yeaas!
“I’ll be damned. I don’t believe there ever was a mighty man.
“By God... if there ever was one... world march on... thump, thump... world come to your knees now. Here’s a man.
“Well, anyway it’s not me,” Red thought. “Don’t begin to think big now,” he warned himself.
There was just the trouble — his own boyishness. He was always imagining things — some heroic act he had done or was about to do... he saw a woman — he thought, “Suppose she should suddenly — unexpectedly — fall in love with me.” He had done it that very night — the workingwoman he had been with. He smiled, a bit sadly, thinking of it.
That was the idea. You thought out certain things. Perhaps you even talked a little to others as Red Oliver had talked to Neil Bradley — the one close man friend he had made... as he had tried to talk to the woman with whom he thought he was in love — to Ethel Long.
Red had never been able to talk much to Ethel Long, couldn’t get his ideas explained when he was with her. It was partly because they were half formed in his own mind and partly because he was always excited when he was with her... wanting, wanting, wanting...
“Well... she... will she let me?”...
*
IN the communist camp near Birchfield, across the river from the Birchfield mills, there was an undertone of excitement. Red felt it. Voices kept coming from the rude little hut where, evidently, the leading spirits among the strikers were congregating. Shadowy figures hurried through the camp.
Two men went out of the camp and crossed the bridge that led away into the town. Red saw them go. There was a little light from a waning moon. Daylight would come soon now. He could hear footsteps on the bridge. The two men were going into town. They were scouts sent out by the strike leaders. Red imagined that. He didn’t know.
There had been rumors in the camp that day, on the Sunday while Molly Seabright was away, while she was at home over the week-end with her own people. The struggle at Birchfield had been carried on between the strikers and deputy sheriffs appointed by the sheriff of the county of North Carolina in which Birchfield lay. There had been, from the local newspaper, the mayor of the town, a call sent to the Governor of the State for troops but the Governor was a liberal. He half wanted to stand by labor. There were liberal newspapers in the State. “Even a communist has some rights in a free country,” they said. “A man or woman has a right to be a communist if he wants to.”
The Governor had wanted to be impartial. He was himself a mill owner. He didn’t want people to be able to say— “There, you see.” He even wanted secretly to lean far back, get the name of being the most open-minded and liberal Governor in the whole Union— “these States,” as Walt Whitman had said.
He had found he couldn’t. There was too much pressure. Now it was said that the State was coming in. Soldiers were coming. The strikers had even been allowed to picket the mill. They could picket if they stayed a certain distance from the mill gate, if they stayed out of the mill village. Now all was to be stopped. An injunction had been issued. The soldiers were coming. The strikers were to be hemmed in. “Stay in your own camp. Rot there.” That was the cry now.
But what good is a strike if you can’t picket? The new move meant, if the rumor was true, that the communists were blocked. There would be a new turn to things now. That was the trouble with all this business of being a communist. You got blocked.
“I’ll tell you what — these poor workers — they are being led into a trap,” the mill owners had begun saying. Committees of citizens had gone to see the Governor. There were mill owners among them. “We are not against unions,” they had now begun saying. They even praised unions, the right kind of unions. “This communism is un-American,” they said. “Its aim is to destroy our institutions, you see.” One of them took the Governor aside. “If anything happens and it will happen... already there have been riots, people hurt... the citizens themselves will not stand for this communism. If a few citizens, upright men and women, are killed — you know who will be blamed.”
It was the trouble with anything in America that had any kick. Red Oliver had begun to realize that. He was one of man
y thousands of young Americans beginning to realize it a little. “Suppose, for example, you were a man in America who really wanted God — suppose, you wanted to try really to be a Christian — a God man.
“How could you do that? All society would be against you. Even the church wouldn’t stand that — it couldn’t.
“Just the same there must have been — once — when the world was younger — when men were more naïve — there must have been godly men, willing and ready enough to die for God. They might even have wanted to.”
