The Woodburns of Columbus were wealthy by the standards of their day.
They lived in a large house and kept two carriages and four servants,
but had no children. Henderson Woodburn was small of stature, wore a
gray beard, and was neat and precise about his person. He was treasurer
of the plow manufacturing company and was also treasurer of the church
he and his wife attended. In his youth he had been called “Hen” Woodburn
and had been bullied by larger boys, and when he grew to be a man and
after his persistent shrewdness and patience had carried him into a
position of some power in the business life of his native city he in
turn became something of a bully to the men beneath him. He thought
his wife Priscilla had come from a better family than his own and was
a little afraid of her. When they did not agree on any subject, she
expressed her opinion gently but firmly, while he blustered for a time
and then gave in. After a misunderstanding his wife put her arms about
his neck and kissed the bald spot on the top of his head. Then the
subject was forgotten.
Life in the Woodburn house was lived without words. After the stir and
bustle of the farm, the silence of the house for a long time frightened
Clara. Even when she was alone in her own room she walked about on
tiptoe. Henderson Woodburn was absorbed in his work, and when he came
home in the evening, ate his dinner in silence and then worked again.
He brought home account books and papers from the office and spread them
out on a table in the living room. His wife Priscilla sat in a large
chair under a lamp and knitted children's stockings. They were, she told
Clara, for the children of the poor. As a matter of fact the stockings
never left her house. In a large trunk in her room upstairs lay hundreds
of pairs knitted during the twenty-five years of her family life.
Clara was not very happy in the Woodburn household, but on the
other hand, was not very unhappy. She attended to her studies at the
University passably well and in the late afternoons took a walk with a
girl classmate, attended a matinee at the theater, or read a book. In
the evening she sat with her aunt and uncle until she could no longer
bear the silence, and then went to her own room, where she studied
until it was time to go to bed. Now and then she went with the two older
people to a social affair at the church, of which Henderson Woodburn
was treasurer, or accompanied them to dinners at the homes of other
well-to-do and respectable business men. On several occasions young men,
sons of the people with whom the Woodburns dined, or students at the
university, came in the evening to call. On such an occasion Clara and
the young man sat in the parlor of the house and talked. After a time
they grew silent and embarrassed in each other's presence. From the next
room Clara could hear the rustling of the papers containing the columns
of figures over which her uncle was at work. Her aunt's knitting needles
clicked loudly. The young man told a tale of some football game, or if
he had already gone out into the world, talked of his experiences as a
traveler selling the wares manufactured or merchandized by his father.
Such visits all began at the same hour, eight o'clock, and the young man
left the house promptly at ten. Clara grew to feel that she was being
merchandized and that they had come to look at the goods. One evening
one of the men, a fellow with laughing blue eyes and kinky yellow hair,
unconsciously disturbed her profoundly. All the evening he talked just
as the others had talked and got out of his chair to go away at the
prescribed hour. Clara walked with him to the door. She put out her
hand, which he shook cordially. Then he looked at her and his eyes
twinkled. “I've had a good time,” he said. Clara had a sudden and almost
overpowering desire to embrace him. She wanted to disturb his assurance,
to startle him by kissing him on the lips or holding him tightly in
her arms. Shutting the door quickly, she stood with her hand on the
door-knob, her whole body trembling. The trivial by-products of her
age's industrial madness went on in the next room. The sheets of paper
rustled and the knitting needles clicked. Clara thought she would like
to call the young man back into the house, lead him to the room where
the meaningless industry went endlessly on and there do something that
would shock them and him as they had never been shocked before. She ran
quickly upstairs. “What is getting to be the matter with me?” she asked
herself anxiously.
