Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  Into the invaded city he had rushed at the head of his men and, when the city was being sacked, he demanded riches for his men but took none for himself. For his own portion of the loot he had taken the virginal daughter of the leader of the Federal forces and it was this woman he was now dragging in at the door of our hut.

  She was very beautiful and perhaps, had I been older, I should not have blamed father, but at that time the love of right was very strong in me.

  When father saw that I had already been born he staggered back for a step and leaned against the wall of the cabin, still however clinging to the hand of his new-found woman. “I had hoped to arrive before or at the very hour of birth, I had counted on that,” he muttered, cursing under his breath.

  For a moment he stood looking at mother and myself and both of us looked calmly at him.

  “Birth — the birth hour — is the test of womanhood,” he said, taking hold of the shoulder of his new woman and shaking her violently, as though to fix her attention. I wanted you to see how the women of my own race meet bravely all such trying situations; for, as you must know, by the customs of my country, the woman who marries an American becomes instantly an American, with all the American virtues. It is our climate, I dare say, and it happens to people very quickly.

  “At any rate there it is. The woman you see before you I really love, but she has become Anglo-Saxon, through having married me, and is therefore above me, as far above me as the stars.

  “I cannot live with her. She is too good, too brave,” said my fanciful father, staggering through the door and dragging his woman after him. Outside the door I heard him still talking loudly to his new woman as they went away. “Our Anglo-Saxon women are the most wonderful creatures in the world,” I heard him saying. “In a few years now they will run the world.”

  It was growing dark in the hayloft in the barn in the state of Ohio. Did I, as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay, really imagine the absurd scene depicted above? Although I was very young I had already read many novels and stories. In any event the whole silly affair has remained in my fancy for years. When I was a lad I played with such fanciful scenes as other boys play with brightly colored marbles. From the beginning there has been, as opposed to my actual life, these grotesque fancies. Later, to be sure, I did acquire more or less skill in bringing them more and more closely into the world of the actual. They were but the raw materials with which the story-writer must work as the worker in woods works with trees cut in a forest.

  As for the fancies themselves, they have always seemed to me like trees that have grown without having been planted. Later, after the period in my own life of which I am now writing, I worked for many years as a laborer in many places, and gradually as I stood all day beside a lathe in some factory, or later went about among business men trying to sell some article, in which I was myself not interested, I began to look at other men and to wonder what absurd fancies went on in secret within them. There was that curiosity and there was something else. I had perhaps, as I have no doubt all people have, a great desire to be loved and a little respected. My own fancies rule me. Even to-day I cannot go into a movie theatre and see there some such national hero as, say, Bill Hart, without wishing myself such another. In the theatre I sit looking at the people and see how they are all absorbed in the affairs of the man on the stage. Now he springs lightly off a horse and goes toward the door of a lonely cabin. We, in the theatre, know that within the cabin are some ten desperate men all heavily armed with guns and with them, bound to a chair, is a fair woman, another virgin got off the reservation, as it were. Bill stops at the door of the cabin and takes a careful look at his guns, and we, in the audience, know well enough that in a few minutes now he will go inside and just shoot all of those ten fellows in there to death, fairly make sieves of them, and that he will get wounded himself but not seriously — just enough to need the help of the virgin in getting out of the cabin and onto his horse — so he can ride to her father’s ranch house and go to bed and get well after a while, in time for the wedding.

  All these things we know, but we love our Bill and can hardly wait until the shooting begins. As for myself I never see such a performance but that I later go out of the theatre and, when I get off into a quiet street alone, I become just such another. Looking about to see that I am unobserved, I jerk two imaginary guns out of my hip pockets and draw a quick bead on some near-by tree. “Dog,” I cry, “unhand her!” All my early reading of American literature comes into my mind and I try to do a thing that is always being spoken of in the books. I try to make my eyes narrow to pin points. Bill Hart can do it wonderfully in the pictures and why not I? As I sat in the movie house it was evident that Bill Hart was being loved by all the men women and children sitting about and I also want to be loved — to be a little dreaded and feared, too, perhaps. “Ah! there goes Sherwood Anderson! Treat him with respect. He is a bad man when he is aroused. But treat him kindly and he will be as gentle with you as any cooing dove.”

  As a boy lying buried in the hay I presume I had some such notion as that, and later as a man standing by a lathe in some factory some such notion must have still been in my mind. I wanted then to be something heroic in the eyes of my own mother, now dead, and at the same time wanted to be something heroic in my own eyes too.

  One could not do the thing in actual life, so one did it in a new world created within one’s fancy.

  And what a world that fanciful one — how grotesque, how strange, how teeming with strange life! Could one ever bring order into that world? In my own actual work as a tale-teller I have been able to organize and tell but a few of the fancies that have come to me. There is a world into which no one but myself has ever entered and I would like to take you there; but how often when I go, filled with confidence, to the very door leading into that strange world, I find it locked! Now, in the morning, I myself cannot enter the land into which all last night, as I lay awake in my bed, I went alone at will.

