PART TWO
FOR a good many years Tom wrote advertisements in an office in Chicago where I was also employed. He had grown middle-aged and was unmarried and in the evenings and on Sundays sat in his apartment reading or playing rather badly on a piano. Outside business hours he had few associates and although his youth and young manhood had been a time of hardship, he continually, in fancy, lived in the past.
He and I had been intimate, in a loose detached sort of way, for a good many years. Although I was a much younger man we often got half-drunk together.
Little fluttering tag-like ends of his personal history were always leaking out of him and, of all the men and women I have known, he gave me the most material for stories. His own talks, things remembered or imagined, were never quite completely told. They were fragments caught up, tossed in the air as by a wind and then abruptly dropped.
All during the late afternoon we had been standing together at a bar and drinking. We had talked of our work and as Tom grew more drunken he played with the notion of the importance of advertising writing. At that time his more mature point of view puzzled me a little. “I’ll tell you what, that lot of advertisements on which you are now at work is very important. Do put all your best self into your work. It is very important that the American house-wife buy Star laundry soap, rather than Arrow laundry soap. And there is something else—the daughter of the man who owns the soap factory, that is at present indirectly employing you, is a very pretty girl. I saw her once. She is nineteen now but soon she will be out of college and, if her father makes a great deal of money it will profoundly affect her life. The very man she is to marry may be decided by the success or failure of the advertisements you are now writing. In an obscure way you are fighting her battles. Like a knight of old you have tipped your lance, or shall I say typewriter, in her service. Today as I walked past your desk and saw you sitting there, scratching your head, and trying to think whether to say, “buy Star Laundry Soap—it’s best,” or whether to be a bit slangy and say, “Buy Star—You win!”—well, I say, my heart went out to you and to this fair young girl you have never seen, may never see. I tell you what, I was touched.” He hiccoughed and leaning forward tapped me affectionately on the shoulder. “I tell you what, young fellow,” he added smiling, “I thought of the middle ages and of the men, women and children who once set out toward the Holy Land in the service of the Virgin. They didn’t get as well paid as you do. I tell you what, we advertising men are too well paid. There would be more dignity in our profession if we went barefooted and walked about dressed in old ragged cloaks and carrying staffs. We might, with a good deal more dignity, carry beggar’s bowls, in our hands, eh!”
He was laughing heartily now, but suddenly stopped laughing. There was always an element of sadness in Tom’s mirth.
We walked out of the saloon, he going forward a little unsteadily for, even when he was quite sober, he was not too steady on his legs. Life did not express itself very definitely in his body and he rolled awkwardly about, his heavy body at times threatening to knock some passerby off the sidewalk.
For a time we stood at a corner, at La Salle and Lake Streets in Chicago, and about us surged the home-going crowds while over our heads rattled the elevated trains. Bits of newspaper and clouds of dust were picked up by a wind and blown in our faces and the dust got into our eyes. We laughed together, a little nervously.
At any rate for us the evening had just begun. We would walk and later dine together. He plunged again into the saloon out of which we had just come, and in a moment returned with a bottle of whiskey in his pocket.
“It is horrible stuff, this whiskey, eh, but after all this is a horrible town. One couldn’t drink wine here. Wine belongs to a sunny, laughing people and clime,” he said. He had a notion that drunkenness was necessary to men in such a modern industrial city as the one in which we lived. “You wait,” he said, “you’ll see what will happen. One of these days the reformers will manage to take whiskey away from us, and what then? We’ll sag down, you see. We’ll become like old women, who have had too many children. We’ll all sag spiritually and then you’ll see what’ll happen. Without whiskey no people can stand up against all this ugliness. It can’t be done, I say. We’ll become empty and bag-like—we will—all of us. We’ll be like old women who were never loved but who have had too many children.”
We had walked through many streets and had come to a bridge over a river. It was growing dark now and we stood for a time in the dusk and in the uncertain light the structures, built to the very edge of the stream, great warehouses and factories, began to take on strange shapes. The river ran through a canyon formed by the buildings, a few boats passed up and down, and over other bridges, in the distance, street-cars passed. They were like moving clusters of stars against the dark purple of the sky.
