Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Red sat on the track, waiting, and presently his companion reappeared. He had a loaf of bread and two dried herring. “I got it for fifteen cents. That was my pile. I panhandled it out of a fat son-of-a-bitch in a town back there, before I met up with you.” He made a jerking movement with his thumb back along the track. “We had better eat it here,” he said. “There’s too many in that crowd of dirty bastards.” He meant the men in the jungle. The two young men sat on railroad ties and ate. Again shame took possession of Red. The bread was bitter in his mouth.

  He kept thinking of the money in his shoes. Suppose they had robbed me. “What of it?” he thought. He wanted to tell the young man, “Look here, I’ve got seven dollars.” His companion would perhaps have wanted to go on a bust.

  He would have wanted to get liquor. Red had thought, “I’ll make the money go as far as I can.” Now it seemed to burn the flesh inside his shoes. His companion kept talking cheerfully, but Red grew silent. When they had finished eating he followed the man back to the camp. Shame had taken complete possession of Red. “We got a hand-out,” Red’s companion said to the men sitting about the little fires. There might have been fifteen men gathered in the camp. Some of them had food, others didn’t. Those who had food divided.

  Red could hear the Voices of the Negro tramps in another camp near by. There was laughter over there. A Negro’s voice began to sing softly, and Red thought sweetly.

  One of the men in the white man’s camp spoke to Red’s companion. He was a tall middle-aged man. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he asked. “You look like hell,” he said.

  Red’s companion grinned. “I got the syph,” he said, grinning. “It’s eating me up.”

  There was a general discussion of the disease that had attacked the man and Red drew away to another side and sat listening. Some of the men in the camp began telling of their experiences with the same disease and how they got it. The mind of the tall man took a practical turn. He jumped up. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I’ll tell you how to get cured.”

  “You get into jail,” he said. He didn’t laugh. He meant it. “Now I’ll tell you what to do,” he continued, pointing along the railroad track toward the city of Atlanta.

  “Well, you go in there. So there you are. You walk along the street.” The tall man was something of an actor. He walked up and down. “You have a stone in your pocket — see.” There was the half of a burned brick lying near by and he picked it up but the brick was hot and he dropped it quickly. The other men in the camp laughed, but the tall man was absorbed. He got a stone and put it into the side pocket of his torn coat. “You see,” he said. Now he took the stone out of his pocket and with a wide movement of his arm threw it aside through bushes into the little stream that ran near the camp. His earnestness made the other men in the camp smile. He ignored them. “So you are walking along a street of stores. You see. You get into a fashionable street. You pick out a street where the best stores are. Then you hurl your brick or stone through the window. You don’t run. You stand there. If the store-keeper comes out you tell him to go to hell.” The man had been walking up and down. Now he stood as though defying a crowd. “You might as well smash the window of some rich son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

  “So — you see — you get arrested. They put you in jail... you see — they cure your syphilis in there. It’s the best way,” he said. “If you are just broke they won’t pay any attention to you. In the jail they got a doctor. A doctor comes in there. It’s the best way.”

  Red had crept away from the camp of tramps and from his companion and after walking a half mile along a road, inquiring his way, he got a street car. The seven dollars in his shoe annoyed and hurt him and he stepped aside behind some bushes and took it out. Some of the men he had been with since he had become a wanderer had laughed at him because of the small bag he carried, but on that day there had been in the crowd a man carrying something even more strange, and the attention of the crowd had been centered upon him. The man said he was a newspaper reporter out of work and was going to try to catch on in Atlanta. He carried a small portable typewriter. “Look at him,” the others in the camp shouted. “Ain’t we getting swell? We are getting high-brow.” Red had wanted to run into the camp that evening and give the men gathered there his seven dollars. “What does it matter to me what they do with it?” he thought. “Suppose they get drunk — what the hell do I care?” When he had got some distance from the camp he went hesitatingly back. It would have been easy enough if he had only told them earlier in the day. For several hours he had been with the men. Some of them were hungry. Just the same if he went back and stood before the men, taking the seven dollars out of his pocket— “Here, you men... take this.”

  How silly!

  He would be most ashamed before the young fellow who had spent his last fifteen cents buying the bread and herring. When he got again to the edge of the camp the men gathered there had become quiet. They had built a little fire of sticks and were lying about. Many of them would sleep there on the pine needles. They were gathered in little groups, some talking softly and others stretched out already asleep on the ground. It was then Red heard the story of the death of the singing woman at Birchfield from the lips of the bleary-eyed man. The young man who had syphilis had disappeared. Red wondered if he had already gone off to the city to smash the store window and get himself arrested and put into jail.

