Sherwood Anderson

by Collected Stories- Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses

  He was clear of the law after that but his manner in no way changed. There was, somewhere, a man or a woman who would understand just what he understood and it was important to find that person and talk things over. There was a time, during the trial and immediately afterward, when I saw a good deal of him, and I had this sharp sense of him, feeling about in the darkness trying to find something like a needle or a pin lost on the floor. Well, he was like an old man who cannot find his glasses. He feels in all his pockets and looks helplessly about.

  There was a question in my own mind too, in everyone’s mind—“Can a man be wholly casual and brutal, in every outward way, at a moment when the one nearest and dearest to him is dying, and at the same time, and with quite another part of himself, be altogether tender and sensitive?”

  * * *

  Anyway it’s a story, and once in a while a man likes to tell a story straight out, without putting in any newspaper jargon about beautiful heiresses, cold-blooded murderers and all that sort of tommyrot.

  As I picked the story up the sense of it was something like this—

  The man’s name was Wilson,—Edgar Wilson—and he had come to Chicago from some place to the westward, perhaps from the mountains. He might once have been a sheep herder or something of the sort in the far west, as he had the peculiar abstract air, acquired only by being a good deal alone. About himself and his past he told a good many conflicting stories and so, after being with him for a time, one instinctively discarded the past.

  “The devil—it doesn’t matter—the man can’t tell the truth in that direction.—Let it go,” one said to oneself. What was known was that he had come to Chicago from a town in Kansas and that he had run away from the Kansas town with another man’s wife.

  As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one time, I imagine, a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding sort of way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather messy. In those dead flat Kansas towns lives have a way of getting ugly and messy without anything very definite having happened to make them so. One can’t imagine the reasons—Let it go. It just is so and one can’t at all believe the writers of Western tales about the life out there.

  To be a little more definite about this particular woman—in her young girlhood her father had got into trouble. He had been some sort of a small official, a travelling agent or something of the sort for an express company, and got arrested in connection with the disappearance of some money. And then, when he was in jail and before his trial, he shot and killed himself. The girl’s mother was already dead.

  Within a year or two she married a man, an honest enough fellow but from all accounts rather uninteresting. He was a drug clerk and a frugal man and after a short time managed to buy a drug store of his own.

  The woman, as I have said, had been strong and well-built but now grew thin and nervous. Still she carried herself well with a sort of air, as it were, and there was something about her that appealed strongly to men. Several men of the seedy little town were smitten by her and wrote her letters, trying to get her to creep out with them at night. You know how such things are done. The letters were unsigned. “You go to such and such a place on Friday evening. If you are willing to talk things over with me carry a book in your hand.”

  Then the woman made a mistake and told her husband about the receipt of one of the letters and he grew angry and tramped off to the trysting place at night with a shotgun in his hand. When no one appeared he came home and fussed about. He said little mean tentative things. “You must have looked—in a certain way—at the man when he passed you on the street. A man don’t grow so bold with a married woman unless an opening has been given him.”

  The man talked and talked after that, and life in the house must have been gay. She grew habitually silent, and when she was silent the house was silent. They had no children.

  Then the man Edgar Wilson came along, going eastward, and stopped over in the town for two or three days. He had at that time a little money and stayed at a small workingmen’s boarding-house, near the railroad station. One day he saw the woman walking in the street and followed her to her home and the neighbors saw them standing and talking together for an hour by the front gate and on the next day he came again.

  That time they talked for two hours and then she went into the house; got a few belongings and walked to the railroad station with him. They took a train for Chicago and lived there together, apparently very happy, until she died—in a way I am about to try to tell you about. They of course could not be married and during the three years they lived in Chicago he did nothing toward earning their common living. As he had a very small amount of money when they came, barely enough to get them here from the Kansas town, they were miserably poor.

  They lived, when I knew about them, over on the North side, in that section of old three- and four-story brick residences that were once the homes of what we call our nice people, but that had afterward gone to the bad. The section is having a kind of rebirth now but for a good many years it rather went to seed. There were these old residences, made into boarding-houses, and with unbelievably dirty lace curtains at the windows, and now and then an utterly disreputable old tumble-down frame house—in one of which Wilson lived with his woman.

  The place is a sight! Someone owns it, I suppose, who is shrewd enough to know that in a big city like Chicago no section gets neglected always. Such a fellow must have said to himself, “Well, I’ll let the place go. The ground on which the house stands will some day be very valuable but the house is worth nothing. I’ll let it go at a low rental and do nothing to fix it up. Perhaps I will get enough out of it to pay my taxes until prices come up.”

  And so the house had stood there unpainted for years and the windows were out of line and the shingles nearly all off the roof. The second floor was reached by an outside stairway with a handrail that had become just the peculiar grey greasy black that wood can become in a soft-coal-burning city like Chicago or Pittsburgh. One’s hand became black when the railing was touched; and the rooms above were altogether cold and cheerless.