From time to time he sucked at the whiskey bottle and occasionally offered me a drink but often he forgot me and drank alone. When he had taken the bottle from his lips he held it before him and spoke to it softly, “Little mother,” he said, “I am always at your breast, eh? You cannot wean me, can you?”
He grew a little angry. “Well, then why did you drop me down here? Mothers should drop their children in places where men have learned a little to live. Here there is only a desert of buildings.”
He took another drink from the bottle and then held it for a moment against his cheek before passing it to me. “There is something feminine about a whiskey bottle,” he declared. “As long as it contains liquor one hates to part with it and passing it to a friend is a little like inviting a friend to go in to your wife. They do that, I’m told, in some of the Oriental countries—a rather delicate custom. Perhaps they are more civilized than ourselves, and then, you know, perhaps, it’s just possible, they have found out that the women sometimes like it too, eh?”
I tried to laugh but did not succeed very well. Now that I am writing of my friend, I find I am not making a very good likeness of him after all. It may be that I overdo the note of sadness I get into my account of him. There was always that element present but it was tempered in him, as I seem to be unable to temper it in my account of him.
For one thing he was not very clever and I seem to be making him out a rather clever fellow. On many evenings I have spent with him he was silent and positively dull and for hours walked awkwardly along, talking of some affair at the office. There was a long rambling story. He had been at Detroit with the president of the company and the two men had visited an advertiser. There was a long dull account of what had been said—of “he saids,” and, “I saids.”
Or again he told a story of some experience of his own, as a newspaper man, before he got into advertising. He had been on the copy desk in some Chicago newspaper, the Tribune, perhaps. One grew accustomed to a little peculiarity of his mind. It traveled sometimes in circles and there were certain oft-told tales always bobbing up. A man had come into the newspaper office, a cub reporter with an important piece of news, a great scoop in fact. No one would believe the reporter’s story. He was just a kid. There was a murderer, for whom the whole town was on the watchout, and the cub reporter had picked him up and had brought him into the office.
There he sat, the dangerous murderer. The cub reporter had found him in a saloon and going up to him had said, “You might as well give yourself up. They will get you anyway and it will go better with you if you come in voluntarily.”
And so the dangerous murderer had decided to come and the cub reporter had escorted him, not to the police station but to the newspaper office. It was a great scoop. In a moment now the forms would close, the newspaper would go to press. The dead line was growing close and the cub reporter ran about the room from one man to another. He kept pointing at the murderer, a mild-looking little man with blue eyes, sitting on a bench, waiting. The cub reporter was almost insane. He danced up and down and shouting “I tell you that’s Murdock, sitting there. Don’t be a lot of damn fools. I tell you that’s Murdock, sitting there.”
Now one of the editors has walked listlessly across the room and is speaking to the little man with blue eyes, and suddenly the whole tone of the newspaper office has changed. “My God! It’s the truth! Stop everything! Clear the front page! My God! It is Murdock! What a near thing! We almost let it go! My God! It’s Murdock!”
The incident in the newspaper office had stayed in my friend’s mind. It swam about in his mind as in a pool. At recurring times, perhaps once every six months, he told the story, using always the same words and the tenseness of that moment in the newspaper office was reproduced in him over and over. He grew excited. Now the men in the office were all gathering about the little blue-eyed Murdock. He had killed his wife, her lover and three children. Then he had run into the street and quite wantonly shot two men, innocently passing the house. He sat talking quietly and all the police of the city, and all the reporters for the other newspapers, were looking for him. There he sat talking, nervously telling his story. There wasn’t much to the story. “I did it. I just did it. I guess I was off my nut,” he kept saying.
“Well, the story will have to be stretched out.” The cub reporter who has brought him in walks about the office proudly. “I’ve done it! I’ve done it! I’ve proven myself the greatest newspaper man in the city.” The older men are laughing. “The fool! It’s fool’s luck. If he hadn’t been a fool he would never have done it. Why he walked right up. ‘Are you Murdock?’ He had gone about all over town, into saloons, asking men, ‘Are you Murdock?’ God is good to fools and drunkards!”
