and had found Kate saying in the letter what she had been unable to say
on the night of his departure. The factory closed at five on Saturday
and he came home in his overalls and went to his room. He had found the
letter on a little broken table under a spluttering oil lamp, by the
front door, and had climbed the stairs carrying it in his hand. He read
the letter anxiously, waiting as for a hand to come out of the blank
wall of the room and strike.
His father was getting better. The deep burns that had taken such a long
time to heal, were really healing now and the doctor had said the danger
of infection had passed. Kate had found a new and soothing remedy. One
took slippery elm and let it lie in milk until it became soft. This
applied to the burns enabled Tom to sleep better at night.
As for Fred, Kate and her father had decided he might as well go back to
school. It was really too bad for a young boy to miss the chance to get
an education, and anyway there was no work to be had. Perhaps he could
get a job, helping in some store on Saturday afternoons.
A woman from the Woman’s Relief Corps had had the nerve to come to the
Appleton house and ask Kate if the family needed help. Well, Kate had
managed to hold herself back, and had been polite but, had the woman
known what was in her mind, her ears would have been itching for a
month. The idea!
It had been fine of Will to send a postcard, as soon as he had got to
Erie and got a job. As for his sending money home—of course the family
would be glad to have anything he could spare—but he wasn’t to go
depriving himself. “We’ve got good credit at the stores. We’ll get along
all right,” Kate had said stoutly.
And then it was she had added the line, had said the thing she could not
say that night when he was leaving. It concerned herself and her future
plans. “That night when you were going away I wanted to tell you
something, but I thought it was silly, talking too soon.” After all
though, Will might as well know she was planning to be married in the
spring. What she wanted was for Fred to come and live with her and her
husband. He could keep on going to school, and perhaps they could manage
so that he could go to college. Some one in the family ought to have a
decent education. Now that Will had made his start in life, there was no
point in waiting longer before making her own.
* * * * *
Will sat, in his tiny room at the top of the huge frame house, owned now
by the wife of the old cornet player of the train, and held the letter
in his hand. The room was on the third floor, under the roof, in a wing
of the house, and beside it was another small room, occupied by the old
man himself. Will had taken the room because it was to be had at a low
price and he could manage the room and his meals, get his washing done,
send three dollars a week to Kate, and still have left a dollar a week
to spend. One could get a little tobacco, and now and then see a movie.
“Ugh!” Will’s lips made a little grunting noise as he read Kate’s words.
He was sitting in a chair, in his oily overalls, and where his fingers
gripped the white sheets of the letter there was a little oily smudge.
Also his hand trembled a little. He got up, poured water out of a
pitcher into a white bowl, and began washing his face and hands.
When he had partly dressed a visitor came. There was the shuffling sound
of weary feet along a hallway, and the cornet player put his head
timidly in at the door. The dog-like appealing look Will had noted on
the train was still in his eyes. Now he was planning something, a kind
of gentle revolt against his wife’s power in the house, and he wanted
Will’s moral support.
For a week he had been coming for talk to Will’s room almost every
evening. There were two things he wanted. In the evening sometimes, as
he sat in his room, he wanted to blow upon his cornet, and he wanted a
little money to jingle in his pockets.
And there was a sense in which Will, the newcomer in the house, was his
property, did not belong to his wife. Often in the evenings he had
talked to the weary and sleepy young workman, until Will’s eyes had
closed and he snored gently. The old man sat on the one chair in the
room, and Will sat on the edge of the bed, while old lips told the tale
of a lost youth, boasted a little. When Will’s body had slumped down
upon the bed the old man got to his feet and moved with cat-like steps
about the room. One mustn’t raise the voice too loudly after all. Had
Will gone to sleep? The cornet player threw his shoulders back and bold
words came, in a halfwhisper, from his lips. To tell the truth, he had
been a fool about the money he had made over to his wife and, if his
wife had taken advantage of him, it wasn’t her fault. For his present
position in life he had no one to blame but himself. What from the very
beginning he had most lacked was boldness. It was a man’s duty to be a
man and, for a long time, he had been thinking—well, the boarding house
no doubt made a profit and he should have his share. His wife was a good
girl all right, but when one came right down to it, all women seemed to
lack a sense of a man’s position in life.
“I’ll have to speak to her—yes siree, I’m going to speak right up to
her. I may have to be a little harsh but it’s my money runs this house,
and I want my share of the profits. No foolishness now. Shell out, I
tell you,” the old man whispered, peering out of the corners of his
blue, watery eyes at the sleeping form of the young man on the bed.
* * * * *
And now again the old man stood at the door of the room, looking
anxiously in. A bell called insistently, announcing that the evening
meal was ready to be served, and they went below, Will leading the way.
At a long table in the dining room several men had already gathered, and
there was the sound of more footsteps on the stairs.
Two long rows of young workmen eating silently. Saturday night and two
long rows of young workmen eating in silence.
After the eating, and on this particular night, there would be a swift
flight of all these young men down into the town, down into the lighted
parts of the town.
Will sat at his place gripping the sides of his chair.
There were things men did on Saturday nights. Work was at an end for the
week and money jingled in pockets. Young workmen ate in silence and
hurried away, one by one, down into the town.
Will’s sister Kate was going to be married in the spring. Her walking
about with the young clerk from the jewelry store, in the streets of
Bidwell, had come to something.
Young workmen employed in factories in Erie, Pennsylvania, dressed
themselves in their best clothes and walked about in the lighted streets
of Erie on Saturday evenings. They went into parks. Some stood talking
to girls while others walked with girls through the streets. And there
were still others who went into saloons and had drinks. Men stood
talking together at a bar. “Dang that foreman of mine! I’ll bust him in
the jaw if he gives me any of his lip.”
There was a young man from Bidwell, sitting at a table in a boarding
house at Erie, Pennsylvania, and before him on a plate was a great pile
of meat and potatoes. The room was not very well lighted. It was dark
and gloomy, and there were black streaks on the grey wall paper. Shadows
played on the walls. On all sides of the young man sat other young
men—eating silently, hurriedly.
Will got abruptly up from the table and started for the door that led
into the street but the others paid no attention to him. If he did not
want to eat his meat and potatoes, it made no difference to them. The
mistress of the house, the wife of the old cornet player, waited on
table when the men ate, but now she had gone away to the kitchen. She
was a silent grim-looking woman, dressed always in a black dress.
To the others in the room—except only the old cornet player—Will’s going
or staying meant nothing at all. He was a young workman, and at such
places young workmen were always going and coming.
A man with broad shoulders and a black mustache, a little older than
most of the others, did glance up from his business of eating. He nudged
his neighbor, and then made a jerky movement with his thumb over his
shoulder. “The new guy has hooked up quickly, eh?” he said, smiling. “He
can’t even wait to eat. Lordy, he’s got an early date—some skirt waiting
for him.”
At his place, opposite where Will had been seated, the cornet player saw
Will go, and his eyes followed, filled with alarm. He had counted on an
evening of talk, of speaking to Will about his youth, boasting a little
in his gentle hesitating way. Now Will had reached the door that led to
the street, and in the old man’s eyes tears began to gather. Again his
lip trembled. Tears were always gathering in the man’s eyes, and his
lips trembled at the slightest provocation. It was no wonder he could no
longer blow a cornet in a band.
* * * * *
And now Will was outside the house in the darkness and, for the cornet
player, the evening was spoiled, the house a deserted empty place. He
had intended being very plain in his evening’s talk with Will, and
wanted particularly to speak of a new attitude, he hoped to assume
toward his wife, in the matter of money. Talking the whole matter out
with Will would give him new courage, make him bolder. Well, if his
money had bought the house, that was now a boarding house, he should
have some share in its profits. There must be profits. Why run a
boarding house without profits? The woman he had married was no fool.
Even though a man were old he needed a little money in his pockets.
Well, an old man, like himself, has a friend, a young fellow, and now
and then he wanted to be able to say to his friend, “Come on friend,
let’s have a glass of beer. I know a good place. Let’s have a glass of
beer and go to the movies. This is on me.”
The cornet player could not eat his meat and potatoes. For a time he
stared over the heads of the others, and then got up to go to his room.
His wife followed into the little hallway at the foot of the stairs.
“What’s the matter, dearie—are you sick?” she asked.
“No,” he answered, “I just didn’t want any supper.” He did not look at
her, but tramped slowly and heavily up the stairs.
* * * * *
Will was walking hurriedly through streets but did not go down into the
brightly lighted sections of town. The boarding house stood on a factory
street and, turning northward, he crossed several railroad tracks and
went toward the docks, along the shore of Lake Erie. There was something
to be settled with himself, something to be faced. Could he manage the
matter?
He walked along, hurriedly at first, and then more slowly. It was
getting into late October now and there was a sharpness like frost in
the air. The spaces between street lamps were long, and he plunged in
and out of areas of darkness. Why was it that everything about him
seemed suddenly strange and unreal? He had forgotten to bring his
overcoat from Bidwell and would have to write Kate to send it.
Now he had almost reached the docks. Not only the night but his own
body, the pavements under his feet, and the stars far away in the
sky—even the solid factory buildings he was now passing—seemed strange
and unreal. It was almost as though one could thrust out an arm and push
a hand through the walls, as one might push his hand into a fog or a
cloud of smoke. All the people Will passed seemed strange, and acted in
a strange way. Dark figures surged toward him out of the darkness. By a
factory wall there was a man standing—perfectly still, motionless. There
was something almost unbelievable about the actions of such men and the
strangeness of such hours as the one through which he was now passing.
He walked within a few inches of the motionless man. Was it a man or a
shadow on the wall? The life Will was now to lead alone, had become a
strange, a vast terrifying thing. Perhaps all life was like that, a
vastness and emptiness.
He came out into a place where ships were made fast to a dock and stood
for a time, facing the high wall-like side of a vessel. It looked dark
and deserted. When he turned his head he became aware of a man and a
woman passing along a roadway. Their feet made no sound in the thick
dust of the roadway, and he could not see or hear them, but knew they
were there. Some part of a woman’s dress—something white—flashed faintly
into view and the man’s figure was a dark mass against the dark mass of
the night. “Oh, come on, don’t be afraid,” the man whispered, hoarsely.
“There won’t anything happen to you.”
“Do shut up,” a woman’s voice answered, and there was a quick outburst
of laughter. The figures fluttered away. “You don’t know what you are
talking about,” the woman’s voice said again.
Now that he had got Kate’s letter, Will was no longer a boy. A boy is,
quite naturally, and without his having anything to do with the matter,
connected with something—and now that connection had been cut. He had
been pushed out of the nest and that fact, the pushing of himself off
the nest’s rim, was something accomplished. The difficulty was that,
while he was no longer a boy, he had not yet become a man. He was a
thing swinging in space. There was no place to put down his feet.
He stood in the darkness under the shadow of the ship making queer
little wriggling motions with his shoulders, that had become now almost
the shoulders of a man. No need now to think of evenings at the Appleton
house with Kate and Fred standing about, and his father, Tom Appleton,
spreading his paint brushes on the kitchen table, no need of thinking of
the sound of Kate’s feet going up a stairway of the Appleton house, late
at night when she had been out walking with her clerk. What was the good
of trying to amuse oneself by thinking of a shepherd dog in an Ohio
town, a dog made ridiculous by the trembling hand of a timid old woman?