*
IN reality Red knew quite a lot. He had got a dose of his own limitations and that experience had perhaps taught him something. It had happened at Langdon.
There had come a strike at Langdon and he was in it and not in it. He tried to get in. It wasn’t a communist strike. There had been a riot in the early morning in front of the plant at Langdon. They were trying to bring in new workers, “scabs,” the strikers called them. They were only poor people out of work. They had come flocking into Langdon from the hills. All they knew was that jobs were being offered. It was a time when jobs were getting scarce. There had been fighting and Red had fought. The people he had come to know a little — not very well — men and women in the plant with whom he had worked — were fighting with other men and women. There were screams and cries. A crowd had surged out to the plant from town. They came racing out in cars. It was early morning and men of the town jumped out of their beds, sprang into their cars and raced out there. Deputy sheriffs, appointed to protect the plant, were in it and Red got in.
That morning he had just gone out there, being curious. The plant had been closed a week and word had been sent out that it was to be opened with new workers. The old workers of the plant were all there. Most of them were pale and silent. A man stood with his fists in the air, swearing. Many of the town people did not get out of their cars. They shouted and cursed the strikers. There were women attacking other women. Dresses were being torn and hair pulled. There was no shooting, but deputy sheriffs ran about waving guns and shouting.
Red had got into it. He sprang in. The amazing thing about it all... it was amusing really... it made him want to cry afterward, when he realized it... was that, although he had fought furiously, in the midst of a mob of people, fists flying, himself taking blows, giving blows, women even attacking men... no one of the town of Langdon knew and even the workers did not know that Red Oliver was in there fighting thus on the side of the strikers.
Things got like that sometimes in life. Life played that kind of a damned joke on a man.
The point was that afterwards, when the fight was over, when some of the strikers had been dragged off to the town jail in Langdon, when the strikers were defeated, dispersed... some of them fighting furiously to the last and others caving in... when it was all over that morning there was no one, either among the workers or among the town people, who even suspected that Red Oliver had been fighting so furiously on the workers’ side, and then, when all was quiet, he had lost his nerve.
There had been a chance. He hadn’t left Langdon at once. After a few days, the strikers, who had been arrested, were brought up for trial. There they were in court. They had been kept in the town jail since the riot. The strikers had formed a union but the union leader had been rather like Red. When the test came he had thrown up his hands. He had declared that he hadn’t wanted trouble. He had been advising, begging the strikers to remain quiet. He had been lecturing them in meetings. He was one of the kind of leaders who wanted to sit at a council table with the employers, but the strikers had got out of hand. When they saw people taking their places they couldn’t stand it. The union leader got out of town. The strike was broken.
There remained the people in jail, who were to come up for trial. Red had been going through a curious struggle with himself. All the town, the people of the town, took it for granted he had been in the fight on the town’s side, on the side of property and of the mill owners. He had got a black eye. Men meeting him on the street laughed and slapped him on the back. “Good boy,” they said, “you got it, didn’t you?”
The men of the town, most of whom had no money interest in the mill, took the whole thing as an adventure. There had been a fight and they had won. They felt it their own victory. As for the people in the jail, who were they, what were they? They were poor mill hands, no-good poor whites, lint-heads. They were to be tried in court. No doubt they would get heavy jail sentences. There were women workers of the mill, women like the one named Doris who had attracted Red’s attention and the blonde woman named Nell who had also attracted him who would be sent away to prison. The woman named Doris had a husband and a baby and Red wondered about that. If she had to go for a long term in prison, would she take the baby with her?