My friend told the story to me ten, twelve, fifteen times, and did not know it had grown to be an old story. When he had reproduced the scene in the newspaper office he made always the same comment. “It’s a good yarn, eh. Well it’s the truth. I was there. Someone ought to write it up for one of the magazines.”
I looked at him, watched him closely as he told the story and as I grew older and kept hearing the murderer’s story and certain others, he also told regularly without knowing he had told them before, an idea came to me. “He is a tale-teller who has had no audience,” I thought. “He is a stream dammed up. He is full of stories that whirl and circle about within him. Well, he is not a stream dammed up, he is a stream overfull.” As I walked beside him and heard again the story of the cub reporter and the murderer I remembered a creek back of my father’s house in an Ohio town. In the spring the water overflowed a field near our house and the brown muddy water ran round and round in crazy circles. One threw a stick into the water and it was carried far away but, after a time, it came whirling back to where one stood on a piece of high ground, watching.
What interested me was that the untold stories, or rather the uncompleted stories of my friend’s mind, did not seem to run in circles. When a story had attained form it had to be told about every so often, but the unformed fragments were satisfied to peep out at one and then retire, never to reappear.
It was a spring evening and he and I had gone for a walk in Jackson Park. We went on a street-car and when we were alighting the car started suddenly and my awkward friend was thrown to the ground and rolled over and over in the dusty street. The motorman, the conductor and several of the men passengers alighted and gathered about. No, he was not hurt and would not give his name and address to the anxious conductor. “I’m not hurt. I’m not going to sue the company. Damn it, man, I defy you to make me give my name and address if I do not care to do so.”
He assumed a look of outraged dignity. “Just suppose now that I happen to be some great man, traveling about the country—in foreign parts, incognito, as it were. Let us suppose I am a great prince or a dignitary of some sort. Look how big I am.” He pointed to his huge round paunch. “If I told who I was cheers might break forth. I do not care for that. With me, you see, it is different than with yourselves. I have had too much of that sort of thing already. I’m sick of it. If it happens that, in the process of my study of the customs of your charming country, I chose to fall off a street-car that is my own affair. I did not fall on anyone.”
We walked away leaving the conductor, the motorman and passengers somewhat mystified. “Ah, he’s a nut,” I heard one of the passengers say to another.
As for the fall, it had shaken something out of my friend. When later we were seated on a bench in the park one of the fragments, the little illuminating bits of his personal history, that sometimes came from him and that were his chief charm for me, seemed to have been shaken loose and fell from him as a ripe apple falls from a tree in a wind.
He began talking, a little hesitatingly, as though feeling his way in the darkness along the hallway of a strange house at night. It had happened I had never seen him with a woman and he seldom spoke of women, except with a witty and half scornful gesture, but now he began speaking of an experience with a woman.
The tale concerned an adventure of his young manhood and occurred after his mother had died and after his father married again, in fact after he had left home, not to return.
The enmity, that seemed always to have existed between himself and his father became while he continued living at home, more and more pronounced, but on the part of the son, my friend, it was never expressed in words and his dislike of his father took the form of contempt that he had made so bad a second marriage. The new woman in the house seemed such a poor stick. The house was always dirty and the children, some other man’s children, were always about under foot. When the two men who had been working in the fields came into the house to eat, the food was badly cooked.
The father’s desire to have God make him, in some mysterious way a Methodist minister continued and, as he grew older, the son had difficulty keeping back certain sharp comments upon life in the house, that wanted to be expressed. “What was a Methodist minister after all?” The son was filled with the intolerance of youth. His father was a laborer, a man who had never been to school. Did he think that God could suddenly make him something else and that without effort on his own part, by this interminable praying? If he had really wanted to be a minister why had he not prepared himself? He had chased off and got married and when his first wife died he could hardly wait until she was buried before making another marriage. And what a poor stick of a woman he had got.
The son looked across the table at his step-mother who was afraid of him. Their eyes met and the woman’s hands began to tremble. “Do you want anything?” she asked anxiously. “No,” he replied and began eating in silence.