  There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell you. I should like to take you with me through the gate into the land, let you wander there with me. There are people there with whom I should like you to talk. There is the old woman accompanied by the gigantic dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day, the stout man with the gray eyes and with the pack on his back, who stands talking to the beautiful woman as she sits in her carriage, the little dark woman with the boyish husband who lives in a small frame house by a dusty road far out, in the country.

  These and many other figures, all having a life of their own, all playing forever in the field of my fancy. The fanciful shadowy life striving to take on flesh, to live as you and I live, to come out of the shadowy world of the fancy into the actuality of accomplished art.

  When I had grown to be a man, and had begun to try a little to organize this inner life, I wondered often if a woman, being pregnant, and walking about through the streets, past factory doors, in the “loop district” of Chicago, let us say, if such a woman being conscious of something alive within — that is, at the moment a part of herself, flesh of her flesh, and that will presently come out of herself to live its own life, in a world her eyes now see passing before her — if such a woman does not have dreadful moments of fear.

  To the tale-teller, you must understand, the telling of the tale is the cutting of the natal cord. When the tale is told it exists outside oneself and often it is more living than the living man from whom it came. The imagined figure may well live on and on in the fanciful life of others after the man from whose lips it came, or whose fingers guided the pen that wrote the tale, long after he is forgotten, and I have myself had some curious experiences of this sort. A public speaker, in speaking of my Winesburg tales, praised me as a writer but spoke slightingly of the figures that lived in the tales. “They weren’t worth telling about,” he said; and I remember that I sat at the back of the room, filled with people, hearing him speak, and remember sharply also just the sense of horror that crept
over me at the moment. “It is a lie. He has missed the point,” I cried to myself. Could the man not understand that he was doing a quite unpermissible thing? As well go into the bedroom of a woman during her lying-in and say to her: “You are no doubt a very nice woman, but the child to which you have just given birth is “a little monster and will be hanged.” Surely any man can understand that, to such a one, it might be permitted to speak at any length regarding her own failings as a woman, but — if the child live — surely this other thing must not be done. “It must not be condemned for the failings of the mother,” I thought, shivering with fright. As I sat listening certain figures, Wing Biddlebaum, Hugh McVey, Elizabeth Willard, Kate Swift, Jesse Bentley, marched across the field of my fancy. They had lived within me, and I had given a kind of life to them. They had lived, for a passing moment anyway, in the consciousness of others beside myself. Surely I myself might well be blamed — condemned — for not having the strength or skill in myself to give them a more vital and a truer life — but that they should be called people not fit to be written about filled me with horror.

  However, I again find myself plunging forward into a more advanced and sophisticated point of view than could have been held by the boy, beginning to remake his own life more to his own liking by plunging into a fanciful life. I shall be blamed. Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes.

  It does not matter. My point is that, in the boy, as later in the man into whom the boy is to grow, there are two beings, each distinct, each having its own life and each of importance to the man himself.

  The boy who lives in the world of fact is to help his father put a priming coat on a new house built by a prosperous Ohio farmer. In my day we used a dirty yellow ochre for the purpose. The color satisfied no sensual part of myself. How I hated it! It was used because it was cheap and later was to be covered up, buried away out of sight. Ugly colors, buried away out of sight, have a way of remaining always in sight in the consciousness of the painter who has spread them.

  In the hayloft the fat boy was awake now. Darkness was coming fast and he must bestir himself, must if possible escape the wrath of his father for the day wasted in entertaining me. He crawled up out of his own hole and, reaching down, put a fat hand on my shoulder and shook me. He had a plan for his own escape which he whispered to me as my head came up into sight in the dim evening light in the loft.

  He was an only son and his mother was fond of him — she would even lie for him. Now he would creep away unseen to the house and frankly tell his mother he has been fooling about with me all day long. She would scold a little but, after a time, when his father came into the house for supper and when in harsh tones he asked what the boy had been doing, the gentle little lie would come. “It won’t really be a lie,” the fat boy declared stoutly, defending the virtue of his mother. “Do you expect me to do all the housework and the churning as well?” the farm woman would ask her husband sharply. She, it seemed, was a person of understanding and did not expect a boy to do a man’s work all the time. “You’d think dad never was a kid,” he whispered to me. “He works all the time and he wants me to work all the time too. I wouldn’t never have no fun if it wasn’t for ma. Gee, I only wish I had a dad like your’n. He’s just like a kid himself, isn’t he now?”

