Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  I had decided to try to say “boo” to Nora, I fancy. There I was in the room with her (I had been in the house about three days and had only seen her and heard her name spoken once before, when she was sweeping out the hallway by my door), and now she was throwing the covers back over the soiled sheets on my bed and there was dust on the window panes and streaks along the wall paper, while the floor of the room had been given but two or three careless whisks with a broom. Nora was making the bed and back of her head, as she leaned over to do the job, there was a picture on the wall, a picture of five or six water lilies lying on a table. There was a streak of dust down across the white face of the lilies and at that moment a cloud of dust, stirred up by the heavy trucks now going homeward along the street, floated just outside the window.

  “Well, Miss Nora,” I suddenly said after I had been standing in the room for a moment, silently and boldly staring at her. I began advancing toward her and no doubt my eyes were shining with enthusiasm. I dare say I was pretty drunk but I am sure I walked steadily. “Well,” I cried in a loud voice, “what are you up to there?”

  She turned to stare at me and I went on, still speaking rapidly, with a kind of hurried nervous stuttering manner brought on by the liquor and a fear that if I stopped speaking I should not be able to start again. “I refer to the bed,” I said, going up close to her and pointing at it. “You see, don’t you, that the sheets you are putting on the bed are soiled?” I pounded on my own chest, much in the manner of the primitive hero in Mr. Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape”; and no doubt had I at that time seen the play I might at that moment have begun saying in hoarse, throaty tones:— “I belong. I belong.”

  I did not say anything of the sort because I am not primitive and had not then seen the play, nor did I whine or complain because of the soiled sheets on the bed. I talked, I am afraid, rather like a Napoleon or a Tamerlane to poor Nora who was already appalled by my sudden descent upon her.

  Pounding on my chest and descending upon her I made a speech something in the following manner: “My dear Nora, you are a woman and no doubt a virgin, but you may not always be one. Have hopes. Some day a man will come along who will admire your person and will ask your hand in marriage.” I looked at her somewhat critically. “You will not refuse him,” I declared, with the air of a soothsayer delivering himself of a prophecy. “You will accept the marriage state, Nora, partly because you are bored, partly because you will look upon the opportunity as a means of escape from your present way of life, and partly because you will find within yourself an instinct telling you that any kind of marriage will bring you something you want.

  “But we will not discuss you. We will discuss myself,” I declared. I continued pounding myself on the chest and so great was my momentary enthusiasm that later my breast was somewhat sore. “Nora, woman,” I said, “look at me! You cannot see my body and I dare say if I did not have on these soiled clothes your maidenly modesty would compel you to run out of this room. But do not run. I do not intend to take off my clothes. “Very well, we will not speak any more of my body,” I said in a loud voice, wishing to reassure her since I could see she was becoming a little alarmed. No doubt she thought me insane. She had grown slightly pale and had stepped away from me so that her back was against the wall and the soiled water lilies were just above her head. “I am not speaking of my own body in relation to your body, do not get that entirely feminine notion into your head,” I explained. “I am speaking of my body in relation to yonder soiled sheets.”

  And now I pointed toward the bed and stopped pounding my own chest which was becoming sore. Stepping quite close to her, so close in fact that my face was within a few inches of her own, I put one hand against the wall and tried to quiet my own loud, blustering tones, and to assume a tone of great ease, or rather, of nonchalance. I took a cigarette from my pocket and succeeded in lighting it without burning my fingers, a feat requiring a good deal of concentration under the circumstances. The truth is, that I had bethought myself that in a moment more Nora would either hit me with the broom, that stood close at her hand, or would run out of the room thinking me insane.

  As I had a notion I wanted to put over to her while I could and while my beer-born courage lasted I now tried to be more at my ease. A little smile began to play about the comers of my mouth and I thought of myself at the moment as a diplomat — not an American or an English diplomat, let me say, but an Italian diplomat of, we will suppose, the sixteenth century.

  In as light and bantering a tone as I could assume under the circumstances — my task was the more difficult because a workman, hearing my speech from a neighboring room, had come along the hallway and was now standing at the door with a look of astonishment on his face — assuming, I say, a light bantering tone, I now rapidly explained to Nora the notion that had been in my head when I interrupted her bedmaking. She had been about to reach for the broom and with it to drive me from the room, but now the words streaming from my lips caught and held her attention. With a fluency in words that never comes to me when I am writing and that only comes to my lips when I am slightly under the influence of strong drink I explained myself. To the astonished young woman I compared the bed she had been making to a suit of clothes I might be about to put on my body after I had bathed the aforesaid body. Talking rapidly and enunciating my words very distinctly so she should lose nothing of my discourse (and I might here explain to you, my readers, that in ordinary conversation I am rather given to the slovenly dragging of words so common to the people of the Middle West. We, you must know, do not say “feah,” as a New Englander might, nor “fear,” as an Italian-American might, that is to say, pronouncing distinctly the “r,” but “feehr”), going on very clearly and distinctly I told Nora she was not to judge me by the smell that came from my clothes, that under my clothes lived a body I was about to wash clean as soon as she had finished her work in the room and had gone away. Leaving both her and the workman outside the door standing and staring at me I walked to the window and threw it up. “The cloud of dust you see floating up from the street below,” I explained, “does not represent all the elements of the atmosphere even in an American industrial city.” I then tried, as best I could, to explain to my limited audience that air, normally, might be a clean thing to be cleanly breathed into the lungs and that a man like myself, although he might wear dirty, soiled clothes in order to earn money to keep his body alive might also at the same time have a certain feeling of pride and joy in his body and want clean sheets to put it between when he laid it down to sleep at night.