One day in the spring, when he was working in the field with his father, he decided to start out into the world. He and his father were planting corn. They had no corn-planter and the father had marked out the rows with a home-made marker and now he was going along in his bare feet, dropping the grains of corn and the son, with a hoe in his hand, was following. The son drew earth over the corn and then patted the spot with the back of the hoe. That was to make the ground solid above so that the crows would not come down and find the corn before it had time to take root.
All morning the two worked in silence, and then at noon and when they came to the end of a row, they stopped to rest. The father went into a fence corner.
The son was nervous. He sat down and then got up and walked about. He did not want to look into the fence corner, where his father was no doubt kneeling and praying—he was always doing that at odd moments—but presently he did. Dread crept over him. His father was kneeling and praying in silence and the son could see again the bottoms of his two bare feet, sticking out from among low-growing bushes. Tom shuddered. Again he saw the heels and the cushions of the feet, the two ball-like cushions below the toes. They were black but the instep of each foot was white with an odd whiteness—not unlike the whiteness of the belly of a fish.
The reader will understand what was in Tom’s mind—a memory.
Without a word to his father or to his father’s wife, he walked across the fields to the house, packed a few belongings and left, saying good-bye to no one. The woman of the house saw him go but said nothing and after he had disappeared, about a bend in the road, she ran across the fields to her husband, who was still at his prayers, oblivious to what had happened. His wife also saw the bare feet sticking out of the bushes and ran toward them screaming. When her husband arose she began to cry hysterically. “I thought something dreadful had happened, Oh, I thought something dreadful had happened,” she sobbed.
“Why, what’s the matter,—what’s the matter?” asked her husband but she did not answer but ran and threw herself into his arms, and as the two stood thus, like two grotesque bags of grain, embracing in a black newly-plowed field under a grey sky, the son, who had stopped in a small clump of trees, saw them. He walked to the edge of a wood and stood for a moment and then went off along the road. Afterward he never saw or heard from them again.
About Tom’s woman adventure—he told it as I have told you the story of his departure from home, that is to say in a fragmentary way. The story, like the one I have just tried to tell, or rather perhaps give you a sense of, was told in broken sentences, dropped between long silences. As my friend talked I sat looking at him and I will admit I sometimes found myself thinking he must be the greatest man I would ever know. “He has felt more things, has by his capacity for silently feeling things, penetrated further into human life than any other man I am likely ever to know, perhaps than any other man who lives in my day,” I thought—deeply stirred.
And so he was on the road now and working his way slowly along afoot through Southern Ohio. He intended to make his way to some city and begin educating himself. In the winter, during boyhood, he had attended a country school, but there were certain things he wanted he could not find in the country, books, for one thing. “I knew then, as I know now, something of the importance of books, that is to say real books. There are only a few such books in the world and it takes a long time to find them out. Hardly anyone knows what they are and one of the reasons I have never married is because I did not want some woman coming between me and the search for the books that really have something to say,” he explained. He was forever breaking the thread of his stories with little comments of this kind.
All during that summer he worked on the farms, staying sometimes for two or three weeks and then moving on and in June he had got to a place, some twenty miles west of Cincinnati, where he went to work on the farm of a German, and where the adventure happened that he told me about that night on the park bench.
The farm on which he was at work belonged to a tall, solidly-built German of fifty, who had come to America twenty years before, and who, by hard work, had prospered and had acquired much land. Three years before he had made up his mind he had better marry and had written to a friend in Germany about getting him a wife. “I do not want one of these American girls, and I would like a young woman, not an old one,” he wrote. He explained that the American girls all had the idea in their heads that they could run their husbands and that most of them succeeded. “It’s getting so all they want is to ride around all dressed up or trot off to town,” he said. Even the older American women he employed as housekeepers were the same way; none of them would take hold, help about the farm, feed the stock and do things the wife of a European farmer expected to do. When he employed a housekeeper she did the housework and that was all.
Then she went to sit on the front porch, to sew or read a book. “What nonsense! You get me a good German girl, strong and pretty good-looking. I’ll send the money and she can come over here and be my wife,” he wrote.
