by Collected Stories- Winesburg, Ohio, The Triumph of the Egg, Horses
“But Harry!” she said. “You have forgotten something. You have not kissed me.”
“Why, of course,” he said. His feet were on the stairs but he came back up into her room. She was lying there, wide awake. “I am going to that woman. I do not know what will happen. I must, I must. She will surrender.
“It may all end in some sort of a scandal. I do not know but I cannot help doing what I am about to do. There are times when a man is in the grip of forces stronger than himself.
“What is this thing about women, about men? Why does all of this thing, this force, so powerful, so little understood, why with the male does it all become suddenly directed upon one woman and not upon another? Why is it sometimes true also of the female?
“There is this force, so powerful. I have suddenly, at forty-seven, a man established in life, fallen into its grip. I am powerless.
“There is this woman, my wife, in bed here, in this room. The moonlight is falling upon her upturned face. How beautiful she is. I do not want her, do not want to kiss her. She is looking up expectantly at me.” The doctor was by his wife’s bed. He leaned over her.
“I am going to this woman. I am going. I am going.”
He was leaning over his wife, about to kiss her, but suddenly turned away.
“Martha,” he said, “I cannot explain. This is a strange night for me. I will perhaps explain it all later. I cannot kiss you now.”
“Wait. Wait.”
He was hurrying away from her down the stairs. He got into his car. He went to that house. He got the woman, the Polish woman. “When I explained to her she was quite willing.” He thought afterwards that she had been on the whole rather fine, telling him quite plainly that as he had felt when he saw her so she had felt.
She was definite enough. “I am not a weak woman. Although I am thirty I am still a virgin. However I am in no way virginal.”
She had been, the doctor said, half a mystic, saying that she had always known that the man who would answer some powerful call in her would some day come. “He has come. It is you.”
They went, I gathered, to walk. She told him that since she had first seen him she had made some inquiries. She had found out about the loss of his two sons, about his crippled daughter, about his wife. “I do not want you to be unfaithful to her.”
All this, the doctor explained, said to him by the woman, as, having left his car by the roadside, they walked in country roads. It was a very beautiful night and they had got into a road lined with trees. There were splashes of moonlight falling down through the leaves in the road before them as they walked. For an hour, two hours, they walked, not, as it turned out, ever touching each other. Sometimes they stopped and stood for long silent times. He said that several times he put out his hand to touch her but each time he drew it back.
“Why?”
It was the doctor himself who asked the question. He tried to explain. “There she was. She was mine to possess.” He said that he thought she was to him the most beautiful woman he had ever known or ever would know.
“But that is not true,” he said. “It is both true and untrue.
“It may be that if I had touched her, even with my finger ends, there would have been quite a different story to tell. She was beautiful, with her own beauty, so appealing, oh so very appealing to me, but there was also, at home, lying as I knew awake in her bed, my own wife.”
He said that in the end, after he had been with the Polish woman for perhaps an hour, she understood. He thought she must have been extremely intelligent. They had stopped in the road and she turned to him and again, as in the room with the cripple, there was a long silence. “You are not going to take me,” she said.
“I am a woman of thirty and have never been taken by a man. I had never wanted to be until I saw you.
“It may be that now I never shall be.”
The doctor said he did not answer. What was to be said? “I couldn’t,” he explained. He thought that it was the great moment of his life. He used the word I have also used in speaking of him. “I think, a little, I have been, since that moment, a mature man.”
The doctor had stopped talking but I could not resist questioning him.
“And you ended by not touching her?” I asked.
“Yes. I took her back to her place and when I next went there to see the crippled girl she was gone and another woman had taken her place.
“I think that man, that manufacturer, did not fail after all.”
There was another time of silence. “After all,” I thought, “this man has, from his own impulse, told me this tale. I have not asked for it. There is a question I think now that I may dare ask.” I ventured. “And your wife?” There was that laugh that I so liked. It is my theory that it can come only from the men and women who have got their maturity.
“I returned to her. I gave her the kiss I had denied earlier that night.”
I was of course not satisfied. “But,” I said. Again the laugh. “If I had not wanted to tell you I should not have begun this tale,” he said. We got up from the flat stone on which we had been sitting and prepared for the great moment of trout fishing, as every trout fisherman knows, the quivering time, so short a time between the last of the day and the beginning of the night. The doctor preceded me down across a flat sloping rock to the pool where we each got two fine trout. “I was in love with her as I had never really been with the Polish woman and in the same way. In a way until after that time I never had been.
“And there was all the rest, our life together, what we had gone through together.”
The doctor stopped talking but did not look at me. He was selecting a fly. “You know my wife’s name is Martha.
“When I returned to her that night and when I had kissed her, she for a moment held my face in her hands. She said something. “We have been through it again, haven’t we?” she said. She took her hands away and turned her face from me. “I have been thinking for the last week or two that we had lost each other,” she said. “I do not know why,” she added and then she laughed. “It was the nicest laugh I ever heard from her lips. It seemed to come from so far down inside. I guess all men and women who have got something know that it might be easily lost,” the doctor said as he finished his tale. He had hooked a trout and was absorbed in playing his fish.
