Sherwood Anderson

“ The woman at the window, like every one else in her town and in all the towns of the mid-western country, became touched with the idea of the romance of industry. The dreams of the Missouri boy that he had fought, had by the strength of his persistency twisted into new channels so that they had expressed themselves in definite things, in corn-cutting machines and in machines for unloading coal cars and for gathering hay out of a field and loading it on wagons without aid of human hands, were still dreams and capable of arousing dreams in others. They awoke dreams in the mind of the woman. ”

“ The hill country through which her train came into town was in the full flush of its summer beauty. In the little patches of level land between the hills grain was ripening in the fields. Along the streets of the tiny towns and on dusty country roads farmers in overalls stood up in their wagons and scolded at the horses, rearing and prancing in half pretended fright of the passing train. In the forests on the hillsides the open places among the trees looked cool and enticing. Clara put her cheek against the car window and imagined herself wandering in cool forests with a lover. ”

“ In the corn fields the green stalks stood up like young trees. Facing the fields lay the white roads, once the silent roads, hushed and empty through the nights and often during many hours of the day, the night silence broken only at long intervals by the clattering hoofs of homeward bound horses and the silence of days by creaking wagons. Along the roads on a summer evening went the young farm hand in his buggy for which he had spent a summer's wage, a long summer of sweaty toil in hot fields. ”

“ Old men, who had been cabbage farmers in the country north of Bidwell all their lives, and whose bodies were all twisted out of shape by the terrible labor of the cabbage fields, came hobbling into town to look at the model of the new machine. Their opinions were anxiously sought by the merchant, the carpenter, the artisan, the doctor—by all the townspeople. Almost without exception, they shook their heads in doubt. Standing on the sidewalk before the jeweler's window, they stared at the machine and then, turning to the crowd that had gathered about, they shook their heads in doubt. ”

“ The quiet Main Street, on which his shop had faced since he was a young man just come home from his trade adventures, and which had always been such a sleepy place at the noon hour in the summer, was now like a battle-field from which an army had retreated. A great gash had been cut in the street where the new sewer was to be laid. Swarms of workingmen, most of them strangers, had come into Main Street from the factories by the railroad tracks. ”

“ The little mice, gathered in the darkness out of sight in the great houses, squeal with delight. After a time when nothing happens they become sad and depressed. Their minds go back to the time when they lived in the fields, but they do not go out of the walls of the houses, because long living in droves has made them afraid of the silence of long nights and the emptiness of skies. In the houses giant children are being reared. ”

“ The car ran through miles of the low farming country, through the main streets of towns, where the people ran out of the stores to stand on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder, through sleeping bits of woodlands—remnants of the great forests in which Tom had worked as a boy—and across wooden bridges over small streams, beside which grew tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow and fragrant with blossoms. ”

“ Farmers jumping into their wagons started their horses away on the trot. The whole street was populous with people shouting and running. To an observing person standing at the bank window, Bidwell, Ohio, might have seemed no longer a quiet town filled with people who lived quiet lives and thought quiet thoughts, but a tiny section of some giant modern city. The sky was extraordinarily black as from the smoke of a mill. The hurrying people might have been workmen escaping from the mill at the end of the day. Clouds of dust swept through the street. Steve Hunter's imagination was aroused. ”

“ A new machine that went along roads at a startlingly increased rate of speed might change the whole face of the world, as her father declared it would, but it did not change certain facts of her life. “Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh impossible as a husband?” she asked herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, having got into a long stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sail through the air like a bird. ”

“ The mind of the young inventor, that had for so long been dreamy and uncertain, had suddenly become extraordinarily clear and free. One of the inspired moments that come to intense natures, working intensely, had come to him. The mechanical problem he was trying so hard to work out became clear. It was one of the moments that Hugh afterwards thought of as justifying his existence, and in later life he came to live for such moments. With a nod of his head to Steve he arose and hurried out to the building that was used by the Wheeling as a freight warehouse. The jeweler's son ran at his heels. ”

“ The crowd in the grand stand, such fellows as Tom Butterworth, have not seen what he's doing. He sits still. By God, what a man! He waits. He looks half asleep. If he doesn't have to do it, he makes no effort. If the horse has it in him to win without help he sits still. The people are shouting and jumping up out of their seats in the grand stand, and if that Bud Doble has a horse in the race he's leaning forward in the sulky, shouting at his horse and making a holy show of himself.
“Ha, that Geers! He waits. He doesn't think of the people but of the horse he's driving. ”

“ In the midst of the little hopeless community of beaten men and yellow defeated women on the bank of the Mississippi River, the woman who had become Hugh McVey's second mother and in whose veins flowed the blood of the pioneers, felt herself undefeated and unbeatable. She and her husband would, she felt, stay in the Missouri town for a while and then move on to a larger town and a better position in life. They would move on and up until the little fat man was a railroad president or a millionaire. ”

“ He did not then know and, in spite of his own later success and his own later use of the machinery by which illusion is created, he never found out that in an industrial world reputations for greatness of mind are made as a Detroit manufacturer would make automobiles. He did not know that men are employed to bring up the name of a politician so that he may be called a statesman, as a new brand of breakfast food that it may be sold; that most modern great men are mere illusions sprung out of a national hunger for greatness. ”