One stood face to face with manhood now—one stood alone. If only one
could get one’s feet down upon something, could get over this feeling of
falling through space, through a vast emptiness.
“Manhood”—the word had a queer sound in the head. What did it mean?
Will tried to think of himself as a man, doing a man’s work in a
factory. There was nothing in the factory, where he was now employed,
upon which he could put down his feet. All day he stood at a machine and
bored holes in pieces of iron. A boy brought to him the little, short,
meaningless pieces of iron in a box-like truck and, one by one, he
picked them up and placed them under the point of a drill. He pulled a
lever and the drill came down and bit into the piece of iron. A little,
smoke-like vapor arose, and then he squirted oil on the spot where the
drill was working. Then the lever was thrown up again. The hole was
drilled and now the meaningless piece of iron was thrown into another
box-like truck. It had nothing to do with him. He had nothing to do with
it.
At the noon hour, at the factory, one moved about a bit, stepped outside
the factory door to stand for a moment in the sun. Inside, men were
sitting along benches eating lunches out of dinner pails and some had
washed their hands while others had not bothered about such a trivial
matter. They were eating in silence. A tall man spat on the floor and
then drew his foot across the spot. Nights came and one went home from
the factory to eat, sitting with other silent men, and later a boastful
old man came into one’s room to talk. One lay on a bed and tried to
listen, but presently fell asleep. Men were like the pieces of iron in
which holes had been bored—one pitched them aside into a box-like truck.
One had nothing really to do with them. They had nothing to do with
oneself. Life became a procession of days and perhaps all life was just
like that—just a procession of days.
“Manhood.”
Did one go out of one place and into another? Were youth and manhood two
houses, in which one lived during different periods in life? It was
evident something of importance must be about to happen to his sister
Kate. First, she had been a young woman, having two brothers and a
father, living with them in a house at Bidwell, Ohio.
And then a day was to come when she became something else. She married
and went to live in another house and had a husband. Perhaps children
would be born to her. It was evident Kate had got hold of something,
that her hands had reached out and had grasped something definite. Kate
had swung herself off the rim of the home nest and, right away, her feet
had landed on another limb of the tree of life—womanhood.
As he stood in the darkness something caught at Will’s throat. He was
fighting again but what was he fighting? A fellow like himself did not
move out of one house and into another. There was a house in which one
lived, and then suddenly and unexpectedly, it fell apart. One stood on
the rim of the nest and looked about, and a hand reached out from the
warmth of the nest and pushed one off into space. There was no place for
a fellow to put down his feet. He was one swinging in space.
What—a great fellow, nearly six feet tall now, and crying in the
darkness, in the shadow of a ship, like a child! He walked, filled with
determination, out of the darkness, along many streets of factories and
came into a street of houses. He passed a store where groceries were
sold and looking in saw, by a clock on the wall, that it was already ten
o’clock. Two drunken men came out at the door of a house and stood on a
little porch. One of them clung to a railing about the porch, and the
other pulled at his arm. “Let me alone. It’s settled. I want you to let
me alone,” grumbled the man clinging to the railing.
* * * * *
Will went to his boarding house and climbed the stairs wearily. The
devil—one might face anything if one but knew what was to be faced!
He turned on a light and sat down in his room on the edge of the bed,
and the old cornet player pounced upon him, pounced like a little
animal, lying under a bush along a path in a forest, and waiting for
food. He came into Will’s room carrying his cornet, and there was an
almost bold look in his eyes. Standing firmly on his old legs in the
centre of the room, he made a declaration. “I’m going to play it. I
don’t care what she says, I’m going to play it,” he said.
He put the cornet to his lips and blew two or three notes—so softly that
even Will, sitting so closely, could barely hear. Then his eyes wavered.
“My lip’s no good,” he said. He thrust the cornet at Will. “You blow
it,” he said.
Will sat on the edge of the bed and smiled. There was a notion floating
in his mind now. Was there something, a thought in which one could find
comfort. There was now, before him, standing before him in the room, a
man who was after all not a man. He was a child as Will was too really,
had always been such a child, would always be such a child. One need not
be too afraid. Children were all about, everywhere. If one were a child
and lost in a vast, empty space, one could at least talk to some other
child. One could have conversations, understand perhaps something of the
eternal childishness of oneself and others.
Will’s thoughts were not very definite. He only felt suddenly warm and
comfortable in the little room at the top of the boarding house.
And now the man was again explaining himself. He wanted to assert his
manhood. “I stay up here,” he explained, “and don’t go down there, to
sleep in the room with my wife because I don’t want to. That’s the only
reason. I could if I wanted to. She has the bronchitis—but don’t tell
anyone. Women hate to have anyone told. She isn’t so bad. I can do what
I please.”
He kept urging Will to put the cornet to his lips and blow. There was in
him an intense eagerness. “You can’t really make any music—you don’t
know how—but that don’t make any difference,” he said. “The thing to do
is to make a noise, make a deuce of a racket, blow like the devil.”
Again Will felt like crying but the sense of vastness and loneliness,
that had been in him since he got aboard the train that night at
Bidwell, had gone. “Well, I can’t go on forever being a baby. Kate has a
right to get married,” he thought, putting the cornet to his lips. He
blew two or three notes, softly.
“No, I tell you, no! That isn’t the way! Blow on it! Don’t be afraid! I
tell you I want you to do it. Make a deuce of a racket! I tell you what,
I own this house. We don’t need to be afraid. We can do what we please.
Go ahead! Make a deuce of a racket!” the old man kept pleading.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MAN’S STORY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MAN’S STORY
DURING his trial for murder and later, after he had been cleared through
the confession of that queer little bald chap with the nervous hands, I
watched him, fascinated by his continued effort to make something
understood.
He was persistently interested in something, having nothing to do with
the charge that he had murdered the woman. The matter of whether or not,
and by due process of law, he was to be convicted of murder and hanged
by the neck until he was dead didn’t seem to interest him. The law was
something outside his life and he declined to have anything to do with
the killing as one might decline a cigarette. “I thank you, I am not
smoking at present. I made a bet with a fellow that I could go along
without smoking cigarettes for a month.”
That is the sort of thing I mean. It was puzzling. Really, had he been
guilty and trying to save his neck he couldn’t have taken a better line.
You see, at first, everyone thought he had done the killing; we were all
convinced of it, and then, just because of that magnificent air of
indifference, everyone began wanting to save him. When news came of the
confession of the crazy little stage-hand everyone broke out into
cheers.
He was clear of the law after that but his manner in no way changed.
There was, somewhere, a man or a woman who would understand just what he
understood and it was important to find that person and talk things
over. There was a time, during the trial and immediately afterward, when
I saw a good deal of him, and I had this sharp sense of him, feeling
about in the darkness trying to find something like a needle or a pin
lost on the floor. Well, he was like an old man who cannot find his
glasses. He feels in all his pockets and looks helplessly about.
There was a question in my own mind too, in everyone’s mind—“Can a man
be wholly casual and brutal, in every outward way, at a moment when the
one nearest and dearest to him is dying, and at the same time, and with
quite another part of himself, be altogether tender and sensitive?”
* * * * *
Anyway it’s a story, and once in a while a man likes to tell a story
straight out, without putting in any newspaper jargon about beautiful
heiresses, coldblooded murderers and all that sort of tommyrot.
As I picked the story up the sense of it was something like this—
The man’s name was Wilson,—Edgar Wilson—and he had come to Chicago from
some place to the westward, perhaps from the mountains. He might once
have been a sheep herder or something of the sort in the far west, as he
had the peculiar abstract air, acquired only by being a good deal alone.
About himself and his past he told a good many conflicting stories and
so, after being with him for a time, one instinctively discarded the
past.
“The devil—it doesn’t matter—the man can’t tell the truth in that
direction.—Let it go,” one said to oneself. What was known was that he
had come to Chicago from a town in Kansas and that he had run away from
the Kansas town with another man’s wife.
As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one time, I
imagine, a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding sort of
way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather messy. In those
dead flat Kansas towns lives have a way of getting ugly and messy
without anything very definite having happened to make them so. One
can’t imagine the reasons—Let it go. It just is so and one can’t at all
believe the writers of Western tales about the life out there.
To be a little more definite about this particular woman—in her young
girlhood her father had got into trouble. He had been some sort of a
small official, a travelling agent or something of the sort for an
express company, and got arrested in connection with the disappearance
of some money. And then, when he was in jail and before his trial, he
shot and killed himself. The girl’s mother was already dead.
Within a year or two she married a man, an honest enough fellow but from
all accounts rather uninteresting. He was a drug clerk and a frugal man
and after a short time managed to buy a drug store of his own.
The woman, as I have said, had been strong and well-built but now grew
thin and nervous. Still she carried herself well with a sort of air, as
it were, and there was something about her that appealed strongly to
men. Several men of the seedy little town were smitten by her and wrote
her letters, trying to get her to creep out with them at night. You know
how such things are done. The letters were unsigned. “You go to such and
such a place on Friday evening. If you are willing to talk things over
with me carry a book in your hand.”
Then the woman made a mistake and told her husband about the receipt of
one of the letters and he grew angry and tramped off to the trysting
place at night with a shotgun in his hand. When no one appeared he came
home and fussed about. He said little mean tentative things. “You must
have looked—in a certain way—at the man when he passed you on the
street. A man don’t grow so bold with a married woman unless an opening
has been given him.”
The man talked and talked after that, and life in the house must have
been gay. She grew habitually silent, and when she was silent the house
was silent. They had no children.
Then the man Edgar Wilson came along, going eastward, and stopped over
in the town for two or three days. He had at that time a little money
and stayed at a small workingmen’s boarding house, near the railroad
station. One day he saw the woman walking in the street and followed her
to her home and the neighbors saw them standing and talking together for
an hour by the front gate and on the next day he came again.
That time they talked for two hours and then she went into the house;
got a few belongings and walked to the railroad station with him. They
took a train for Chicago and lived there together, apparently very
happy, until she died—in a way I am about to try to tell you about. They
of course could not be married and during the three years they lived in
Chicago he did nothing toward earning their common living. As he had a
very small amount of money when they came, barely enough to get them
here from the Kansas town, they were miserably poor.
They lived, when I knew about them, over on the North side, in that
section of old three- and four-story brick residences that were once the
homes of what we call our nice people, but that had afterward gone to
the bad. The section is having a kind of rebirth now but for a good many
years it rather went to seed. There were these old residences, made into
boarding houses, and with unbelievably dirty lace curtains at the
windows, and now and then an utterly disreputable old tumble-down frame
house—in one of which Wilson lived with his woman.
The place is a sight! Someone owns it, I suppose, who is shrewd enough
to know that in a big city like Chicago no section gets neglected
always. Such a fellow must have said to himself, “Well, I’ll let the
place go. The ground on which the house stands will some day be very
valuable but the house is worth nothing. I’ll let it go at a low rental
and do nothing to fix it up. Perhaps I will get enough out of it to pay
my taxes until prices come up.”
And so the house had stood there unpainted for years and the windows
were out of line and the shingles nearly all off the roof. The second
floor was reached by an outside stairway with a handrail that had become
just the peculiar grey greasy black that wood can become in a
soft-coal-burning city like Chicago or Pittsburgh. One’s hand became
black when the railing was touched; and the rooms above were altogether
cold and cheerless.