Two Lovers
* * *
JOHN WESCOTT, the father of Rudolph and Fred Wescott, was a small man with a little mustache. Life had always been difficult for him, but the difficulties he had to face had developed in him a kind of shrewdness. He got along. He went, stuttering painfully, with a little insinuating smile, through life. There was in him a kind of basic humbleness and sweetness that made other men like him. The other men in his office and the Chicago business men who were his acquaintances often smiled, thinking of the little stuttering man, but in the end he often had his own way with them. He had come up in the world financially without the help of a formal education and after his success came and until a sudden attack of appendicitis took him off . . . this in the somewhat distracted year after his wife’s sudden death . . . he had always the feeling that he had missed something very important. He wasn’t a man who would have spoken of the good life. He wouldn’t have put it that way.
“I’ll tell you what, education is the thing,” he would have said.
It may be that he had got this feeling about education from association with his wife Clara. Being as he was, small and certainly never a distinguished looking man, it had always been a source of wonder to him that a talented woman like his wife had married him at all. He thought his wife beautiful. He always thought so. She had been to college. She had a master’s degree. She had traveled in Europe. She could speak and read, it is true with some difficulty, both French and German. She read books he never would have thought of tackling. He spoke about it sometimes to his business associates.
“What books she reads,” he said. “Occasionally I pick one of them up. I can’t for the life of
me make out what the man is talking about.”
The fact that his wife had been willing and even perhaps anxious to marry him, was always to John Wescott a source of wonder. There was an evening, after his wife’s death, when he spoke of it all to a friend. It was the first time he had ever done such a thing. The truth was that John Wescott was, all his life and in spite of the fact that the business he was in made it necessary for him to be constantly meeting and talking to people, much like the younger of his two sons. He was always a shy man.
He had however found out something. Although John Wescott never became what would be called a hard drinking man he had become, in secret, a tippler. He kept a bottle in a locked drawer in his desk at his office. He did not drink regularly, but took what he thought of as an occasional bracer. He did it because he had found out that, when he had to talk to some one, a real estate prospect, sometimes a man much higher up in the business and financial world than himself, some man he instinctively looked up to, he lost his nerve.
He made a discovery. He had found out that, in such a situation, or if it were a real important man he had to meet, a drink set him up. On rare occasions he took two. His shyness went away and there was even an improvement in his speech.
And there had been occasions, even before his wife’s death and always in the summer . . . this after he had begun to be somewhat prosperous on his own, no longer so dependent upon the favor of his father-in-law . . . when his wife with the two sons, then both small, mere children, had gone away to a certain summer resort, there were occasions when John even became a bit spiffed.
He did it always with the same man, his one intimate friend. The man was a rather large, fat man with a round and babylike face, who was at the head of an advertising agency.
The two had become friends through the medium of a real estate deal. John had sold, to his friend, whose name was A. P. Grubb, a lot on which to build a house, in a fashionable suburb of the city, and while the two men were negotiating something had happened. The man Grubb was known to all his associates as “A. P.” John Wescott never knew any other name for him. It was one of the occasions when John, realizing that he had to meet and talk with a man who was the president of a rather large and prosperous business, had taken two drinks. He went to A. P.’s office. There was some talk of the deal about to be made, John speaking with a good deal of difficulty, and A. P. reached across his desk and poked the real estate man on the chest with a fat finger. A. P. was always that way. He was a warm friendly fellow.
“Look here, Wescott,” he said. “I am about ready to close this deal. I have talked it over with the little woman but, you see, I can’t think straight unless I have a couple of drinks under my belt.”
The two men went from A. P.’s office in one of the Chicago skyscrapers, to a neighboring bar, where they had drinks. They each took two, A. P. setting them up and then John Wescott insisted that they have another. It was a time when John, with four straight drinks taken within an hour, had to make a struggle to keep his head but he did manage. The deal was closed and A. P. never knew that John was a little over the line. It was a rule of John’s that when he had to see a prospect and had taken one, or two, to brace himself, to go and get a bag of salted peanuts. He had heard another man speak of it. The man had said that a bag of peanuts was the best thing he had found to sweeten his breath after he had taken a drink.
John Wescott and A. P. Grubb became close friends. A. P. was the only man to whom John ever spoke in any intimate way of his wife. On a certain occasion, on a summer night, the two men being together, A. P.’s wife having gone to the country, they were sitting together in a bar. They had taken several and, as often happens with men on such occasions, there was talk of women and of a man’s relations with women.
A. P. did most of the talking. There was always in A. P. and in spite of John’s fondness for him, something that a little shocked the real estate man. He was a little shocked but at the same time got a rather pleasant thrill out of his friend’s boldness. After his marriage, to his employer’s daughter, John had never even thought of anything that could be called an approach to intimacy with another woman, but with A. P. it was different.