* * * * *
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. Before them across an open
field stood a factory, and Clara remembered that the whistle had
long since blown and the men from the factory had gone home. She grew
restless and sprang to her feet. Young Metcalf who had been talking very
earnestly arose and stood beside her. “I can't marry for two years,
but we can be engaged and that will be all the same thing as far as the
right and wrong of what I want and need is concerned. It isn't my fault
I can't ask you to marry me now,” he declared. “In two years now, I'll
inherit eleven thousand dollars. My aunt left it to me and the old fool
went and fixed it so I don't get it if I marry before I'm twenty-four. I
want that money. I've got to have it, but I got to have you too.”
Clara looked away into the evening darkness and waited for him to
finish his speech. All afternoon he had been making practically the
same speech, over and over. “Well, I can't help it, I'm a man,” he said
doggedly. “I can't help it, I want you. I can't help it, my aunt was an
old fool.” He began to explain the necessity of remaining unmarried in
order that he could receive the eleven thousand dollars. “If I don't get
that money I'll be just the same as I am now,” he declared. “I won't
be any good.” He grew angry and, thrusting his hands into his pockets,
stared also across the field into the darkness. “Nothing keeps me
satisfied,” he said. “I hate being in my father's business and I hate
going to school. In only two years I'll get the money. Father can't keep
it from me. I'll take it and light out. I don't know just what I'll do.
I'm going maybe to Europe, that's what I'm going to do. Father wants
me to stay here and work in his office. To hell with that. I want to
travel. I'll be a soldier or something. Anyway I'll get out of here and
go somewhere and do something exciting, something alive. You can go with
me. We'll cut out together. Haven't you got the nerve? Why don't you be
my woman?”
Young Metcalf took hold of Clara's shoulder and tried to take her into
his arms. For a moment they struggled and then, in disgust, he stepped
away from her and again began to scold.
Clara walked away across two or three vacant lots and got into a street
of workingmen's houses, the man following at her heels. Night had come
and the people in the street facing the factory had already disposed
of the evening meal. Children and dogs played in the road and a
strong smell of food hung in the air. To the west across the fields, a
passenger train ran past going toward the city. Its light made wavering
yellow patches against the bluish black sky. Clara wondered why she had
come to the out of the way place with Frank Metcalf. She did not like
him, but there was a restlessness in him that was like the restless
thing in herself. He did not want stupidly to accept life, and that fact
made him brother to herself. Although he was but twenty-two years old,
he had already achieved an evil reputation. A servant in his father's
house had given birth to a child by him, and it had cost a good deal of
money to get her to take the child and go away without making an open
scandal. During the year before he had been expelled from the University
for throwing another young man down a flight of stairs, and it was
whispered about among the girl students that he often got violently
drunk. For a year he had been trying to ingratiate himself with Clara,
had written her letters, sent flowers to her house, and when he met her
on the street had stopped to urge that she accept his friendship. On the
day in May she had met him on the street and he had begged that she give
him one chance to talk things out with her. They had met at a street
crossing where cars went past into the suburban villages that lay about
the city. “Come on,” he had urged, “let's take a street car ride, let's
get out of the crowds, I want to talk to you.” He had taken hold of her
arm and fairly dragged her to a car. “Come and hear what I have to say,”
he had urged, “then if you don't want to have anything to do with
me, all right. You can say so and I'll let you alone.” After she had
accompanied him to the suburb of workingmen's houses, in the vicinity of
which they had spent the afternoon in the fields, Clara had found he had
nothing to urge upon her except the needs of his body. Still she felt
there was something he wanted to say that had not been said. He was
restless and dissatisfied with his life, and at bottom she felt that way
about her own life. During the last three years she had often wondered
why she had come to the school and what she was to gain by learning
things out of books. The days and months went past and she knew certain
rather uninteresting facts she had not known before. How the facts were
to help her to live, she couldn't make out. They had nothing to do with
such problems as her attitude toward men like John May the farm hand,
the school teacher who had taught her something by holding her in his
arms and kissing her, and the dark sullen young man who now walked
beside her and talked of the needs of his body. It seemed to Clara that
every additional year spent at the University but served to emphasize
its inadequacy. It was so also with the books she read and the thoughts
and actions of the older people about her. Her aunt and uncle did not
talk much, but seemed to take it for granted she wanted to live such
another life as they were living. She thought with horror of the
probability of marrying a maker of plows or of some other dull necessity
of life and then spending her days in the making of stockings for babies
that did not come, or in some other equally futile manifestation of her
dissatisfaction. She realized with a shudder that men like her uncle,
who spent their lives in adding up rows of figures or doing over and
over some tremendously trivial thing, had no conception of any outlook
for their women beyond living in a house, serving them physically,
wearing perhaps good enough clothes to help them make a show of
prosperity and success, and drifting finally into a stupid acceptance
of dullness--an acceptance that both she and the passionate, twisted man
beside her were fighting against.