  No one had spoken to Red when he returned to the edge of the camp. He held the money in his hand. No one looked at him. He stood leaning against a tree holding the money, a little ball of bills, gripped in his fingers. “What’ll I do?” he thought. Some of those in the camp were veteran tramps but many of them were men out of work, not young men like himself, adventuring, trying to find out about themselves, seeking something, but just mature men with no work, drifting about the country, seeking work. It would have been something wonderful, Red thought, that night, if there had been something of the actor in himself as in the tall man, if he could have gone to stand before the group at the fire. He might have told a lie, as he did afterwards when he met Molly Seabright. “Look here, I found this money,” or “I held up a man.” That would have sounded big and fine, being a hold-up man. He would have got admiration. What happened was that he did nothing. He stood leaning against the tree embarrassed, shaking with shame and then, not knowing how to do what he wanted to do, went quietly away. When he got into the city that night he was still ashamed. He wished he had thrown the money in among the men and then run. He got a bed that night in the Y. M. C. A. building in Atlanta, and when he had got into bed he again took the money out of his pocket and held it in his hand looking at it. “Hell,” he thought, “men think they want money. It only gets you into trouble. It makes a fool out of you,” he decided. Just the same, already, after a week on the road, he had got to the place where seven dollars seemed almost a fortune. “It doesn’t take much money to make a man pretty cheap,” he had thought.

  8

  THEY WERE THE same boy — the same young man — that was the queer part of it. They were American young men and had read the same magazines and newspapers... heard the same talks on the radio... political conventions... the man who... Amos and Andy... Mr. Hoover at Arlington, Mr. Harding and Mr. Wilson at Arlington... America the hope of the world... the eyes of the world upon us... “this rugged individualism.” They had seen the same talkies. Life keeps moving, too. Stand aside and see it move. Stand aside and see the glory of the Lord.

  “Have you seen Ford’s new car? Charley Schwab says we are all poor together now. Oh yeaas!”

  Naturally the two young men had gone through many of the same experiences — boyhood loves — material for later novels, if they had happened to be novelists — school — baseball — going swimming in the summer — not, of course, in the same creek, river, lake, pond... the economic urges, drifts, pushes that make men — that seem so like the accidents of life — are they accidents? “The next revolution that comes w
ill be economic, not political.” Talk in drug stores, in court houses, on streets.

  A young man gets his dad’s car in the evening. Ned Sawyer had done that more than Red. He was a young man who felt freer — moved more freely in the atmosphere into which he was born.

  His mother and father felt freer in their atmosphere — neither of them ever having been poor or having been of working people like Red Oliver’s mother. They were respected, looked up to. They subscribed. Ned’s father was never a drunkard. He had never been a chaser of loose women. The mother was soft speaking and gentle. She was a good church member.

  If you are a young man like Ned Sawyer, nowadays, you get the family car in the evening and drive out into the country. You pick up a girl. The automobile has certainly changed life. With some girls you can go in for big petting. With some you can’t.

  It’s a problem for the girls, too — to pet or not to pet. How far is it safe to go? What is the best line?

  If you are a young man you pass through times of depression. Some young men like to read books. They go in for being intellectuals. They like to get into a room with books and read and then later they go out and talk bookish talk while other young men are all for action. They have got to be doing something or they’ll bust. Extraverts and introverts, hello.

  Some young men go big with women while others do not. You can never tell what will get a woman.

  The two young men who met so strangely, tragically, one morning in a town called Birchfield, in North Carolina, didn’t know they were so much alike. They had never before seen each other or heard of each other. How were they to know they were so much alike?

  Were they both just ordinary young American middle-class men? Well, you can’t blame yourself, being middle-class, if you are an American. Isn’t America the greatest middle-class country on earth? Haven’t its people more middle-class comforts than any other people on earth?

  “Sure.”

  The one young man was named Ned Sawyer and the other Red Oliver. One was the son of a North Carolina smalltown lawyer and the other the son of a Georgia small-town doctor. One was rather stockily built, a broad-shouldered young man with thick, rather stiff red hair and with troubled questioning gray-blue eyes, while the other was tall and slender. He had yellow hair and gray eyes that also occasionally grew questioning and troubled.

  With Ned Sawyer it wasn’t a question of communism. It wasn’t that definite with him. “Damn communism,” he would have said. He didn’t know about it and didn’t want to know about it. He thought of it as something un-American — strange and ugly. However, there were disturbing things in his life, too. There was something going on in America in his day, an under-current of questionings pretty much voiceless yet, that disturbed him. He didn’t want to be disturbed. “Why can’t we, in America, go on just as we have always gone on?” was about what he thought. He had heard of communism and thought of it as something strange and foreign to American life. He even talked about it now and then to other young men he knew. He made pronouncements. “It’s foreign to our way of thought,” he said. “So? You think? Yes, we believe in individualism here in America. Give every man a chance and let the devil take the hindmost. That’s our way. If, in America, we don’t like a law we break it and have a good laugh. That’s our way.” Ned was himself half intellectual. He had read Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Selfreliance, that’s what I stand for.”

  “But,” a young man friend said to him. “But?”

  One of the two young men, mentioned above, shot the other. He killed him. It all happened in this way....

  The one young man — the one named Ned Sawyer — had joined up with the military company of his town. He had been too young to get into the World War, just as had Red Oliver. It wasn’t that he thought of war-wanting — wanting killing and all that. He didn’t. There wasn’t anything cruel or savage about Ned. He liked the idea... a company of men swinging along a street or along a road, all in uniform, himself one of them — himself in command.

