Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  A hot afternoon at Saratoga. I had gone to the races with two men from Kentucky, one a professional gambler and the other a business man who could never succeed because he was always running off to the horse races or some such place with such no-accounts as the little gambler and myself. We were smoking big black cigars and all of us were clad in rather garish clothes. All about us were men just like us but with big diamonds on their fingers or in their neckties. On a stretch of green lawn beneath trees a horse was being saddled. Such a beauty! What a buzz of colorful words! The professional gambler, a small man with crooked legs, had once been a jockey and later a trainer of race horses. It was said he had done something crooked, had got himself into disgrace with other horsemen but of that I knew little. At the sight of such a horse as we were now watching as the saddle was put on something strange happened to him. A soft light came into his eyes. The devil! I had once or twice seen just such a light in the eyes of painters at work, I had seen such a light in the eyes of Alfred Stieglitz in the presence of a painting. Well, it was such a light as might have come into the eyes of a Stark Young holding in his hands some piece of old Italian craftsmanship.

  I remember that as the little old gambler and I stood near the horse I spoke to him of a painting I had once seen in New York, that painting of Albert Ryder’s of the ghostly white horse running beneath a mysteriously encircled moon on an old race track at night.

  The gambler and I talked of the painting. “I know,” he said, “I like to hang around race tracks at night myself.”

  That was all he said and we stood watching the horse. In a few minutes now that tense trembling body would be at ease, fallen into the ease of its long, swinging stride, out there on the track.

  The gambler and I went away to stand by a fence. Were men less fortunate than horses? Did men also seek but to express themselves beautifully as in a few minutes now the horse would do? The gambler’s body trembled as did my own. When the horse ran (he broke the record for the mile, that day) he and I did not speak to each other. We had together seen something we together loved. Was it enough? “At least,” I told myself, “we men have a kind of consciousness that perhaps the horses haven’t. We have this consciousness of one another. That is what love is, perhaps.”

  There was a child, a young boy of fourteen walking beside his mother in a park at Cleveland, Ohio. I sat on a bench there and saw him go by and after that one moment of his passing never saw him again but I’ll never forget while I live. The moment was like the moment of the running of the horse. Could it be that it was the boy’s most beautiful moment? Well, I had seen it. Why was I not made to be a painter? The boy’s head was thrown a little back, he had black curly hair and carried his hat in his hand. In just that moment of his passing the bench on which I sat his young body was all alive, all of the senses fully alive. Whose son was he? Such a living thing as that, to be thrown into the life of Cleveland, Ohio or of Paris or Venice either for that matter.

  I am always having those moments of checking up like a miser dosing the shutters of his house at night to count his gold before he goes to bed and although there are many notes on which I might close this book on my own imaginative life in America, it seems to me good enough to close it just there as I sat that day before Chartres Cathedral beside a man I had come to love and in the presence of that cathedral that had made me more deeply happy than any other work of art I had ever seen.

  My friend kept pretending to read his book but from time to time I saw how his eyes followed the old tower of the church and the gladness that came into him too.

  We would both soon be going back to America to our separate places there. We wanted to go, wanted to take our chances of getting what we could out of our own lives in our own places. We did not want to spend our lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europe from which we were separated by a wide ocean. Americans with cultural impulses had done too much of that sort of thing in the past. The game was worn out and even a ladies’ literary society in an Iowa city was coming to know that a European artist of the present day was not necessarily of importance just because he was a European.

  The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that. In Europe they knew it better than they did in America.

  It was for me a morning of such thoughts, such memories — just there before Chartres with my friend.

  Once, in one of my novels, “Poor White,” I made my hero at the very end of the book go on a trip alone. He was feeling the futility of his own life pretty fully, as I myself have so often done, and so after his business was attended to he went to walk on a beach. That was in the town of Sandusky, in the state of Ohio, my own state.

  He gathered up a little handful of shining stones like a child, and later carried them about with him. They were a comfort to him. Life, his own efforts at life, had seemed so futile and ineffectual but the little stones were something glistening and clear. To the child man, the American who was hero of my book and, I thought, to myself and to many other American men I had seen, they were something a little permanent. They were beautiful and strange at the moment and would be still beautiful and strange after a week, a month, a year.

  I had ended my novel on that note and a good many of my friends had told me they did not know what I was talking about. Was it because, to most Americans, the desire for something, for even little colored stones to hold in the hand now and then to glisten and shine outside the muddle of life, was it because to most Americans that desire had not become as yet conscious?

  Perhaps it had not but that was not my story. At least in me it had become conscious, if not as yet well directed or very intelligent. It had made me a restless man all my life, had set me wandering from place to place, had driven me from the towns to the cities and from one city to another.

  In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I did it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly. I had found out that trying to do my job was fun and that doing it well and finely was a task for the most part beyond me.