For what? For fighting for the right to work, to make a living. The thought of it sickened Red. The thought of the position into which he had got himself sickened him. He had begun keeping off the streets of the town. In the daytime, during that curious period of his life, he was restless and went to walk all day alone in the pine forest about Langdon and at night he could not sleep. A dozen times, during the week after the strike and before the day came when the strikers were to be brought to trial, he came to a strong resolution. He would go into the court. He would even ask to be arrested and thrown into jail with the strikers. He would say that he had been fighting on their side. What they had done he had done. He wouldn’t wait until the time for the trial but would go at once to the judge or to the sheriff of the county and tell the truth. “Arrest me also,” he would say, “I was on the side of the workers, I fought on their side.” Once or twice Red had even got out of bed at night and had partially dressed, determined to go down into the town, to awaken the sheriff, to tell his story.
He didn’t. He had caved in. The whole notion had seemed to him, most of the time, silly. He would only be playing a heroic rôle, making a silly ass of himself. “Anyway I fought for them. Whether any one knows it or not, I did,” he told himself. In the end, unable longer to bear his own thoughts, he had left Langdon, hadn’t even told his mother where he was going. He didn’t know. It was night and he had packed a few things in a little bag and had left the house. He had a little money in his pocket, a few dollars. He left Langdon.
“Where am I going?” he had kept asking himself. He bought newspapers and had read about the communist strike at Birchfield. Was he a complete coward? He didn’t know. He wanted to test himself. There had been moments, since he had left Langdon, when, if some one had suddenly come up to him saying— “Who are you? what are you worth? — he would have answered:
“Nothing — I am worth nothing. I am cheaper than the cheapest man in the world.”
Red had been through another experience that he remembered with shame. It wasn’t much of an experience after all. It was unimportant. It was terribly important.
It had happened in the camp of the tramps, in the place where he had heard the bleary-eyed man talking of the killing of the singing woman on the streets of Birchfield. He had been going toward Birchfield, hitch-hiking his way along and beating his way on freight trains. For the time he lived as tramps lived, as the unemployed live. He had got in with another young fellow of about his own age. He was a pale young man with feverish eyes. Like the bleary-eyed man he was very profane. Oaths fell constantly from his lips, but Red liked him. The two young men had met at the edge of a Georgia town and had climbed aboard a freight train that was crawling slowly toward the city of Atlanta.
Red was curious about his companion. The man looked ill. They got into a box car. There were at least a dozen other men in the car. There were whites and blacks. The blacks stayed in one end of the car and the whites in the other. There was, however, a feeling of friendliness. Jokes and talk went back and forth.
Red still had seven dollars of the money he had brought from home. He had a guilty feeling about it. He was afraid. If this crowd knew it they would rob him, he thought. He had the bills tucked
away in his shoes. “I’ll keep mum about it,” he decided. The train went slowly north and at last stopped at a small town, but a short distance from the city. It was late in the afternoon and the young man, who had attached himself to Red, told him they had better get off there. All the others would be getting off. In Southern towns and cities, tramps and men out of work were often arrested and given jail sentences. They put them to work on the Georgia roads. Red and his companion got out of the car and all along the train — it was a long one — he could see other men, whites and blacks, jumping to the ground.
The young man he was with stuck to Red. When they were in the car he had whispered. “You got any money,” he had asked and Red had shaken his head. The moment Red did it he was ashamed. “Still I’d better stick to it now,” he thought. A little army of men, the whites in one group and the blacks in another, went along the tracks and turned across a field. They went into a little pine wood. There were evidently veteran tramps among the men and they knew what they were doing. They called to the others, “Come on,” they said. There was a tramps’ hang-out at that place — a jungle. There was a little stream and inside the woods an open place covered with pine needles. There were no houses near. Some of the men made fires and began to cook food. They took scraps of meat and bread, wrapped in old newspapers, out of their pockets. There were crude cooking utensils lying about, empty vegetable cans blackened by old fires. There were little piles of blackened bricks and stones other wanderers had gathered together.
The man who had attached himself to Red called him aside. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here. There ain’t nothing here for us,” he said. He went across the field swearing and Red followed him. “I get tired of these dirty bastards,” he declared. They got out on the railroad track quite near the town and the young man told Red to wait. He disappeared along the street. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 171