Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  And so along a street I went to my room, followed by two or three curious children who perhaps thought I had been hit by a freight train and succeeded in also getting my door bolted against any sudden descent of Nora. My eyes were very evidently going to be badly discolored, my nose bled and my lips were badly cut, and so, after bathing my face in cold water, I put a wet towel over it and went and threw myself on the bed.

  It was one of those moments that come, I presume, into every man’s life. I was lying on my bed in my room, in the condition already described, the door was bolted, Nora was not directly about and I was out from under the eyes of my fellowmen.

  I tried to think as one will at such moments.

  As for Nora, I might very well have gone to my door and called to her — she was at work somewhere on the floor below and would have gladly come running to offer her woman’s sympathy to my hurt physical self — but it was not my hurt physical self that I thought wanted attention. As far as that is concerned I was then, as I have been all my life, not so much concerned with the matter of physical discomfort or pain. Always it has been true of me that a framed water lily on a wall or a walk in a factory street can hurt me worse than a blow on the jaw and long afterward when I became a scribbler of tales I was able to take advantage of this peculiarity of my nature to do my work under conditions that would have disheartened a more physically sensitive man. As I was destined to live most of my life and do most of my work in factory towns and in little, ill-smelling, hideously-furnished rooms, freezing cold in winter and hot and cheerless in summer, it turned out to be a good and convenient trait in me and in the end I had so trained myself to forget my surroundings that I could sit for hours lost in my own thoughts and dreams, or scribbling oftentimes meaningless sentences in a cold room in a factory street, on a log beside some country road, in a railroad station or in the lobby of some large hotel, filled with the hurrying hustling figures of business men, totally unconscious of my surroundings, until my mood had worn itself out and I had sunk into one of the moods of depression common, I think, to all such fellows as myself. Never was such an almighty scribbler as I later became and am even now. Ink, paper and pencils are cheap in our day and I have taken full advantage of that fact and have during some years written hundreds of thousands of words which have afterward been thrown away. Many have told me, in print or by word of mouth, that all should have been thrown away and they may be right, but I am one who loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with words always gladdens me. The result of the scribbling, the tale of perfect balance, all the elements of the tale understood, an infinite number of minute adjustments perfectly made, the power of self-criticism fully at work, the shifting surface of word values and color in full play, form and the rhythmic flow of thought and mood marching forward with the sentences — these are things of a dream, of a far dim day toward which one goes knowing one can never arrive but infinitely glad to be on the road. It is the story I dare say of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the sloughs and sink holes on the road are many but the tale of that journey is known to other men than scribblers.

  The consolation of ink and paper came, however, long after the time with which I am now concerned, and what a consolation it is! How much easier it is to sit in a room before a desk and with paper before one to describe a fight between oneself as hero of some tale and five or six burly ruffians than with the fists to dispose of one baseball player on the platform of a warehouse.

  In the tale one can do any such job as it should be done and in the doing give satisfaction both to oneself and the possible reader, for the reader will always share in the emotions of the hero and gloat with him over his victories. In the tale, as you will understand, all is in order. The feint and the cross, the powerful left to the jaw, the golden smile, the shifting movements of the shoulders that confuse and disconcert the opponent, all work like well-oiled machines. One defeats not one baseball player or ruffian of the city streets but a dozen if the need arises. Oh, what glorious times I have had, sitting in little rooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood have run from the wounds of the villains, foolish enough to oppose me on the field of honor; what fair women I have loved and how they have loved me and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, open-hearted and fine I have been! I remember how I sat in the back room of a small bootlegging establishment at Mobile, Alabama, one afternoon, long after the time with which I am now concerned and while three drunken sailors discussed the divinity of Christ at a near-by table wrote the story of little, tired-out and crazed Joe Wainsworth’s killing of Jim Gibson in the harness shop at Bidwell Ohio, that afterward was used in the novel “Poor White”; and of how at a railroad station at Detroit I sat writing the tale of Elsie Leander’s westward journey, in “The Triumph of the Egg,” and missed my own train — these remain as rich and fine spots in a precarious existence.

  But at the time of which I am speaking the consolation of ink and paper was a thing of the future and my bunged-up eyes and hurt spirits were facts.

  Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

  As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

  I lay on my back on my bed, trying to get up courage to face facts. As for the throbbing of the hurt places, the pain was a kind of satisfaction to me at the moment.

  There was the warehouse where I had been more or less a spiritual bully but where I would now have to eat crow. Well, I need not go back. The day before had been payday and I would, by never going near the place again, lose little money and save myself the humiliation of facing the teamsters. And when it came to the scratch, I thought, there was the city I was in, the state, the very United States of America itself — I could if I chose desert them all. I was young, had been well trained in poverty, had no family ties, no social position to uphold, I was unmarried and as yet childless.

  I was a free man, I told myself, sitting on the bed and staring about the room through swollen eyelids. Was I free? Did any man ever achieve freedom? I had my own life before me. Why did I not, by some grand effort, begin to live a life?