On the summer evening the two men, having dined together, were sitting together in the back room of a saloon in South Dearborn Street in Chicago. It was a rather small and even perhaps a tough little place. They had been walking together on Michigan Boulevard and had crossed to Dearborn. A. P. was talking and was absorbed. He had unconsciously been looking for a bar and seeing the one, on South Dearborn Street, had suggested that they drop in.
They had passed into a little room at the back and as they sat, preparing to order a drink, two women came along a little hallway past the open door. There was a burlesque show playing on South State Street and the two women were from the show. They had dropped in between acts to get a drink.
One of them put her head in at the open door.
“Hello, boys,” she said to the two middle-aged men sitting at a little table.
Nothing more happened. One of the women looked at A. P. and laughed. A. P. had a perfectly bald head. The woman who had laughed spoke of it as a radish. She took a step into the room where the two men sat and put out a hand to A. P.
“Do you mind if I touch the radish?” she said. She started to approach A. P. who sat smiling at her, but the other woman grabbed her arm. “Oh, come on, Mag,” she said.
The incident may have been the cause of the drift taken by the conversation between the two men.
“A couple of hot babies, eh,” said A. P. “I’ll tell you how it is with me about women.” It was A. P. talking. “With me it is like this. . . . He hesitated and smiled. He sometimes felt a little awkward in the presence of John Wescott.
“I wonder how far you can go with this bird,” he thought.
“At any rate,” he thought, “he’ll never be an advertiser.” There was little danger that the man Wescott would ever become a client of his advertising agency. There was no need being too cautious.
“I wouldn’t want you to think,” A. P. said, “that I am a woman chaser.” John Wescott assured him that such a thought had never entered his head. “Why, what an idea,” he said.
A. P. spoke of his wife, now gone away to the country.
“I wouldn’t ever do the little woman any dirt, not really. I’ll tell you what, Wescott, I have always been faithful to her, that is to say . . . well you know.” He winked.
He was, however, mistaken. John Wescott didn’t know.
“I mean,” A. P. added. He hesitated. “To tell you the truth, Wescott, there have been times, three or four times, since I have been married. . . .
Again he hesitated.
“Oh, you know how it is. I dare say it has been the same with you. It has always happened when I have been a little high.”
John Wescott didn’t know what to say. For just a moment he half wished that he had himself been a more adventurous man. He kept nodding his head.
“This is what I mean,” A. P. said. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. They could hear men’s voices at the bar outside the little room and a woman laughed. John Wescott felt that in being with A. P. in such a place, he was getting a peep into real life.
“I mean . . . to tell the truth . . . this is just between us two . . . I guess, in the real estate game, you fellows don’t have the temptations we advertising men have.”
He didn’t at the moment continue the explanation of what he had meant. He began speaking of John Wescott’s business, of the buying and selling of real estate, of houses and lots.
“You are in this real estate game. You sell some fellow a lot on which to build a house, like you did to me. He is going to build himself a house, a home. He is a bird who is going to build himself a nest.”
A. P. was often like that. He was inclined to slip off into something like poetry.
“You see the man is thinking of that, of the little woman, of his children. He is thinking of a happy home
life, sitting by the fire on winter nights, eh . . . the little wife there beside him. She is knitting. The children are playing on the floor.”
John Wescott was thinking of what a wonderful advertising man A. P. must be.
“What marvelous copy he must write,” he thought.
His own firm, called Caldwell and Wescott, occasionally ran advertisements in the Chicago daily newspapers. Caldwell had been his wife’s father but now Caldwell was dead and he was himself in control of the firm. He had taken in a young assistant, having made up his mind that neither of his two sons would become a real estate man.
He didn’t really care about that, did not want them to be real estate men. He thought, he hoped sometime, that they might both become notable men in some other field, as scholars perhaps, or even as artists. It was something he felt his wife had wanted and that he also had come to want. He sat with his friend thinking.
“Here is A. P.” he thought. “He and I have become friends. We are chums, buddies. Now that my wife is dead and his wife has gone to the country with his children, we occasionally go about together like this.”
He was half wondering if he dare ask A. P. to do him a favor. It would be a rather delicate matter to bring up.
“Look here, A. P. . . . what you have just said . . . it would make wonderful advertising copy for my firm . . . would you mind writing it out for me? I could use it, you see, in an ad.”
He decided he couldn’t do it. It would be, he thought, too much like asking a doctor, who happened to be your friend . . . “Say Doc, what about it . . . look me over, eh?”
He couldn’t. He didn’t run many advertisements in the newspapers and they were usually small ones. He could not hope to become one of A. P.’s clients. It wouldn’t be worth A. P.’s time.
“I’ll tell you what, A. P. is a big man. He’s smart. He can make words fairly sing.”