  To Nora, standing there and staring at me, half in wonder, half in anger, I tried to explain a little my habit of having visions and sketched for her, as rapidly and briefly as I could, the marvelous sights I had in fancy seen in the vacant lot near the warehouse in the late afternoon, and also I preached her a kind of sermon, not, I assure you, with the object of changing her own character but rather to carry out the plan that had formed in my rather befuddled brain, a plan for bullying her — that is to say of bending her to my own purpose if possible.

  Being by nature a rather shrewd man, however, I did not put the case to her directly but pursuing the method common to preachers who always try to conceal their own wants under the mask of the common good, so that a man who is apparently always trying to get others into Heaven is really only afraid he will not manage to get there himself, pursuing valiantly this method, I pointed to the soiled water lilies above Nora’s head. An inspiration seized me. At that time, you must remember, I did know that Nora was engaged to be married to an engineer’s assistant on a lake steamer. I chanced at that moment to see the picture of the water lilies and thought of the little quiet back waters of Sandusky Bay where as a boy I had sometimes gone fishing with a certain charming old country doctor who for a time had employed me, ostensibly as a stable boy but really as a companion on long country drives. The old doctor had been a talkative soul and loved to speculate on life and its purposes and we often went f
ishing on summer afternoons and evenings, not so much for the purpose of catching fish as to give the doctor the opportunity to sit in a boat on the bank of some stream and pour wisdom into my willing young ears.

  And so there I was, in the presence of Nora and that wondering workman, standing with one arm raised and pointing at the cheap chromo on the wall and being as much the actor as I could. Even though my brain was somewhat befuddled I was watching Nora, waiting and hoping that something I might say would really arrest her attention, and now I thought, as I have said, of quiet sweet back waters of bays and rivers, of suns going down in clean evening skies, of my own white bare feet dangling in warm pellucid waters.

  To Nora I said the following words, quite without definite thought, as they came flowing from my lips: “I do not know you, young woman, and have never until this moment thought of you and your life but I’ll tell you this: the time will come when you will marry a man who now sails on the seas. Even at this moment he is standing on the deck of a boat and thinking of you, and the air about him is not like this air you and I for our sins are compelled to breathe, “Ah ha!” I cried, seeing by a look in Nora’s eyes that my chance shot had hit home and shrewdly following up the advantage that gave me. “Ah ha!” I cried; “let us think and speak of the life of a sailor. He is in the presence of the clean sea. God has made clean the scene upon which his eyes rest. At night he lies down in a clean bunk. Nothing about him is as it is about us. There is no foul air, no dirty streaks on wall paper, no unclean sheets, no unclean beds.

  “Your young sailor lies in bed at night and his body is clean, as I dare say also is his mind. He thinks of his sweetheart on shore and of necessity, do you see, all about him is so clean, he must think of her as one who in her soul is clean.”

  And now to my readers I must stop a moment to explain that I speak at length in this way of my conversation with Nora, my triumph with her, as I may I think legitimately call it, because it was a purely literary feat and I am writing, as you know, of the life of a literary man. I had never, when all this occurred, been at sea nor had I ever been aboard a ship, but I had, to be sure, read books and stories regarding ships and the conduct of sailors aboard ships, and in my boyhood I had known a man who was once mate on a river boat on the Mississippi River. He to be sure had spoken more often of the gaudiness rather than the cleanliness of the boats on which he had worked but, as I have said, I was being as literary as I could.

  And realizing now that I had by good fortune stumbled upon the right note I went on elaborating the romantic side of the life of the sailor aboard ship, touching upon the hopes and dreams of such a man and pointing out to Nora that it was a great mistake on her part not to have one room in the great house of so many rooms, upon the care of which she could pour some of the natural housewifely qualities with which her nature was, I was certain, so richly endowed.

  I saw, you understand, that I had her but was careful not to press my advantage too far. And then, too, I had begun to like her, as all literary men like inordinately those who take seriously their outpourings.

  And so I now quickly drove a bargain with Nora. Like herself, I explained, I was lonely and wanting companionship. Strange thoughts and fancies came to me that I would like to tell to another. “We will have a friendship,” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “In the evenings we will walk about together. I will tell you of the strange notions that come into my head and of the marvelous adventures that sometimes occur to me in the life of my fancy. I will do that and you — well, you see, you will take extra good care of my room. You will lavish upon it some of the affection natural to your nature, thinking as you do so, not of me but of your sailor man at sea, and of the time to come when you may make a clean warm nest for him ashore.