  Wouldn’t it be strange if this individualism we Americans so love to talk about was something we don’t want after all?

  There is a gang spirit in America, too —

  Ned Sawyer had gone to college as Red Oliver had. He also played baseball in college. He was a pitcher while Red played shortstop and sometimes second base. Ned was a pretty good pitcher. He had a fast ball with a little hop on it and a tantalizing slow ball. He was a rather nice, steady curve-ball pitcher.

  One summer, while he was still in college, he went to an officers’ training camp. He liked it. He liked commanding men and later, when he was back again in his own home town, he got elected, or appointed, first lieutenant of the military company of his town.

  It was nice. He liked it.

  “Fours-right into line.”

  “Present arms!” Ned had a good voice for it. He could bark it out — sharp and nice-like. —

  It was a nice feeling. You took the young men, your company, awkward fellows — white men from the farms near the town and young fellows from town — and you drilled them up by the schoolhouse, in the vacant lot up there. You took them swinging down Cherry Street into Main.

  They were awkward and you made them not awkward. “Come on, now! Try that again! Catch it! Catch it!

  “One, two, three, four! Count it off in your own minds like that! Make it snappy, now! One, two, three, four!”

  It was nice, nice — in the evening in the summer, taking the men thus out into the street. Up in the hall, in the big town hall in the winter, it wasn’t quite so gaudy. You felt shut in up there. You got tired of it. There wasn’t any one watching as you drilled the men.

  There you were. You had a nice uniform to wear. An officer bought his own uniform. He wore a sword and at night it glistened in the town lights. After all, you know — being an officer, it was — every one admitted that — it was being a gentleman. In the summer young women of the town were sitting in cars parked along the streets, the streets down which you swung your men. The daughters of the best people in town were looking at you. The captain of the company was in politics. He was getting rather fat. He hardly ever came out.

  “Shoulder arms!”

  “Mark time!”

  “Company, halt!”

  There was the rattle of gun butts hitting the pavement in the main street of a town. Ned halted his men before the drug store where there was a crowd loitering about. The men wore uniforms furnished them by the State or by the national government. “Be ready! Be prepared!”

  “For what?”

  “My country, right or wrong, but always my country!” It wasn’t likely that Ned Sawyer ever thought... surely no one ever mentioned it when he went to the officers’ training camp... he didn’t think about taking his men out and facing other Americans. There was a cotton mill in his home town and some of the fellows in his company were cotton-mill hands. It was nice for them, he thought, being in the company. After all, they were cotton-mill hands. They were mostly unmarried cotton-mill hands. They lived up there in the mill village at the edge of town.

  It was true, you had to admit it, that such young fellows were rather separated from the life of the town. It was nice for them, getting a chance like that — joining up with a military company. Once a year, in the summer, the men went to a camp. They got a fine vacation, costing them nothing.

  Some of the cotton-mill hands were great joiners and a lot of them, only a few years earlier, had joined up with the Ku Klux Klan. The military company was a lot better than that.

  In the South — you understand — it isn’t the tradition for the first-class white men to work with their hands. First-class white men don’t work with their hands.

  “I mean — you understand — the kind of men who have made the South and the traditions of the South.”

  Ned Sawyer never made any such pronouncement, not even to himself. He had been for two years up North in college. The traditions of the old South were being broken down. He knew that. He would ha
ve laughed at the idea of himself having contempt for a white man who had to work in a factory or on a farm. He often said so. He said there were Negroes and Jews who were okay. “I like some of them fine,” he said. Ned always wanted to be broad-minded and liberal.

  His home town in North Carolina was called Syntax, and the Syntax mills were there. His father was the leading attorney of the town. He was an attorney for the mills and Ned intended to be an attorney. He was three or four years older than Red Oliver and that year — the year he went with his military company to the town of Birchfield — he had already been graduated from college, from the North Carolina State University at Chapel Hill, and after Christmas that year he had planned to go to law school.

  But things in his family had got a little tightened up. His father had lost a good deal of money in the stock market. It was the year 1930. His father said, “Ned,” he said— “I’m a little tight just now.” Ned had one sister in school yet, taking post-graduate work in Columbia University in New York, and she was a bright woman. She was as bright as hell. Ned would have said it himself. She was several years older than Ned and had got her M.A. and was now working for her Ph.D. She was a lot more radical than Ned and hated his going to the officers’ training camp and later she hated his taking the lieutenancy in the local military company. When she came home she said, “Look out, Ned.” She was going to take her Ph.D. in economics. Women like that get notions in their heads. “There’s going to be trouble,” she said to Ned.

  “What do you mean?”

  They were at home, in the summer, and were sitting on the front porch of their house. Ned’s sister — named Louise — would sometimes, suddenly, break out at him like that.

  She foretold the struggle coming in America — a real struggle, she said. She didn’t look like Ned, but was small like the mother. Like the mother, her hair was inclined to turn prematurely gray.