Sherwood Anderson

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

  Well, he had the notion that no one in the world could think or feel anything alone, and that people only got into trouble and walled themselves in by trying it, or something of the sort. There was a discord. Things were jangled. Someone, it seems, had to strike a pitch that all voices could take up before the real song of life could begin. Mind you I’m not putting forth any notions of my own. What I am trying to do is to give you a sense of something I got from having read Wilson’s stuff, from having known him a little, and from having seen something of the effect of his personality upon others.

  He felt, quite definitely, that no one in the world could feel or even think alone. And then there was the notion, that if one tried to think with the mind without taking the body into account, one got all balled-up. True conscious life built itself up like a pyramid. First the body and mind of a beloved one must come into one’s thinking and feeling and then, in some mystic way, the bodies and minds of all the other people in the world must come in, must come sweeping in like a great wind—or something of the sort.

  Is all this a little tangled up to you, who read my story of Wilson? It may not be. It may be that your minds are more clear than my own and that what I take to be so difficult will be very simple to you.

  However, I have to bring up to you just what I can find, after diving down into this sea of motives and impulses—I admit I don’t rightly understand.

  The hunchback girl felt (or is it my own fancy coloring what she said?)—it doesn’t really matter. The thing to get at is what the man Edgar Wilson felt.

  He felt, I fancy, that in the field of poetry he had something to express that could never be expressed until he had found a woman who could, in a peculiar and absolute way, give herself in the world of the flesh—and that then there was to be a marriage out of which beauty would come for all people. He had to find the woman who had that power, and the power had to be untainted by self-interest, I fancy. A profound egotist, you see—and he thought he had found what he needed in the wife of the Kansas druggist.

  He had found her and had done something to her. What it was I can’t quite make out, except that she was absolutely and wholly happy with him, in a strangely inexpressive sort of way.

  Trying to speak of him and his influence on others is rather like trying to walk on a tightrope stretched between two tall buildings above a crowded street. A cry from below, a laugh, the honk of an automobile horn, and down one goes into nothingness. One simply becomes ridiculous.

  He wanted, it seems, to condense the flesh and the spirit of himself and his woman into his poems. You will remember that in one of the things of his I have quoted he speaks of condensing, of squeezing all the people of a city into one person and of loving that person.

  One might think of him as a powerful person, almost hideously powerful. You will see, as you read, how he has got me in his power and is making me serve his purpose.

  And he had caught and was holding the woman in his grip. He had wanted her—quite absolutely, and had taken her—as all men, perhaps, want to do with their women, and don’t quite dare. Perhaps too she was in her own way greedy and he was making actual love to her always day and night, when they were together and when they were apart.

  I’ll admit I am confused about the whole matter myself. I am trying to express something I have felt, not in myself, nor in the words that came to me from the lips of the hunchback girl whom, you will remember, I left kneeling on the floor in that back room and peeking through a keyhole.

  There she was, you see, the hunchback, and in the room before her were the man and woman and the hunchback girl also had fallen under the power of the man Wilson. She also was in love with him—there can be no doubt of that. The room in which she knelt was dark and dusty. There must have been a thick accumulation of dust on the floor.

  What she said—or if she did not say the words what she made me feel was that the man Wilson worked in the room, or walked up and down in there before his woman, and that, while he did that, his woman sat in the chair, and that there was in her face, in her eyes, a look—

  He was all the time making love to her, and his making love to her in just that abstract way, was a kind of love-making with all people? and that was possible because the woman was as purely physical as he was something else. If all this is meaningless to you, at least it wasn’t to the hunchback girl—who certainly was uneducated and never would have set herself up as having any special powers of understanding. She knelt in the dust, listening, and looking in at the keyhole, and in the end she came to feel that the man, in whose presence she had never been and whose person had never in any way touched her person, had made love to her also.

  She had felt that and it had gratified her entire nature. One might say it had satisfied her. She was what she was and it had made life worth living for her.

  * * *

  Minor things happened in the room and one may speak of them.

  For example, there was a day in June, a dark warm rainy day. The hunchback girl was in her room, kneeling on the floor, and Wilson and his woman were in their room.

  Wilson’s woman had been doing a family washing, and as it could not be dried outdoors she had stretched ropes across the room and had hung the clothes inside.

  When the clothes were all hung Wilson came from walking outside in the rain and going to the desk sat down and began to write.

  He wrote for a few minutes and then got up and went about the room, and in a walking a wet garment brushed against his face.

  He kept right on walking and talking to the woman but as he walked and talked he gathered all the clothes in his arms and going to the little landing at the head of the stairs outside, threw them down into the muddy yard below. He did that and the woman sat without moving or saying anything until he had gone back to his desk, then she went down the stairs, got the clothes and washed them again—and it was only after she had done that and when she was again hanging them in the room above that he appeared to know what he had done.