The letter had been sent to a friend of his young manhood, now a small merchant in a German town and after talking the matter over with his wife the merchant decided to send his daughter, a woman of twenty-four. She had been engaged to marry a man who was taken sick and had died while he was serving his term in the army and her father decided she had been mooning about long enough. The merchant called the daughter into a room where he and his wife sat and told her of his decision and, for a long time she sat looking at the floor. Was she about to make a fuss? A prosperous American husband who owned a big farm was not to be sneezed at. The daughter put up her hand and fumbled with her black hair—there was a great mass of it. After all she was a big strong woman. Her husband wouldn’t be cheated. “Yes, I’ll go,” she said quietly, and getting up walked out of the room.
In America the woman had turned out all right but her husband thought her a little too silent. Even though the main purpose in life be to do the work of a house and farm, feed the stock and keep a man’s clothes in order, so that he is not always having to buy new ones, still there are times when something else is in order. As he worked in his fields the farmer sometimes muttered to himself. “Everything in its place. For everything there is a time and a place,” he told himself. One worked and then the time came when one played a little too. Now and then it was nice to have a few friends about, drink beer, eat a good deal of heavy food and then have some fun, in a kind of way. One did not go too far but if there were women in the party someone tickled one of them and she giggled. One made a remark about legs—nothing out of the way. “Legs is legs. On horses or women legs count a good deal.” Everyone laughed. One had a jolly evening, one had some fun.
Often, after his woman came, the farmer, working in his fields, tried to think what was the matter with her. She worked all the time and the house was in order. Well, she fed the stock so that he did not have to bother about that. What a good cook she was. She even made beer, in the old-fashioned German way, at home—and that was fine too.
The whole trouble lay in the fact that she was silent, too silent. When one spoke to her she answered nicely but she herself made no conversation and at night she lay in the bed silently. The German wondered if she would be showing signs of having a child pretty soon. “That might make a difference,” he thought. He stopped working and looked across the fields to where there was a meadow. His cattle were there feeding quietly. “Even cows, and surely cows were quiet and silent enough things, even cows had times. Sometimes the very devil got into a cow. You were leading her along a road or a lane and suddenly she went half insane. If one weren’t careful she would jam her head through fences, knock a man over, do almost anything. She wanted something insanely, with a riotous hunger. Even a cow wasn’t always just passive and quiet.” The German felt cheated. He thought of the friend in Germany who had sent his daughter. “Ugh, the deuce, he might have sent a livelier one,” he thought.
It was June when Tom came to the farm and the harvest was on. The German had planted several large fields to wheat and the yield was good. Another man had been employed to work on the farm all summer but Tom could be used too. He would have to sleep on the hay in the barn but that he did not mind. He went to work at once.
And anyone knowing Tom, and seeing his huge and rather ungainly body, must realize that, in his youth, he might have been unusually strong. For one thing he had not done so much thinking as he must have done later, nor had he been for years seated at a desk. He worked in the fields with the other two men and at the meal time came into the house with them to eat. He and the German’s wife must have been a good deal alike. Tom had in his mind certain things—thoughts concerning his boyhood—and he was thinking a good deal of the future. Well, there he was working his way westward and making a little money all the time as he went, and every cent he made he kept. He had not yet been into an American city, had purposely avoided such places as Springfield, Dayton and Cincinnati and had kept to the smaller places and the farms.
After a time he would have an accumulation of money and would go into cities, study, read books, live. He had then a kind of illusion about American cities. “A city was a great gathering of people who had grown tired of loneliness and isolation. They had come to realize that only by working together could they have the better things of life. Many hands working together might build wonderfully, many minds working together might think clearly, many impulses working together might channel all lives into an expression of something rather fine.”
I am making a mistake if I give you the impression that Tom, the boy from the Ohio farm, had any such definite notions. He had a feeling—of a sort. There was a dumb kind of hope in him. He had even then, I am quite sure, something else, that he later always retained, a kind of almost holy inner modesty. It was his chief attraction as a man but perhaps it stood in the way of his ever achieving the kind of outstanding and assertive manhood we Americans all seem to think we value so highly.
