“When I got my pen in hand I became dumb.” How foolish. After I had left the country the doctor used to write me long letters. He still does it sometimes, but not often enough. The letters are wonderful little stories of the doctor’s moods on certain days as he drives about in the country, descriptions of days, of fall days and spring days . . . how full of true feeling the man is . . . what a deep and true culture he has . . . little tales of people, his patients. He has forgotten he is writing. The letters are like his talk.
But I must say something of the doctor’s wife and of his daughter. The daughter was a cripple, like President Roosevelt a victim of infantile paralysis, moving about with great difficulty. She would have been, but for this misfortune, a very beautiful woman. She died some four years after the summer when her father and I were so much together. And there was the wife. Her name was, I remember, Martha.
I did not know well either the wife or the daughter. Sometimes there are such friendships formed between two men. “Now you look here . . . I have a certain life inside my own house. I have, let me say, a certain loyalty to that life but it is not the whole of my life. It isn’t that I don’t want to share that intimate life with you but . . . I am sure you will understand . . . we have chanced upon each other . . . you are in one field of work and I in another.”
There is a life that goes on between men too . . . something almost like love can be born and grow steadily . . . what an absurd word that “love” . . . it does not at all describe what I mean.
Common experience, feelings a man sometimes has, his own kind of male flights of fancy as it were . . . we men you see . . . I wonder if it is peculiarly true of Americans? I often think so. We men here, I often think, depend too much upon women. It is due to our intense hunger, half shy, for each other.
I wonder if two men, in the whole history of man, were ever much together that they did not begin to speak presently of their experiences with women. I dare say that the same thing goes on between women and women. Not that the doctor ever spoke much of his wife. She was rather small and dark, a woman very beautiful in her own way . . . the way I should say of a good deal of suffering.
In the first place, the doctor, that man, so very male, virile, was naturally quick and even affectionate in all his relations with people and particularly with women. He was a man needing more than one outlet for his feelings. He needed dozens. If he had let himself go in that direction he could have had his office always full of women patients of the neurotic sort. There are that sort, plenty of them, on farms and in country towns as well as in the cities. He could not stand them. “I won’t have it, will not be that sort of doctor.” They were the only sort of people he ever treated rudely. “Now you get out of here and don’t come back. There is nothing wrong with you that I can cure.”
I knew from little tales he told of what a struggle it had been. Some of the women were very persistent, were determined not to be put off. It happened that his practice was in a hill country to which in the summer a good many city people came. There would be wives without husbands, the husbands coming from a distant city for the weekend or for a short vacation in the hot months . . . women with money, with husbands who had money. There was one such woman with a husband who was an insurance man in a city some two hundred miles away. I think he was president of the company, a small rather mouse-like man but with eyes that were like the eyes of a ferret, sharp, quick-moving little eyes, missing nothing. The woman, his wife, had money, plenty of it from him, and she had inherited money.
She wanted the doctor to come to the city. “You could be a great success. You could get rich.” When he would not see her in his office she wrote him letters and every day sent flowers for his office, to the office of a country doctor. “I don’t mind selling her out to you,” he said. “There are women and women.” There were roses ordered for him from the city. They came in big boxes and he used to throw them out of his office window and into an alleyway. “The whole town, including my wife, knew of it. You can’t conceal anything of this sort in a small town. At any rate my wife has a head. She knew well enough I was not to be caught by one of that sort.”
He showed me a letter she had written him. It may sound fantastic but she actually offered, in the letter, to place at his disposal a hundred thousand dollars. She said she did not feel disloyal to her husband in making the offer. It was her own money. She said she was sure he had in him the making of a great doctor. Her husband need know nothing at all of the transaction. She did not ask him to give himself to her, to be her lover. There was but one string to the offer, intended to give him the great opportunity, to move to the city, set up offices in a fashionable quarter, become a doctor to rich women. He was to take her as a patient, see her daily.
“The hell,” he said. “I am in no way a student and never have been. By much practice I have become a fairly good country doctor. It is what I am.”
“There is but one other thing I ask. If you are not to be my lover, you must promise that you will not become the lover of some other woman.” He was, I gathered, to keep himself, as she said, pure.
The doctor had very little money. His daughter was the only living child of his marriage. There had been two sons born but they had both died in the outbreak of infantile paralysis that had crippled the daughter.
The daughter, then a young woman of seventeen, had to spend most of her life in a wheel chair. It was possible that, with plenty of money to send her off to some famous physician, perhaps to Europe . . . the woman in her letter suggested something of the sort . . . she might be cured.
“Oho!” The doctor was one of the men who throw money about, cannot save it, cannot accumulate. He was very careless about sending bills. His wife had undertaken that job but there were many calls he did not report to her. He forgot them, often purposely.
“My husband need know nothing of all this.”
“Is that so? What, that little ferret-eyed man? Why, he has never missed a money bet in his life.”
