She had spoken more than once of all this to Kit, who only partly understood. There was a tale she had told, of a strike in a mill at Marion, North Carolina. “I was there, in that one,” she said. She explained that, being unconnected — her father and mother were both dead and she had no brothers or sisters — she had got out, when the strike got hopeless, had changed her name. Like a criminal she had got an alias. “Otherwise I’d have been put on the black list.” The manufacturers passed the word about, from one to another: “Look out for so and so. He, or she, is a trouble maker.”
The point about the particular strike, at Marion... she told the story of the excitement of the strike’s beginning. She had got a little cynical. It was at about this time that the president of the A. F of L. gave out a statement: “We are going to organize the whole cotton industry.”
“The hell you say.”
The excitement of the early days of a strike, outside leaders, young radicals as well as the regular old-line labor leaders coming in... grand feeling... “See, we are brothers. We stand shoulder to shoulder”... fiery speeches made, gatherings of strikers... “I’ll stand here till I die”...
As a rule it all turned out pretty sadly, Agnes told Kit.
Certainly the manufacturers weren’t fools. There was a way to break down the morale of the workers. At Marion there had been several people, workers, shot and killed at the mill gate.
It was in the early dawn, the night shift coming off, day shift, already on strike, waiting, Agnes there with the others, to tell the night workers, “We’re out, we’re on strike.”
The company was prepared, too. A mill, so threatened, Agnes explained, went to a so-called detective agency. Such agencies were in reality just strike-breaking organizations... tough guys employed... killers. Al Capone got his start as a strikebreaker. They at the mill gate too... ready.
Pity of it. Bodies of dead workers lying in the dust in a road at a mill gate. “Some of the rest of us ran. All those shot were shot in the back. Some of the rest of us just stood there, dumb. There is so much force against us, officials of the town, of the county, of the State, of the U. S. A. What the hell are we to do? We’ve never had the nerve to ask for much.
“All we want is just a little more of the stuff we make, a little more leisure, fair treatment... Jesus.” Agnes always got high when she talked thus.
At Marion, the funeral of the dead workers... speakers from the outside world. A famous man, a famous writer, came down... rumors of the big massacre at Marion flying out, to an outside world. A big city newspaper had hired the big writer to come down. Agnes had heard, later, that he got $10,000 for ten articles written about that particular strike. He came and went. Others, speakers, officials of labor unions, etc., came and went. “Of course, afterwards, after the strike was broken, the mill started up again with other workers inside... people just like us... we on charity. The famous writer sent us down a barrel of apples. Wasn’t that swell of him? I want to get drunk, smash something or some one.
“Ah, what the hell, Kit... let’s talk about something else.
“Don’t say no more,” Agnes cried. Kit had said nothing. Agnes had done all the talking.
It had been bitterly cold for several days and then had got somewhat warmer and the snow had come. States like North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri — called Southern, Oh, Thou Sunny South — can be colder than North Dakota, Idaho, Alaska. The cold gets you more. The world was white as Kit and Agnes walked down from the mill village. There had been a drizzling rain earlier that day. It turned to snow.
A kind of glory and mystery in the night, too. The two women felt it, each in her own way. The snow, very wet, had clung to everything as it fell, to the branches of trees that lined a paved road that led down past the mill gate, to the gate itself, now closed... little house there by the gate in which, on other nights, sat an old crippled workman on guard... an old workman who had been hurt in the mill and had got now this sinecure... to the heavy wire fence built around the mill yard, each wire outlined in white...
“Old Pete,” Agnes said. She meant the old fellow who sat at night in the little house by the gate, “Old Pete’s in his hole tonight.”
White snow on the roofs of houses, in the mill village, along the road, roof of the mill itself... casements of windows, dimly lighted on this night of joy for workers... Saturday night.
“Saturday night and supper on the table. It’s the happiest time in a workingman s life.” (Old Worker’s Song.)
White snow everywhere. There was an automobile standing before a little frame house beside the road... no lights in the house. Some family was moving, in or out. It was all outlined in white, spokes of wheels, hood of the car, the body. There were pieces of furniture tied to the outside. The car was an old Ford, Model T. Outlined in white two or three chairs, a broken table, some wire bed springs. Electric street lights shining down on a white shining world. There was no sidewalk from the mill village down to the town but the way was lighted. It was an okay road for those who owned cars. The two women wore cheap, thin shoes, tramping down to town in the snow. They were both young. It didn’t too much matter to them.
Except... “Damn it, now look... I got to get me some new kicks again.”
Something else, also new in modern life, something concerned with women. In Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and other cities there were, when Kit was thus a young kid, pretty puzzled yet, listening to Agnes’ talk... labor, capital, rise of the new world, we’ll-make-em-come-to-us-yet-one-of-these-days... establishments in cities, busy machines clattering away, catering to a new, and old, hunger in women.
The hunger was not in Agnes. If it had ever been in her, it had been put down. It was in Kit.