  In the gathering darkness the farm boy and I crept down a ladder to the floor of the barn and he ran away to the farmhouse, his feet making no sound in the soft mud of the farmyard. The rain persisted and the night would be cold. In another part of the barn the farmer was doing his evening chores, assisted by father — always the accommodating one — who held the lantern and ran to get ears of corn to throw into the horses’ feed-boxes. I could hear his voice, calling cheerfully. Already he knew all the farm horses by name and spoke of them familiarly. “How many ears for old Frank? Does Topsy get five ears too?” Outside the barn, as I stood under the eaves, there was still a faint streak of light in the western sky, and the new house we were to give the priming coat, built close down to the road, could still be seen. Little strings of water fell from the roof above and made a tiny stream at my feet. The new house had two full stories and an attic. How magnificent to be a man, to be rich and to be able to build such a house! When the fat boy grew into manhood he would inherit the house and many broad acres. He also would be rich and would have a great house, with bathrooms and perhaps electric lights. The automobile had come. No doubt he would have one. How magnificent a house, a farm, an automobile — a beautiful wife to lie with him at night! I had been to Sunday school and had heard the stories of the magnificent men of old, Jacob and David and that young man Absalom, who had everything in the world to look forward to but who nevertheless did unspeakable things.

  And now the voices of the men inside the barn seemed far away. The new house was in some queer way a menace to me. I wondered why. The older house, the one the young New Englander had builded when he had first come into the new land, stood far away from the road. One went, from the barns, along a path to the right. The path lay beside an apple orchard, and at the orchard’s end there was a bridge over a small stream. Then one crossed the bridge and started climbing the hill against the side of which the house had been built. It had been built of logs, very solidly, on a small terrace, and as the farmer had begun to prosper wings had been added. Back of the house stood forest trees, some the same trees that had been there when the first room of the cabin was built. The young farmer, with some of his neighbors, had felled the trees for his house on the very ground on which it now stood, and then during the long winter he had felled many other trees in the flat plain below, where his farming land was to lie, and, on a certain day, there had no doubt been a log-rolling, with other young farmers and their women coming from far and near. A whole forest of magnificent trees had been rolled into a great pile and burned — there had been feastings, tests of physical strength among the young men, a few unmarried fellows about, looking shyly at the unmarried girls, game on the table, talk in the evening of the possibilities of a war with the slaveholding farmers of the South.

  All these things the older house had seen as it crouched on the side of the hill, and now it seemed to have crept away out of sight in the darkness, hidden itself among the trees still left standing on the hill; but even as I stood looking lights began to appear at its windows. The old house seemed smiling and calling to me. Now, myself and my brothers had no home — the house in which we at that time lived was not a home — for us there could be no home now that mother was not there. We but stayed temporarily in a house, with a few sticks of furniture — waiting — for what?

  The older people of our native town had gone out of themselves, warmly, toward us. How many times had I been stopped on the street by some solid citizen of our town, a carpenter, Yet Howard, a wheelwright, Val Voght, a white bearded old merchant, Thad Hurd. In the eyes of these older people, as they talked to me, there was something, a light shining as the lights now shone from the farmhouse among the trees. They knew father — loved him, too, in a way — but well they knew he was not one to plan for his sons, help his sons in making their own plans. Was there something wistful in their eyes as they stood talking to the boy on the village street? I remember the old merchant spoke of God, but the carpenter and the wheelwright spoke of something else — of the new times coming. “Things are on the march,” they said, “and the new generation will do great things. We older fellows belong to something that is passing. We had our trades and worked at them, but you young fellows have to think of something else. It is going to be a time when money will count big, so save your money, boy. You have energy. I’ve watched you. Now you are a little wild after the girls and going to dances. I saw you going down toward the cemetery with that little Truscan girl last Wednesday evening. Better cut that all out. Work. Save money. Get into the manufacturing business if you can. The thing now is to get rich, be in the swim. That’s the ticket.”


  The older fellows had said these words to me, somewhat wistfully, as the old house, hidden now in the darkness, seemed to look at me. Was it because the men who said the words were themselves not quite convinced? Did the old American farmhouse among the trees know the end of its life was at hand and was it also calling wistfully to me?

  One remains doubtful and, as I now sit writing, I am most doubtful of all the veracity of this impression I am trying to give of myself as a boy standing in the darkness in the shelter of the barn’s eaves.

  Did I really want to be the son of some prosperous farmer with the prospect ahead of some day owning land of my own and having a big new house and an automobile? Or did my eyes but turn hungrily toward the older house because it represented to my lonely heart the presence of a mother — who would even go to the length of lying for a fellow?

  I was sure I wanted something I did not have, could never (having my father’s blood in me) achieve.

  Old houses in which long lives have been lived, in which men and women have lived, suffered and endured together — a people, my own people, come to a day when entire lives are lived in one place, a people who have come to love the streets of old towns, the mellow color of the stone walls of old houses.

  Did I want these things, even then? Being an American in a new land and facing a new time, did I want even what Europe must have meant in the hearts of many of the older men who had talked to the boy on the streets of an Ohio town? Was there something in me that, at the moment, went wandering back through the blood of my ancestors, through the blood of the ancestors of the men about me — to England, to Italy, Sweden, Russia, France, Germany — older places, older towns, older impulses?

  The new house, the farmer was having built, stood clear of the forest and directly faced the dirt road that led into town. It had instinctively run out to meet the coming automobile and the interurban car — and how blatantly it announced itself! “You see I am new, I cost money. I am big. I am bold,” it seemed to be saying.