The doctor took the letter to his wife who read it and smiled. I have already said that his wife was in her own way beautiful. Her beauty was certainly not very obvious. She had been through too much, had been too badly hurt in the loss of her sons. She had grown thin and, in repose, there was a seeming hardness about her mouth and about her eyes that were of a curious greenish grey. The great beauty of the doctor’s wife only came to life when she smiled. There was then a curious, a quite wonderful transformation. “By this woman, hard or soft, hurt or unhurt, I will stand until I die.
“It is not always, however, so easy,” said the doctor. He spoke of something. We had gone for an afternoon fishing and were sitting and resting on a flat rock, under a small tree by a mountain brook. We had brought some beer packed in ice in a hamper. “It is not a story you may care to use.” I have already said that the doctor is a great reader. “Nowadays, it seems there is not much interest in human relations. Human relations are out of style. You must write now of the capitalists and of the proletariat. You must give things an economic slant. Hurrah for economics! Economics forever!”
I have spoken of his wife’s smile. The doctor seldom smiled. He laughed heartily, with a great roar of laughter that could frighten the trout for a mile along a stream. His big body and his big head shook. He enjoyed his own laughter.
“And so it shall be an old fashioned story of love, eh, what?”
Another woman had come to him. It had all happened some two or three years before the summer when I knew him and when I spent so much time in his company. There was a well-to-do family, he said, that came into that country for the summer and they had an only child, a daughter, crippled as was his own daughter. They were not, he said, extremely rich but they had money enough or at first he thought they had. He said that the father, the head of that family, was some sort of manufacturer. “I never saw him but twice and then we did not have much talk, although I think we liked each other. He let me know that he was very busy and I saw that he was a littl
e worried. It was because things at his factory were not going so well.
“There was the man’s wife and daughter and a servant and they had brought for the daughter a nurse. She was a very strong woman, a Pole. They engaged me to come on my regular rounds to their house. They had taken a house in the country, some three miles out of town. There were certain instructions from their city doctor. There was the wish to have within call a doctor, to be at hand in case of an emergency.
“And so I went there.” I have already spoken of sitting with the doctor at the end of an afternoon’s fishing. Moments and hours with such people as the doctor are always afterward remembered. There is something . . . shall I call it inner laughter . . . to speak in the terms of fighters, “They can take it.” They have something . . . it may be knowledge, or better yet maturity . . . surely a rare enough quality, that last, that maturity. You get the feeling from all sorts of people.
There is a little farmer who has worked for years. For no fault of his own . . . as everyone knows, nature can be very whimsical and cruel . . . long droughts coming, corn withering, hail in the young crops, or sudden pests of insects coming suddenly, destroying all. And so everything goes. You imagine such a one, struggling on into late middle life, trying, let us say, to get money to educate his children, to give them a chance he did not have, a man not afraid of work, an upstanding straight-going man.
And so all is gone. Let us think of him thus, say on a fall day. His little place, fields he has learned to love, as all real workers love the materials in which they work, to be sold over his head. You imagine him, the sun shining. He takes a walk alone over the fields. His old wife, who has also worked as he has, with rough hands and careworn face . . . she is in the house, has been trying to brace him up. “Never mind, John. We’ll start over again. We’ll make it yet.” The children with solemn faces. The wife would really like to go alone into a room and cry. “We’ll make it yet, eh.”
“The hell we will. Not us.”
He says nothing of the sort. He walks across his fields, goes into a wood. He stands for a while there, perhaps at the edge of the wood, looking over the fields.
And then the laughter, down inside him . . . laughter not bitter. “It has happened to others. I am not alone in this. All over the world men are getting it in the neck as I am now . . . men are being forced into wars in which they do not believe . . . there is a Jew, an upright man, cultured, a man of fine feeling, suddenly insulted in a hotel or in the street . . . the bitter necessity of standing and taking it . . . a Negro scholar spat upon by some ignorant white.
“Well, men, here we are. Life is like this.
“But I do not go back on life. I have learned to laugh, not loudly, boisterously, bitterly, because it happens that I, by some strange chance, have been picked upon by fate. I laugh quietly.
“Why?
“Why, because I laugh.”
There must be thousands of men and women . . . they may be the finest flowers of humanity . . . who will understand the above. It is the secret of America’s veneration for Abraham Lincoln. He was that sort of man.
“And so.
“So I went to that house.” It was my friend, the country doctor, telling his tale. “There was the woman, the mother of the crippled girl, a very gentle-looking woman, in some odd way like my wife. I have told you that I had a talk with the girl’s father, the manufacturer.
“There was the crippled girl herself, destined perhaps to spend her life in bed, or going laboriously about in a wheel chair. Surely she had done nothing, this girl, that God, or nature, call it what you will, should have done this to her. Would it not be wonderful to have some of these cock-sure people explain the mystery of such things in the world? There is a job for your thinker, eh what?”