At the front there was a large room with a fireplace, from which many
bricks had fallen, and back of that were two small sleeping rooms.
Wilson and his woman lived in the place, at the time when the thing
happened I am to tell you about, and as they had taken it in May I
presume they did not too much mind the cold barrenness of the large
front room in which they lived. There was a sagging wooden bed with a
leg broken off—the woman had tried to repair it with sticks from a
packing box—a kitchen table, that was also used by Wilson as a writing
desk, and two or three cheap kitchen chairs.
The woman had managed to get a place as wardrobe woman in a theatre in
Randolph Street and they lived on her earnings. It was said she had got
the job because some man connected with the theatre, or a company
playing there, had a passion for her but one can always pick up stories
of that sort about any woman who works about the theatre—from the
scrubwoman to the star.
Anyway she worked there and had a reputation in the theatre of being
quiet and efficient.
As for Wilson, he wrote poetry of a sort I’ve never seen before,
although, like most newspaper men, I’ve taken a turn at verse making
myself now and then—both of the rhymed kind and the newfangled vers
libre sort. I rather go in for the classical stuff myself.
About Wilson’s verse—it was Greek to me. Well now, to get right down to
hardpan in this matter, it was and it wasn’t.
The stuff made me feel just a little bit woozy when I took a whole sheaf
of it and sat alone in my room reading it at night. It was all about
walls, and deep wells, and great bowls with young trees standing erect
in them—and trying to find their way to the light and air over the rim
of the bowl.
Queer crazy stuff, every line of it, but fascinating too—in a way. One
got into a new world with new values, which after all is I suppose what
poetry is all about. There was the world of fact—we all know or think we
know—the world of flat buildings and middle-western farms with wire
fences about the fields and fordson tractors running up and down, and
towns with high schools and advertising billboards, and everything that
makes up life—or that we think makes up life.
There was this world, we all walk about in, and then there was this
other world, that I have come to think of as Wilson’s world—a dim place
to me at least—of far-away near places—things taking new and strange
shapes, the insides of people coming out, the eyes seeing new things,
the fingers feeling new and strange things.
It was a place of walls mainly. I got hold of the whole lot of Wilson’s
verse by a piece of luck. It happened that I was the first newspaper man
who got into the place on the night when the woman’s body was found, and
there was all his stuff, carefully written out in a sort of child’s copy
book, and two or three stupid policemen standing about. I just shoved
the book under my coat, when they weren’t looking, and later, during
Wilson’s trial, we published some of the more intelligible ones in the
paper. It made pretty good newspaper stuff—the poet who killed his
mistress,
“He did not wear his purple coat,
For blood and wine are red”—
and all that. Chicago loved it.
To get back to the poetry itself for a moment. I just wanted to explain
that all through the book there ran this notion, that men had erected
walls about themselves and that all men were perhaps destined to stand
forever behind the walls—on which they constantly beat with their fists,
or with whatever tools they could get hold of. Wanted to break through
to something, you understand. One couldn’t quite make out whether there
was just one great wall or many little individual walls. Sometimes
Wilson put it one way, sometimes another. Men had themselves built the
walls and now stood behind them, knowing dimly that beyond the walls
there was warmth, light, air, beauty, life in fact—while at the same
time, and because of a kind of madness in themselves, the walls were
constantly being built higher and stronger.
The notion gives you the fantods a little, doesn’t it? Anyway it does
me.
And then there was that notion about deep wells, men everywhere
constantly digging and digging themselves down deeper and deeper into
deep wells. They not wanting to do it, you understand, and no one
wanting them to do it, but all the time the thing going on just the
same, that is to say the wells getting constantly deeper and deeper, and
the voices growing dimmer and dimmer in the distance—and again the light
and the warmth of life going away and going away, because of a kind of
blind refusal of people to try to understand each other, I suppose.
It was all very strange to me—Wilson’s poetry, I mean—when I came to it.
Here is one of his things. It is not directly concerned with the walls,
the bowl or the deep well theme, as you will see, but it is one we ran
in the paper during the trial and a lot of folks rather liked it—as I’ll
admit I do myself. Maybe putting it in here will give a kind of point to
my story, by giving you some sense of the strangeness of the man who is
the story’s hero. In the book it was called merely “Number
Ninety-seven,” and it went as follows:
The firm grip of my fingers on the thin paper of this cigarette
is a sign that I am very quiet now. Sometimes it is not so. When
I am unquiet I am weak but when I am quiet, as I am now, I am
very strong.
* * * * *
Just now I went along one of the streets of my city and in at a
door and came up here, where I am now, lying on a bed and
looking out at a window. Very suddenly and completely the
knowledge has come to me that I could grip the sides of tall
buildings as freely and as easily as I now grip this cigarette.
I could hold the building between my fingers, put it to my lips
and blow smoke through it. I could blow confusion away. I could
blow a thousand people out through the roof of one tall building
into the sky, into the unknown. Building after building I could
consume, as I consume the cigarettes in this box. I could throw
the burning ends of cities over my shoulder and out through a
window.
* * * * *
It is not often I get in the state I am now in—so quiet and sure
of myself. When the feeling comes over me there is a directness
and simplicity in me that makes me love myself. To myself at
such times I say strong sweet words.
* * * * *
I am on a couch by this window and I could ask a woman to come
here to lie with me, or a man either for that matter.
* * * * *
I could take a row of houses standing on a street, tip them
over, empty the people out of them, squeeze and compress all the
people into one person and love that person.
* * * * *
Do you see this hand? Suppose it held a knife that could cut
down through all the falseness in you. Suppose it could cut down
through the sides of buildings and houses where thousands of
people now lie asleep.
* * * * *
It would be something worth thinking about if the fingers of
this hand gripped a knife that could cut and rip through all the
ugly husks in which millions of lives are enclosed.
Well, there is the idea you see, a kind of power that could be tender
too. I will quote you just one more of his things, a more gentle one. It
is called in the book, “Number Eighty-three.”
I am a tree that grows beside the wall. I have been thrusting up
and up. My body is covered with scars. My body is old but still
I thrust upward, creeping toward the top of the wall.
* * * * *
It is my desire to drop blossoms and fruit over the wall.
* * * * *
I would moisten dry lips.
* * * * *
I would drop blossoms on the heads of children, over the top of
the wall.
* * * * *
I would caress with falling blossoms the bodies of those who
live on the further side of the wall.
* * * * *
My branches are creeping upward and new sap comes into me out of
the dark ground under the wall.
* * * * *
My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into
the arms of the others, over the top of the wall.
And now as to the life led by the man and woman in the large upper room
in that old frame house. By a stroke of luck I have recently got rather
a line on that by a discovery I have made.
After they had moved into the house—it was only last spring—the theatre
in which the woman was employed was dark for a long time and they were
more than usually hard up, so the woman tried to pick up a little extra
money—to help pay the rent I suppose—by sub-letting the two little back
rooms of that place of theirs.
Various people lived in the dark tiny holes, just how I can’t make out
as there was no furniture. Still there are places in Chicago called
“flops” where one may sleep on the floor for five or ten cents and they
are more patronized than respectable people know anything about.
What I did discover was a little woman—she wasn’t so young but she was
hunchbacked and small and it is hard not to think of her as a girl—who
once lived in one of the rooms for several weeks. She had a job as
ironer in a small hand-laundry in the neighborhood and someone had given
her a cheap folding cot. She was a curiously sentimental creature, with
the kind of hurt eyes deformed people often have, and I have a fancy she
had herself a romantic attachment of a sort for the man Wilson. Anyway I
managed to find out a lot from her.
After the other woman’s death and after Wilson had been cleared on the
murder charge, by the confession of the stage-hand, I used to go over to
the house where he had lived, sometimes in the late afternoon after our
paper had been put to bed for the day. Ours is an afternoon paper and
after two o’clock most of us are free.
I found the hunchback girl standing in front of the house one day and
began talking with her. She was a gold mine.
There was that look in her eyes I’ve told you of, the hurt sensitive
look. I just spoke to her and we began talking of Wilson. She had lived
in one of the rooms at the back. She told me of that at once.
On some days she found herself unable to work at the laundry because her
strength suddenly gave out and so, on such days, she stayed in the room,
lying on the cot. Blinding headaches came that lasted for hours during
which she was almost entirely unconscious of everything going on about
her. Then afterward she was quite conscious but for a long time very
weak. She wasn’t one who is destined to live very long I suppose and I
presume she didn’t much care.
Anyway, there she was in the room, in that weak state after the times of
illness, and she grew curious about the two people in the front room, so
she used to get off her couch and go softly in her stockinged feet to
the door between the rooms and peek through the keyhole. She had to
kneel on the dusty floor to do it.
The life in the room fascinated her from the beginning. Sometimes the
man was in there alone, sitting at the kitchen table and writing the
stuff he afterward put into the book I collared, and from which I have
quoted; sometimes the woman was with him, and again sometimes he was in
there alone but wasn’t writing. Then he was always walking and walking
up and down.
When both people were in the room, and when the man was writing, the
woman seldom moved but sat in a chair by one of the windows with her
hands crossed. He would write a few lines and then walk up and down
talking to himself or to her. When he spoke she did not answer except
with her eyes, the crippled girl said. What I gathered of all this from
her talk with me, and what is the product of my own imaginings, I
confess I do not quite know.
Anyway what I got and what I am trying, in my own way, to transmit to
you is a sense of a kind of strangeness in the relationship of the two.
It wasn’t just a domestic household, a little down on its luck, by any
means. He was trying to do something very difficult—with his poetry I
presume—and she in her own way was trying to help him.
And of course, as I have no doubt you have gathered from what I have
quoted of Wilson’s verse, the matter had something to do with the
relationships between people—not necessarily between the particular man
and woman who happened to be there in that room, but between all
peoples.
The fellow had some half-mystic conception of all such things, and
before he found his own woman had been going aimlessly about the world
looking for a mate. Then he had found the woman in the Kansas town
and—he at least thought—things had cleared, for him.
Well, he had the notion that no one in the world could think or feel
anything alone, and that people only got into trouble and walled
themselves in by trying it, or something of the sort. There was a
discord. Things were jangled. Someone, it seems, had to strike a pitch
that all voices could take up before the real song of life could begin.
Mind you I’m not putting forth any notions of my own. What I am trying
to do is to give you a sense of something I got from having read
Wilson’s stuff, from having known him a little, and from having seen
something of the effect of his personality upon others.
He felt, quite definitely, that no one in the world could feel or even
think alone. And then there was the notion, that if one tried to think
with the mind without taking the body into account, one got all
balled-up. True conscious life built itself up like a pyramid. First the
body and mind of a beloved one must come into one’s thinking and feeling
and then, in some mystic way, the bodies and minds of all the other
people in the world must come in, must come sweeping in like a great
wind—or something of the sort.
Is all this a little tangled up to you, who read my story of Wilson? It
may not be. It may be that your minds are more clear than my own and
that what I take to be so difficult will be very simple to you.
However, I have to bring up to you just what I can find, after diving
down into this sea of motives and impulses—I admit I don’t rightly
understand.
The hunchback girl felt (or is it my own fancy coloring what she
said?)—it doesn’t really matter. The thing to get at is what the man
Edgar Wilson felt.
