Sherwood Anderson

“ Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of vast work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him, keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals. ”

“ The wind from the lake and the laughter and talk of people passing under the lights cooled the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the eloquence of John Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his voice marshalling the armies of the standing corn.
Into Sam’s mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of, moving always forward, silent, powerful—the force of sex. ”

“ Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the fine vows of their early love-making days.
Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness is a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little turns of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate and at rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost ideal happiness constantly during that time. ”

“ Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on their tongues.
In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired, unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes—only their fingers occupied. ”

“ Sometimes he caught himself wondering if there ever had been such a war and thought that it must be a lie like everything else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he had wondered why some sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did not rise, and in a matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing as the Civil War had ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in the minds of pompous old men demanding unearned glory of their fellows. Now hurrying along the street with burning cheeks, he decided that after all there must have been such a war. ”

“ Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that lurked at the bottom of men’s tales of the submerged world. He wanted his golden girl. He was like the naïve German lad in the South Water Street warehouses who had once said to him—he was a frugal soul—“I would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who will be my mistress and not charge anything.”
Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. ”

“ The eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable men—of whom he intended to be one—intent upon growth.
In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came out again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a woman—tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on her head. As she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at her, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward with a cry. ”

“ And yet Sam, son of that Jane McPherson who had won the admiration of the men of Caxton by her ceaseless efforts to keep her family afloat and clean handed, could not sit idly by, living upon the income of his own and Sue’s money. The stirring, forward-moving world called to him; he looked about him at the broad, significant movements in business and finance, at the new men coming into prominence and apparently finding a way for the expression of new big ideas, and felt his youth stirring in him and his mind reaching out to new projects and new ambitions. ”

“ He saw again the tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom’s hand in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying to blow the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of death through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record of his loves on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man rubbing his hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this—this home with its safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at the head of it all. ”

“ Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders, for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses close by the beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls with their lovers walked up and down. ”

“ For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the street. In the end they die full of faith, hoping for a life to come.
Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been marching through his mind. ”

“ Her plans if followed would have made him a scholar, a man living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had chosen to live his life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at evening through the street to Freedom’s house, going in and out of Wildman’s, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the talking, laughing idler. ”

“ His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in the presence of the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled with a strange new fear and began to talk of the life after death, making effort after effort to get at what she wanted to say, and only succeeding in finding expression for her thoughts in little sentences broken by long painful pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all that there was some kind of future life and that she believed she should see and live with him again after they had finished with this world. ”

“ Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices of women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He thought that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the lighted Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of the town; had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called to him with a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had not heard? Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not talk. ”

“ With the completion of the deal Sam stood to win five million dollars, more money than Colonel Tom or any of the Raineys had ever controlled, and had placed himself in the eyes of the business men of Chicago and New York where before he had placed himself in the eyes of Caxton and South Water Street. Instead of another Windy McPherson failing to blow his bugle before the waiting crowd, he was still the man who made good, the man who achieved, the kind of man of whom America boasts before the world.
He did not see Sue again. ”

“ He knew that after a time Jack Prince would come and take her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their talk.
Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively on his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.
“You talk!” she broke out. “Books are not full of pretence and lies; you business men are—you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They are the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and forget to lie, but you business men never forget. ”

“ A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam’s throat.
“Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this, our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to carry life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking them at night.” ”

“ Telfer, who had begun talking thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making the words roll and tumble from his lips.
“No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes many virtues that are forever on men’s lips,” he declared fiercely as though trying to down an opponent. “It is one of the virtues that proves man not a savage. ”

“ Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in DeJonge’s restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before him on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers, talked to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.
“He will be late, of course,” he exclaimed, refilling Sam’s glass. “The man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from the cheeks of a maiden.” ”

“ Mary Underwood laughed quietly.
“I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making you a man at work upon the things of the mind,” she said. “The sense of privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer’s method was better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a flourish.”
Sam shook his head.
“Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh,” he said stoutly. “Here is something at you—it is tearing at you—it has got to be met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over in their minds. ”

“ In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a thought he had got from a book of Janet’s or from some talk he had heard, perhaps at his own dinner table.
“It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying dead.” ”

“ So vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed the sense of Telfer’s talk, thought that all society had resolved itself into a few sturdy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to make of himself such another arose engulfing him. ”

“ One stands waiting for the discord, strained, missing the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that he must keep a check upon his tongue and that things of which they had talked with great freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated his wife when brought into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who, during his life with Sue, had learned the joy of free, open talk upon any subject that came into his mind and whose native interest in life and in the motives of men and women had blossomed in the large leisure and independence of the last year, this was trying. ”

“ He looked at the girls and the women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material, as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in the great workshop of the universe. “Marriage is a port, a beginning, a point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage of life,” he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. ”

“ For several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves very seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the thought that they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged upon a worthy and ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed in admiration of their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous, disciplined, new life they were to give the world by the combined efficiency of their two bodies and minds they were, at a word and a shake of the head from Doctor Grover, compelled to remake the outline of their future together. ”

“ They were, many of them, not of the brute trader type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted quickly and with a daring and audacity impossible to the average mind. They wanted power and were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but for the most part they were men with a fire burning within them, men who became what they were because the world offered them no better outlet for their vast energies.
Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard, quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there in the city. ”

“ It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops of high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. ”

“ In all Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and who took them seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude toward them puzzling and would stand with open mouth listening as Telfer swore or laughed at a book as he did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a fine portrait of Browning which he kept hung in the stable and before this he would stand, his legs spread apart, and his head tilted to one side, talking.
“A rich old sport you are, eh?” he would say, grinning. “Getting yourself discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old fraud!” ”

“ Up and down the street went men looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their necks, their hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women pressed against the little squares of glass and then, turning, suddenly, sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued. Among the walkers on the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats whose feet scuffled as they hurried along, and young boys with the pink of virtue in their cheeks. In the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It got into Sam’s brain and he stood hesitating and uncertain, startled, nerveless, afraid. ”

“ One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said that the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in Christ by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the man, whom he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was something insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence he had heard from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore—“How can they believe and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their belief?” ”