  While the clothes were being rewashed he went for another walk and when she heard his footsteps on the stairs the hunchback girl ran to the keyhole. As she knelt there, and as he came into the room, she could look directly into his face. “He was like a puzzled child for a moment and then, although he said nothing, the tears began to run down his cheeks,” she said. That happened and then the woman, who was at the moment re-hanging the clothes, turned and saw him. She had her arm filled with clothes but dropped them on the floor and ran to him. She half knelt, the hunchback girl said, and putting her arms about his body and looking up into his face pleaded with him. “Don’t. Don’t be hurt. Believe me I know everything. Please don’t be hurt,” was what she said.

  * * *

  And now as to the story of the woman’s death. It happened in the fall of that year.

  In the place where she was sometimes employed—that is to say in the theatre—there was this other man, the little half-crazed stage-hand who shot her.

  He had fallen in love with her and, like the men in the Kansas town from which she came, had written her several silly notes of which she said nothing to Wilson. The letters weren’t very nice and some of them, the most unpleasant ones, were by some twist of the fellow’s mind, signed with Wilson’s name. Two of them were afterwards found on her person and were brought in as evidence against Wilson during his trial.

  And so the woman worked in the theatre and the summer had passed and on an evening in the fall there was to be a dress rehearsal at the theatre and the woman went there, taking Wilson with her. It was a fall day, such as we sometimes have in Chicago, cold and wet and with a heavy fog lying over the city.

  The dress rehearsal did not come off. The star was ill, or something of the sort happened, and Wilson and his woman sat about, in the cold empty theatre, for an hour or two and then the woman was told she could go for the night.

  She and Wilson walked across the city, stopping to get something to eat at a small restaurant. He was in one of the abstr
act silent moods common to him. No doubt he was thinking of the things he wanted to express in the poetry I have tried to tell you about. He went along, not seeing the woman beside him, not seeing the people drifting up to them and passing them in the streets. He went along in that way and she—

  She was no doubt then as she always was in his presence—silent and satisfied with the fact that she was with him. There was nothing he could think or feel that did not take her into account. The very blood flowing up through his body was her blood too. He had made her feel that, and she was silent and satisfied as he went along, his body walking beside her but his fancy groping its way through the land of high walls and deep wells.

  They had walked from the restaurant, in the Loop District, over a bridge to the North Side, and still no words passed between them.

  When they had almost reached their own place the stagehand, the small man with the nervous hands who had written the notes, appeared out of the fog, as though out of nowhere, and shot the woman.

  That was all there was to it. It was as simple as that.

  They were walking, as I have described them, when a head flashed up before the woman in the midst of the fog, a hand shot out, there was the quick abrupt sound of a pistol shot and then the absurd little stage-hand, he with the wrinkled impotent little old woman’s face—then he turned and ran away.

  All that happened, just as I have written it and it made no impression at all on the mind of Wilson. He walked along as though nothing had happened and the woman, after half falling, gathered herself together and managed to continue walking beside him, still saying nothing.

  They went thus, for perhaps two blocks, and had reached the foot of the outer stairs that led up to their place when a policeman came running, and the woman told him a lie. She told him some story about a struggle between two drunken men, and after a moment of talk the policeman went away, sent away by the woman in a direction opposite to the one taken by the fleeing stage-hand.

  They were in the darkness and the fog now and the woman took her man’s arm while they climbed the stairs. He was as yet—as far as I will ever be able to explain logically—unaware of the shot, and of the fact that she was dying, although he had seen and heard everything. What the doctors said, who were put on the case afterwards, was that a cord or muscle, or something of the sort that controls the action of the heart, had been practically severed by the shot.

  She was dead and alive at the same time, I should say.

  Anyway the two people marched up the stairs, and into the room above, and then a really dramatic and lovely thing happened. One wishes that the scene, with just all its connotations, could be played out on a stage instead of having to be put down in words.

  The two came into the room, the one dead but not ready to acknowledge death without a flash of something individual and lovely, that is to say, the one dead while still alive and the other alive but at the moment dead to what was going on.

  The room into which they went was dark but, with the sure instinct of an animal, the woman walked across the room to the fireplace, while the man stopped and stood some ten feet from the door—thinking and thinking in his peculiarly abstract way. The fireplace was filled with an accumulation of waste matter, cigarette ends—the man was a hard smoker—bits of paper on which he had scribbled—the rubbishy accumulation that gathers about all such fellows as Wilson. There was all of this quickly combustible material, stuffed into the fireplace, on this—the first cold evening of the fall.

  And so the woman went to it, and found a match somewhere in the darkness, and touched the pile off.

  There is a picture that will remain with me always—just that—the barren room and the blind unseeing man standing there, and the woman kneeling and making a little flare of beauty at the last. Little flames leaped up. Lights crept and danced over the walls. Below, on the floor of the room, there was a deep well of darkness in which the man, blind with his own purpose, was standing.