And then there was the woman, the Polish woman. The doctor, with a queer smile, began to speak of something that often happens suddenly to men and women. He was a man at that time forty-seven years old and the Polish woman . . . he never told me her name . . . might have been thirty. I have already said that the doctor was physically very strong, have tried to give the suggestion of a fine animal. There are men like that who are sometimes subject to very direct and powerful sex calls. The calls descend on them as storms descend on peaceful fields. It happened to him with the Polish woman the moment he saw her and as it turned out it also happened to her.
He said that she was in the room with the crippled girl when he went in. She was sitting in a chair near the bed. She arose and they faced each other. It all happened, I gather, at once. “I am the doctor.”
“Yes,” she said. There was something slightly foreign in her pronunciation of even the one simple English word, a slight shade of something he thought colored the word, made it extraordinarily nice. For a moment he just stood, looking at her as she did at him. She was a rather large woman, strong in the shoulders, big breasted, in every way, he said, physically full and rich. She had, he said, something very full and strong about her head. He spoke particularly of the upper part of her face, the way the eyes were set in the head, the broad white forehead, the shape of the head. “It is odd,” he said, “now that she is gone, that I do not remember the lower part of her face.” He began to speak of woman’s beauty. “All this nonsense you writers write, concerning beauty in women,” he said. “You know yourself that the extraordinary beauty of my own wife is not in the color of her eyes, the shape of her mouth . . . this rosebud mouth business, Cupid’s bow, eyes of blue, or, damn it man, of red or pink or lavender for that matter.” I remember thinking, as the man talked, that he might have made a fine sculptor. He was emphasizing form, what he felt in the Polish woman as great beauty of line. “In my wife beauty comes at rare intervals but then how glorious it is. It comes, as I think you may have noted, with her rare and significant smile.”
He was standing in that room, with the little crippled girl and the Polish woman.
“For a time, I do not know how long, I couldn’t move, could not take my eyes from her.
“My God, how crazy it now seems,” the doctor said.
“There she was. Voices I had never heard before were calling in me and, as I later found out, in her also. The strangeness of it. ‘Why there you are, at last, at last, there you are.’
“You have to keep it all in mind,” said the doctor, “my love of my wife, what my wife and I had been through, our suffering together over the loss of our two sons, our one child, our daughter, a cripple as you know.
“And then our daily life together for years. My wife had done something very fine for me. You know how I am. But for her I might have starved. I could not remember to send bills, was always getting into debt, spending too freely. She had taken my affairs in hand. She attended to everything for me.
“And there I was, you see, suddenly stricken like that . . . by love, ha! What does any sensible man know of this love?
“Why, it was pure lust in me and nothing else. I did not know that woman, had never seen her until that moment, did not know her name. As it was with me so it turned out it was with her. In some way I knew that. Afterwards she told me, and I believed her, that, as the Bible likes to put it, she had never known man.
“I stood there, you understand, looking at her and she at me.” He spoke of all this happening, as he presently realized, when with an effort he got himself in hand, in the presence of the little crippled girl in her bed. “It was almost as though I had, in that moment, in the child’s presence, actually taken the woman. It seemed to me that she was something I had all of my life been wanting with a kind of terrible force, you understand, with my entire being.”
The doctor’s mind went off at a tangent. The reader is not to think that he told me all this in a high excited voice. Quite the contrary. His voice was very low and quiet and I remember the scene before us as we sat on the flat rock above the mountain stream . . . we had driven a hundred miles to get to that stream . . . the soft hills in the distance beyond the stream, which just there went dashing d
own over the rocks, the deepening light over distant hills and distant forests. Later we got some very nice trout out of a pool below the rapids above which we sat.
It may have been the stream that sent him off into a side tale of a fishing trip taken alone, on a moonlight night, in a very wild mountain stream, on the night after he had buried his second son, the strangeness of that night, himself wading in a rushing stream, feeling his way sometimes in the half darkness, touches of moonlight on occasional pools, the casts made into such pools, often dark forests coming down to the stream’s edge, the cast and, now and then, the strike, himself standing in the swift running water.
Himself fighting, all that night, not to be overcome by the loss of the second and last of his sons, the utter strangeness of what seemed to him that night a perfectly primitive world. “As though,” he said, “I had stepped off into a world never before known to man, untouched by any man.”
And then the strike, perhaps of a fine big trout . . . the sudden sharp feeling of life out there at the end of a slender cord running between it and him . . . the fight for life out there and, at the other end of the cord, in him.
The fight to save himself from despair.
Was it the same thing between him and the Polish woman? He said he did manage at last to free himself from the immediate thing. The city doctor had written him a letter. “I am told you have yourself a daughter, a sufferer from infantile paralysis.” My friend had thought of the city doctor. “He must have been a man of sense.”
“We know so very little,” the city doctor had said. “There is perhaps nothing we can do. I do not quite know why it is but the foolish people seem to like to have one of us about, within call.” My friend, the country doctor, made on that day of his first visit a passing examination of the child and went on his way.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 294