  At the front there was a large room with a fireplace, from which many bricks had fallen, and back of that were two small sleeping rooms.

  Wilson and his woman lived in the place, at the time when the thing happened I am to tell you about, and as they had taken it in May I presume they did not too much mind the cold barrenness of the large front room in which they lived. There was a sagging wooden bed with a leg broken off—the woman had tried to repair it with sticks from a packing box—a kitchen table, that was also used by Wilson as a writing desk, and two or three cheap kitchen chairs.

  The woman had managed to get a place as wardrobe woman in a theatre in Randolph Street and they lived on her earnings. It was said she had got the job because some man connected with the theatre, or a company playing there, had a passion for her but one can always pick up stories of that sort about any woman who works about the theatre—from the scrubwoman to the star.

  Anyway she worked there and had a reputation in the theatre of being quiet and efficient.

  As for Wilson, he wrote poetry of a sort I’ve never seen before, although, like most newspaper men, I’ve taken a turn at verse making myself now and then—both of the rhymed kind and the newfangled vers libre sort. I rather go in for the classical stuff myself.

  About Wilson’s verse—it was Greek to me. Well now, to get right down to hardpan in this matter, it was and it wasn’t.

  The stuff made me feel just a little bit woozy when I took a whole sheaf of it and sat alone in my room reading it at night. It was all about walls, and deep wells, and great bowls with young trees standing erect in them—and trying to find their way to the light and air over the rim of the bowl.

  Queer crazy stuff, every line of it, but fascinating too—in a way. One got into a new world with new values, which after all is I suppose what poetry is all about. There was the world of fact—we all know or think we know—the w
orld of flat buildings and middle-western farms with wire fences about the fields and fordson tractors running up and down, and towns with high schools and advertising billboards, and everything that makes up life—or that we think makes up life.

  There was this world, we all walk about in, and then there was this other world, that I have come to think of as Wilson’s world—a dim place to me at least—of far-away near places—things taking new and strange shapes, the insides of people coming out, the eyes seeing new things, the fingers feeling new and strange things.

  It was a place of walls mainly. I got hold of the whole lot of Wilson’s verse by a piece of luck. It happened that I was the first newspaper man who got into the place on the night when the woman’s body was found, and there was all his stuff, carefully written out in a sort of child’s copy book, and two or three stupid policemen standing about. I just shoved the book under my coat, when they weren’t looking, and later, during Wilson’s trial, we published some of the more intelligible ones in the paper. It made pretty good newspaper stuff—the poet who killed his mistress,

  “He did not wear his purple coat,

  For blood and wine are red”—

  and all that. Chicago loved it.

  To get back to the poetry itself for a moment. I just wanted to explain that all through the book there ran this notion, that men had erected walls about themselves and that all men were perhaps destined to stand forever behind the walls—on which they constantly beat with their fists, or with whatever tools they could get hold of. Wanted to break through to something, you understand. One couldn’t quite make out whether there was just one great wall or many little individual walls. Sometimes Wilson put it one way, sometimes another. Men had themselves built the walls and now stood behind them, knowing dimly that beyond the walls there was warmth, light, air, beauty, life in fact—while at the same time, and because of a kind of madness in themselves, the walls were constantly being built higher and stronger.

  The notion gives you the fantods a little, doesn’t it? Anyway it does me.

  And then there was that notion about deep wells, men everywhere constantly digging and digging themselves down deeper and deeper into deep wells. They not wanting to do it, you understand, and no one wanting them to do it, but all the time the thing going on just the same, that is to say the wells getting constantly deeper and deeper, and the voices growing dimmer and dimmer in the distance—and again the light and the warmth of life going away and going away, because of a kind of blind refusal of people to try to understand each other, I suppose.

  It was all very strange to me—Wilson’s poetry, I mean—when I came to it. Here is one of his things. It is not directly concerned with the walls, the bowl or the deep well theme, as you will see, but it is one we ran in the paper during the trial and a lot of folks rather liked it—as I’ll admit I do myself. Maybe putting it in here will give a kind of point to my story, by giving you some sense of the strangeness of the man who is the story’s hero. In the book it was called merely “Number Ninety-seven,” and it went as follows:

  The firm grip of my fingers on the thin paper of this cigarette is a sign that I am very quiet now. Sometimes it is not so. When I am unquiet I am weak but when I am quiet, as I am now, I am very strong.

  Just now I went along one of the streets of my city and in at a door and came up here, where I am now, lying on a bed and looking out at a window. Very suddenly and completely the knowledge has come to me that I could grip the sides of tall buildings as freely and as easily as I now grip this cigarette. I could hold the building between my fingers, put it to my lips and blow smoke through it. I could blow confusion away. I could blow a thousand people out through the roof of one tall building into the sky, into the unknown. Building after building I could consume, as I consume the cigarettes in this box. I could throw the burning ends of cities over my shoulder and out through a window.

