by Sherwood Anderson
Winifred Walker understood some things clearly enough. She understood that when a man is put behind iron bars he is in prison. Marriage was marriage to her.
It was that to her husband Hugh Walker, too, as he found out. Still he didn’t understand. It might have been better had he understood, then he might at least have found himself. He didn’t. After his marriage five or six years passed like shadows of wind blown trees playing on a wall. He was in a drugged, silent state. In the morning and evening every day he saw his wife. Occasionally something happened within him and he kissed her. Three children were born. He taught mathematics in the little college at Union Valley, Illinois, and waited.
For what? He began to ask himself that question. It came to him at first faintly like an echo. Then it became an insistent question. “I want answering,” the question seemed to say. “Stop fooling along. Give your attention to me.”
Hugh walked through the streets of the Illinois town. “Well, I’m married. I have children,” he muttered.
He went home to his own house. He did not have to live within his income from the little college, and so the house was rather large and comfortably furnished. There was a negro woman who took care of the children and another who cooked and did the housework. One of the women was in the habit of crooning low soft negro songs. Sometimes Hugh stopped at the house door and listened. He could see through the glass in the door into the room where his family was gathered. Two children played with blocks on the floor. His wife sat sewing. The old negress sat in a rocking chair with his youngest child, a baby, in her arms. The whole room seemed under the spell of the crooning voice. Hugh fell under the spell. He waited in silence. The voice carried him far away somewhere, into forests, along the edges of swamps. There was nothing very definite about his thinking. He would have given a good deal to be able to be definite.
He went inside the house. “Well, here I am,” his mind seemed to say, “here I am. This is my house, these are my children.”
He looked at his wife Winifred. She had grown a little plump since their marriage. “Perhaps it is the mother in her coming out, she has had three children,” he thought.
The crooning old negro woman went away, taking the youngest child with her. He and Winifred held a fragmentary conversation. “Have you been well to-day, dear?” she asked. “Yes,” he answered.
If the two older children were intent on their play his chain of thought was not broken. His wife never broke it as the children did when they came running to pull and tear at him. Throughout the early evening, after the children went to bed, the surface of the shell of him was not broken at all. A brother college professor and his wife came in or he and Winifred went to a neighbor’s house. There was talk. Even when he and Winifred were alone together in the house there was talk. “The shutters are becoming loose,” she said. The house was an old one and had green shutters. They were continually coming loose and at night blew back and forth on their hinges making a loud banging noise.
Hugh made some remark. He said he would see a carpenter about the shutters. Then his mind began playing away, out of his wife’s presence, out of the house, in another sphere. “I am a house and my shutters are loose,” his mind said. He thought of himself as a living thing inside a shell, trying to break out. To avoid distracting conversation he got a book and pretended to read. When his wife had also begun to read he watched her closely, intently. Her nose was so and so and her eyes so and so. She had a little habit with her hands. When she became lost in the pages of a book the hand crept up to her cheek, touched it and then was put down again. Her hair was not in very good order. Since her marriage and the coming of the children she had not taken good care of her body. When she read her body slumped down in the chair. It became bag-like. She was one whose race had been run.
Hugh’s mind played all about the figure of his wife but did not really approach the woman who sat before him. It was so with his children. Sometimes, just for a moment, they were living things to him, things as alive as his own body. Then for long periods they seemed to go far away like the crooning voice of the negress.
It was odd that the negress was always real enough. He felt an understanding existed between himself and the negress. She was outside his life. He could look at her as at a tree. Sometimes in the evening when she had been putting the children to bed in the upper part of the house and when he sat with a book in his hand pretending to read, the old black woman came softly through the room, going toward the kitchen. She did not look at Winifred, but at Hugh. He thought there was a strange, soft light in her old eyes. “I understand you, my son,” her eyes seemed to say.
Hugh was determined to get his life cleaned up if he could manage it. “All right, then,” he said, as though speaking to a third person in the room. He was quite sure there was a third person there and that the third person was within himself, inside his body. He addressed the third person.
“Well, there is this woman, this person I married, she has the air of something accomplished,” he said, as though speaking aloud. Sometimes it almost seemed to him he had spoken aloud and he looked quickly and sharply at his wife. She continued reading, lost in her book. “That may be it,” he went on. “She has had these children. They are accomplished facts to her. They came out of her body, not out of mine. Her body has done something. Now it rests. If she is becoming a little bag-like, that’s all right.”