He felt, I fancy, that in the field of poetry he had something to
express that could never be expressed until he had found a woman who
could, in a peculiar and absolute way, give herself in the world of the
flesh—and that then there was to be a marriage out of which beauty would
come for all people. He had to find the woman who had that power, and
the power had to be untainted by self-interest, I fancy. A profound
egotist, you see—and he thought he had found what he needed in the wife
of the Kansas druggist.
He had found her and had done something to her. What it was I can’t
quite make out, except that she was absolutely and wholly happy with
him, in a strangely inexpressive sort of way.
Trying to speak of him and his influence on others is rather like trying
to walk on a tightrope stretched between two tall buildings above a
crowded street. A cry from below, a laugh, the honk of an automobile
horn, and down one goes into nothingness. One simply becomes ridiculous.
He wanted, it seems, to condense the flesh and the spirit of himself and
his woman into his poems. You will remember that in one of the things of
his I have quoted he speaks of condensing, of squeezing all the people
of a city into one person and of loving that person.
One might think of him as a powerful person, almost hideously powerful.
You will see, as you read, how he has got me in his power and is making
me serve his purpose.
And he had caught and was holding the woman in his grip. He had wanted
her—quite absolutely, and had taken her—as all men, perhaps, want to do
with their women, and don’t quite dare. Perhaps too she was in her own
way greedy and he was making actual love to her always day and night,
when they were together and when they were apart.
I’ll admit I am confused about the whole matter myself. I am trying to
express something I have felt, not in myself, nor in the words that came
to me from the lips of the hunchback girl whom, you will remember, I
left kneeling on the floor in that back room and peeking through a
keyhole.
There she was, you see, the hunchback, and in the room before her were
the man and woman and the hunchback girl also had fallen under the power
of the man Wilson. She also was in love with him—there can be no doubt
of that. The room in which she knelt was dark and dusty. There must have
been a thick accumulation of dust on the floor.
What she said—or if she did not say the words what she made me feel was
that the man Wilson worked in the room, or walked up and down in there
before his woman, and that, while he did that, his woman sat in the
chair, and that there was in her face, in her eyes, a look—
He was all the time making love to her, and his making love to her in
just that abstract way, was a kind of love-making with all people? and
that was possible because the woman was as purely physical as he was
something else. If all this is meaningless to you, at least it wasn’t to
the hunchback girl—who certainly was uneducated and never would have set
herself up as having any special powers of understanding. She knelt in
the dust, listening, and looking in at the keyhole, and in the end she
came to feel that the man, in whose presence she had never been and
whose person had never in any way touched her person, had made love to
her also.
She had felt that and it had gratified her entire nature. One might say
it had satisfied her. She was what she was and it had made life worth
living for her.
* * * * *
Minor things happened in the room and one may speak of them.
For example, there was a day in June, a dark warm rainy day. The
hunchback girl was in her room, kneeling on the floor, and Wilson and
his woman were in their room.
Wilson’s woman had been doing a family washing, and as it could not be
dried outdoors she had stretched ropes across the room and had hung the
clothes inside.
When the clothes were all hung Wilson came from walking outside in the
rain and going to the desk sat down and began to write.
He wrote for a few minutes and then got up and went about the room, and
in walking a wet garment brushed against his face.
He kept right on walking and talking to the woman but as he walked and
talked he gathered all the clothes in his arms and going to the little
landing at the head of the stairs outside, threw them down into the
muddy yard below. He did that and the woman sat without moving or saying
anything until he had gone back to his desk, then she went down the
stairs, got the clothes and washed them again—and it was only after she
had done that and when she was again hanging them in the room above that
he appeared to know what he had done.
While the clothes were being rewashed he went for another walk and when
she heard his footsteps on the stairs the hunchback girl ran to the
keyhole. As she knelt there, and as he came into the room, she could
look directly into his face. “He was like a puzzled child for a moment
and then, although he said nothing, the tears began to run down his
cheeks,” she said. That happened and then the woman, who was at the
moment re-hanging the clothes, turned and saw him. She had her arm
filled with clothes but dropped them on the floor and ran to him. She
half knelt, the hunchback girl said, and putting her arms about his body
and looking up into his face pleaded with him. “Don’t. Don’t be hurt.
Believe me I know everything. Please don’t be hurt,” was what she said.
* * * * *
And now as to the story of the woman’s death. It happened in the fall of
that year.
In the place where she was sometimes employed—that is to say in the
theatre—there was this other man, the little half-crazed stage-hand who
shot her.
He had fallen in love with her and, like the men in the Kansas town from
which she came, had written her several silly notes of which she said
nothing to Wilson. The letters weren’t very nice and some of them, the
most unpleasant ones, were by some twist of the fellow’s mind, signed
with Wilson’s name. Two of them were afterwards found on her person and
were brought in as evidence against Wilson during his trial.
And so the woman worked in the theatre and the summer had passed and on
an evening in the fall there was to be a dress rehearsal at the theatre
and the woman went there, taking Wilson with her. It was a fall day,
such as we sometimes have in Chicago, cold and wet and with a heavy fog
lying over the city.
The dress rehearsal did not come off. The star was ill, or something of
the sort happened, and Wilson and his woman sat about, in the cold empty
theatre, for an hour or two and then the woman was told she could go for
the night.
She and Wilson walked across the city, stopping to get something to eat
at a small restaurant. He was in one of the abstract silent moods common
to him. No doubt he was thinking of the things he wanted to express in
the poetry I have tried to tell you about. He went along, not seeing the
woman beside him, not seeing the people drifting up to them and passing
them in the streets. He went along in that way and she—
She was no doubt then as she always was in his presence—silent and
satisfied with the fact that she was with him. There was nothing he
could think or feel that did not take her into account. The very blood
flowing up through his body was her blood too. He had made her feel
that, and she was silent and satisfied as he went along, his body
walking beside her but his fancy groping its way through the land of
high walls and deep wells.
They had walked from the restaurant, in the Loop District, over a bridge
to the North Side, and still no words passed between them.
When they had almost reached their own place the stage-hand, the small
man with the nervous hands who had written the notes, appeared out of
the fog, as though out of nowhere, and shot the woman.
That was all there was to it. It was as simple as that.
They were walking, as I have described them, when a head flashed up
before the woman in the midst of the fog, a hand shot out, there was the
quick abrupt sound of a pistol shot and then the absurd little
stage-hand, he with the wrinkled impotent little old woman’s face—then
he turned and ran away.
All that happened, just as I have written it and it made no impression
at all on the mind of Wilson. He walked along as though nothing had
happened and the woman, after half falling, gathered herself together
and managed to continue walking beside him, still saying nothing.
They went thus, for perhaps two blocks, and had reached the foot of the
outer stairs that led up to their place when a policeman came running,
and the woman told him a lie. She told him some story about a struggle
between two drunken men, and after a moment of talk the policeman went
away, sent away by the woman in a direction opposite to the one taken by
the fleeing stage-hand.
They were in the darkness and the fog now and the woman took her man’s
arm while they climbed the stairs. He was as yet—as far as I will ever
be able to explain logically—unaware of the shot, and of the fact that
she was dying, although he had seen and heard everything. What the
doctors said, who were put on the case afterwards, was that a cord or
muscle, or something of the sort that controls the action of the heart,
had been practically severed by the shot.
She was dead and alive at the same time, I should say.
Anyway the two people marched up the stairs, and into the room above,
and then a really dramatic and lovely thing happened. One wishes that
the scene, with just all its connotations, could be played out on a
stage instead of having to be put down in words.
The two came into the room, the one dead but not ready to acknowledge
death without a flash of something individual and lovely, that is to
say, the one dead while still alive and the other alive but at the
moment dead to what was going on.
The room into which they went was dark but, with the sure instinct of an
animal, the woman walked across the room to the fireplace, while the man
stopped and stood some ten feet from the door—thinking and thinking in
his peculiarly abstract way. The fireplace was filled with an
accumulation of waste matter, cigarette ends—the man was a hard
smoker—bits of paper on which he had scribbled—the rubbishy accumulation
that gathers about all such fellows as Wilson. There was all of this
quickly combustible material, stuffed into the fireplace, on this—the
first cold evening of the fall.
And so the woman went to it, and found a match somewhere in the
darkness, and touched the pile off.
There is a picture that will remain with me always—just that—the barren
room and the blind unseeing man standing there, and the woman kneeling
and making a little flare of beauty at the last. Little flames leaped
up. Lights crept and danced over the walls. Below, on the floor of the
room, there was a deep well of darkness in which the man, blind with his
own purpose, was standing.
The pile of burning papers must have made, for a moment, quite a glare
of light in the room and the woman stood for a moment, beside the
fireplace, just outside the glare of light.
And then, pale and wavering, she walked across the light, as across a
lighted stage, going softly and silently toward him. Had she also
something to say? No one will ever know. What happened was that she said
nothing.
She walked across to him and, at the moment she reached him, fell down
on the floor and died at his feet, and at the same moment the little
fire of papers died. If she struggled before she died, there on the
floor, she struggled in silence. There was no sound. She had fallen and
lay between him and the door that led out to the stairway and to the
street.
It was then Wilson became altogether inhuman—too much so for my
understanding.
The fire had died and the woman he had loved had died.
And there he stood looking into nothingness, thinking—God knows—perhaps
of nothingness.
* * * * *
He stood a minute, five minutes, perhaps ten. He was a man who, before
he found the woman, had been sunk far down into a deep sea of doubt and
questionings. Before he found the woman no expression had ever come from
him. He had perhaps just wandered from place to place, looking at
people’s faces, wondering about people, wanting to come close to others
and not knowing how. The woman had been able to lift him up to the
surface of the sea of life for a time, and with her he had floated on
the surface of the sea, under the sky, in the sunlight. The woman’s warm
body—given to him in love—had been as a boat in which he had floated on
the surface of the sea, and now the boat had been wrecked and he was
sinking again, back into the sea.
All of this had happened and he did not know—that is to say he did not
know, and at the same time he did know.
He was a poet, I presume, and perhaps at the moment a new poem was
forming itself in his mind.
At any rate he stood for a time, as I have said, and then he must have
had a feeling that he should make some move, that he should if possible
save himself from some disaster about to overtake him.
He had an impulse to go to the door, and by way of the stairway, to go
down stairs and into the street—but the body of the woman was between
him and the door.
What he did and what, when he later told of it, sounded so terribly
cruel to others, was to treat the woman’s dead body as one might treat a
fallen tree in the darkness in a forest. First he tried to push the body
aside with his foot and then as that seemed impossible, he stepped
awkwardly over it.
He stepped directly on the woman’s arm. The discolored mark where his
heel landed was afterward found on the body.
He almost fell, and then his body righted itself and he went walking,
marched down the rickety stairs and went walking in the streets.
By chance the night had cleared. It had grown colder and a cold wind had
driven the fog away. He walked along, very nonchalantly, for several
blocks. He walked along as calmly as you, the reader, might walk, after
having had lunch with a friend.
As a matter of fact he even stopped to make a purchase at a store. I
remember that the place was called “The Whip.” He went in, bought
himself a package of cigarettes, lighted one and stood a moment,
apparently listening to a conversation going on among several idlers in
the place.
And then he strolled again, going along smoking the cigarette and
thinking of his poem no doubt. Then he came to a moving-picture theatre.