In a class in the University Clara had met, during that her third year
there, a woman named Kate Chanceller, who had come to Columbus with her
brother from a town in Missouri, and it was this woman who had given her
thoughts form, who had indeed started her thinking of the inadequacy of
her life. The brother, a studious, quiet man, worked as a chemist in a
manufacturing plant somewhere at the edge of town. He was a musician and
wanted to become a composer. One evening during the winter his sister
Kate had brought Clara to the apartment where the two lived, and the
three had become friends. Clara had learned something there that she did
not yet understand and never did get clearly into her consciousness.
The truth was that the brother was like a woman and Kate Chanceller, who
wore skirts and had the body of a woman, was in her nature a man. Kate
and Clara spent many evenings together later and talked of many things
not usually touched on by girl students. Kate was a bold, vigorous
thinker and was striving to grope her way through her own problem in
life and many times, as they walked along the street or sat together
in the evening, she forgot her companion and talked of herself and the
difficulties of her position in life. “It's absurd the way things are
arranged,” she said. “Because my body is made in a certain way I'm
supposed to accept certain rules for living. The rules were not made
for me. Men manufactured them as they manufacture can-openers, on the
wholesale plan.” She looked at Clara and laughed. “Try to imagine me in
a little lace cap, such as your aunt wears about the house, and spending
my days knitting baby stockings,” she said.
The two women had spent hours talking of their lives and in speculating
on the differences in their natures. The experience had been
tremendously educational for Clara. As Kate was a socialist and Columbus
was rapidly becoming an industrial city, she talked of the meaning of
capital and labor and the effect of changing conditions on the lives of
men and women. To Kate, Clara could talk as to a man, but the antagonism
that so often exists between men and women did not come into and spoil
their companionship. In the evening when Clara went to Kate's house her
aunt sent a carriage to bring her home at nine. Kate rode home with her.
They got to the Woodburn house and went in. Kate was bold and free with
the Woodburns, as with her brother and Clara. “Come,” she said laughing,
“put away your figures and your knitting. Let's talk.” She sat in a
large chair with her legs crossed and talked with Henderson Woodburn of
the affairs of the plow company. The two got into a discussion of the
relative merits of the free trade and protection ideas. Then the two
older people went to bed and Kate talked to Clara. “Your uncle is an
old duffer,” she said. “He knows nothing about the meaning of what he's
doing in life.” When she started home afoot across the city, Clara was
alarmed for her safety. “You must get a cab or let me wake up uncle's
man; something may happen,” she said. Kate laughed and went off,
striding along the street like a man. Sometimes she thrust her hands
into her skirt pockets, that were like the trouser pockets of a man, and
it was difficult for Clara to remember that she was a woman. In Kate's
presence she became bolder than she had ever been with any one. One
evening she told the story of the thing that had happened to her that
afternoon long before on the farm, the afternoon when, her mind having
been inflamed by the words of Jim Priest regarding the sap that goes up
the tree and by the warm sensuous beauty of the day, she had wanted so
keenly to draw close to some one. She explained to Kate how she had been
so brutally jarred out of the feeling in herself that she felt was at
bottom all right. “It was like a blow in the face at the hand of God,”
she said.