The establishments in the cities sent experts off to the big style centers... smart men, smart women designers, thinking out new, striking, enticing ways to bring out the charm of women in dress. The experts went to New York. They went to Paris. They kept on the alert, bought or stole the lines of new gowns, bought originals at high prices. The most enticing ones were bid for, fought for, high prices paid, then rushed home. It’s there, in modern machines, the ability to duplicate, endlessly, endlessly.
Cheaper, shabbier cloth, but keep the design and the colors. Make duplicates, plenty of them. The big mail-order houses sending the word out too, even to remote villages, to farms. In Paris today, in Beanville, Arkansas, three weeks from now. “Hurry girls, hurry little working girls and women.”
Song of the Shirt, hell... make it the Song of the Shimmy.
Flood the market quickly. Women’s fashions change quickly. There’s something going on, unknown to women a generation or two ago. Even girls in factories, or servant girls, can rig themselves out now in the latest thing out of Paris — even in Paris, Illinois. Quick, buy copies of Delineator, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion, McCall’s Magazine. Take home a copy of Woman’s Home Companion, young woman. Keep up to snuff.
Stories too, in the magazines. After all, even poor girls — sometimes, not often, but there’s the chance — they marry old rich ones. Damn it, a girl might as well get an old Papa if she can’t get a young one, if she’s got some of it, eh?
There are men who like them warm. Others like the cold ones. If you can warm up a cold one it makes you feel big, like a conqueror.
There are dreams in women’s heads besides dreams of getting a man. A woman wants her own foundation for living, too. If a woman likes beautiful clothes it isn’t always and altogether as a way to the man hunt. The chances are that women dress more for other women than for men.
And there is something else too... a thing not too often thought of... it is too easily taken for granted that having money, living in a fine house, driving a fine car, makes for sensitiveness, the possibility of tenderness. We group people too easily... new words rapidly coming into our American vocabulary... the proletariat... the bourgeoisie... the capitalists... separations too simple, too easily made.
&n
bsp; Kit Brandon, as she walked in the snow along the road with Agnes, hadn’t, as yet, any definite ideas about clothes, getting a man or not getting one. She was beginning to get, faintly, ideas of what might be done. There was her straight slender young body, white flesh, straight legs, slender ankles. She did not spend much time dreaming of strong male arms about her, the brave male protecting the shrinking female. She was getting along a little in a matter of growing importance to herself, beginning to want something that some man might — by a conceivable chance — she having aforesaid nice legs, arms, little hard breasts just budding, etc. — help her to get.
What nice eyes! They could be soft and apparently gentle and yielding at times. They could be hard shrewd eyes. Kit was having her being, her young womanhood, in the period immediately after the World War in America....
“They sure gypped us in that war.”
The thought not very definite in the minds of the young. The war had, for example, not touched Kit or any one she knew very directly. There was something in the air. “These big boys aren’t so big, are they?” Doubts regarding not only great soldiers, so-called, but also great statesmen, captains of industry and others. There was no definite immediate organization of thought, for example, toward impulse to revolt, make revolution, a new start. Age of the so-called hard-boiled ones... they often enough a new kind of sentimentalists too... the wise crackers... hard boys.
All of this merely suggested here, as part, unconscious part, of Kit Brandon, what she would have been becoming. In her day the American intellectual world was being flooded with books... she hadn’t read them... she came later to a time of book reading, trying to “improve” herself in that way as people do. “It may be that is the way, the hard sharpness,” she was thinking.
All of this, hinted at, certainly not yet very definite in her. The young are often more open and ready to receive than people want to believe. It is so much easier for any one of us to think of another, of any one, as all one thing, easy to understand. It makes everything so simple and nice, doesn’t it?
It, the thing here suggested, however, standing up in Kit. She was more intensely personal than Agnes. It may be that the thing Agnes had was more healthy, that it was something bigger — growing belief in revolution for example — growing readiness to give self, throw self away, fight, even perhaps to die for others but, again, this not all of Agnes either. There was a side of her that wanted to be more like Kit. Once that evening as they were walking along, she stopped in the road and stood for a minute, looking at Kit. The struggle along the road, in the snow at the side of the road, had brought a flush of color to Kit’s cheeks that were, ordinarily, rather pale. They were under a street light. “Gee, Kid... God, you’re a swell-looker, Kid.”
And then there was the world the two were moving in that night. It was oddly, strangely, a world more mysterious than they knew, at least consciously. Men and women in a new American world trying to adjust... new mystery inside houses they passed, outside houses, inside factories, outside factories. The two young women, walking down thus through the snowy night, walked under electric lights. The states of the upper South had been made what they were, what they suddenly, in a single decade, became, by the coming of water power. Duke... the Duke fortune... a man named Duke, certainly a go-getter... in tobacco, organizer of the American Tobacco Company... the government busting that up... effort of another generation to stop the development of the next generation... Teddy Roosevelt, the trust-buster.