He got up and making some trivial excuse got out of the room and out of the house. In his youth and young manhood the long periods of walking straight ahead through the country, that had come upon him like visitations of some recurring disease, had helped. Walking solved nothing. It only tired his body, but when his body was tired he could sleep. After many days of walking and sleeping something occurred. The reality of life was in some queer way re-established in his mind. Some little thing happened. A man walking in the road before him threw a stone at a dog that ran barking out of a farm-house. It was evening perhaps, and he walked in a country of low hills. Suddenly he came out upon the top of one of the hills. Before him the road dipped down into darkness but to the west, across fields, there was a farm-house. The sun had gone down, but a faint glow lit the western horizon. A. woman came out of the farmhouse and went toward a barn. He could not see her figure distinctly. She seemed to be carrying something, no doubt a milk pail; she was going to a barn to milk a cow.
The man in the road who had thrown the stone at the farm dog had turned and seen Hugh in the road behind him. He was a little ashamed of having been afraid of the dog. For a moment he seemed about to wait and speak to Hugh, and then was overcome with confusion and hurried away. He was a middle-aged man, but quite suddenly and unexpectedly he looked like a boy.
As for the farm woman, dimly seen going toward a distant barn, she also stopped and looked toward him. It was impossible she should have seen him. She was dressed in white and he could see her but dimly against the blackish green of the trees of an orchard behind her. Still she stood looking and seemed to look directly into his eyes. He had a queer sensation of her having been lifted by an unseen hand and brought to him. It seemed to him he knew all about her life, all about the life of the man who had thrown the stone at the dog.
In his youth, when life had stepped out of his grasp, Hugh had walked and walked until several such things had occurred and then suddenly he was all right again and could again work and live among men.
After his marriage and after such an evening at home he started walking rapidly as soon as he left the house. As quickly as possible he got out of town and struck out along a road that led over the rolling prairie. “Well, I can’t walk for days and days as I did once,” he thought. “There are certain facts in life and I must face facts. Winifred, my wife, is a fact, and my children are facts. I must get my fingers on facts. I must live by them and with them. It’s the way lives are lived.”
Hugh got out of town and on to a road that ran between cornfields. He was an athletic looking man and wore loose fitting clothes. He went along distraught and puzzled. In a way he felt like a man capable of taking a man’s place in life and in another way he didn’t at all.
The country spread out, wide, in all directions. It was always night when he walked thus and he could not see, but the realization of distances was always with him. “Everything goes on and on but I stand still,” he thought. He had been a professor in the little college for six years. Young men and women had come into a room and he had taught them. It was nothing. Words and figures had been played with. An effort had been made to arouse minds.
For what?
There was the old question, always coming back, always wanting answering as a little animal wants food. Hugh gave up trying to answer. He walked rapidly, trying to grow physically tired. He made his mind attend to little things in the effort to forget distances. One night he got out of the road and walked completely around a cornfield. He counted the stalks in each hill of corn and computed the number of stalks in a whole field. “It should yield twelve hundred bushels of corn, that field,” he said to himself dumbly, as though it mattered to him. He pulled a little handful of cornsilk out of the top of an ear of corn and played with it. He tried to fashion himself a yellow moustache. “I’d be quite a fellow with a trim yellow moustache,” he thought.
One day in his class-room Hugh suddenly began to look with new interest at his pupils. A young girl attracted his attention. She sat beside the son of a Union Valley merchant and the young man was writing something on the back of a book. She looked at it and then turned her head away. The young man waited.
It was winter and the merchant’s son had asked the girl to go with him to a skating party. Hugh, however, did not know that. He felt suddenly old. When he asked the girl a question she was confused. Her voice trembled.
When the class was dismissed an amazing thing happened. He asked the merchant’s son to stay for a moment and, when the two were alone together in the room, he grew suddenly and furiously angry. His voice was, however, cold and steady. “Young man,” he said, “you do not come into this room to write on the back of a book and waste your time. If I see anything of the kind again I’ll do something you don’t expect. I’ll throw you out through a window, that’s what I’ll do.”