Kate Chanceller was excited as Clara told the tale and listened with
a fiery light burning in her eyes. Something in her manner encouraged
Clara to tell also of her experiments with the school teacher and for
the first time she got a sense of justice toward men by talking to the
woman who was half a man. “I know that wasn't square,” she said. “I know
now, when I talk to you, but I didn't know then. With the school teacher
I was as unfair as John May and my father were with me. Why do men and
women have to fight each other? Why does the battle between them have to
go on?”
Kate walked up and down before Clara and swore like a man. “Oh, hell,”
she exclaimed, “men are such fools and I suppose women are as bad. They
are both too much one thing. I fall in between. I've got my problem too,
but I'm not going to talk about it. I know what I'm going to do. I'm
going to find some kind of work and do it.” She began to talk of the
stupidity of men in their approach to women. “Men hate such women as
myself,” she said. “They can't use us, they think. What fools! They
should watch and study us. Many of us spend our lives loving other
women, but we have skill. Being part women, we know how to approach
women. We are not blundering and crude. Men want a certain thing from
you. It is delicate and easy to kill. Love is the most sensitive thing
in the world. It's like an orchid. Men try to pluck orchids with ice
tongs, the fools.”
Walking to where Clara stood by a table, and taking her by the shoulder,
the excited woman stood for a long time looking at her. Then she picked
up her hat, put it on her head, and with a flourish of her hand started
for the door. “You can depend on my friendship,” she said. “I'll do
nothing to confuse you. You'll be in luck if you can get that kind of
love or friendship from a man.”
Clara kept thinking of the words of Kate Chanceller on the evening
when she walked through the streets of the suburban village with Frank
Metcalf, and later as the two sat on the car that took them back to the
city. With the exception of another student named Phillip Grimes,
who had come to see her a dozen times during her second year in the
University, young Metcalf was the only one of perhaps a dozen men she
had met since leaving the farm who had been attracted to her. Phillip
Grimes was a slender young fellow with blue eyes, yellow hair and a not
very vigorous mustache. He was from a small town in the northern end of
the State, where his father published a weekly newspaper. When he came
to see Clara he sat on the edge of his chair and talked rapidly. Some
person he had seen in the street had interested him. “I saw an old woman
on the car,” he began. “She had a basket on her arm. It was filled
with groceries. She sat beside me and talked aloud to herself.” Clara's
visitor repeated the words of the old woman on the car. He speculated
about her, wondered what her life was like. When he had talked of the
old woman for ten or fifteen minutes, he dropped the subject and began
telling of another experience, this time with a man who sold fruit at a
street crossing. It was impossible to be personal with Phillip Grimes.
Nothing but his eyes were personal. Sometimes he looked at Clara in a
way that I made her feel that her clothes were being stripped from her
body, and that she was being made to stand naked in the room before her
visitor. The experience, when it came, was not entirely a physical one.
It was only in part that. When the thing happened Clara saw her whole
life being stripped bare. “Don't look at me like that,” she once said
somewhat sharply, when his eyes had made her so uncomfortable she could
no longer remain silent. Her remark had frightened Phillip Grimes away.
He got up at once, blushed, stammered something about having another
engagement, and hurried away.
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. Clara looked at her companion, who stared
straight ahead, and then turned to look out of the car window. The
window was open and she could see the interiors of the laborers' houses
along the streets. In the evening with the lamps lighted they seemed
cosy and comfortable. Her mind ran back to the life in her father's
house and its loneliness. For two summers she had escaped going home.
At the end of her first year in school she had made an illness of her
uncle's an excuse for spending the summer in Columbus, and at the end
of the second year she had found another excuse for not going. This year
she felt she would have to go home. She would have to sit day after day
at the farm table with the farm hands. Nothing would happen. Her father
would remain silent in her presence. She would become bored and weary of
the endless small talk of the town girls. If one of the town boys began
to pay her special attention, her father would become suspicious and
that would lead to resentment in herself. She would do something she did
not want to do. In the houses along the streets through which the car
passed, she saw women moving about. Babies cried and men came out of
the doors and stood talking to one another on the sidewalks. She decided
suddenly that she was taking the problem of her own life too seriously.