  Often enough I sat thinking of my wasted years, making excuses for myself, but in my happier moments and when I was not at work on my job I was happiest when I was in the mood into which I had fallen on the day when I sat before the cathedral — that is to say, when I sat rolling over and over the little colored stones I had managed to gather up. The man with the two women had just dropped another into my hands. How full my hands were! How many flashes of beauty had come to me out of American life.

  It was up to me to carve the stones, to make them more beautiful if I could but often enough my hands trembled. I wasn’t young any more, but I had sought teachers and had found a few. One of them was with me at that moment sitting on the bench before the cathedral and pretending to read a book about it. He grew tired of the pretense and taking out a package of cigarettes offered me one, but then found he hadn’t any match. To such confirmed smokers as my friend and myself the French notion of making a government monopoly of matches is a pest. It is like so much that is European nowadays. It is like the penuriousness of an old age of which at least there is none in America. “The devil!” said my friend. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We did walk, down through the lovely old town, the town made lovely not by the men who live there now but by men of another age, long since fast asleep. If we were neither of us so young in years any more, there was a way in which we were both young enough. We were young with that America of which we both at that moment felt ourselves very much a part, and of which, for many other reasons aside from the French monopoly in matches, we were glad in our hearts to be a part.

  EPILOGUE

  I

  IT SEEMS BUT yesterday although a year has passed since that afternoon when Edward and I sat talking in a restaurant. I was staying at a small hotel in a side street in the city of New York. It had been an uncertain day with us, such days as come In any relationship. One asks something of a friend and finds him empty-handed or something is
asked and a vacant look comes into one’s own eyes. Two men, or a man and woman, were but yesterday very close and now they are far apart.

  Edward came to lunch with me and we went to a restaurant in the neighborhood. It was of the cheap hurried highly-sanitary sort, shiny and white. After eating we sat on and on, looking at each other, trying to say to each other something for which we could find no words. In a day or two I would be going away to the South. Each of us felt the need of something from the other, an expression of regard perhaps. We were both engaged in the practice of the same craft — story-tellers both of us. And what fumblers! Each man fumbling often and often in materials not well enough understood — that is to say in the lives and the drama in the lives of the people about whom the tales were told.

  We sat looking at each other and as it was now nearly three o’clock in the afternoon we were the only people in the restaurant. Then a third man came in and sat as far away from us as possible. For some time the women waiters in the place had been looking at Edward and myself somewhat belligerently. It may have been they were employed only for the noon rush and now wanted to go home. A somewhat large woman with her arms crossed stood glaring at us.

  As for the third man in the place, the fellow who had just come in, he had been in prison for some crime he had committed and had but recently been let out. I do not mean to suggest that he came to Edward and myself and told his story. Indeed he was afraid of us and when he saw us loitering there went to sit as far away as possible. He watched us furtively with frightened eyes. Then he ordered some food and after eating hurriedly went away leaving the flavor of himself behind. He had been trying to get a job but on all sides had been defeated by his own timidity. Now like ourselves he wanted some place to rest, to sit with a friend, to talk, and by an odd chance I, and Edward as well, knew the fellow’s thoughts while he was in the room. The devil! — he was tired and discouraged and had thought he would go into the restaurant, eat slowly, gather himself together. Perhaps Edward and myself — and the waitress with her arms crossed who wanted to get our tip and cut out to some movie show — perhaps all of us had chilled the heart of the man from prison. “Well, things are so and so. One’s own heart has been chilled. You are going away to the South, eh? Well, good-by; I must be getting along.”

  II

  I was walking in the streets of the city that evening of November. There was snow on the roofs of buildings, but it had all been scraped off the roadways. There is a thing happens to American men. It is pitiful. One walks along, going slowly along in the streets, and when one looks sharply at one’s fellows something dreadful comes into the mind. There is a thing happens to the backs of the necks of American men. There is this sense of something drying, getting old without having ripened. The skin does something. One becomes conscious of the back of one’s own neck and is worried. “Might not all our lives ripen like fruit — drop at the end, full-skinned and rich with color, from the tree of life, eh?” When one is in the country one looks at a tree. “Can a tree be a dead dried-up thing while it is still young? Can a tree be a neurotic?” one asks.

  I had worked myself into a state of mind, as so often happens with me, and so I went out of the streets, out of the presence of all the American people hurrying along; the warmly dressed, unnecessarily weary, hurrying, hustling, half-frightened city people.

  In my room I sat reading a book of the tales of Balzac. Then I had got up to prepare for dinner when there came a knock at the door and in answer to my call a man entered.

  He was a fellow of perhaps forty-five, a short strongly-built broad-shouldered man with graying hair. There was in his face something of the rugged simplicity of a European peasant. One felt he might live a long time, do hard work and keep to the end the vigor of that body of his.