Hugh made a gesture and the young man went away, white and silent. Hugh felt miserable. For several days he thought about the girl who had quite accidentally attracted his attention. “I’ll get acquainted with her. I’ll find out about her,” he thought.
It was not an unusual thing for professors in the college at Union Valley to take students home to their houses. Hugh decided he would take the girl to his home. He thought about it several days and late one afternoon saw her going down the college hill ahead of him.
The girl’s name was Mary Cochran and she had come to the school but a few months before from a place called Huntersburg, Illinois, no doubt just such another place as Union Valley. He knew nothing of her except that her father was dead, her mother too, perhaps. He walked rapidly down the hill to overtake her. “Miss Cochran,” he called, and was surprised to find that his voice trembled a little. “What am I so eager about?” he asked himself. A new life began in Hugh Walker’s house. It was good for the man to have some one there who did not belong to him, and Winifred Walker and the children accepted the presence of the girl. Winifred urged her to come again. She did come several times a week.
To Mary Cochran it was comforting to be in the presence of a family of children. On winter afternoons she took Hugh’s two sons and a sled and went to a small hill near the house. Shouts arose. Mary Cochran pulled the sled up the hill and the children followed. Then they all came tearing down together.
The girl, developing rapidly into womanhood, looked upon Hugh Walker as something that stood completely outside her own life. She and the man who had become suddenly and intensely interested in her had little to say to each other and Winifred seemed to have accepted her without question as an addition to the household. Often in the afternoon when the two negro women were busy she went away leaving the two older children in Mary’s charge.
It was late afternoon and perhaps Hugh had walked home with Mary from the college. In the spring he worked in the neglected garden. It had been plowed and planted, but he took a hoe and rake and puttered about. The children played about the house with the college girl. Hugh did not look at them but at her. “She is one of the world of people with whom I live and with whom I am supposed to work here,” he thought. “Unlike Winifred and these children she does not belong to me. I could go to her now, touch her fingers, look at her and then go away and never see her again.”
That thought was a comfort to the distraught man. In the evening when he went out to walk the sense of distance that lay all about him did not tempt him to walk and walk, going half insanely forward for hours, trying to break through an intangible wall.
He thought about Mary Cochran. She was a girl from a country town. She must be like millions of American girls. He wondered what went on in her mind as she sat in his class-room, as she walked beside him along the streets of Union Valley, as she played with the children in the yard beside his house.
In the winter, when in the growing darkness of a late afternoon Mary and the children built a snow man in the yard, he went upstairs and stood in the darkness to look out a window. The tall straight figure of the girl, dimly seen, moved quickly about. “Well, nothing has happened to her. She may be anything or nothing. Her figure is like a young tree that has not borne fruit,” he thought. He went away to his own room and sat for a long time in the darkness. That night when he left the house for his evening’s walk he did not stay long but hurried home and went to his own room. He locked the door. Unconsciously he did not want Winifred to come to the door and disturb his thoughts. Sometimes she did that.
All the time she read novels. She read the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson. When she had read them all she began again.
Sometimes she came upstairs and stood talking by his door. She told some tale, repeated some wise saying that had fallen unexpectedly from the lips of the children. Occasionally she came into the room and turned out the light. There was a couch by a window. She went to sit on the edge of the couch. Something happened. It was as it had been before their marriage. New life came into her figure. He also went to sit on the couch and she put up her hand and touched his face.
Hugh did not want that to happen now. He stood within the room for a moment and then unlocked the door and went to the head of the stairs. “Be quiet when you come up, Winifred. I have a headache and am going to try to sleep,” he lied.
When he had gone back to his own room and locked the door again he felt safe. He did not undress but threw himself on the couch and turned out the light.
He thought about Mary Cochran, the school girl, but was sure he thought about her in a quite impersonal way. She was like the woman going to milk cows he had seen across hills when he was a young fellow and walked far and wide over the country to cure the restlessness in himself. In his life she was like the man who threw the stone at dog.
“Well, she is unformed; she is like a young tree,” he told himself again. “People are like that. They just grow up suddenly out of childhood. It will happen to my own children. My little Winifred that cannot yet say words will suddenly be like this girl. I have not selected her to think about for any particular reason. For some reason I have drawn away from life and she has brought me back. It might have happened when I saw a child playing in the street or an old man going up a stairway into a house. She does not belong to me. She will go away out of my sight. Winifred and the children will stay on and on here and I will stay on and on. We are imprisoned by the fact that we belong to each other. This Mary Cochran is free, or at least she is free as far as this prison is concerned. No doubt she will, after a while make a prison of her own and live in it, but I will have nothing to do with the matter.”