  “Poor man,” I said, “you must remember that he is buffeted often by storms, often his life is in danger and often too he is in strange ports where but for his constancy to the thoughts of you, he might get into almost any kind of a muddle with some other woman.”

  I had succeeded, you see, by a purely literary trick, in getting myself into Nora’s consciousness as in some way connected with her absent lover.

  “But I must not press the matter too far,” I thought, and, stepping back, stood smiling at her as genially as I could.

  And then another thought came. “There will be a kind of wrath in her soul at this moment and I must direct it quickly toward someone other than myself.” The workman who, attracted by my loud words at the beginning of my discourse, had come along the hallway and who now stood at the door of my room looking in, did not speak English very well and I was sure had not understood much of my long speech.

  Going to the open window I now said, over my shoulder:— “I am silly saying all these things to you, Nora, but I have been lonesome and to tell the truth I am a little drunk. Forgive me. You know yourself that the other men in this house are stupid fellows and do not care at all in what shape their rooms are kept. They work like dogs and sleep like dogs and do not have thoughts and dreams as you do and as I and your sailor man do.

  “There is that man listening to our little conversation, there now, by the door,” I said straightening up and pointing; but my speech got no further. As I had conjectured within myself, Nora had for some minutes been anxious to hit someone with the broom that stood close at hand and she now, suddenly and quite unreasonably, decided to hit the workman. Grabbing the broom in her hand she flew at him screaming with wrath. “Can’t we have a little talk, my friend and I, without your sticking in your nose?” she cried, and the workman fled down the hallway with Nora at his heels, striking vigorously at him with the broom.

  NOTE II

  ONE WHO LIKE myself could not, because of circumstances, spend the years of his youth in the schools must of necessity turn to books and to the men and women directly about him; upon these he must depend for his knowledge of life and to these I had turned. What a life the people of the books led! They were for the most part such respectable people, with problems I did not have at all or they were such keen and brainy villains as I could, never hope to become. Being a Nero a Jesse James or a Napoleon I often thought would suit me first rate but I could not see how I was going to make it. In the first place I never could shoot very well, I hadn’t the courage to kill people I did not like and to steal on any grand scale involved the risk of prison — or at least I then thought it did. I later found that only petty thieves were in danger but at that time, long before I myself became a schemer in business, I knew only petty thieves. At the race tracks some of my friends were always being marched off to prison or I heard of some man I had known being nabbed and taken away and prisons frightened me. I remembered vividly a night of my boyhood and myself going through an alleyway and past our town jail and the white face of a man staring out at me from behind iron bars. “Hey kid, get me an iron bar or a hammer and pass it up here to me and I’ll give you a quarter,” he said in harsh throaty tones but I was frightened at the sight of his white drawn face in the moonlight and at the thoughts of the grim silent place in which he stood. A murderer, a crazed farmer who had killed his wife and hired man with an ax, had once been lodged in the jail and I had got the notion into my head that all men who passed into its doors were terrible and dangerous. I ran quickly away and got out of the alleyway into a lighted street and always afterward I remembered that moment, the stars in the sky, the moonlight shining on the faces of buildings, the quick sharp laughter of a girl somewhere in the darkness on the porch of a house, the sound of a horse’s hoofs in a roadway, all the sweet sounds of free men and women walking about. I wanted to spend my life walking about and looking at things, listening to words, to the sound of winds blowing through trees, smelling life sweet and alive, not put away somewhere in a dark ill-smelling place. Once later when I was working at Columbus, Ohio, I went with a fellow — he had a sickening kind of curiosity about such places and kept urging and urging — to the state prison on visiting day. It was at the hour when the prisoners take exe
rcise and many of them were in a large open place between high walls, on which guards with guns walked up and down. I looked once and then closed my eyes and during the rest of our pilgrimage through the place I carefully avoided looking into the prisoners’ faces or into the cells before which we stopped but looked down instead at the stone floors until we were again outside in the sunlight.

  As I have said the books were mostly about respectable people with moral problems, with family fortunes that must be saved or built up, daughters safely married, hints at a possible loss of virtue on the part of some woman and the terrible consequences that were to follow. In the books the women who grew familiar with men, to whom they were not married, were always having children and thus giving themselves away to all and I did not know any such women. The kind of women among whom life at that time threw me were much wiser and pretty much seemed to have children or not as they chose and I presume I thought the other kind must be a rather foolish sort and not worth bothering or thinking about.

  And then there was the grand life in the big world, the life of the courts, the field, camp and palace, and in the America of Newport, Boston and New York. It was all a life far away from me but it seemed to occupy the attention of most of the novelists. As for myself I did not think at that time that I would ever see much of such life and I am afraid it did not much tempt me.

  However, I read greedily everything that came into my hands. Laura Jean Libbey, Walter Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Fielding, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Balzac, the Bible, Stephen Crane, dime novels, Cooper, Stevenson, our own Mark Twain and Howells and later Whitman. The books — any books — have always fed my dreams and I am one who has always lived by his dreams and even to-day I can often get as much fun and satisfaction out of a dull book as out of a so-called brilliant or witty one. The books like life itself are only useful to me in as much as they feed my own dreams or give me a background upon which I can construct new dreams.