Sherwood Anderson

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

  Harry said to Frank, “Frank, you ought to read more of these books that explain American life.” He said there are a lot of good ones coming out. “It seems,” he continued, “that we Americans have been, from the beginning, a nation of dreamers. We got that way, according to these guys, because this was such a swell, big, rich continent when it first got opened up. So we all got the dream that we were all going to be rich. Ain’t that swell, Frank? The rich you and I have known are such great guys. They’re all so happy, too, eh? So we got this dream and it’s busted, but we can’t get over it and that makes us all children. Do you know what we’ve got, Frank? We’ve got a cultural lag.”

  “The hell we have,” said Frank.

  “Yes we have, and a lot of other things too. I’ve been reading them all up in these books—you know, nights at home. What the hell is a man to talk about to his wife, if she’s a Methodist and everything?

  “Yes, we go around like children, expecting we can all be happy or rich or gorgeously wicked, like some movie king or queen, or something, and when we get older we stay the same and so the country gets filled up with old boys—not with men. You see, Frank? . . .

  “We got to have a change of life, see? I’ve had mine.”

  Frank didn’t understand. He was a long time getting Harry’s slant. Sometimes the man would come in and get off something about his wife. Her name was Sue and Frank Blandin had never seen her. “Sue’s down with a bad cold,” Harry would say. “I’m fifty and she’s fifty-seven. She’s been a good Methodist now for fifty years and is sure of Heaven. Ain’t it nice, Frank? It won’t be long for the old girl now.”

  Harry told Frank that all of his children were respectable and good upstanding members of society except his one son Jim. Jim had studied law, and when he got into practice had managed to catch on as attorney for one of the Chicago gangs. It had feathered his nest, and as he hadn’t married—all the rest of Harry’s children had—the nest was the same one Harry lived in. “Ma,” said Harry, “ain’t onto Jim, but I am, and Jim knows I am, and it makes it more comfortable for us both at home.”

  There had been a time, Frank gathered from Harry’s talk, when the man had been all cut up about his son Jim. There were always shootings and killings going on between the various gangs in Chicago, and Jim was always in court and his name was always getting into the papers,—not that he ever did anything illegal—Jim was slick, they couldn’t pin anything on him—justice is justice—even the blackest criminal has a right to be heard.

  Just the same, his name was always being hooked up with such people. Jim could always square it with his mother. She said she knew her son would never do anything wrong, or against Christianity, but Harry . . . At that time he was still prosperous. Once, he asked his son to quit it, and later he told Frank about that. “Come on. Quit it, Jim. Start to build up a real practice—say among business men. I can let you have any money you need. You got the brains, Jim. Why, you could be another Charles Evans Hughes.” But Jim had only given his father the laugh. “Don’t get into the deep water, Dad,” he said, “you might sink.”

  So Harry—he was forty-seven when it happened—passed through what he called his change of life. He decided to commit suicide. Later he told Frank about that. He didn’t tell everything. A part of it he just hinted at. There was a stenographer, a tall red-haired woman, Frank gathered. “O Love! O Romance!” he said. “She couldn’t see it and was my secretary, and I didn’t know whether to fire her or go jump in the lake.” So he went to walk, he said, all afternoon in the rain, over on the West Side—on Halstead Street—he said, and was silly and cried.

  It was in the early fall and the night was rainy. He had bought a big revolver and went home to his suburb and had dinner with his wife. His son Jim wasn’t at home.

  Then after dinner he slipped out, the revolver, all loaded, in his raincoat pocket.

  He said his suburb, where he had a big frame house—one of the best on one of the best streets—was pretty far out and you could get out into open prairie. He did. He said he floundered about, going across some cornfields in the mud, slipping and falling now and then. Frank understood about that. He thought Harry about the most awkward fat man he had ever seen.

  He had to climb over some barbed wire fences. He was trying to make for a creek, on the banks of which he was in the habit of walking alone, sometimes on Sunday afternoons, when he had got fed up on being at home alone, just with the wife, and that night he had got the notion into his head that if he walked in the paved roads, someone driving past in a car would suddenly stop, jump out of the car, take the loaded revolver away from him and perhaps even overpower him and take him back home or to jail.

  There would be an absurd article in the newspapers—“Harry Wells, a prominent Chicago advertising man, attempts suicide,”—something like that.

  So he floundered around in the mud, in the fields, always near paved roads, with cars going up and down, and got at last to the creek. It didn’t take long. The place to which he had got was near a big cement bridge, where a highway crossed the creek, and the bridge was only some fifty yards away from the spot where he came down to the creek. There was a sloping grassy bank there, all wet now. He sat down on the bank in the rain.

  His scheme, he told Frank Blandin, was to shoot himself in the head, at a moment when there were no cars in sight, and then, he figured, his body being round as it was, would roll down the slick, grassy bank into the creek, swollen now by the fall rains. The body would be found on the next day somewhere down stream, and there would be the bullet hole in the head. “Another gang murder. Harry Wells, the father of James K. Wells, well known as an attorney for the Smearcase Gang, meets a sudden and violent death.” It would set Jim to thinking and perhaps put his feet back onto the straight and narrow path.