By the time Mary Cochran was in her third year in the college at Union Valley she had become almost a fixture in the Walker household. Still she did not know Hugh. She knew the children better than he did, perhaps better than their mother. In the fall she and the two boys went to the woods to gather nuts. In the winter they went skating on a little pond near the house.
Winifred accepted her as she accepted everything, the service of the two negroes, the coming of the children, the habitual silence of her husband.
And then quite suddenly and unexpectedly Hugh’s silence, that had lasted all through his married life, was broken up. He walked homeward with a German who had the chair of modern languages in the school and got into a violent quarrel. He stopped to speak to men on the street. When he went to putter about in the garden he whistled and sang.
One afternoon in the fall he came home and found the whole family assembled in the living room of the house. The children were playing on the floor and the negress sat in the chair by the window with his youngest child in her arms, crooning one of the negro songs. Mary Cochran was there. She sat reading a book.
Hugh walked directly toward her and looked over her shoulder. At that moment Winifred came into the room. He reached forward and snatched the book out of the girl’s hands. She looked up startled. With an oath he threw it into the fire that burned in an open grate at the side of the room. A flood of words ran from him. He cursed books and people and schools. “Damn it all,” he said. “What makes you want to read about life? What makes people want to think about life? Why don’t they live? Why don’t they leave books and thoughts and schools alone?”
He turned to look at his wife who had grown pale and stared at him with a queer fixed uncertain stare. The old negro woman got up and went quickly away. The two older children began to cry. Hugh was miserable. He looked at the startled girl in the chair who also had tears in her eyes, and at his wife. His fingers pulled nervously at his coat. To the two women he looked like a boy who had been caught stealing food in a pantry. “I am having one of my silly irritable spells,” he said, looking at his wife but in reality addressing the girl. “You see I am more serious than I pretend to be. I was not irritated by your book but by something else. I see so much that can be done in life and I do so little.”
He went upstairs to his own room wondering why he had lied to the two women, why he continually lied to himself.
Did he lie to himself? He tried to answer the question but couldn’t. He was like one who walks in the darkness of the hallway of a house and comes to a blank wall. The old desire to run away from life, to wear himself out physically, came back upon him like a madness.
For a long time he stood in the darkness inside his own room. The children stopped crying and the house became quiet again. He could hear his wife’s voice speaking softly and presently the back door of the house banged and he knew the schoolgirl had gone away.
Life in the house began again. Nothing happened. Hugh ate his dinner in silence and went for a long walk. For two weeks Mary Cochran did not come to his house and then one day he saw her on the college grounds. She was no longer one of his pupils. “Please do not desert us because of my rudeness,” he said. The girl blushed and said nothing. When he got home that evening she was in the yard beside the house playing with the children. He went at once to his own room. A hard smile came and went on his face. “She isn’t like a young tree any more. She is almost like Winifred. She is almost like a person who belongs here, who belongs to me and my life,” he thought.
* * * * *
Mary Cochran’s visits to the Walker household came to an end very abruptly. One evening when Hugh was in his room she came up the stairway with the two boys. She had dined with the family and was putting the two boys into their beds. It was a privilege she claimed when she dined with the Walkers.
Hugh had hurried upstairs immediately after dining. He knew where his wife was. She was downstairs, sitting under a lamp, reading one of the books of Robert Louis Stevenson.
For a long time Hugh could hear the voices of his children on the floor above. Then the thing happened.
Mary Cochran came down the stairway that led past the door of his room. She stopped, turned back and climbed the stairs again to the room above. Hugh arose and stepped into the hallway. The schoolgirl had returned to the children’s room because she had been suddenly overtaken with a hunger to kiss Hugh’s oldest boy, now a lad of nine. She crept into the room and stood for a long time looking at the two boys, who unaware of her presence had gone to sleep. Then she stole forward and kissed the boy lightly. When she went out of the room Hugh stood in the darkness waiting for her. He took hold of her hand and led her down the stairs to his own room.