At any rate there he was, and there was that woman, the silent one, now twenty-seven years old. The three men sat at table eating and she waited on them. They ate in the farm kitchen, a large old-fashioned one, and she stood by the stove or went silently about putting more food on the table as it was consumed.
At night the men did not eat until late and sometimes darkness came as they sat at table and then she brought lighted lamps for them. Great winged insects flew violently against the screen door and a few moths, that had managed to get into the house, flew about the lamps. When the men had finished eating they sat at the table drinking beer and the woman washed the dishes.
The farm hand, employed for the summer, was a man of thirty-five, a large bony man with a drooping mustache. He and the German talked. Well, it was good, the German thought, to have the silence of his house broken. The two men spoke of the coming threshing time and of the hay harvest just completed. One of the cows would be calving next week. Her time was almost here. The man with the mustache took a drink of beer and wiped his mustache with the back of his hand, that was covered with long black hair.
Tom had drawn his chair back against the wall and sat in silence and, when the German was deeply engaged in conversation, he looked at the woman, who sometimes turned from her dish-washing to look at him.
There was something, a certain feeling he had sometimes—she, it might be, also had—but of the two men in the room that could not be said. It was too bad she spoke no English. Perhaps, however even though she spoke his language, he could not speak to her of the things he meant. But, pshaw, there wasn’t anything in his mind, nothing that could be said in words. Now and then her husband spoke to her in German and she replied quietly, and then the conversation between the two men was resumed in English. More beer was brought. The German felt expansive. How good to have talk in the house. He urged beer upon Tom who took it and drank. “You’re another close-mouthed one, eh?” he said laughing.
Tom’s adventure happened during the second week of his stay. All the people about the place had gone to sleep for the night but, as he could not sleep, he arose silently and came down out of the hay loft carrying his blanket. It was a silent hot soft night without a moon and he went to where there was a small grass plot that came down to the barn and spreading his blanket sat with his back to the wall of the barn.
That he could not sleep did not matter. He was young and strong. “If I do not sleep tonight I will sleep tomorrow night,” he thought. There was something in the air that he thought concerned only himself, and that made him want to be thus awake, sitting out of doors and looking at the dim distant trees in the apple orchard near the barn, at the stars in the sky, at the farm house, faintly seen some few hundred feet away. Now that he was out of doors he no longer felt restless. Perhaps it was only that he was nearer something that was like himself at the moment, just the night perhaps.
He became aware of something, of something moving, restlessly in the darkness. There was a fence between the farm yard and the orchard, with berry bushes growing beside it, and something was moving in the darkness along the berry bushes. Was it a cow that had got out of the stable or were the bushes moved by a wind? He did a trick known to country boys. Thrusting a finger into his mouth he stood up and put the wet finger out before him. A wind would dry one side of the warm wet finger quickly and that side would turn cold. Thus one told oneself something, not only of the strength of a wind but its direction. Well, there was no wind strong enough to move berry bushes—there was no wind at all. He had come down out of the barn loft in his bare feet and in moving about had made no sound and now he went and stood silently on the blanket with his back against the wall of the barn.
The movement among the bushes was growing more distinct but it wasn’t in the bushes. Something was moving along the fence, between him and the orchard. There was a place along the fence, an old rail one, where no bushes grew and now the silent moving thing was passing the open space.
It was the woman of the house, the German’s wife. What was up? Was she also trying dumbly to draw nearer something that was like herself, that she could understand, a little? Thoughts flitted through Tom’s head and a dumb kind of desire arose within him. He began hoping vaguely that the woman was in search of himself.
Later, when he told me of the happenings of that night, he was quite sure that the feeling that then possessed him was not physical desire for a woman. His own mother had died several years before and the woman his father had later married had seemed to him just a thing about the house, a not very competent thing, bones, a hank of hair, a body that did not do very well what one’s body was supposed to do. “I was intolerant as the devil, about all women. Maybe I always have been but then—I’m sure I was a queer kind of country bumpkin aristocrat. I thought myself something, a special thing in the world, and that woman, any women I had ever seen or known, the wives of a few neighbors as poor as my father, a few country girls—I had thought them all beneath my contempt, dirt under my feet.