  “It wasn’t that raw,” Harry said, telling about it; “no evangelical stuff, but you get the idea.

  “And I was wrong, too. Jim would only have shrugged his shoulders. He would have thought I had been reading novels or going to the movies and had got softened up.” You gathered, hearing Harry talk, that he was rather strong, at bottom, for his son Jim.

  As for that night, on the creek bank in the rain, near the bridge, he got all set and felt in his raincoat pocket for the revolver and it was gone. He had dropped it somewhere, perhaps in struggling through or over a barbed wire fence.

  So he sat and thought. He said he always did have a horror of cold water, and besides, that stuff about a gang killing would be all off if there were no evidence of violence.

  He decided to go on home, and perhaps try again some other night; but he couldn’t. He was sitting on the wet sloping bank and now he began to feel himself slipping. Fortunately, there were two small trees near by, trees with trunks about the size of fish poles, and as his raincoat was slick and he was every moment slipping more and more, he dropped flat on his back and threw out his hands. Luckily, his right hand got hold of the trunk of one of the little trees, and presently his left hand found the other.

  And there he was. The rain was pouring down—icy cold rain too, he said. Even if he had called out, the people driving by in cars might not have heard; but he didn’t call. He tried hauling himself up the bank, and then tried getting to his feet as he was but he couldn’t do it.

  “So I did some more thinking,” he said. He decided to turn over on his belly, and after a struggle, managed it, but even then he wasn’t clear. Every time he tried to creep up the bank, to get on his hands and knees and thus rise, his feet slipped or got tangled up in the tails of his raincoat. “I’d get part way up, you know—to my hands and knees, or maybe part way erect even—and then—thump! down I’d come, hitting on my belly. You see what it’s like—my belly, I mean. Every time, it knocked the wind out of me.”

  He said it happened to him a dozen times, and then, lying there like that—trying to get his breath back—the rain pouring down on him—respectable, solid people, very likely from his own suburb, scooting by h
im so nice and comfortable in their closed cars, going maybe to a restaurant for dinner or into town to the theatre, belonging maybe to the same church he and his wife did, so near him and yet so far away—

  He was pretty sure that presently, his fat, not overstrong hands—that had written so much advertising copy, “helping,” he said in telling about it, “thus to build up modern civilization,”—he was pretty sure that presently his hands would slip and down the bank into the creek he would go, like a fat pig into the scalding barrel. He said he couldn’t swim a stroke.

  He began to laugh. “It was my change of life,” he told Frank Blandin. “There’s where it happened, there on that creek bank, in the rain that night.” He said he did finally manage to get up the bank when his strength was about gone, and that then he marched straight down the broad highway home—mud and all, not giving a damn.

  He said his wife had a headache and had gone to her room upstairs and that he got on some dry clothes and went into the hallway to the door of her room and shouted through the door telling her he had got a long distance call and had to get into town and take a night train to Detroit.

  “But what are you laughing about, Harry?” she asked, but he didn’t answer. He got a train into town and went to a hotel and sent for some whiskey. “When you get your change of life fast like that, you got to have you a bracer,” he said. So he got one from a bell boy. He had put into his bag one of the books about American civilization, and what is wrong with it and why, and so he lay in the bed and had a good time drinking and reading and laughing.

  And after the depression came, he was still all right. He lost his job but there was Jim. Jim had an instinct for knowing when his Dad was close up to the wind, and slipped him a twenty, or maybe two or three. “For civilization, eh, Dad?” Jim would say, and he’d laugh and Harry would laugh.

  Harry kept trying, after the depression came, to get a job, but not too hard. Every day he went into town and walked around, and if there was an advertising men’s dinner, or something of that sort, there he was. He said that being among advertising men and hearing them talk and make speeches had got to be one of the great joys of his life.

  Or if he was on the street and some man, more down and out than he was, stopped him, saying “What about a piece of change, Mister?” he stopped and looked at the man and shook his head and laughed. “Not from me,” he said. “I’m not giving out the kind of change you need. What you need,” he said to the panhandlers on the Chicago streets, “is not the kind of change you’re talking about, but a change of life.”

  And then he had himself another laugh. He thought the laughs were coming to him, he having been a serious advertising man as long as he had.

  Mrs. Wife

  * * *

  THE doctor told the story. He got very quiet, very serious in speaking of it. I knew him well, knew his wife and his daughter. He said that I must know of course that in his practice he came into intimate contact with a good many women. We had been speaking of the relations of men and women. He had been living through an experience that must come to a great many men.

  In the first place I should say, in speaking of the doctor, that he is a rather large, very strong and very handsome man. He had always lived in the country where I knew him. He was a doctor and his father had been a doctor in that country before him. I spent only one summer there but we became great friends. I went with him in his car to visit his patients, living here and there over a wide countryside, valleys, hills and plains. We were both fond of fishing and there were good trout streams in that country.

  And then besides there was something else we had in common. The doctor was a great reader and, as with all true book lovers, there were certain books, certain tales, he read over and over.