She was terribly afraid and her fright in an odd way pleased him. “Well,” he whispered, “you can’t understand now what’s going to happen here but some day you will. I’m going to kiss you and then I’m going to ask you to go out of this house and never come back.”
He held the girl against his body and kissed her upon the cheeks and lips. When he led her to the door she was so weak with fright and with new, strange, trembling desires that she could with difficulty make her way down the stair and into his wife’s presence. “She will lie now,” he thought, and heard her voice coming up the stairs like an echo to his thoughts. “I have a terrible headache. I must hurry home,” he heard her voice saying. The voice was dull and heavy. It was not the voice of a young girl.
“She is no longer like a young tree,” he thought. He was glad and proud of what he had done. When he heard the door at the back of the house close softly his heart jumped. A strange quivering light came into his eyes. “She will be imprisoned but I will have nothing to do with it. She will never belong to me. My hands will never build a prison for her,” he thought with grim pleasure.
Senility
by Sherwood Anderson
He was an old man and he sat on the steps of the railroad station in a small Kentucky town.
A well dressed man, some traveler from the city, approached and stood before him.
The old man became self-conscious.
His smile was like the smile of a very young child. His face was all sunken and wrinkled and he had a huge nose.
“Have you any coughs, colds, consumption or bleeding sickness?” he asked. In his voice there was a pleading quality.
The stranger shook his head. The old man arose.
“The sickness that bleeds is a terrible nuisance,” he said. His tongue protruded from between his teeth and he rattled it about. He put his hand on the stranger’s arm and laughed.
“Bully, pretty,” he exclaimed. “I cure them all–coughs, colds, consumption and the sickness that bleeds. I take warts from the hand–I cannot explain how I do it–it is a mystery–I charge nothing–my name is Tom–do you like me?”
The stranger was cordial. He nodded his head. The old man became reminiscent. “My father was a hard man,” he declared. “He was like me, a blacksmith by trade, but he wore a plug hat. When the corn was high he said to the poor, ‘go into the fields and pick’ but when the war came he made a rich man pay five dollars for a bushel of corn.”
“I married against his will. He came to me and he said, ‘Tom I do not like that girl.’”
“’But I love her,’ I said.
“’I don’t,’ he said.
“My father and I sat on a log. He was a pretty man and wore a plug hat. ‘I will get the license,’ I said.
“’I will give you no money,’ he said.
“My marriage cost me twenty-one dollars–I worked in the corn–it rained and the horses were blind–the clerk said, ‘Are you over twenty- one?’ I said ‘yes’ and she said ‘yes.’ We had chalked it on our shoes. My father said, ‘I give you your freedom.’ We had no money. My marriage cost twenty-one dollars. She is dead.”
The old man looked at the sky. It was evening and the sun had set. The sky was all mottled with grey clouds. “I paint beautiful pictures and give them away,” he declared. “My brother is in the penitentiary. He killed a man who called him an ugly name.”
The decrepit old man held his hands before the face of the stranger. He opened and shut them. They were black with grime. “I pick out warts,” he explained plaintively. “They are as soft as your hands.”
“I play on an accordion. You are thirty-seven years old. I sat beside my brother in the penitentiary. He is a pretty man with pompadour hair. ‘Albert’ I said, ‘are you sorry you killed a man?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am not sorry. I would kill ten, a hundred, a thousand!’”
The old man began to weep and to wipe his hands with a soiled handkerchief. He attempted to take a chew of tobacco and his false teeth became displaced. He covered his mouth with his hands and was ashamed.
“I am old. You are thirty-seven years old but I am older than that,” he whispered.
“My brother is a bad man–he is full of hate–he is pretty and has pompadour hair, but he would kill and kill. I hate old age–I am ashamed that I am old.
“I have a pretty new wife. I wrote her four letters and she replied. She came here and we married–I love to see her walk–O, I buy her pretty clothes.
“Her foot is not straight–it is twisted–my first wife is dead–I pick warts off the hand with my fingers and no blood comes–I cure coughs, colds, consumption and the sickness that bleeds–people can write to me and I answer the letters–if they send me no money it is no matter–all is free.”
Again the old man wept and the stranger tried to comfort him. “You are a happy man?” the stranger asked.