“About that German’s wife I had not felt that way. I don’t know why. Perhaps because she had a habit of keeping her mouth shut as I did just at that time, a habit I have since lost.”
And so Tom stood there—waiting. The woman came slowly along the fence, keeping in the shadow of the bushes and then crossed an open space toward the barn.
Now she was walking slowly along the barn wall, directly toward the young man who stood in the heavy shadows holding his breath and waiting for her coming.
Afterwards, when he thought of what had happened, he could never quite make up his mind whether she was walking in sleep or was awake as she came slowly toward him. They did not speak the same language and they never saw each other after that night. Perhaps she had only been restless and had got out of the bed beside her husband and made her way out of the house, without any conscious knowledge of what she was doing.
She became conscious when she came to where he was standing however, conscious and frightened. He stepped out toward her and she stopped. Their faces were very close together and her eyes were large with alarm. “The pupils dilated,” he said in speaking of that moment. He insisted upon the eyes. “There was a fluttering something in them. I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that at the moment I saw everything as clearly as though we had been standing together in the broad daylight. Perhaps something had happened to my own eyes, eh? That might be possible. I could not speak to her, reassure her—I could not say, ‘Do not be frightened, woman.’ I couldn’t say anything. My eyes I suppose had to do all the saying.”
Evidently there was something to be said. At any rate there my friend stood, on that remarkable night of his youth, and his face and the woman’s face drew nearer each other. Then their lips met and he took her into his arms and held her for a moment.
That was all. They stood together, the woman of twenty-seven and the young man of nineteen and he was a country boy and was afraid. That may be the explanation of the fact that nothing else happened.
I do not know as to that but in telling this tale I have an advantage you who read cannot have. I heard the tale told, brokenly, by the man—who had the experience I am trying to describe. Story-tellers of old times, who went from place to place telling their wonder tales, had an advantage we, who have come in the age of the printed word, do not have. They were both story tellers and actors. As they talked they modulated their voices, made gestures with their hands. Often they carried conviction simply by the power of their own conviction. All of our modern fussing with style in writing is an attempt to do the same thing.
And what I am trying to express now is a sense I had that night, as my friend talked to me in the park, of a union of two people that took place in the heavy shadows by a barn in Ohio, a union of two people that was not personal, that concerned their two bodies and at the same time did not concern their bodies. The thing has to be felt, not understood with the thinking mind.
Anyway they stood for a few minutes, five minutes perhaps, with their bodies pressed against the wall of the barn and their hands together, clasped together tightly. Now and then one of them stepped away from the barn and stood for a moment directly facing the other. One might say it was Europe facing America in the darkness by a barn. One might grow fancy and learned and say almost anything but all I am saying is that they stood as I am describing them, and oddly enough with their faces to the barn wall—instinctively turning from the house I presume—and that now and then one of them stepped out and stood for a moment facing the other. Their lips did not meet after the first moment.
The next step was taken. The German awoke in the house and began calling, and then he appeared at the kitchen door with a lantern in his hand. It was the lantern, his carrying of the lantern, that saved the situation for the wife and my friend. It made a little circle of light outside of which he could see nothing, but he kept calling his wife, whose name was Katherine, in a distracted frightened way. “Oh, Katherine. Where are you? Oh, Katherine,” he called.
My friend acted at once. Taking hold of the woman’s hand he ran—making no sound—along the shadows of the barn and across the open space between the barn and the fence. The two people were two dim shadows flitting along the dark wall of the barn, nothing more and at the place in the fence where there were no bushes he lifted her over and climbed over after her. Then he ran through the orchard and into the road before the house and putting his two hands on her shoulders shook her. As though understanding his wish, she answered her husband’s call and as the lantern came swinging down toward them my friend dodged back into the orchard.
The man and wife went toward the house, the German talking vigorously and the woman answering quietly, as she had always answered him. Tom was puzzled. Everything that happened to him that night puzzled him then and long afterward when he told me of it. Later he worked out a kind of explanation of it—as all men will do in such cases—but that is another story and the time to tell it is not now.