That perhaps touched him off. He also was an old fireplace, stuffed with
old thoughts, scraps of unwritten poems—God knows what rubbish! Often he
had gone at night to the theatre, where the woman was employed, to walk
home with her, and now the people were coming out of a small
moving-picture house. They had been in there seeing a play called “The
Light of the World.”
Wilson walked into the midst of the crowd, lost himself in the crowd,
smoking his cigarette, and then he took off his hat, looked anxiously
about for a moment, and suddenly began shouting in a loud voice.
He stood there, shouting and trying to tell the story of what had
happened in a loud voice, and with the uncertain air of one trying to
remember a dream. He did that for a moment and then, after running a
little way along the pavement, stopped and began his story again. It was
only after he had gone thus, in short rushes, back, along the street to
the house and up the rickety stairway to where the woman was lying—the
crowd following curiously at his heels—that a policeman came up and
arrested him.
He seemed excited at first but was quiet afterwards and he laughed at
the notion of insanity, when the lawyer who had been retained for him,
tried to set up the plea in court.
As I have said his action, during his trial, was confusing to us all, as
he seemed wholly uninterested in the murder and in his own fate. After
the confession of the man who had fired the shot he seemed to feel no
resentment toward him either. There was something he wanted, having
nothing to do with what had happened.
There he had been, you see, before he found the woman, wandering about
in the world, digging himself deeper and deeper into the deep wells he
talked about in his poetry, building the wall between himself and all us
others constantly higher and higher.
He knew what he was doing but he could not stop. That’s what he kept
talking about, pleading with people about. The man had come up out of
the sea of doubt, had grasped for a time the hand of the woman, and with
her hand in his had floated for a time upon the surface of life—but now
he felt himself again sinking down into the sea.
His talking and talking, stopping people in the street and talking,
going into people’s houses and talking, was I presume but an effort, he
was always afterward making, not to sink back forever into the sea, it
was the struggle of a drowning man I dare say.
At any rate I have told you the man’s story—have been compelled to try
to tell you his story. There was a kind of power in him, and the power
has been exerted over me as it was exerted over the woman from Kansas
and the unknown hunchback girl, kneeling on the floor in the dust and
peering through a keyhole.
Ever since the woman died we have all been trying and trying to drag the
man Wilson back out of the sea of doubt and dumbness into which we feel
him sinking deeper and deeper—and to no avail.
It may be I have been impelled to tell his story in the hope that by
writing of him I may myself understand. Is there not a possibility that
with understanding would come also the strength to thrust an arm down
into the sea and drag the man Wilson back to the surface again?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN OHIO PAGAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN OHIO PAGAN
CHAPTER I
TOM EDWARDS was a Welshman, born in Northern Ohio, and a descendant of
that Thomas Edwards, the Welsh poet, who was called, in his own time and
country, Twn O’r Nant—which in our own tongue means “Tom of the dingle
or vale.”
The first Thomas Edwards was a gigantic figure in the history of the
spiritual life of the Welsh. Not only did he write many stirring
interludes concerning life, death, earth, fire and water but as a man he
was a true brother to the elements and to all the passions of his sturdy
and musical race. He sang beautifully but he also played stoutly and
beautifully the part of a man. There is a wonderful tale, told in Wales
and written into a book by the poet himself, of how he, with a team of
horses, once moved a great ship out of the land into the sea, after
three hundred Welshmen had failed at the task. Also he taught Welsh
woodsmen the secret of the crane and pulley for lifting great logs in
the forests, and once he fought to the point of death the bully of the
countryside, a man known over a great part of Wales as The Cruel
Fighter. Tom Edwards, the descendant of this man was born in Ohio near
my own native town of Bidwell. His name was not Edwards, but as his
father was dead when he was born, his mother gave him the old poet’s
name out of pride in having such blood in her veins. Then when the boy
was six his mother died also and the man for whom both his mother and
father had worked, a sporting farmer named Harry Whitehead, took the boy
into his own house to live.
They were gigantic people, the Whiteheads. Harry himself weighed two
hundred and seventy pounds and his wife twenty pounds more. About the
time he took young Tom to live with him the farmer became interested in
the racing of horses, moved off his farms, of which he had three, and
came to live in our town.
* * * * *
In the town of Bidwell there was an old frame building, that had once
been a factory for the making of barrel staves but that had stood for
years vacant, staring with windowless eyes into the streets, and Harry
bought it at a low price and transformed it into a splendid stable with
a board floor and two long rows of box stalls. At a sale of blooded
horses held in the city of Cleveland he bought twenty young colts, all
of the trotting strain, and set up as a trainer of race horses.
Among the colts thus brought to our town was one great black fellow
named Bucephalus. Harry got the name from John Telfer, our town poetry
lover. “It was the name of the mighty horse of a mighty man,” Telfer
said, and that satisfied Harry.
Young Tom was told off to be the special guardian and caretaker of
Bucephalus, and the black stallion, who had in him the mighty blood of
the Tennessee Patchens, quickly became the pride of the stables. He was
in his nature a great ugly-tempered beast, as given to whims and notions
as an opera star, and from the very first began to make trouble. Within
a year no one but Harry Whitehead himself and the boy Tom dared go into
his stall. The methods of the two people with the great horse were
entirely different but equally effective. Once big Harry turned the
stallion loose on the floor of the stable, closed all the doors, and
with a cruel long whip in his hand, went in to conquer or to be
conquered. He came out victorious and ever after the horse behaved when
he was about.
The boy’s method was different. He loved Bucephalus and the wicked
animal loved him. Tom slept on a cot in the barn and day or night, even
when there were mares about, walked into Bucephalus’ box-stall without
fear. When the stallion was in a temper he sometimes turned at the boy’s
entrance and with a snort sent his iron-shod heels banging against the
sides of the stall, but Tom laughed and putting a simple rope halter
over the horse’s head led him forth to be cleaned or hitched to a cart
for his morning’s jog on our town’s half-mile race track. A sight it was
to see the boy with the blood of Twn O’r Nant in his veins leading by
the nose Bucephalus of the royal blood of the Patchens.
When he was six years old the horse Bucephalus went forth to race and
conquer at the great spring race meeting at Columbus, Ohio. He won two
heats of the trotting free-for-all—the great race of the meeting—with
heavy Harry in the sulky and then faltered. A gelding named “Light o’
the Orient” beat him in the next heat. Tom, then a lad of sixteen, was
put into the sulky and the two of them, horse and boy, fought out a
royal battle with the gelding and a little bay mare, that hadn’t been
heard from before but that suddenly developed a whirlwind burst of
speed.
The big stallion and the slender boy won. From amid a mob of cursing,
shouting, whip-slashing men a black horse shot out and a pale boy,
leaning far forward, called and murmured to him. “Go on, boy! Go boy! Go
boy!” the lad’s voice had called over and over all through the race.
Bucephalus got a record of 2.06¼ and Tom Edwards became a newspaper
hero. His picture was in the Cleveland _Leader_ and the Cincinnati
_Enquirer_, and when he came back to Bidwell we other boys fairly wept
in our envy of him.
Then it was however that Tom Edwards fell down from his high place.
There he was, a tall boy, almost of man’s stature and, except for a few
months during the winters when he lived on the Whitehead farms, and
between his sixth and thirteenth years, when he had attended a country
school and had learned to read and write and do sums, he was without
education. And now, during that very fall of the year of his triumph at
Columbus, the Bidwell truant officer, a thin man with white hair, who
was also superintendent of the Baptist Sunday School, came one afternoon
to the Whitehead stables and told him that if he did not begin going to
school both he and his employer would get into serious trouble.
Harry Whitehead was furious and so was Tom. There he was, a great tall
slender fellow who had been with race horses to the fairs all over
Northern Ohio and Indiana, during that very fall, and who had just come
home from the journey during which he had driven the winner in the
free-for-all trot at a Grand Circuit meeting and had given Bucephalus a
mark of 2.06¼.
Was such a fellow to go sit in a schoolroom, with a silly school book in
his hand, reading of the affairs of the men who dealt in butter, eggs,
potatoes and apples, and whose unnecessarily complicated business life
the children were asked to unravel,—was such a fellow to go sit in a
room, under the eyes of a woman teacher, and in the company of boys half
his age and with none of his wide experience of life?
It was a hard thought and Tom took it hard. The law was all right, Harry
Whitehead said, and was intended to keep noaccount kids off the streets
but what it had to do with himself Tom couldn’t make out. When the
truant officer had gone and Tom was left alone in the stable with his
employer the man and boy stood for a long time glumly staring at each
other. It was all right to be educated but Tom felt he had book
education enough. He could read, write and do sums, and what other
book-training did a horseman need? As for books, they were all right for
rainy evenings when there were no men sitting by the stable door and
talking of horses and races. And also when one went to the races in a
strange town and arrived, perhaps on Sunday, and the races did not begin
until the following Wednesday—it was all right then to have a book in
the chest with the horse blankets. When the weather was fine and the
work was all done on a fine fall afternoon, and the other swipes, both
niggers and whites, had gone off to town, one could take a book out
under a tree and read of life in far away places that was as strange and
almost as fascinating as one’s own life. Tom had read “Robinson Crusoe,”
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Tales from the Bible,” all of which he had
found in the Whitehead house and Jacob Friedman, the school
superintendent at Bidwell, who had a fancy for horses, had loaned him
other books that he intended reading during the coming winter. They were
in his chest—one called “Gulliver’s Travels” and the other “Moll
Flanders.”
And now the law said he must give up being a horseman and go every day
to a school and do little foolish sums, he who had already proven
himself a man. What other schoolboy knew what he did about life? Had he
not seen and spoken to several of the greatest men of this world, men
who had driven horses to beat world records, and did they not respect
him? When he became a driver of race horses such men as Pop Geers,
Walter Cox, John Splan, Murphy and the others would not ask him what
books he had read, or how many feet make a rod and how many rods in a
mile. In the race at Columbus, where he had won his spurs as a driver,
he had already proven that life had given him the kind of education he
needed. The driver of the gelding “Light o’ the Orient” had tried to
bluff him in that third heat and had not succeeded. He was a big man
with a black mustache and had lost one eye so that he looked fierce and
ugly, and when the two horses were fighting it out, neck and neck, up
the back stretch, and when Tom was tooling Bucephalus smoothly and
surely to the front, the older man turned in his sulky to glare at him.
“You damned little whipper-snapper,” he yelled, “I’ll knock you out of
your sulky if you don’t take back.”
He had yelled that at Tom and then had struck at the boy with the butt
of his whip—not intending actually to hit him perhaps but just missing
the boy’s head, and Tom had kept his eyes steadily on his own horse, had
held him smoothly in his stride and at the upper turn, at just the right
moment, had begun to pull out in front.
Later he hadn’t even told Harry Whitehead of the incident, and that fact
too, he felt vaguely, had something to do with his qualifications as a
man.
And now they were going to put him into a school with the kids. He was
at work on the stable floor, rubbing the legs of a trim-looking colt,
and Bucephalus was in his stall waiting to be taken to a late fall
meeting at Indianapolis on the following Monday, when the blow fell.
Harry Whitehead walked back and forth swearing at the two men who were
loafing in chairs at the stable door. “Do you call that law, eh, robbing
a kid of the chance Tom’s got?” he asked, shaking a riding whip under
their noses. “I never see such a law. What I say is Dod blast such a
law.”
Tom took the colt back to its place and went into Bucephalus’ box-stall.