  The pile of burning papers must have made, for a moment, quite a glare of light in the room and the woman stood for a moment, beside the fireplace, just outside the glare of light.

  And then, pale and wavering, she walked across the light, as across a lighted stage, going softly and silently toward him. Had she also something to say? No one will ever know. What happened was that she said nothing.

  She walked across to him and, at the moment she reached him, fell down on the floor and died at his feet, and at the same moment the little fire of papers died. If she struggled before she died, there on the floor, she struggled in silence. There was no sound. She had fallen and lay between him and the door that led out to the stairway and to the street.

  It was then Wilson became altogether inhuman—too much so for my understanding.

  The fire had died and the woman he had loved had died.

  And there he stood looking into nothingness, thinking—God knows—perhaps of nothingness.

  * * *

  He stood a minute, five minutes, perhaps ten. He was a man who, before he found the woman, had been sunk far down into a deep sea of doubt and questionings. Before he found the woman no expression had ever come from him. He had perhaps just wandered from place to place, looking at people’s faces, wondering about people, wanting to come close to others and not knowing how. The woman had been able to lift him up to the surface of the sea of life for a time, and with her he had floated on the surface of the sea, under the sky, in the sunlight. The woman’s warm body—given to him in love—had been as a boat in which he had floated on the surface of the sea, and now the boat had been wrecked and he was sinking again, back into the sea.

  All of this had happened and he did not know—that is to say he did not know, and at the same time he did know.

  He was a poet, I presume, and perhaps at the moment a new poem was forming itself in his mind.

  At any rate he stood for a time, as I have said, and then he must have had a feeling that he should make some move, that he should if possible save himself from some disaster about to overtake him.

  He had an impulse to go to the door, and by way of the stairway, to go down stairs and into the street.—but the body of the woman was between him and the door.

  What he did and what, when he later told of it, sounded so terribly cruel to others, was to treat the woman’s dead body as one might treat a fallen tree in the darkness in a forest. First he tried to push the body aside with his foot and then as that seemed impossible, he stepped awkwardly over it.

  He stepped directly on the woman’s arm. The discolored mark where his heel landed was afterward found on the body.

  He almost fell, and then his body righted itself and he went walking, marched down the rickety stairs and went walking in the streets.

  By chance the night had cleared. It had grown colder and a cold wind had driven the fog away. He walked along, very nonchalantly, for several blocks. He walked along as calmly as you, the reader, might walk, after having had lunch with a friend.

  As a matter of fact he even stopped to make a purchase at a store. I remember that the place was called “The Whip.” He went in, bought himself a package of cigarettes, lighted one and stood a moment, apparently listening to a conversation going on among several idlers in the place.

  And then he strolled again, going along smoking the cigarette and thinking of his poem no doubt. Then he came to a moving picture theatre.

  That perhaps touched him off. He also was an old fireplace, stuffed with old thoughts, scraps of unwritten poems—God knows what rubbish! Often he had gone at night to the theatre, where the woman was employed, to walk home with her, and now the people were coming out of a small moving-picture house. They had been in there seeing a play called “The Light of the World.”

  Wilson walked into the midst of the crowd, lost himself in the crowd, smoking his cigarette, and then he took off his hat, looked anxiously about for a moment, and suddenly began shouting in a loud voice.

  He stood there, shouting and trying
to tell the story of what had happened in a loud voice, and with the uncertain air of one trying to remember a dream. He did that for a moment and then, after running a little way along the pavement, stopped and began his story again. It was only after he had gone thus, in short rushes, back along the street to the house and up the rickety stairway to where the woman was lying—the crowd following curiously at his heels—that a policeman came up and arrested him.

  He seemed excited at first but was quiet afterwards and he laughed at the notion of insanity, when the lawyer who had been retained for him, tried to set up the plea in court.

  As I have said his action, during his trial, was confusing to us all, as he seemed wholly uninterested in the murder and in his own fate. After the confession of the man who had fired the shot he seemed to feel no resentment toward him either. There was something he wanted, having nothing to do with what had happened.

  There he had been, you see, before he found the woman, wandering about in the world, digging himself deeper and deeper into the deep wells he talked about in his poetry, building the wall between himself and all us others constantly higher and higher.

  He knew what he was doing but he could not stop. That’s what he kept talking about, pleading with people about. The man had come up out of the sea of doubt, had grasped for a time the hand of the woman, and with her hand in his had floated for a time upon the surface of life—but now he felt himself again sinking down into the sea.

  His talking and talking, stopping people in the street and talking, going into people’s houses and talking, was I presume but an effort, he was always afterward making, not to sink back forever into the sea, it was the struggle of a drowning man I dare say.

  At any rate I have told you the man’s story—have been compelled to try to tell you his story. There was a kind of power in him, and the power has been exerted over me as it was exerted over the woman from Kansas and the unknown hunchback girl, kneeling on the floor in the dust and peering through a keyhole.