  I lay on the bed with the wet towel thrown aside thinking, trying to make plans. A faint suspicion of something permanently wrong with me had begun to creep into my consciousness. Was I, alas, a fellow born out of his place and time? I was in a world where only men of action seemed to thrive. Already I had noted that fact. One wanted a definite thing to go after, money, fame, a position of power in the big world, and having something definite of the sort in mind one shut one’s eyes and pitched in with all the force of one’s physical and mental self. I squirmed about trying to force myself to face myself. My body was strong enough for all practical purposes, when not scarred and bruised by the blows of an angry ball player, and I was not such a bad-looking fellow. I was not lazy and on the whole rather liked hard physical labor. Need I be what I at the moment seemed to myself to be, a useless and foolish dreamer, a child in a world filled with what I thought to be grown-up men? Why should I myself not also grow up, take the plow by the handle, plow vast fields, become rich or famous? Perhaps I could become a man of power and rule or influence many other men’s lives.

  There is a trick the fancy has. Start it in any direction and it goes prancing off at a great rate and that trick my own fancy now did.

  Although my body ached as a result of my recent plunge into the field of action I, in fancy, plunged in again and began thinking of myself as holding the handle of a plow and plowing the fields of life, turning great furrows, planting perhaps the seeds of new ideas. Oho, for the smell of new-turned earth, the sight of the sower casting his seed!

  I was off again. On that day Nora had done the work in my room early but now she was sweeping and dusting on the floor below and I could hear her moving about.

  Why should I not first of all conquer Nora? That, I at that moment thought, was surely the beginning of manhood, to conquer some woman, and why not Nora as well as another? It
would be something of an undertaking that was sure. Nora was not beautiful nor perhaps too subtle in her outlook on life but then was I myself subtle? She was direct and simple and had, I thought, a direct and simple mind and after I had conquered her, had bent her to my own will, what might we not do together? There was to be sure the sailor with whom she was to live and to whom she was promised but I brushed him aside. “I can cook his goose in some way,” I thought to myself, much as I had thought I could easily dispose of the ball player by my feints and crosses.

  We might, I thought, following up the fancy I had just had, begin by being tillers of the soil. We could go West somewhere and take up land. Already I had read many tales of the West and had a fancy for casting in my fortunes with the West. “Out where the smile lasts a little longer, out where the handclasp is a little stronger,” etc. “Oho, for the land where men are men and gals are gals!” I thought my fancy running away like a wild horse broken out of its stall. I saw myself owning vast farms somewhere in the Far West and saw, I am afraid, Nora doing most of the plowing, planting and the harvesting of crops, the while I rode grandly over the estate on a black stallion, receiving the homage of serfs.

  But what would I do with my odd moments? I had tried talking to Nora of the things that interested me most, the play of light over a factory chimney, seen amid smoke as darkness came on, odd expressions caught from the lips of passing men and women, the play of the fancy over the imagined lives of men and women too. Had Nora understood or cared? Could I go on always talking and talking in the face of the fact that I knew she was not much interested?

  With a rush of resolution I threw my doubts aside. Oh, to be one who made two blades of grass where but one had grown before! With Nora at my side I would in some field become great and powerful. I was at the moment but a bunged-up fellow lying on the bed in a cheap rooming house but what did that matter? All about me was the great American world rushing on and on to new mechanical and material triumphs. Teddy Roosevelt and the strenuous life had not yet come but he was implicit in the American mood. Imperialism had already come. It was time, I told myself, to he up and doing.

  Behind him lay the gray Azores,

  Behind the Gates of Hercules;

  Before him not the ghost of shores;

  Before him only shoreless seas.

  The good mate said, “Now must we pray,

  For lo, the very stars are gone.

  Brave Admr’l speak.”

  “What shall I say?”

  “Why say:— ‘Sail on, sail on and on.’”

  NOTE VII

  JUMPING OFF THE bed I instantly began to try to prepare myself for new adventures. As I had been lying on the bed thinking the thoughts above set down and working myself up to new heights of fancied grandeur some time had passed. Perhaps I had slept and awakened. At any rate it was now dark in the room and I lighted a lamp. By its light and after I had bathed my face for some time it did not look so swollen although both eyes had turned a deep purple.

  Undaunted I dressed in my best Sunday clothes and prepared to set out. I had engaged to walk with Nora on that evening and if was our custom on such occasions for me to pass quietly out of the house, tapping on the door of her room on the floor below and waiting for her on the front steps.

  To tell the truth I had already got well going the new dramatization of myself as a man of action but was not sure of myself in the new rôle to want to face any of the workmen in the house. Nora I thought I could handle.

  As I stood in the room dressed in my best clothes I counted my money and then decided I would not be a Western ranchman after all but a man of commerce, an empire builder perhaps. I had in my possession some ninety-eight dollars which seemed to me at the moment sufficient for a start in almost any undertaking. It would support me for a few weeks while I looked about and then I would pitch in somewhere and become an empire builder. It would take time but what was time to me? I had an abundance of time. “I’ll do it,” I told myself resolutely.

