Being like a professional model, stepped out of the advertising pages of The New Yorker.
There was a car loaded and ready to be run out... it would be high-priced imported stuff, bound say for Cincinnati or Charleston, W. Va.... to be got through before daylight the next morning... it raining hard... there would be tricky mountain roads to be got over, heavy fogs lying over the mountaintops... the better to serve her purpose. There would be the ride out to the farmhouse from some rather dreary small town hotel, at which she had arrived early that afternoon. She would have come by train.
Oh, the dreariness of some of the rooms! There would be the kind of cheap furniture common to so many hotel rooms in the smaller towns. There would be a note for her. Like a criminal she constantly changed her name... Kit Brandon, alias Mary Wetherby, alias Sally Smith, alias Mrs. Eugene Masters, alias Mrs. Erskine Hemmingway. After she had taken a few trips she worked out a little scheme. She sent herself a telegram that would arrive ahead of her. Let’s say her run was to be from some little town on the northern border of North Carolina and her load was to be delivered in Charleston, West Virginia. The telegram read... “Jim, your husband, badly hurt in accident at Charleston, West Virginia. Come at once.”
She was stopped by a policeman in one of the streets of Roanoke, Virginia, on one of her early trips, was rather hurrying through a street along which many cars were parked... It was a wet rainy night and a uniformed policeman stopped her...
Men were backing cars out from a curb ahead. There was no chance to give her own machine the gun and run for it. The car was loaded with rather expensive stuff. There was a policeman in the road and two others standing near by on the sidewalk. She was green then, new at the game and her heart began to beat heavily. Her hands were trembling.
It turned out to be a false alarm. “Please drive carefully through here,” the cop said. There was some kind of children’s entertainment going on in a church. The incident however started her brain to working. The telegram was to flash on any federal man or cop who might stop her to search her car. She never did use one of the telegrams but once and then it worked. This was after she had got better at the game, her nerves steadier, herself leaning out of the car, speaking politely to the man who had stopped her. She made her voice as closely as she could an earnest pleading one. “Please read this.”
The man was standing in a dark road with the telegram in his hand, his flashlight making a brilliant spot of light on the yellow paper. “Please, please, don’t stop me, don’t delay me.”
“What is your husband?” the man asked solicitously.
“He’s chief of police in Charleston. I’ve been away on a visit. His car was struck by a fire truck going to a fire.”
It happened that the federal man had blocked a narrow bridge, not far from the place where she was stopped, and the man to whom she handed the telegram sent another man with a car to clear the way for her.
She was in one of the little hotel rooms. In spite of the reputation she was presently to get... the romanticizing of her figure by the newspapers... herself heralded as a desperate character, bold, beautiful, dangerous, etc., etc., she never did carry a gun or any sort of weapon. Often, in the fall and winter months, she arrived in such a place when it was raining or snowing. She had brought books and sat reading and looking out at sad-enough small-town streets.
There was the dreariness of such rooms, the curious smell that gets into the wall paper, into the chairs, into the often half-soiled bed coverings and window curtains, smell of generations of travelling salesmen, an old cigar butt pushed into the corner of the little clothes closet by a slovenly maid, an empty corn liquor bottle with the cork gone left in the rickety chest-of-drawers. She went to sit by the window that looked into the street. “God,” she said in speaking of that time, “if I hadn’t to look forward to the excitement and danger of the drive ahead, I’d have gone crazy.”
There was from the first something creeping in on her. On fair days she could escape, make an arrangement for a car, get out of the hotel, drive in country roads, build up her knowledge of that particular section, but there were many days not fair and it wasn’t wise for her to be too much seen... small-town men, retail merchants, lawyers, etc., often with little enough to do... the winter days in such places passing drearily, respectability that would not permit them to get drunk except occasionally in secret... no movies in the daytime... no fishing in winter in near-by streams... the hunting season at an end... they sizing her up... “Say, did you see that? Now, who the hell can that one be? What’s she doing here?”
“Boy, there’s some swell-looking dame. Boy, wouldn’t you like,” etc., etc., Curiosity aroused. It was better to keep, as much as possible, out of sight. The less people notice you, think about you, the better. There was a curious persistent loneliness, it growing on her, getting into her being like a disease, only broken by the excitement of her work.
She thought of things read in newspapers, stories of criminals hiding out. Some man of the criminal class had made a haul. He had held up a bank or a bank messenger, had kidnapped the child of some rich man, had got a lot of swag, had got away with it.
Time to lie low now, keep out of sight. Kit, always an imaginative one, always a bit more mental than physical, found herself, in imagination, being some such a one. She had books with her but couldn’t read. She moved restlessly about in the narrow quarters of some such dreary hotel room, sat by the window with a book in her hand, tried to concentrate on its pages. If, as sometimes happened, she had to stay in such a place for two or three days, the weather bad... it might be a place of two or three thousand people, the hotel a flimsy frame building... she got half hysterical. She tried to explain it. “It wasn’t outside. It was inside me,” she said. As suggested, she identified herself with some imagined desperate person, that is to say with some real criminal, who has done some desperate deed and was in hiding. She tried to reason with herself. “Suppose I am caught, arrested, thrown into jail... what of it?”