The point is that my friend had, at the moment, the feeling of having completely possessed the woman, and with that knowledge came also the knowledge that her husband would never possess her, could never by any chance possess her. A great tenderness swept over him and he had but one desire, to protect the woman, not to by any chance make the life she had yet to live any harder.
And so he ran quickly to the barn, secured the blanket and climbed silently up into the loft.
The farm hand with the drooping mustache was sleeping quietly on the hay and Tom lay down beside him and closed his eyes. As he expected the German came, almost at once, to the loft and flashed the lantern, not into the face of the older man but into Tom’s face. Then he went away and Tom lay awake smiling happily. He was young then and there was something proud and revengeful in him—in his attitude toward the German, at the moment. “Her husband knew, but at the same time did not know, that I had taken his woman from him,” he said to me when he told of the incident long afterward. “I don’t know why that made me so happy then, but it did. At the moment I thought I was happy only because we had both managed to escape, but now I know that wasn’t it.”
And it is quite sure my friend did have a sense of something. On the next morning when he went into the house the breakfast was on the table but the woman was not on hand to serve it. The food was on the table and the coffee on the stove and the three men ate in silence. And then Tom and the German stepped out of the house together, stepped, as by a prearranged plan into the barnyard. The German knew nothing—his wife had grown restless in the night and had got out of bed and walked out into the road and both the other men were asleep in the barn. He had never had any reason for suspecting her of anything at all and she was just the kind of woman he had wanted, never went trapsing off to town, didn’t spend a lot of money on clothes, was willing to do any kind of work, made no trouble. He wondered why he had taken such a sudden and violent dislike for his young employee.
Tom spoke first. “I think I’ll quit. I think I’d better be on my way,” he said. It was obvious his going, at just that time, would upset the plans the German had made for getting the work done at the rush time but he made no objection to Tom’s going and at once. Tom had arranged to work by the week and the German counted back to the Saturday before and tried to cheat a little. “I owe you for only one week, eh?” he said. One might as well get two days extra work out of the man without pay—if it were possible.
But Tom did not intend being defeated. “A week and four days,” he replied, purposely adding an extra day. “If you do not want to pay for the four days I’ll stay out the week.”
The German went into the house and got the money and Tom set off along the road.
When he had walked for two or three miles he stopped and went into a wood where he stayed all that day thinking of what had happened.
Perhaps he did not do much thinking. What he said, when he told the story that night in the Chicago park, was that all day there were certain figures marching through his mind and that he just sat down on a log and let them march. Did he have some notion that an impulse toward life in himself had come, and that it would not come again?
As he sat on the log there were the figures of his father and his dead mother and of several other people who had lived about the Ohio countryside where he had spent his boyhood. They kept doing things, saying things. It will be quite clear to my readers that I think my friend a story teller who for some reason has never been able to get his stories outside himself, as one might say, and that might of course explain the day in the wood. He himself thought he was in a sort of comatose state. He had not slept during the night before and, although he did not say as much, there was something a bit mysterious in the thing that had happened to him.
There was one thing he told me concerning that day of dreams that is curious. There appeared in his fancy, over and over again, the figure of a woman he had never seen in the flesh and has never seen since. At any rate it wasn’t the German’s wife, he declared.
“The figure was that of a woman but I could not tell her age,” he said. “She was walking away from me and was clad in a blue dress covered with black dots. Her figure was slender and looked strong but broken. That’s it. She was walking in a path in a country such as I had then never seen, have never seen, a country of very low hills and without trees. There was no grass either but only low bushes that came up to her knees. One might have thought it an Arctic country, where there is summer but for a few weeks each year. She had her sleeves rolled to her shoulders so that her slender arms showed, and had buried her face in the crook of her right arm. Her left arm hung like a broken thing, her legs were like broken things, her body was a broken thing.
“And yet, you see, she kept walking and walking, in the path, among the low bushes, over the barren little hills. She walked vigorously too. It seems impossible and a foolish thing to tell about but all day I sat in the woods on the stump and every time I closed my eyes I saw that woman walking thus, fairly rushing along, and yet, you see, she was all broken to pieces.”
THE MAN WHO BECAME A WOMAN