The stallion was in one of his gentle moods and turned to have his nose
rubbed, but Tom went and buried his face against the great black neck
and for a long time stood thus, trembling. He had thought perhaps Harry
would let him drive Bucephalus in all his races another season and now
that was all to come to an end and he was to be pitched back into
childhood, to be made just a kid in school. “I won’t do it,” he decided
suddenly and a dogged light came into his eyes. His future as a driver
of race horses might have to be sacrificed but that didn’t matter so
much as the humiliation of this other, and he decided he would say
nothing to Harry Whitehead or his wife but would make his own move.
“I’ll get out of here. Before they get me into that school I’ll skip out
of town,” he told himself as his hand crept up and fondled the soft nose
of Bucephalus, the son royal of the Patchens.
Tom left Bidwell during the night, going east on a freight train, and no
one there ever saw him again. During that winter he lived in the city of
Cleveland, where he got work driving a milk wagon in a district where
factory workers lived.
Then spring came again and with it the memory of other springs—of
thunder-showers rolling over fields of wheat, just appearing, green and
vivid, out of the black ground—of the sweet smell of new plowed fields,
and most of all the smell and sound of animals about barns at the
Whitehead farms north of Bidwell. How sharply he remembered those days
on the farms and the days later when he lived in Bidwell, slept in the
stables and went each morning to jog race horses and young colts round
and round the half-mile race track at the fair grounds at Bidwell.
That was a life! Round and round the track they went, young colthood and
young manhood together, not thinking but carrying life very keenly
within themselves and feeling tremendously. The colt’s legs were to be
hardened and their wind made sound and for the boy long hours were to be
spent in a kind of dream world, and life lived in the company of
something fine, courageous, filled with a terrible, waiting surge of
life. At the fair ground, away at the town’s edge, tall grass grew in
the enclosure inside the track and there were trees from which came the
voices of squirrels, chattering and scolding, accompanied by the call of
nesting birds and, down below on the ground, by the song of bees
visiting early blossoms and of insects hidden away in the grass.
How different the life of the city streets in the springtime! To Tom it
was in a way fetid and foul. For months he had been living in a boarding
house with some six, and often eight or ten, other young fellows, in
narrow rooms above a foul street. The young fellows were unmarried and
made good wages, and on the winter evenings and on Sundays they dressed
in good clothes and went forth, to return later, half drunk, to sit for
long hours boasting and talking loudly in the rooms. Because he was shy,
often lonely and sometimes startled and frightened by what he saw and
heard in the city, the others would have nothing to do with Tom. They
felt a kind of contempt for him, looked upon him as a “rube” and in the
late afternoon when his work was done he often went for long walks alone
in grim streets of workingmen’s houses, breathing the smoke-laden air
and listening to the roar and clatter of machinery in great factories.
At other times and immediately after the evening meal he went off to his
room and to bed, half sick with fear and with some strange nameless
dread of the life about him.
And so in the early summer of his seventeenth year Tom left the city and
going back into his own Northern Ohio lake country found work with a man
named John Bottsford who owned a threshing outfit and worked among the
farmers of Erie County, Ohio. The slender boy, who had urged Bucephalus
to his greatest victory and had driven him the fastest mile of his
career, had become a tall strong fellow with heavy features, brown eyes,
and big nerveless hands—but in spite of his apparent heaviness there was
something tremendously alive in him. He now drove a team of plodding
grey farm horses and it was his job to keep the threshing engine
supplied with water and fuel and to haul the threshed grain out of the
fields and into farmers’ barns.
The thresherman Bottsford was a broad-shouldered, powerful old man of
sixty and had, besides Tom, three grown sons in his employ. He had been
a farmer, working on rented land, all his life and had saved some money,
with which he had bought the threshing outfit, and all day the five men
worked like driven slaves and at night slept in the hay in the farmers’
barns. It was rainy that season in the lake country and at the beginning
of the time of threshing things did not go very well for Bottsford.
The old thresherman was worried. The threshing venture had taken all of
his money and he had a dread of going into debt and, as he was a deeply
religious man, at night when he thought the others asleep, he crawled
out of the hayloft and went down onto the barn floor to pray.
Something happened to Tom and for the first time in his life he began to
think about life and its meaning. He was in the country, that he loved,
in the yellow sunwashed fields, far from the dreaded noises and dirt of
city life, and here was a man, of his own type, in some deep way a
brother to himself, who was continuously crying out to some power
outside himself, some power that was in the sun, in the clouds, in the
roaring thunder that accompanied the summer rains—that was in these
things and that at the same time controlled all these things.
The young threshing apprentice was impressed. Throughout the rainy days,
when no work could be done, he wandered about and waited for night, and
then, when they all had gone into the barn loft and the others prepared
to sleep, he stayed awake to think and listen. He thought of God and of
the possibilities of God’s part in the affairs of men. The thresherman’s
youngest son, a fat jolly fellow, lay beside him and, for a time after
they had crawled into the hay, the two boys whispered and laughed
together. The fat boy’s skin was sensitive and the dry broken ends of
grass stalks crept down under his clothes and tickled him. He giggled
and twisted about, wriggling and kicking and Tom looked at him and
laughed also. The thoughts of God went out of his mind.
In the barn all became quiet and when it rained a low drumming sound
went on overhead. Tom could hear the horses and cattle, down below,
moving about. The smells were all delicious smells. The smell of the
cows in particular awoke something heady in him. It was as though he had
been drinking strong wine. Every part of his body seemed alive. The two
older boys, who like their father had serious natures, lay with their
feet buried in the hay. They lay very still and a warm musty smell arose
from their clothes, that were full of the sweat of toil. Presently the
bearded old thresherman, who slept off by himself, arose cautiously and
walked across the hay in his stockinged feet. He went down a ladder to
the floor below, and Tom listened eagerly. The fat boy snored but he was
quite sure that the older boys were awake like himself. Every sound from
below was magnified. He heard a horse stamp on the barn floor and a cow
rub her horns against a feed box. The old thresherman prayed fervently,
calling on the name of Jesus to help him out of his difficulty. Tom
could not hear all his words but some of them came to him quite clearly
and one group of words ran like a refrain through the thresherman’s
prayer. “Gentle Jesus,” he cried, “send the good days. Let the good days
come quickly. Look out over the land. Send us the fair warm days.”
Came the warm fair days and Tom wondered. Late every morning, after the
sun had marched far up into the sky and after the machines were set by a
great pile of wheat bundles he drove his tank wagon off to be filled at
some distant creek or at a pond. Sometimes he was compelled to drive two
or three miles to the lake. Dust gathered in the roads and the horses
plodded along. He passed through a grove of trees and went down a lane
and into a small valley where there was a spring and he thought of the
old man’s words, uttered in the silence and the darkness of the barns.
He made himself a figure of Jesus as a young god walking about over the
land. The young god went through the lanes and through the shaded
covered places. The feet of the horses came down with a thump in the
dust of the road and there was an echoing thump far away in the wood.
Tom leaned forward and listened and his cheeks became a little pale. He
was no longer the growing man but had become again the fine and
sensitive boy who had driven Bucephalus through a mob of angry,
determined men to victory. For the first time the blood of the old poet
Twn O’r Nant awoke in him.
The water boy for the threshing crew rode the horse Pegasus down through
the lanes back of the farm houses in Erie County, Ohio, to the creeks
where the threshing tanks must be filled. Beside him on the soft earth
in the forest walked the young god Jesus. At the creek Pegasus, born of
the springs of Ocean, stamped on the ground. The plodding farm horses
stopped. With a dazed look in his eyes Tom Edwards arose from the wagon
seat and prepared his hose and pump for filling the tank. The god Jesus
walked away over the land, and with a wave of his hand summoned the
smiling days.
A light came into Tom Edwards’ eyes and grace seemed to come also into
his heavy maturing body. New impulses came to him. As the threshing crew
went about, over the roads and through the villages from farm to farm,
women and young girls looked at the young man and smiled. Sometimes as
he came from the fields to a farmer’s barn, with a load of wheat in bags
on his wagon, the daughter of the farmer stepped out of the farm house
and stood looking at him. Tom looked at the woman and hunger crept into
his heart and, in the evenings while the thresherman and his sons sat on
the ground by the barns and talked of their affairs, he walked nervously
about. Making a motion to the fat boy, who was not really interested in
the talk of his father and brothers, the two younger men went to walk in
the nearby fields and on the roads. Sometimes they stumbled along a
country road in the dusk of the evening and came into the lighted
streets of a town. Under the store-lights young girls walked about. The
two boys stood in the shadows by a building and watched and later, as
they went homeward in the darkness, the fat boy expressed what they both
felt. They passed through a dark place where the road wound through a
wood. In silence the frogs croaked, and birds roosting in the trees were
disturbed by their presence and fluttered about. The fat boy wore heavy
overalls and his fat legs rubbed against each other. The rough cloth
made a queer creaking sound. He spoke passionately. “I would like to
hold a woman, tight, tight, tight,” he said.
One Sunday the thresherman took his entire crew with him to a church.
They had been working near a village called Castalia, but did not go
into the town but to a small white frame church that stood amid trees
and by a stream at the side of a road, a mile north of the village. They
went on Tom’s water wagon, from which they had lifted the tank and
placed boards for seats. The boy drove the horses.
Many teams were tied in the shade under the trees in a little grove near
the church, and strange men—farmers and their sons—stood about in little
groups and talked of the season’s crops. Although it was hot, a breeze
played among the leaves of the trees under which they stood, and back of
the church and the grove the stream ran over stones and made a
persistent soft murmuring noise that arose above the hum of voices.
In the church Tom sat beside the fat boy who stared at the country girls
as they came in and who, after the sermon began, went to sleep while Tom
listened eagerly to the sermon. The minister, an old man with a beard
and a strong sturdy body, looked, he thought not unlike his employer
Bottsford the thresherman.
The minister in the country church talked of that time when Mary
Magdalene, the woman who had been taken in adultery, was being stoned by
the crowd of men who had forgotten their own sins and when, in the tale
the minister told, Jesus approached and rescued the woman Tom’s heart
thumped with excitement. Then later the minister talked of how Jesus was
tempted by the devil, as he stood on a high place in the mountain, but
the boy did not listen. He leaned forward and looked out through a
window across fields and the minister’s words came to him but in broken
sentences. Tom took what was said concerning the temptation on the
mountain to mean that Mary had followed Jesus and had offered her body
to him, and that afternoon, when he had returned with the others to the
farm where they were to begin threshing on the next morning, he called
the fat boy aside and asked his opinion.
The two boys walked across a field of wheat-stubble and sat down on a
log in a grove of trees. It had never occurred to Tom that a man could
be tempted by a woman. It had always seemed to him that it must be the
other way, that women must always be tempted by men. “I thought men
always asked,” he said, “and now it seems that women sometimes do the
asking. That would be a fine thing if it could happen to us. Don’t you
think so?”
The two boys arose and walked under the trees and dark shadows began to
form on the ground underfoot. Tom burst into words and continually asked
questions and the fat boy, who had been often to church and for whom the
figure of Jesus had lost most of its reality, felt a little embarrassed.
He did not think the subject should be thus freely discussed and when
Tom’s mind kept playing with the notion of Jesus, pursued and tempted by
a woman, he grunted his disapproval. “Do you think he really refused?”