  For some time I had been expecting the man to come to see me and was curious concerning him. He was an American writer like Edward and myself and two or three weeks before he had gone to Edward pleading.... Well, he had wanted to see and talk with me. Another fellow with a soul, eh?

  And now there the man stood, with his queer old boyish face. He stood in the doorway, smiling anxiously. “Were you going out? Will I be disturbing you?” I had been standing before a glass adjusting a necktie.

  “Come on in,” I said, perhaps a little pompously. Before sensitive people I am likely to become a bit bovine. I do not wag my tail like a dog. What I do is to moo like a cow. “Come into the warm stall and eat hay with me,” I seem to myself to be saying at such times. I would really like to be a jolly friendly sort of a cuss... you will understand.... “It’s always fair weather, when good fellows get together”... that is the sort of thing I mean.

  That is what I want and I can’t achieve it, nor can I achieve a kind of quiet dignity that I often envy in others.

  I stood with my hands fingering my tie and looked at the man in the doorway. I had thrown the book I had been reading on a small table by the bed. “The devil! — he is one of our everlastingly distraught Americans. He is too much like myself.” I was tired and wanted to talk of my craft to some man who was sure of himself. Queer disconnected ideas are always popping into one’s mind. Perhaps they are not so disconnected. At that moment — as I stood looking at the man in the doorway — the figure of another man came sharply to my mind. The man was a carpenter who for a time lived next door to my father’s house when I was a boy in an Ohio town. He was a workman of the old sort, one who would build a house out of timber just as it is cut into boards by a sawmill. He could make the door frames and the window frames, knew how to cut cunningly all the various joints necessary to building a house tightly in a wet cold country.

  And on Summer evenings the carpenter used to come sometimes and stand by the door of our house and talk with mother as she was doing an ironing. He had a flair for mother, I fancy, and was always coming when father was not at home but he never came into the house. He stood at the door speaking of his work. He always talked of his work. If he had a flair for mother and she had one for him it was kept hidden away but one fancied that, when we children were not about, mother spoke to him of us. Our own father was not one with whom one spoke of children. Children existed but vaguely for him.

  As for the carpenter, what I remembered of him on the evening in the hotel in the city of New York was just a kind of quiet assurance in his figure remembered from boyhood. The old workman had spoken to mother of young workmen in his employ. “They aren’t learning their trade properly,” he said. “Everything is cut in the factories now and the young fellows get no chance. They can stand looking at a tree and they do not know what can be done with it... while I... well, I hope it don’t sound like bragging too much.... I know my trade,”

  III

  You see what a confusion! Something was happening to me that is always happening. Try as much as I may I cannot become a man of culture. At my door stood a man waiting to be admitted and there stood I — thinking of a carpenter in a town of my boyhood. I was making the man at the door feel embarrassed by my silent scrutiny of him and that I did not want. He was in a nervous distraught condition and I was making him every moment more distraught. His fingers played with his hat nervously.

  And then he broke the silence by plunging into an apology. “I’ve been very anxious to see you. There are things I have been wanting to ask you about. There is something important to me perhaps you can tell me. Well, you see, I thought — sometime when you are not very busy, when you are unoccupied.... I dare say you are a very busy man. To tell the truth now I did not hope to find you unoccupied when I came in thus, at this hour. You may be going out to dine. You are fixing your tie. It’s a nice tie.... I like it. What I thought was that I could perhaps be so fortunate as to make an appointment with you. Oh, I know well enough you must be a busy man.”

  The deuce! I did not like all this fussiness. I wanted to shout at the man standing at my door and say... “to the devil with you!” You see, I wanted to be more rude than I had already been — leaving him stan
ding there in that way. He was nervous and distraught and already he had made me nervous and distraught.

  “Do come in. Sit there on the edge of the bed. It’s the most comfortable place. You see I have but one chair,” I said, making a motion with my hand. As a matter of fact there were other chairs in the room but they were covered with clothing. I had taken off one suit and put on another.

  We began at once to talk, or rather he talked, sitting on the edge of the bed and facing me. How nervous he was! His fingers twitched.

  “Well now, I really did not expect I would find you unoccupied when I came in here at this hour. I am living, for the time being in this very hotel — on the floor below. What I thought was that I would try to make an appointment with you. ‘We’ll have a talk’ — that’s what I thought.”

  I stood looking at him and then, like a flash, the figure of the man seen that afternoon in the restaurant came into my mind — the furtive fellow who had been a thief, had been sent to prison and who, after he was freed, did not know what to do with himself.

  What I mean is that my mind again did a thing it is always doing. It leaped away from the man sitting before me, confused him with the figures of other men. After I had left Edward I had walked about thinking my own thoughts. Shall I be able to explain what happened at that moment? In one instant I was thinking of the man now sitting before me and who had wanted to pay me this visit, of the ex-thief seen in the restaurant, of myself and my friend Edward, and of the old workman who used to come and stand at the kitchen door to talk with mother when I was a boy.