  It is not often I get in the state I am now in—so quiet and sure of myself. When the feeling comes over me there is a directness and simplicity in me that makes me love myself. To myself at such times I say strong sweet words.

  I am on a couch by this window and I could ask a woman to come here to lie with me, or a man either for that matter.

  I could take a row of houses standing on a street, tip them over, empty the people out of them, squeeze and compress all the people into one person and love that person.

  Do you see this hand? Suppose it held a knife that could cut down through all the falseness in you. Suppose it could cut down through the sides of buildings and houses where thousands of people now lie asleep.

  It would be something worth thinking about if the fingers of this hand gripped a knife that could cut and rip through all the ugly husks in which millions of lives are enclosed.

  Well, there is the idea you see, a kind of power that could be tender too. I will quote you just one more of his things, a more gentle one. It is called in the book, “Number Eighty-three.”

  I am a tree that grows beside the wall. I have been thrusting up and up. My body is covered with scars. My body is old but still I thrust upward, creeping toward the top of the wall.

  It is my desire to drop blossoms and fruit over the wall.

  I would moisten dry lips.

  I would drop blossoms on the heads of children, over the top of the wall.

  I would caress with falling blossoms the bodies of those who live on the further side of the wall.

  My branches are creeping upward and new sap comes into me out of the dark ground under the wall.

  My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of the others, over the top of the wall.

  And now as to the life led by the man and woman in the large upper room in that old frame house. By a stroke of luck I have recently got rather a line on that by a discovery I have made.

  After they had moved into the house—it was only last spring—the theatre in which the woman was employed was dark for a long time and they were more than usually hard up, so the woman tried to pick up a little extra money—to help pay the rent I suppose—by sub-letting the two little back rooms of that place of theirs.

  Various people lived in the dark tiny holes, just how I can’t make out as there was no furniture. Still there are places in Chicago called “flops” where one may sleep on the floor for five or ten cents and they are more patronized than respectable people know anything about.

  What I did discover was a little woman—she wasn’t so young but she was hunchbacked and small and it is hard not to think of her as a girl—who once lived in one of the rooms for several weeks. She had a job as ironer in a small hand-laundry in the neighborhood and someone had given her a cheap folding cot. She was a curiously sentimental creature, with the kind of hurt eyes deformed people often have, and I have a fancy she had herself a romantic attachment of a sort for the man Wilson. Anyway I managed to find out a lot from her.

  After the other woman’s death and after Wilson had been cleared on the murder charge, by the confession of the stage hand, I used to go over to the house where he had lived, sometimes in the late afternoon after our paper had been put to bed for the day. Ours is an afternoon paper and after two o’clock most of us are free.

  I found the hunchback girl standing in front of the house one day and began talking with her. She was a gold mine.

  There was that look in her eyes I’ve told you of, the hurt sensitive look. I just spoke to her and we began talking of Wilson. She had lived in one of the rooms at the back. She told me of that at once.

  On some days she found herself unable to work at the laundry because her strength suddenly gave out and so, on such days, she stayed in the room, lying on the cot. Blinding headaches came that lasted for hours during which she was almost entirely unconscious of everything going on about her. Then afterward she was quite conscious but for a long time very weak. She wasn’t one who is destined to live very long I suppose and I presume she didn’t much care.

  Any
way, there she was in the room, in that weak state after the times of illness, and she grew curious about the two people in the front room, so she used to get off her cot and go softly in her stockinged feet to the door between the rooms and peek through the keyhole. She had to kneel on the dusty floor to do it.

  The life in the room fascinated her from the beginning. Sometimes the man was in there alone, sitting at the kitchen table and writing the stuff he afterward put into the book I collared, and from which I have quoted; sometimes the woman was with him, and again sometimes he was in there alone but wasn’t writing. Then he was always walking and walking up and down.

  When both people were in the room, and when the man was writing, the woman seldom moved but sat in a chair by one of the windows with her hands crossed. He would write a few lines and then walk up and down talking to himself or to her. When he spoke she did not answer except with her eyes, the crippled girl said. What I gathered of all this from her talk with me, and what is the product of my own imaginings, I confess I do not quite know.

  Anyway what I got and what I am trying, in my own way, to transmit to you is a sense of a kind of strangeness in the relationship of the two. It wasn’t just a domestic household, a little down on its luck, by any means. He was trying to do something very difficult—with his poetry I presume—and she in her own way was trying to help him.

  And of course, as I have no doubt you have gathered from what I have quoted of Wilson’s verse, the matter had something to do with the relationships between people—not necessarily between the particular man and woman who happened to be there in that room, but between all peoples.

  The fellow had some half-mystic conception of all such things, and before he found his own woman had been going aimlessly about the world looking for a mate. Then he had found the woman in the Kansas town and—he at least thought—things had cleared, for him.