She had no family with standing in this or any community to be lost. “It just happens that I am in a certain business? There would be no such business if people didn’t want it. I am the same girl who once worked in a factory, who worked in a five-and-ten. I haven’t hurt any one, stolen anything. There was in her no feeling of being morally corrupt. She sat sometimes asking herself questions. “Would I give up what I have got, go back, say into a shoe factory or a cotton mill, live, as I did live, often as lonely as I am now, work for some mill owner for ten or twelve dollars a week?” There was always, in Kit, as perhaps also in Tom Halsey, consciousness of some kind of power in self. In some vague way she knew that, even when she had been half illiterate, there had been a kind of consciousness in her. It might possibly have come out of her mountain ancestry. “I am a woman walking the earth as men walk the earth.” In great numbers of the workers, among whom she had formerly lived, there was a curious humbleness that was not in her. She was, after all, Southern and in great numbers of Southerners, particularly among the poor, the white poor, there is a kind of humbleness... it might have come down into them out of old slavery days... feeling that there are certain people, rich, holding seemingly important positions, large estates, plantations, mills, etc.... “They aren’t the same as we are.”
“The hell they’re not.”
She had never said it. She felt it.
The thing Kit had often felt, never quite defined in her own mind, was defined often enough in things heard. When she was a mill girl or a clerk in the five-and-ten, others talking. The others read newspapers. They went to the movies. The rich, the ones up above them, mill owners, politicians, prominent men and women of all sorts in the mill towns were like the movie stars in Hollywood. “Their doing what they do is not like our doing it.” The idea was in some indefinable way like that. “They must be smart. I’m not smart.” There was a politician accused of stealing a million dollars from the state. He laughed. “Why, you are mistaken. I didn’t steal a
million. I stole two million.”
There were the poor, often scrupulously honest, curiously religious, who gave him a kind of admiration. They went to the polls and voted for him. “After all, he’s smart. He’s a big man.”
Or he got into trouble, denied his guilt, was tried, convicted and they were sorry for him. They said of the man who owned the mill, “It’s not his fault.” There was for Kit the persistent question... “Would it have been better for me to stay where I was, in some factory or in a five-and-ten...
“... wearing myself out for some guy?
“No, I don’t care. I’m glad I’m what I am.”
She turned for relief to the world outside, to the window of the hotel room. There were a few people going along in the street. It rained. The hotel stood at a street intersection and on another corner was the town post office. There was a filling station on a third corner.
There were little pictures of life, caught thus, as though she looked through a magnifying glass. On certain of such days her brain seemed terribly alive. “How curiously separated I am from everybody.
“Is there a wall between me and others?
“I had a husband but he was no husband, a father but he was no father. I had a few friends”... She thought of Agnes, Sarah and other workwomen to whom she had once felt close. “There is something that separates people, curiously, persistently, in American life.” She did not think the thought definitely. As is true of so many other obscure people in America she felt it. There were times when she terribly wanted a man, not primarily as sex comrade, but as real comrade, someone to creep close to, feel close to, perhaps even a little to command her, direct her. If it were true that she had — as the newspapers afterwards, when she became more or less notorious, persistently proclaimed — her own beauty there was a desire to have her beauty mean something definite and real to another, unlike herself a male being.
There were afternoons when she sat thus in such a hotel room and cried. She became annoyed with herself. She tried to concentrate on what life there was in the street outside. A farmer drove up and parked his car in the street and got out. He was quite an old man, tall, poorly dressed. His car was an ancient Model T Ford. He got out and started to cross the street and his wife also got out of the car. She was fat, old and awkward but he did not offer to help her. She stumbled and half fell and then caught, with her old hand, the door of the car. “Why doesn’t he help her? Why doesn’t he?”
The wife followed her man across the street and in at the door of the post office. It was something to think about.
“Are there people, all over the world, always from the beginning of life to the end of life, lonely? What makes it so?
“Is the man, down there in the street, merely brutal? “No.
“It may be he is only one who can’t break some shell about himself. It may be I am like that.
“Will it ever happen to me that some one will come and break it for me?”
There was a young man, hardly more than a boy, who worked in a filling-station. He wore his cap on the side of his head. Cars kept coming and departing. He filled gas tanks; he made remarks to people. People leaned out at the windows of cars and laughed at him and with him. Now he was wiping a windshield. What a fellow! He did a little jig, whistled, sang snatches of songs. It was good to see him, to sit watching him — good, good. He was like a little bird hopping about, chirping, picking his crumbs of relationship.
Presently in the rain there came along the street a young woman. She had on a bright green raincoat and carried an umbrella. There was no car stopping at the filling-station at just that moment and the young filling-station man had gone inside his brightly painted little house but he had evidently been watching through a window.
He hopped out. He greeted the woman. She was young and quite pretty. She came to him and there was a moment of conversation and then he took money out of his pocket and gave it to her and she started away but he called her back.