  Why not? Was I not a man of imagination? Was I not young and did I not have a strong body?

  As I washed the dried blood off my face, put on my Sunday suit and adjusted my tie I in fancy swept the field of commercial adventure with my somewhat damaged eyes. There were the great cities of Chicago and New York I had not yet seen, although I had read much about them and about men who had grown from poverty to riches and power in them. Like all young Americans I had read innumerable tales of men who had begun with nothing and had become great leaders, owners of railroads, governors of states, foreign ambassadors, generals of armies, presidents of great modern republics. Abraham Lincoln walking miles through a storm after a hard day’s work to borrow his first book, Jay Gould the young Wall Street clerk, setting up a great dynasty of wealth, Daniel Drew the cattle dealer becoming a millionaire, Garfield the canal-boat boy and Vanderbilt the ferryman become President and millionaire, Grant the failure, hauling hides from his father’s tannery at Galena, Illinois, to St. Louis — and, it was said, getting so well piped sometimes on the homeward journey that he fell off the wagon — he also became great, the winner of a mighty war, President of his country, a noted traveler, receiving the homage of kings. “And I can carry my liquor better than he could, by all reports,” I said to myself.

  Were these men any better than myself? At the moment and in spite of the gloom of an hour before, I thought not, and as for my having but ninety-eight dollars, what did that matter? As a matter of fact one gathered from having read American history that there was a sort of advantage to be gained from starting with nothing. One had something to talk and brag about in one’s old age, and when one became a candidate for President one furnished one’s campaign managers with materials for campaign slogans.

  And now I was dressed and had tiptoed out of the house, tapped on Nora’s door and was waiting for her outside. I had decided that when she came out I would not make an appeal for her woman’s sympathy by telling of what had actually happened to me. “I do not want woman’s sympathy,” I thought proudly. What I wanted was woman’s respect. I wanted to conquer them, to have them at my feet, to stand before them the conquering male.

  When Nora came and when we had walked to where there was a street light and she had seen my damaged countenance I began at once to brag and to reconstruct the fight at the warehouse more to my own fancy. Not one but four men had attacked me and I had valiantly stood my ground. An inspiration came. I had got into the fight, I told Nora, because of a woman. A young woman, a working girl like Nora herself had passed the platform and the men at work there with me had begun making remarks that were not very nice. What was I to do? I was one who could never stand quietly by and hear an innocent woman, particularly one who had to work for her living and had perhaps no men of her own to stand up for her, hear such a woman subjected to insult. I had, I told Nora, at once pitched into the four men and there had been a terrible fight.

  As I described the fancied affair to Nora the feint and the cross on which I had so depended had worked wonderfully. I had received many hard blows, it was true, and Nora could see by looking at my face how I had suffered, but I had given better than I had received. Like a tornado I had swept up and down the warehouse platform making feints with my right and whipping my powerful left to the jaws of my opponents until at last they were all laid out like dead men before me. And then I had come home, a little fearful that I might have killed one or two of the men but not waiting to see. “I did not care,” I said. “If my opponents have suffered a terrible heating at my hands and if one or two of them die of their injuries it was their own fault. They should have known better than to have insulted a woman in my presence.”

  I had told Nora my story and we had walked in silence until we had come to a street lamp when she suddenly stopped and, taking my left hand, turned it up to the light. As I had not succeeded in the actual fight in striking a blow with it, the hand was unmarked by a bruise. “Huh!” said Nora and we went on in silence.

  The si
lence, which was one of the hardest I have ever had to bear, continued until we had finished our walk — which on that evening did not last very long, — and had got back to the house.

  On the steps in front we stopped and Nora stood for a time looking at me. It was a look I did not much fancy, but what was I to do? Two or three times during our walk I had tried to begin talking a little and had attempted to patch up the structure of my yarn so that it would not be quite so full of holes and leaky but could think of no way to explain the unbruised surface and uninjured knuckles of my left, so I had taken refuge in a kind of sullen silence.

  I had even begun to feel a little injured and angry and was asking myself what right Nora had to question my story — was feeling, to tell the truth, much as I was later to feel when some editor or critic rejected, as not sound, one of my written tales — that is to say, resentful and intolerant of the editor or critic and inclined to call him a fool and to attribute to him all kinds of secret and degrading motives. I was feeling much in this mood, I say, when we had got back to the steps and were standing in the darkness in front.

  And then Nora suddenly put her strong arm about my neck and pulled my head down upon her shoulder and I began to cry like a child.

  That in an odd way made me more resentful than ever. It faced me with a problem I have all my life been trying to face and have never quite succeeded. One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man. It is a fact perhaps but a fact that I have always thought we men should deny with all the strength of our more powerful wills. We men should conquer women. We should not stand in the darkness with our heads on their shoulders, blubbering as I was doing at that moment.