.. Story of Duke, the old one, the wise one... what a doctor, from North Carolina, practising perhaps in New York, told him...
“... Boy, go get the water power of our State. It’s a state of high mountains, cheap land, many mountain streams rushing down...
“... They don’t see it. Go get it!”
“More money in that than in anything yet.”
Power.
Power.
Power.
The Dukes the new kings.
Power hidden in streams, hidden away, far up in the mountains to be sent singing along wires, great steel spiders striding down out of the hills, across the lowlands, to towns, factories... big towns springing up suddenly.
The two mill girls also walking that night under the great steel spiders. The snow clung to them. “Look,” Agnes said to Kit. The steel structures that carry high pressure wires went like an army of gigantic spiders off into the darkness and distance.
The two girls would be passed, even on such a night, by speeding automobiles. The lights of passing automobiles played over their figures struggling along in the snow. There was a car filled with young men. They called to the women:
“Come on. What about it? Want a ride?”
“Ah, you go to hell.”
Laughter. A shout. Speed. Speed. Speed. “Here we go.”
Speed in machines inside factories, infinite speed in power, being carried, high up, over their heads, to factories, outside factories, in the nights, in the days.
Let’s say that, in winter, the days in upper South States become cold and disagreeable. All right. You have money and a fast car. You jump into the car, whirl away. Florida in a day and a half, maybe less... orange trees... Gulf Stream swinging in to wash on a wide sandy beach. “Did you bring your bathing suit? Why not?”
“Think of it... yesterday we were in Greensboro, North Carolina.
“God, wasn’t it cold?”
Cars flying over roads at forty, fifty, sixty, seventy. Who knows yet what it’s all about? Who’s going to tell us what it’s all about?
And in the factories the goods pouring out, shoes pouring out, nice slick foxy little gowns for women... just like the top-notchers in New York, on Park Avenue in New York, on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, on the Rue de la Paix in Paris, just like the top-notch dames in such places wear.
You have to know your stuff to see the difference, when they’re new.
BIG SALE
WOMEN’S SMART GOWNS
MODELS RIGHT FROM PARIS
NOW ONLY $6.72
You can get you a swell fur coat on the installment plan. Mystery in a snowy world walked in by two young women, oddly different, maybe, down inside them, oddly alike.
They got down into the town and their feet were cold and wet. That was tough, not so much on them as on the cheap shoes they wore. “Come on Kit,” Agnes said, and led the way out of the main street. They went down to where a railroad crossed the main street and got into a street of shabby little stores, little hot stuffy restaurants run by Greeks where hot dogs were sold. You could get spaghetti in Italian joints.
On such a street, on most Saturday evenings, plenty of young fellows out trying to pick up something, the girls would have been hailed a half dozen times. “Hey, kid” — this to Kit— “shake that female Jack Dempsey you’re with and come to me. Hot time, kid.” Agnes would turn to swear.
The young bloods weren’t out that night. The girls went along the street to a small frame house, set back from the street, piles of rubbish in the yard, and around the house to the back door. Agnes knocked and a woman came to the door. She knew Agnes. “Hello,” she said, “come in,” and presently they were in a warm inner room and Agnes had called for drinks.
Kit didn’t want her drink. She took it. There were some men in the room, sitting at a near-by table and they were also drinking. What they all got was white mule. It was a raw, terrible drink and burned Kit’s throat. Funny to think it might have been made by her own father, back up in the hills. Tears came into her eyes when the raw stuff touched the tender flesh of her throat and Agnes laughed. “It’s awful stuff but it’s good for you sometimes,” she said.
They were in the room and Agnes was talking again. She had been to the place one might with a certain man. He was, she explained, a radical from New York. She was trying, was always trying to work something out in her own mind. They sat at a little table in the little room, rather dimly lighted, the woman who had admitted them coming in and going out. There were five or
six men at a near-by table and Kit sat so that she faced them as Agnes talked. She didn’t hear much of what Agnes said. There was a young man over there, at the other table, facing her.
He was pale. He did not look well. He was oddly like the young man Frank, the consumptive who had been her first boy friend. She might have called Frank lover. She didn’t.
The one at the table that night was like and unlike. He was dressed well, in well-made clothes. She even looked down at his shoes, could see them under the table. They also were well made. They were unlike the shoes on the feet of the other men at the table. He might be a young swell of the town. Drinking habits and drinking places in America during prohibition were not so swell either.
Agnes talked. She was so absorbed in her own words that she did not notice that she was not being listened to. She talked. The young man at the other table was so unlike his companions. They were all young men. They talked loudly. Once or twice the woman who ran the place had to come in and ask them to be more quiet. The woman was middle-aged, she looked frumpy. The other men at the table were unlike the pale one who looked like Frank.
Frank had died only a few weeks earlier. The young man at the table kept looking at Kit.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 184