“Yes,” said the old man, “and a good man too. Ask everywhere about me– my name is Tom, a blacksmith–my wife walks prettily although she has a twisted foot–I have bought her a long dress–she is thirty and I am seventy-five–she has many pairs of shoes–I have bought them for her, but her foot is twisted–I buy straight shoes–
“She thinks I do not know–everybody thinks Tom does not know–I have bought her a long dress that comes down to the ground–my name is Tom, a blacksmith–I am seventy-five and I hate old age–I take warts off the hands and no blood comes–people may write to me and I answer the letters–all is free.”
Seeds
by Sherwood Anderson
He was a small man with a beard and was very nervous. I remember how the cords of his neck were drawn taut.
For years he had been trying to cure people of illness by the method called psychoanalysis. The idea was the passion of his life. “I came here because I am tired,” he said dejectedly. “My body is not tired but something inside me is old and worn-out. I want joy. For a few days or weeks I would like to forget men and women and the influences that make them the sick things they are.”
There is a note that comes into the human voice by which you may know real weariness. It comes when one has been trying with all his heart and soul to think his way along some difficult road of thought. Of a sudden he finds himself unable to go on. Something within him stops. A tiny explosion takes place. He bursts into words and talks, perhaps foolishly. Little side currents of his nature he didn’t know were there run out and get themselves expressed. It is at such times that a man boasts, uses big words, makes a fool of himself in general.
And so it was the doctor became shrill. He jumped up from the steps where we had been sitting, talking and walked about. “You come from the West. You have kept away from people. You have preserved yourself–damn you! I haven’t–” His voice had indeed become shrill. “I have entered into lives. I have gone beneath the surface of the lives of men and women. Women especially I have studied–our own women, here in America.”
“You have loved them?” I suggested.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes–you are right there. I have done that. It is the only way I can get at things. I have to try to love. You see how that is? It’s the only way. Love must be the beginning of things with me.”
I began to sense the depths of his weariness. “We will go swim in the lake,” I urged.
“I don’t want to swim or do any damn plodding thing. I want to run and shout,” he declared. “For awhile, for a few hours, I want to be like a dead leaf blown by the winds over these hills. I have one desire and one only–to free myself.”
We walked in a dusty country road. I wanted him to know that I thought I understood, so I put the case in my own way.
When he stopped and stared at me I talked. “You are no more and no better than myself,” I declared. “You are a dog that has rolled in offal, and because you are not quite a dog you do not like the smell of your own hide.”
In turn my voice became shrill. “You blind fool,” I cried impatiently. “Men like you are fools. You cannot go along that road. It is given to no man to venture far along the road of lives.”
I became passionately in earnest. “The illness you pretend to cure is the universal illness,” I said. “The thing you want to do cannot be done. Fool–do you expect love to be understood?”
We stood in the road and looked at each other. The suggestion of a sneer played about the corners of his mouth. He put a hand on my shoulder and shook me. “How smart we are–how aptly we put things!”
He spat the words out and then turned and walked a little away. “You think you understand, but you don’t understand,” he cried. “What you say can’t be done can be done. You’re a liar. You cannot be so definite without missing something vague and fine. You miss the whole point. The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men. I am myself covered by crawling creeping vines that choke me.”
He laughed bitterly. “And that’s why I want to run and play,” he said. “I want to be a leaf blown by the wind over hills. I want to die and be born again, and I am only a tree covered with vines and slowly dying. I am, you see, weary and want to be made clean. I am an amateur venturing timidly into lives,” he concluded. “I am weary and want to be made clean. I am covered by creeping crawling things.”
* * * * *
A woman from Iowa came here to Chicago and took a room in a house on the west-side. She was about twenty-seven years old and ostensibly she came to the city to study advanced methods for teaching music.
A certain young man also lived in the west-side house. His room faced a long hall on the second floor of the house and the one taken by the woman was across the hall facing his room.
In regard to the young man–there is something very sweet in his nature. He is a painter but I have often wished he would decide to become a writer. He tells things with understanding and he does not paint brilliantly.
And so the woman from Iowa lived in the west-side house and came home from the city in the evening. She looked like a thousand other women one sees in the streets every day. The only thing that at all made her stand out among the women in the crowds was that she was a little lame. Her right foot was slightly deformed and she walked with a limp. For three months she lived in the house–where she was the only woman except the landlady–and then a feeling in regard to her began to grow up among the men of the house.