Tom asked over and over. The fat boy tried to explain. “He had twelve
disciples,” he said. “It couldn’t have happened. They were always about.
Well, you see, she wouldn’t ever have had no chance. Wherever he went
they went with him. They were men he was teaching to preach. One of them
later betrayed him to soldiers who killed him.”
Tom wondered. “How did that come about? How could a man like that be
betrayed?” he asked. “By a kiss,” the fat boy replied.
On the evening of the day when Tom Edwards—for the first and last time
in his life—went into a church, there was a light shower, the only one
that fell upon John Bottsford’s threshing crew during the last three
months the Welsh boy was with them and the shower in no way interfered
with their work. The shower came up suddenly and a few minutes was gone.
As it was Sunday and as there was no work the men had all gathered in
the barn and were looking out through the open barn doors. Two or three
men from the farm house came and sat with them on boxes and barrels on
the barn floor and, as is customary with country people, very little was
said. The men took knives out of their pockets and finding little sticks
among the rubbish on the barn floor began to whittle, while the old
thresherman went restlessly about with his hands in his trouser pockets.
Tom who sat near the door, where an occasional drop of rain was blown
against his cheek, alternately looked from his employer to the open
country where the rain played over the fields. One of the farmers
remarked that a rainy time had come on and that there would be no good
threshing weather for several days and, while the thresherman did not
answer, Tom saw his lips move and his grey beard bob up and down. He
thought the thresherman was protesting but did not want to protest in
words.
As they had gone about the country many rains had passed to the north,
south and east of the threshing crew and on some days the clouds hung
over them all day, but no rain fell and when they had got to a new place
they were told it had rained there three days before. Sometimes when
they left a farm Tom stood up on the seat of his water wagon and looked
back. He looked across fields to where they had been at work and then
looked up into the sky. “The rain may come now. The threshing is done
and the wheat is all in the barn. The rain can now do no harm to our
labor,” he thought.
On the Sunday evening when he sat with the men on the floor of the barn
Tom was sure that the shower that had now come would be but a passing
affair. He thought his employer must be very close to Jesus, who
controlled the affairs of the heavens, and that a long rain would not
come because the thresherman did not want it. He fell into a deep
reverie and John Bottsford came and stood close beside him. The
thresherman put his hand against the door jamb and looked out and Tom
could still see the grey beard moving. The man was praying and was so
close to himself that his trouser leg touched Tom’s hand. Into the boy’s
mind came the remembrance of how John Bottsford had prayed at night on
the barn floor. On that very morning he had prayed. It was just as
daylight came and the boy was awakened because, as he crept across the
hay to descend the ladder, the old man’s foot had touched his hand.
As always Tom had been excited and wanted to hear every word said in the
older man’s prayers. He lay tense, listening to every sound that came up
from below. A faint glow of light came into the hayloft, through a crack
in the side of the barn, a rooster crowed and some pigs, housed in a pen
near the barn, grunted loudly. They had heard the thresherman moving
about and wanted to be fed and their grunting, and the occasional
restless movement of a horse or a cow in the stable below, prevented
Tom’s hearing very distinctly. He, however, made out that his employer
was thanking Jesus for the fine weather that had attended them and was
protesting that he did not want to be selfish in asking it to continue.
“Jesus,” he said, “send, if you wish, a little shower on this day when,
because of our love for you, we do not work in the fields. Let it be
fine tomorrow but today, after we have come back from the house of
worship, let a shower freshen the land.”
As Tom sat on a box near the door of the barn and saw how aptly the
words of his employer had been answered by Jesus he knew that the rain
would not last. The man for whom he worked seemed to him so close to the
throne of God that he raised the hand, that had been touched by John
Bottsford’s trouser leg to his lips and secretly kissed it—and when he
looked again out over the fields the clouds were being blown away by a
wind and the evening sun was coming out. It seemed to him that the young
and beautiful god Jesus must be right at hand, within hearing of his
voice. “He is,” Tom told himself, “standing behind a tree in the
orchard.” The rain stopped and he went silently out of the barn, towards
a small apple orchard that lay beside the farm house, but when he came
to a fence and was about to climb over he stopped. “If Jesus is there he
will not want me to find him,” he thought. As he turned again toward the
barn he could see, across a field, a low grass-covered hill. He decided
that Jesus was not after all in the orchard. The long slanting rays of
the evening sun fell on the crest of the hill and touched with light the
grass stalks, heavy with drops of rain and for a moment the hill was
crowned as with a crown of jewels. A million tiny drops of water,
reflecting the light, made the hilltop sparkle as though set with gems.
“Jesus is there,” muttered the boy. “He lies on his belly in the grass.
He is looking at me over the edge of the hill.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
JOHN BOTTSFORD went with his threshing crew to work for a large farmer
named Barton near the town of Sandusky. The threshing season was drawing
near an end and the days remained clear, cool and beautiful. The country
into which he now came made a deep impression on Tom’s mind and he never
forgot the thoughts and experiences that came to him during the last
weeks of that summer on the Barton farms.
The traction engine, puffing forth smoke and attracting the excited
attention of dogs and children as it rumbled along and pulled the heavy
red grain separator, had trailed slowly over miles of road and had come
down almost to Lake Erie. Tom, with the fat Bottsford boy sitting beside
him on the water wagon, followed the rumbling puffing engine, and when
they came to the new place, where they were to stay for several days, he
could see, from the wagon seat, the smoke of the factories in the town
of Sandusky rising into the clear morning air.
The man for whom John Bottsford was threshing owned three farms, one on
an island in the bay, where he lived, and two on the mainland, and the
larger of the mainland farms had great stacks of wheat standing in a
field near the barns. The farm was in a wide basin of land, very
fertile, through which a creek flowed northward into Sandusky Bay and,
besides the stacks of wheat in the basin, other stacks had been made in
the upland fields beyond the creek, where a country of low hills began.
From these latter fields the waters of the bay could be seen glistening
in the bright fall sunlight and steamers went from Sandusky to a
pleasure resort called Cedar Point. When the wind blew from the north or
west and when the threshing machinery had been stopped at the noon hour
the men, resting with their backs against a strawstack, could hear a
band playing on one of the steamers.
Fall came on early that year and the leaves on the trees in the forests
that grew along the roads that ran down through the low creek bottom
lands began to turn yellow and red. In the afternoons when Tom went to
the creek for water he walked beside his horses and the dry leaves
crackled and snapped underfoot.
As the season had been a prosperous one Bottsford decided that his
youngest son should attend school in town during the fall and winter. He
had bought himself a machine for cutting firewood and with his two older
sons intended to take up that work. “The logs will have to be hauled out
of the wood lots to where we set up the saws,” he said to Tom. “You can
come with us if you wish.”
The thresherman began to talk to Tom of the value of learning. “You’d
better go to some town yourself this winter. It would be better for you
to get into a school,” he said sharply. He grew excited and walked up
and down beside the water wagon, on the seat of which Tom sat listening
and said that God had given men both minds and bodies and it was wicked
to let either decay because of neglect. “I have watched you,” he said.
“You don’t talk very much but you do plenty of thinking, I guess. Go
into the schools. Find out what the books have to say. You don’t have to
believe when they say things that are lies.”
The Bottsford family lived in a rented house facing a stone road near
the town of Bellevue, and the fat boy was to go to that town—a distance
of some eighteen miles from where the men were at work—afoot, and on the
evening before he set out he and Tom went out of the barns intending to
have a last walk and talk together on the roads.
They went along in the dusk of the fall evening, each thinking his own
thoughts, and coming to a bridge that led over the creek in the valley
sat on the bridge rail. Tom had little to say but his companion wanted
to talk about women and, when darkness came on, the embarrassment he
felt regarding the subject went quite away and he talked boldly and
freely. He said that in the town of Bellevue, where he was to live and
attend school during the coming winter, he would be sure to get in with
a woman. “I’m not going to be cheated out of that chance,” he declared.
He explained that as his father would be away from home when he moved
into town he would be free to pick his own place to board.
The fat boy’s imagination became inflamed and he told Tom his plans. “I
won’t try to get in with any young girl,” he declared shrewdly. “That
only gets a fellow in a fix. He might have to marry her. I’ll go live in
a house with a widow, that’s what I’ll do. And in the evening the two of
us will be there alone. We’ll begin to talk and I’ll keep touching her
with my hands. That will get her excited.”
The fat boy jumped to his feet and walked back and forth on the bridge.
He was nervous and a little ashamed and wanted to justify what he had
said. The thing for which he hungered had he thought become a
possibility—an act half achieved. Coming to stand before Tom he put a
hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go into her room at night,” he declared.
“I’ll not tell her I’m coming, but will creep in when she is asleep.
Then I’ll get down on my knees by her bed and I’ll kiss her, hard, hard.
I’ll hold her tight, so she can’t get away and I’ll kiss her mouth till
she wants what I want. Then I’ll stay in her house all winter. No one
will know. Even if she won’t have me I’ll only have to move, I’m sure to
be safe. No one will believe what she says, if she tells on me. I’m not
going to be like a boy any more, I’ll tell you what—I’m as big as a man
and I’m going to do like men do, that’s what I am.”
The two young men went back to the barn where they were to sleep on the
hay. The rich farmer for whom they were now at work had a large house
and provided beds for the thresherman and his two older sons but the two
younger men slept in the barn loft and on the night before had lain
under one blanket. After the talk by the bridge however, Tom did not
feel very comfortable and that stout exponent of manhood, the younger
Bottsford, was also embarrassed. In the road the young man, whose name
was Paul, walked a little ahead of his companion and when they got to
the barn each sought a separate place in the loft. Each wanted to have
thoughts into which he did not want the presence of the other to
intrude.
For the first time Tom’s body burned with eager desire for a female. He
lay where he could see out through a crack, in the side of the barn, and
at first his thoughts were all about animals. He had brought a horse
blanket up from the stable below and crawling under it lay on his side
with his eyes close to the crack and thought about the love-making of
horses and cattle. Things he had seen in the stables when he worked for
Whitehead, the racing man, came back to his mind and a queer animal
hunger ran through him so that his legs stiffened. He rolled restlessly
about on the hay and for some reason, he did not understand, his lust
took the form of anger and he hated the fat boy. He thought he would
like to crawl over the hay and pound his companion’s face with his
fists. Although he had not seen Paul Bottsford’s face, when he talked of
the widow, he had sensed in him a flavor of triumph. “He thinks he has
got the better of me,” young Edwards thought.
He rolled again to the crack and stared out into the night. There was a
new moon and the fields were dimly outlined and clumps of trees, along
the road that led into the town of Sandusky, looked like black clouds
that had settled down over the land. For some reason the sight of the
land, lying dim and quiet under the moon, took all of his anger away and
he began to think, not of Paul Bottsford, with hot eager lust in his
eyes, creeping into the room of the widow at Bellevue, but of the god
Jesus, going up into a mountain with his woman, Mary.
His companion’s notion of going into a room where a woman lay sleeping
and taking her, as it were unawares, now seemed to him entirely mean and
the hot jealous feeling that had turned into anger and hatred went
entirely away. He tried to think what the god, who had brought the
beautiful days for the threshing, would do with a woman.