  “Do you know,” he said laughing, “I one time thought seriously of trying to become a writer. I couldn’t make it, found that when I took pen in hand I became dumb and self-conscious. I knew that Chekhov the Russian was a doctor.” He looked at me smiling. He had steady grey eyes and a big head on which grew thick curly hair, now turning a little grey.

  “You see, we doctors find out a good many things.” That I, of course, knew. What writer does not envy these country doctors the opportunity they have to enter houses, hear stories, stand with people in times of trouble? Oh the stories buried away in the houses, in lonely farm houses, in the houses of town people, the rich, the well-to-do, the poor, tales of love, of sacrifice and of envy, hatred too. There is, however, this consolation: the problem is never to find and know a little the people whose stories are interesting. There are too many stories. The great difficulty is to tell them.

  “When I got my pen in hand I became dumb.” How foolish. After I had left the country the doctor used to write me long letters. He still does it sometimes, but not often enough. The letters are wonderful little stories of the doctor’s moods on certain days as he drives about in the country, descriptions of days, of fall days and spring days . . . how full of true feeling the man is . . . what a deep and true culture he has . . . little tales of people, his patients. He has forgotten he is writing. The letters are like his talk.

  But I must say something of the doctor’s wife and of his daughter. The daughter was a cripple, like President Roosevelt a victim of infantile paralysis, moving about with great difficulty. She would have been, but for this misfortune, a very beautiful woman. She died some four years after the summer when her father and I were so much together. And there was the wife. Her name was, I remember, Martha.

  I did not know well either the wife or the daughter. Sometimes there are such friendships formed between two men. “Now you look here . . . I have a certain life inside my own house. I have, let me say, a certain loyalty to that life but it is not the whole of my life. It isn’t that I don’t want to share that intimate life with you but . . . I am sure you will understand . . . we have chanced upon each other . . . you are in one field of work and I in another.”

  There is a life that goes on between men too . . . something almost like love can be born and grow steadily . . . what an absurd word that “love” . . . it does not at all describe what I mean.

  Common experience, feelings a man sometimes has, his own kind of male flights of fancy as it were . . . we men you see . . . I wonder if it is peculiarly true of Americans? I often think so. We men here, I often think, depend too much upon women. It is due to our intense hunger, half shy, for each other.

  I wonder if two men, in the whole history of man, were ever much together that they did not begin to speak presently of their experiences with women. I dare say that the same thing goes on between women and women. Not that the doctor ever spoke much of his wife. She was rather small and dark, a woman very beautiful in her own way . . . the way I should say of a good deal of suffering.

  In the first place, the doctor, that man, so very male, virile, was naturally quick and even affectionate in all his relations with people and particularly with women. He was a man needing more than one outlet for his feelings. He needed dozens. If he had let himself go in that direction he could have had his office always full of women patients of the neurotic sort. There are that sort, plenty of them, on farms and in country towns as well as in the cities. He could not stand them. “I won’t have it, will not be that sort of doctor.” They were the only sort of people he ever treated rudely. “Now you get out of here and don’t come back. There is nothing wrong with you that I can cure.”

  I knew from little tales he told of what a struggle it had been. Some of the women were very persistent, were determined not to be put off. It happened that his practice was in a hill country to which in the summer a good many city people came. There would be wives without husbands, the husbands coming from a distant city for the weekend or for a short vacation in the hot months . . . women with money, with husbands who had money. There was one such woman with a husband who was an insurance man in a city some two hundred miles away. I think he was president of the company, a small rather mouse-like man b
ut with eyes that were like the eyes of a ferret, sharp, quick-moving little eyes, missing nothing. The woman, his wife, had money, plenty of it from him, and she had inherited money.

  She wanted the doctor to come to the city. “You could be a great success. You could get rich.” When he would not see her in his office she wrote him letters and every day sent flowers for his office, to the office of a country doctor. “I don’t mind selling her out to you,” he said. “There are women and women.” There were roses ordered for him from the city. They came in big boxes and he used to throw them out of his office window and into an alleyway. “The whole town, including my wife, knew of it. You can’t conceal anything of this sort in a small town. At any rate my wife has a head. She knew well enough I was not to be caught by one of that sort.”

  He showed me a letter she had written him. It may sound fantastic but she actually offered, in the letter, to place at his disposal a hundred thousand dollars. She said she did not feel disloyal to her husband in making the offer. It was her own money. She said she was sure he had in him the making of a great doctor. Her husband need know nothing at all of the transaction. She did not ask him to give himself to her, to be her lover. There was but one string to the offer, intended to give him the great opportunity, to move to the city, set up offices in a fashionable quarter, become a doctor to rich women. He was to take her as a patient, see her daily.

  “The hell,” he said. “I am in no way a student and never have been. By much practice I have become a fairly good country doctor. It is what I am.”

  “There is but one other thing I ask. If you are not to be my lover, you must promise that you will not become the lover of some other woman.” He was, I gathered, to keep himself, as she said, pure.

  The doctor had very little money. His daughter was the only living child of his marriage. There had been two sons born but they had both died in the outbreak of infantile paralysis that had crippled the daughter.