The men all said the same thing concerning her. When they met in the hallway at the front of the house they stopped, laughed and whispered. “She wants a lover,” they said and winked. “She may not know it but a lover is what she needs.”
One knowing Chicago and Chicago men would think that an easy want to be satisfied. I laughed when my friend–whose name is LeRoy–told me the story, but he did not laugh. He shook his head. “It wasn’t so easy,” he said. “There would be no story were the matter that simple.”
LeRoy tried to explain. “Whenever a man approached her she became alarmed,” he said. Men kept smiling and speaking to her. They invited her to dinner and to the theatre, but nothing would induce her to walk in the streets with a man. She never went into the streets at night. When a man stopped and tried to talk with her in the hallway she turned her eyes to the floor and then ran into her room. Once a young drygoods clerk who lived there induced her to sit with him on the steps before the house.
He was a sentimental fellow and took hold of her hand. When she began to cry he was alarmed and arose. He put a hand on her shoulder and tried to explain, but under the touch of his fingers her whole body shook with terror. “Don’t touch me,” she cried, “don’t let your hands touch me!” She began to scream and people passing in the street stopped to listen. The drygoods clerk was alarmed and ran upstairs to his own room. He bolted the door and stood listening. “It is a trick,” he declared in a trembling voice. “She is trying to make trouble. I did nothing to her. It was an accident and anyway what’s the matter? I only touched her arm with my fingers.”
Perhaps a dozen times LeRoy has spoken to me of the experience of the Iowa woman in the west-side house. The men there began to hate her. Although she would have nothing to do with them she would not let them alone. In a hundred ways she continually invited approaches that when made she repelled. When she stood naked in the bathroom facing the hallway where the men passed up and down she left the door slightly ajar. There was a couch in the living room down stairs, and when men were present she would sometimes enter and without saying a word throw herself down before them. On the couch she lay with lips drawn slightly apart. Her eyes stared at the ceiling. Her whole physical being seemed to be waiting for something. The sense of her filled the room. The men standing about pretended not to see. They talked loudly. Embarrassment took possession of them and one by one they crept quietly away.
One evening the woman was ordered to leave the house. Someone, perhaps the drygoods clerk, had talked to the landlady and she acted at once. “If you leave tonight I shall like it that much better,” LeRoy heard the elder woman’s voice saying. She stood in the hallway before the Iowa woman’s room. The landlady’s voice rang through the house.
LeRoy the painter is tall and lean and his life has been spent in devotion to ideas. The passions of his brain have consumed the passions of his body. His income is small and he has not married. Perhaps he has never had a sweetheart. He is not without physical desire but he is not primarily concerned with desire.
On the evening when the Iowa woman was ordered to leave the west-side house, she waited until she thought the landlady had gone down stairs, and then went into LeRoy’s room. It was about eight o’clock and he sat by a window reading a book. The woman did not knock but opened the door. She said nothing but ran across the floor and knelt at his feet. LeRoy said that her twisted foot made her run like a wounded bird, that her eyes were burning and that her breath came in little gasps. “Take me,” she said, putting her face down upon his knees and trembling violently. “Take me quickly. There must be a beginning to things. I can’t stand the waiting. You must take me at once.”
You may be quite sure LeRoy was perplexed by all this. From what he has said I gathered that until that evening he had hardly noticed the woman. I suppose that of all the men in the house he had been the most indifferent to her. In the room something happened. The landlady followed the woman when she ran to LeRoy, and the two women confronted him. The woman from Iowa knelt trembling and frightened at his feet. The landlady was indignant. LeRoy acted on impulse. An inspiration came to him. Putting his hand on the kneeling woman’s shoulder he shook her violently. “Now behave yourself,” he said quickly. “I will keep my promise.” He turned to the landlady and smiled. “We have been engaged to be married,” he said. “We have quarreled. She came here to be near me. She has been unwell and excited. I will take her away. Please don’t let yourself be annoyed. I will take her away.”
When the woman and LeRoy got out of the house she stopped weeping and put her hand into his. Her fears had all gone away. He found a room for her in another house and then went with her into a park and sat on a bench.