“ In making way for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day to emerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities to cover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies of men.
And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giant walked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent his days at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried to adjust his mind to the realization of the fact that he was not to be accepted as fellow by the citizens of the new place to which he had come. ”

“ On the night of Clara's marriage after she and Hugh had disappeared down the county seat road, Jim hurried into the barn and, bringing out a horse, sprang on his back. He was sixty-three but could mount a horse like a young man. As he rode furiously toward Bidwell he thought, not of Clara and her adventure, but of her father. To both men the right kind of marriage meant success in life for a woman. Nothing else really mattered much if that were accomplished. He thought of Tom Butterworth, who, he told himself, had fussed with Clara just as Bud Doble often fussed with a horse in a race. ”

“ It was a man's duty, he thought, to look as much as possible like all his fellow men, to lose himself in the crowds, and these fellows did not look like other men. They loved color, and as they talked they made rapid gestures with their hands. The Italian in the road was with a woman of his own race, and in the growing darkness put his arm about her shoulder. Hugh's heart began to beat rapidly and he forgot his American prejudices. He wished he were a workman and that Clara were a workman's daughter. ”

“ The imaginary man, suggested to her mind by her father's words, became every moment more and more a reality. Before her eyes danced the laughing eyes of the young man who for a moment had lingered beside her while Kate Chanceller talked to his companion that evening when they had been challenged on the streets of Columbus. She remembered the young school teacher, who had held her in his arms through a long Sunday afternoon, and the day when, as an awakening maiden, she had heard Jim Priest talking to the laborers in the barn about the sap that ran up the tree. ”

“ At the corner of Main and McKinley Streets and just beyond the place where three old buildings were being torn down to make room for the building of a new hotel, appeared a man who climbed upon a box and attacked, not the piece work prices at the corn-cutting machine plant, but the whole system that built and maintained factories where the wage scale of the workmen could be fixed by the whim or necessity of one man or a group of men. As the man on the box talked, the workmen in the crowd who were of American birth began to shake their heads. ”

“ One evening in the month of May, during her third year at the University, Clara sat on the bank of a tiny stream by a grove of trees, far out on the edge of a suburban village north of Columbus. Beside her sat a young man named Frank Metcalf whom she had known for a year and who had once been a student in the same classes with herself. He was the son of the president of the plow manufacturing company of which her uncle was treasurer. As they sat together by the stream the afternoon light began to fade and darkness came on. ”

“ On hot summer days a sour, pungent smell arose from the old factory, and at night its presence lent a ghostly flavor to the tiny corner of the world in which lived perhaps a dozen people.
All day and at night an intense persistent silence lay over Pickleville, while in Bidwell a mile away the stir of new life began. In the evenings and on rainy afternoons when men could not work in the fields, old Judge Hanby went along Turner's Pike and across the wagon bridge into Bidwell and sat in a chair at the back of Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked. Men came in to listen to him and went out. ”

“ The mind of the prosperous farmer fell into a reminiscent mood and he spoke of little things concerning his life as a boy and young man; the days of cutting wood alone in the silent, white forest when winter came and it was time for getting out firewood and logs for new farm buildings, the log rollings to which neighboring farmers came, when great piles of logs were made and set afire that space might be cleared for planting. ”

“ In the street car, homeward bound beside Frank Metcalf, Clara thought of Phillip Grimes and wondered whether or not he would have stood the test of Kate Chanceller's speech regarding love and friendship. He had confused her, but that was perhaps her own fault. He had not insisted on himself at all. Frank Metcalf had done nothing else. “One should be able,” she thought, “to find somewhere a man who respects himself and his own desires but can understand also the desires and fears of a woman.” The street car went bouncing along over railroad crossings and along residence streets. ”

“ Hugh had no suspicion that Clara had him under consideration as a possible husband. He knew nothing about her, but after she went away he began to think. She was a woman and good to look upon and at once took Rose McCoy's place in his mind. All unloved men and many who are loved play in a half subconscious way with the figures of many women as women's minds play with the figures of men, seeing them in many situations, vaguely caressing them, dreaming of closer contacts. ”

“ Tom touched some mechanism connected with the engine of the car and it shot suddenly forward. “Suppose one of them labor leaders were standing in the road there,” he cried. Instinctively Hugh leaned forward and peered into the darkness through which the lights of the car cut like a great scythe, and on the back seat Clara half rose to her feet. Tom shouted with delight and as the car plunged along the road his voice rose in triumph. “The damn fools!” he cried. “They think they can stop the machines. Let 'em try. They want to go on in their old hand-made way. ”

“ They felt that every day of hard work done in clearing the land was like laying up treasure against the future. In New England they had fought against a hard climate and had managed to find a living on stony unproductive soil. The milder climate and the rich deep soil of Michigan was, they felt, full of promise. Sarah's father like most of his neighbors had gone into debt for his land and for tools with which to clear and work it and every year spent most of his earnings in paying interest on a mortgage held by a banker in a nearby town, but that did not discourage him. ”

“ The voice of the labor orator arose above the murmur of voices in the street. “We've got to take power into our hands. We've got to carry on our own battle for power,” the voice declared.
The harness maker turned a corner into a quiet street, his hand caressing affectionately the revolver in the side pocket of his coat. He intended to kill himself, but had not wanted to die in the same room with Jim Gibson. In his own way he had always been a very sensitive man and his only fear was that rough hands fall upon him before he had completed the evening's work. ”