He looked about, up and down the street. “They are married. They are a young bride and groom,” Kit told herself. He caught her into his arms and kissed her. She protested but she was glad, happy. She made a pretense of hitting him, slapping him with her open hand, and then, half running, disappeared out of Kit’s line of vision and the young filling-station man stood in the rain before his little house and danced another jig.
The night came. It was a relief. At eight-thirty the man, a deputy sheriff, came for her. He told her afterwards, when they were in the car going to the place where they were to pick up her load, that he had told the hotel clerk that she was employed by the government. He had given the fellow to understand that she was a detective.
“How cute!”
She didn’t like the man, detested him. He perhaps tried to make up to her, get her friendly, but she sat in the car in silence or answered his sallies with monosyllables. She was rigged out all right, not gaudily, but the clothes she wore had a certain air. He was awed, felt embarrassed, was glad when they had got to the place to which he was to take her.
There was a farmhouse, and she went in, the deputy accompanying her to the door. “Well, I’ll say good night. This is the place I was to bring you.” He had done his job, had brought her to the place. He was to have told her any important news of the road, if there were any federal men about, any roads he knew of being blocked. He knew of none, was glad to escape, had earned his particular little cut in the graft. It was time for him to get back to town, sit away the evening perhaps at the back of some drugstore with other men of the town, looking as important as he could. Men would come in, merchants and others, to discuss affairs, politics, prohibition, etc. He would be asked questions. The thing to do was to look mysterious. It made the others think you knew a lot of things you weren’t going to tell.
“Good night,” Kit said coldly enough.
“Gee, I’ll bet she’s a big-timer all right.”
Kit went on, into the farmhouse.
There were people sitting in the farmhouse waiting for her arrival. There was the farmer, an unsuccessful man, a man of fifty, unshaven, a little frightened. He owed money at the bank in town and felt he had been forced into this new thing, this law-breaking. Nowadays there were all sorts of mysterious people appearing at his house. They came usually at night.
His house was on a little-used dirt road that led up into hills. A man, a young fellow, had arrived there on the night before, had driven his car into the farmer’s barn. It was at three in the morning and raining. He had come to the kitchen door, knocked loudly and it happened the farmer’s wife was ill. His daughter had to go downstairs and after the farmer built a fire in the kitchen stove the daughter had to get the fellow something to eat. “This is another new one,” the farmer thought. He was a rough-looking one, young and strong and with one eye gone. He demanded bacon, eggs, and coffee. He stood in the kitchen swearing. “God damn such a night.”
The farmer went out into a shed to get wood for the kitchen stove, leaving his daughter in the kitchen with that fellow. She was but half clad. She was pretty. The farmer had two sons but they had left home, had gone to some distant industrial town to get jobs in factories. He came back into the kitchen, his arms loaded with firewood and there was something wrong.
There was a curious something in the air, fright, indignation. The daughter was leaning over the stove and when the farmer entered she turned her face to him. The fellow had said something to her, had even perhaps touched her with his hands, as Kit, when she was as yet little more than a child, had once been touched. Pictures out of life thus repeating themselves.
“But why did I let myself get into this?”
The farmer’s wife had not been well. She was a small thin woman with a curious yellow complexion. The doctor said it was her liver. Doctor bills to be paid, interest on the loan at the bank in town to be paid. The farmer’s sons did not know what he had let himself in for. The youngest one would say nothing but, if he knew, the older one would raise hell.
<
br /> “All right, give up the damn place then.”
There would be a quarrel between father and son.
“I won’t. This farm belonged to my father and before that to his father. I am master in my own house. I’ll do as I please.”
The man had a suspicion that more than one of the fellows of Tom’s crowd, coming to the house in the night, had said insulting things to his daughter. She was like her mother, a silent one. Once when he was awake at night he had heard the daughter crying in her bed.
Kit came into the house, felt the atmosphere of the place, as she more and more in her loneliness began to feel such things, said little, stood a moment by the fire.
“Is the car ready?”
“Yes, Miss.”
The daughter in the room, looking at her, at her clothes. The daughter was a young thing, not more than sixteen, with a slender young body and a strange frightened look in her eyes. “She could be real pretty,” Kit thought. She was embarrassed by something in the child’s eyes. It was admiration, envy. The farmer was awkwardly pushing a chair toward Kit. “Won’t you sit, Miss? It’s a terrible night out.” Outside the rain was turning to snow. The roads would be dangerously slick. It would be a tough night for Kit’s drive.
“All the better,” Kit was on the road. She was driving rapidly, recklessly through snow, half-rain. To get out of North Carolina into Virginia there was a high mountain to cross. Then she had to cross another to get from Virginia into West Virginia. Silent sleeping towns to go whirling through.
She would be driving a very powerful car, heavily loaded. There was a slogan she had made for herself in regard to driving. “If you come to a dangerous place, a slippery road, sheer drop of perhaps several hundred feet at one side of the road, don’t cut down on your speed. Aim it! Shoot! Go across at speed!
“Control with the motor, not the brake.”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 197