* * * * *
Everything LeRoy has told me concerning this woman strengthens my belief in what I said to the man that day in the mountains. You cannot venture along the road of lives. On the bench he and the woman talked until midnight and he saw and talked with her many times later. Nothing came of it. She went back, I suppose, to her place in the West.
In the place from which she had come the woman had been a teacher of music. She was one of four sisters, all engaged in the same sort of work and, LeRoy says, all quiet capable women. Their father had died when the eldest girl was not yet ten, and five years later the mother died also. The girls had a house and a garden.
In the nature of things I cannot know what the lives of the women were like but of this one may be quite certain–they talked only of women’s affairs, thought only of women’s affairs. No one of them ever had a lover. For years no man came near the house.
Of them all only the youngest, the one who came to Chicago, was visibly affected by the utterly feminine quality of their lives. It did something to her. All day and every day she taught music to young girls and then went home to the women. When she was twenty-five she began to think and to dream of men. During the day and through the evening she talked with women of women’s affairs, and all the time she wanted desperately to be loved by a man. She went to Chicago with that hope in mind. LeRoy explained her attitude in the matter and her strange behavior in the west-side house by saying she had thought too much and acted too little. “The life force within her became decentralized,” he declared. “What she wanted she could not achieve. The living force within could not find expression. When it could not get expressed in one way it took another. Sex spread itself out over her body. It permeated the very fibre of her being. At the last she was sex personified, sex become condensed and impersonal. Certain words, the touch of a man’s hand, sometimes even the sight of a man passing in the street did something to her.”
* * * * *
Yesterday I saw LeRoy and he talked to me again of the woman and her strange and terrible fate.
We walked in the park by the lake. As we went along the figure of the woman kept coming into my mind. An idea came to me.
“You might have been her lover,” I said. “That was possible. She was not afraid of you.”
LeRoy stopped. Like the doctor who was so sure of his ability to walk into lives he grew angry and scolded. For a moment he stared at me and then a rather odd thing happened. Words said by the other man in the dusty road in the hills came to LeRoy’s lips and were said over again. The suggestion of a sneer played about the corners of his mouth. “How smart we are. How aptly we put things,” he said.
The voice of the young man who walked with me in the park by the lake in the city became shrill. I sensed the weariness in him. Then he laughed and said quietly and softly, “It isn’t so simple. By being sure of yourself you are in danger of losing all of the romance of life. You miss the whole point. Nothing in life can be settled so definitely. The woman–you see–was like a young tree choked by a climbing vine. The thing that wrapped her about had shut out the light. She was a grotesque as many trees in the forest are grotesques. Her problem was such a difficult one that thinking of it has changed the whole current of my life. At first I was like you. I was quite sure. I thought I would be her lover and settle the matter.”
LeRoy turned and walked a little away. Then he came back and took hold of my arm. A passionate earnestness took possession of him. His voice trembled. “She needed a lover, yes, the men in the house were quite right about that,” he said. “She needed a lover and at the same time a lover was not what she needed. The need of a lover was, after all, a quite secondary thing. She needed to be loved, to be long and quietly and patiently loved. To be sure she is a grotesque, but then all the people in the world are grotesques. We all need to be loved. What would cure her would cure the rest of us also. The disease she had is, you see, universal. We all want to be loved and the world has no plan for creating our lovers.”
LeRoy’s voice dropped and he walked beside me in silence. We turned away from the lake and walked under trees. I looked closely at him. The cords of his neck were drawn taut. “I have seen under the shell of life and I am afraid,” he mused. “I am myself like the woman. I am covered with creeping crawling vine-like things. I cannot be a lover. I am not subtle or patient enough. I am paying old debts. Old thoughts and beliefs–seeds planted by dead men–spring up in my soul and choke me.”
For a long time we walked and LeRoy talked, voicing the thoughts that came into his mind. I listened in silence. His mind struck upon the refrain voiced by the man in the mountains. “I would like to be a dead dry thing,” he muttered looking at the leaves scattered over the grass. “I would like to be a leaf blown away by the wind.” He looked up and his eyes turned to where among the trees we could see the lake in the distance. “I am weary and want to be made clean. I am a man covered by creeping crawling things. I would like to be dead and blown by the wind over limitless waters,” he said. “I want more than anything else in the world to be clean.”