Tom’s body still burned with desire and his mind wanted to think
lascivious thoughts. The moon that had been hidden behind clouds emerged
and a wind began to blow. It was still early evening and in the town of
Sandusky pleasure seekers were taking the boat to the resort over the
bay and the wind brought to Tom’s ears the sound of music, blown over
the waters of the bay and down the creek basin. In a grove near the barn
the wind swayed gently the branches of young trees and black shadows ran
here and there on the ground.
The younger Bottsford had gone to sleep in a distant part of the barn
loft, and now began to snore loudly. The tenseness went out of Tom’s
legs and he prepared to sleep but before sleeping he muttered, half
timidly, certain words, that were half a prayer, half an appeal to some
spirit of the night. “Jesus, bring me a woman,” he whispered.
Outside the barn, in the fields, the wind, becoming a little stronger,
picked up bits of straw and blew them about among the hard up-standing
stubble and there was a low gentle whispering sound as though the gods
were answering his appeal.
Tom went to sleep with his arm under his head and with his eye close to
the crack that gave him a view of the moonlit fields, and in his dream
the cry from within repeated itself over and over. The mysterious god
Jesus had heard and answered the needs of his employer John Bottsford
and his own need would, he was quite sure, be understood and attended
to. “Bring me a woman. I need her. Jesus, bring me a woman,” he kept
whispering into the night, as consciousness left him and he slipped away
into dreams.
After the youngest of the Bottsfords had departed a change took place in
the nature of Tom’s work. The threshing crew had got now into a country
of large farms where the wheat had all been brought in from the fields
and stacked near the barns and where there was always plenty of water
near at hand. Everything was simplified. The separator was pulled in
close by the barn door and the threshed grain was carried directly to
the bins from the separator. As it was not a part of Tom’s work to feed
the bundles of grain into the whirling teeth of the separator—this work
being done by John Bottsford’s two elder sons—there was little for the
crew’s teamster to do. Sometimes John Bottsford, who was the engineer,
departed, going to make arrangements for the next stop, and was gone for
a half day, and at such times Tom, who had picked up some knowledge of
the art, ran the engine.
On other days however there was nothing at all for him to do and his
mind, unoccupied for long hours, began to play him tricks. In the
morning, after his team had been fed and cleaned until the grey coats of
the old farm horses shone like racers, he went out of the barn and into
an orchard. Filling his pockets with ripe apples he went to a fence and
leaned over. In a field young colts played about. As he held the apples
and called softly they came timidly forward, stopping in alarm and then
running a little forward, until one of them, bolder than the others, ate
one of the apples out of his hand.
All through those bright warm clear fall days a restless feeling, it
seemed to Tom ran through everything in nature. In the clumps of
woodland still standing on the farms flaming red spread itself out along
the limbs of trees and there was one grove of young maple trees, near a
barn, that was like a troop of girls, young girls who had walked
together down a sloping field, to stop in alarm at seeing the men at
work in the barnyard. Tom stood looking at the trees. A slight breeze
made them sway gently from side to side. Two horses standing among the
trees drew near each other. One nipped the other’s neck. They rubbed
their heads together.
The crew stopped at another large farm and it was to be their last stop
for the season. “When we have finished this job we’ll go home and get
our own fall work done,” Bottsford said. Saturday evening came and the
thresherman and his sons took the horses and drove away, going to their
own home for the Sunday, and leaving Tom alone. “We’ll be back early, on
Monday morning,” the thresherman said as they drove away. Sunday alone
among the strange farm people brought a sharp experience to Tom and when
it had passed he decided he would not wait for the end of the threshing
season but a few days off now—but would quit his job and go into the
city and surrender to the schools. He remembered his employer’s words,
“Find out what the books have to say. You don’t have to believe, when
they say things that are lies.”
As he walked in lanes, across meadows and upon the hillsides of the
farm, also on the shores of Sandusky Bay, that Sunday morning Tom
thought almost constantly of his friend the fat fellow, young Paul
Bottsford, who had gone to spend the fall and winter at Bellevue, and
wondered what his life there might be like. He had himself lived in such
a town, in Bidwell, but had rarely left Harry Whitehead’s stable. What
went on in such a town? What happened at night in the houses of the
towns? He remembered Paul’s plan for getting into a house alone with a
widow and how he was to creep into her room at night, holding her
tightly in his arms until she wanted what he wanted. “I wonder if he
will have the nerve. Gee, I wonder if he will have the nerve,” he
muttered.
For a long time, ever since Paul had gone away and he had no one with
whom he could talk, things had taken on a new aspect in Tom’s mind. The
rustle of dry leaves underfoot, as he walked in a forest—the playing of
shadows over the open face of a field—the murmuring song of insects in
the dry grass beside the fences in the lanes—and at night the hushed
contented sounds made by the animals in the barns, were no longer so
sweet to him. For him no more did the young god Jesus walk beside him,
just out of sight behind low hills, or down the dry beds of streams.
Something within himself, that had been sleeping was now awakening. When
he returned from walking in the fields on the fall evenings and,
thinking of Paul Bottsford alone in the house with the widow at
Bellevue, half wishing he were in the same position, he felt ashamed in
the presence of the gentle old thresherman, and afterward did not lie
awake listening to the older man’s prayers. The men who had come from
nearby farms to help with the threshing laughed and shouted to each
other as they pitched the straw into great stacks or carried the filled
bags of grain to the bins, and they had wives and daughters who had come
with them and who were now at work in the farmhouse kitchen, from which
also laughter came. Girls and women kept coming out at the kitchen door
into the barnyard, tall awkward girls, plump red-cheeked girls, women
with worn thin faces and sagging breasts. All men and women seemed made
for each other.
They all laughed and talked together, understood one another. Only he
was alone. He only had no one to whom he could feel warm and close, to
whom he could draw close.
On the Sunday when the Bottsfords had all gone away Tom came in from
walking all morning in the fields and ate his dinner with many other
people in a big farmhouse dining room. In preparation for the threshing
days ahead, and the feeding of many people, several women had come to
spend the day and to help in preparing food. The farmer’s daughter, who
was married and lived in Sandusky, came with her husband, and three
other women, neighbors, came from farms in the neighborhood. Tom did not
look at them but ate his dinner in silence and as soon as he could
manage got out of the house and went to the barns. Going into a long
shed he sat on the tongue of a wagon, that from long disuse was covered
with dust. Swallows flew back and forth among the rafters overhead and,
in an upper corner of the shed where they evidently had a nest, wasps
buzzed in the semi-darkness.
The daughter of the farmer, who had come from town, came from the house
with a babe in her arms. It was nursing time, and she wanted to escape
from the crowded house and, without having seen Tom, she sat on a box
near the shed door and opened her dress. Embarrassed and at the same
time fascinated by the sight of a woman’s breasts, seen through cracks
of the wagon box, Tom drew his legs up and his head down and remained
concealed until the woman had gone back to the house. Then he went again
to the fields and did not go back to the house for the evening meal.
As he walked on that Sunday afternoon the grandson of the Welsh poet
experienced many new sensations. In a way he came to understand that the
things Paul had talked of doing and that had, but a short time before,
filled him with disgust were now possible to himself also. In the past
when he had thought about women there had always been something healthy
and animal-like in his lusts but now they took a new form. The passion
that could not find expression through his body went up into his mind
and he began to see visions. Women became to him something different
than anything else in nature, more desirable than anything else in
nature, and at the same time everything in nature became woman. The
trees, in the apple orchard by the barn, were like the arms of women.
The apples on the trees were round like the breasts of women. They were
the breasts of women—and when he had got on to a low hill the contour of
the fences that marked the confines of the fields fell into the forms of
women’s bodies. Even the clouds in the sky did the same thing.
He walked down along a lane to a stream and crossed the stream by a
wooden bridge. Then he climbed another hill, the highest place in all
that part of the country, and there the fever that possessed him became
more active. An odd lassitude crept over him and he lay down in the
grass on the hilltop and closed his eyes. For a long time he remained in
a hushed, half-sleeping, dreamless state and then opened his eyes again.
Again the forms of women floated before him. To his left the bay was
ruffled by a gentle breeze and far over towards the city of Sandusky two
sailboats were apparently engaged in a race. The masts of the boats were
fully dressed but on the great stretch of water they seemed to stand
still. The bay itself, in Tom’s eyes, had taken on the form and shape of
a woman’s head and body and the two sailboats were the woman’s eyes
looking at him.
The bay was a woman with her head lying where lay the city of Sandusky.
Smoke arose from the stacks of steamers docked at the city’s wharves and
the smoke formed itself into masses of black hair. Through the farm,
where he had come to thresh, ran a stream. It swept down past the foot
of the hill on which he lay. The stream was the arm of the woman. Her
hand was thrust into the land and the lower part of her body was
lost—far down to the north, where the bay became a part of Lake Erie—but
her other arm could be seen. It was outlined in the further shore of the
bay. Her other arm was drawn up and her hand was pressing against her
face. Her form was distorted by pain but at the same time the giant
woman smiled at the boy on the hill. There was something in the smile
that was like the smile that had come unconsciously to the lips of the
woman who had nursed her child in the shed.
Turning his face away from the bay Tom looked at the sky. A great white
cloud that lay along the southern horizon formed itself into the giant
head of a man. Tom watched as the cloud crept slowly across the sky.
There was something noble and quieting about the giant’s face and his
hair, pure white and as thick as wheat in a rich field in June, added to
its nobility. Only the face appeared. Below the shoulders there was just
a white shapeless mass of clouds.
And then this formless mass began also to change. The face of a giant
woman appeared. It pressed upward toward the face of the man. Two arms
formed themselves on the man’s shoulders and pressed the woman closely.
The two faces merged. Something seemed to snap in Tom’s brain.
He sat upright and looked neither at the bay nor at the sky. Evening was
coming on and soft shadows began to play over the land. Below him lay
the farm with its barns and houses and in the field, below the hill on
which he was lying, there were two smaller hills that became at once in
his eyes the two full breasts of a woman. Two white sheep appeared and
stood nibbling the grass on the woman’s breasts. They were like babes
being suckled. The trees in the orchards near the barns were the woman’s
hair. An arm of the stream that ran down to the bay, the stream he had
crossed on the wooden bridge when he came to the hill, cut across a
meadow beyond the two low hills. It widened into a pond and the pond
made a mouth for the woman. Her eyes were two black hollows—low spots in
a field where hogs had rooted the grass away, looking for roots. Black
puddles of water lay in the hollows and they seemed eyes shining
invitingly up at him.
This woman also smiled and her smile was now an invitation. Tom got to
his feet and hurried away down the hill and going stealthily past the
barns and the house got into a road. All night he walked under the stars
thinking new thoughts. “I am obsessed with this idea of having a woman.
I’d better go to the city and go to school and see if I can make myself
fit to have a woman of my own,” he thought. “I won’t sleep tonight but
will wait until tomorrow when Bottsford comes back and then I’ll quit
and go into the city.” He walked, trying to make plans. Even a good man
like John Bottsford, had a woman for himself. Could he do that?
The thought was exciting. At the moment it seemed to him that he had
only to go into the city, and go to the schools for a time, to become
beautiful and to have beautiful women love him. In his half ecstatic
state he forgot the winter months he had spent in the city of Cleveland,
and forgot also the grim streets, the long rows of dark prison-like
factories and the loneliness of his life in the city. For the moment and
as he walked in the dusty roads under the moon, he thought of American
towns and cities as places for beautifully satisfying adventures, for
all such fellows as himself.
THE END
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).