“The thing to do is to get married and then work things out afterward,”
she told herself. She made up her mind that the puzzling, insistent
antagonism that existed between men and women was altogether due to the
fact that they were not married and had not the married people's way
of solving such problems as Frank Metcalf had been talking about all
afternoon. She wished she were with Kate Chancellor so that she could
discuss with her this new viewpoint. When she and Frank Metcalf got off
the car she was no longer in a hurry to go home to her uncle's house.
Knowing she did not want to marry him, she thought that in her turn she
would talk, that she would try to make him see her point of view as all
the afternoon he had been trying to make her see his.
For an hour the two people walked about and Clara talked. She forgot
about the passage of time and the fact that she had not dined. Not
wishing to talk of marriage, she talked instead of the possibility of
friendship between men and women. As she talked her own mind seemed to
her to have become clearer. “It's all foolishness your going on as you
have,” she declared. “I know how dissatisfied and unhappy you sometimes
are. I often feel that way myself. Sometimes I think it's marriage I
want. I really think I want to draw close to some one. I believe every
one is hungry for that experience. We all want something we are not
willing to pay for. We want to steal it or have it given us. That's
what's the matter with me, and that's what's the matter with you.”
They came to the Woodburn house, and turning in stood on a porch in the
darkness by the front door. At the back of the house Clara could see
a light burning. Her aunt and uncle were at the eternal figuring and
knitting. They were finding a substitute for living. It was the thing
Frank Metcalf was protesting against and was the real reason for her
own constant secret protest. She took hold of the lapel of his coat,
intending to make a plea, to urge upon him the idea of a friendship that
would mean something to them both. In the darkness she could not see his
rather heavy, sullen face. The maternal instinct became strong in her
and she thought of him as a wayward, dissatisfied boy, wanting love and
understanding as she had wanted to be loved and understood by her father
when life in the moment of the awakening of her womanhood seemed ugly
and brutal. With her free hand she stroked the sleeve of his coat. Her
gesture was misunderstood by the man who was not thinking of her words
but of her body and of his hunger to possess it. He took her into his
arms and held her tightly against his breast. She tried to struggle, to
tear herself away but, although she was strong and muscular, she found
herself unable to move. As he held her uncle, who had heard the two
people come up the steps to the door, threw it open. Both he and his
wife had on several occasions warned Clara to have nothing to do with
young Metcalf. One day when he had sent flowers to the house, her aunt
had urged her to refuse to receive them. “He's a bad, dissipated, wicked
man,” she had said. “Have nothing to do with him.” When he saw his niece
in the arms of the man who had been the subject of so much discussion
in his own house and in every respectable house in Columbus, Henderson
Woodburn was furious. He forgot the fact that young Metcalf was the son
of the president of the company of which he was treasurer. It seemed
to him that some sort of a personal insult had been thrown at him by a
common ruffian. “Get out of here,” he screamed. “What do you mean, you
nasty villain? Get out of here.”
Frank Metcalf went off along the street laughing defiantly, and Clara
went into the house. The sliding doors that led into the living room had
been thrown open and the light from a hanging lamp streamed in upon her.
Her hair was disheveled and her hat twisted to one side. The man and
woman stared at her. The knitting needles and a sheet of paper held in
their hands suggested what they had been doing while Clara was getting
another lesson from life. Her aunt's hands trembled and the knitting
needles clicked together. Nothing was said and the confused and angry
girl ran up a stairway to her own room. She locked herself in and knelt
on the floor by the bed. She did not pray. Her association with Kate
Chanceller had given her another outlet for her feelings. Pounding with
her fists on the bed coverings, she swore. “Fools, damned fools, the
world is filled with nothing but a lot of damned fools.”