THE SAD HORN BLOWERS
IT had been a disastrous year in Will’s family. The Appletons lived on one of the outlying streets of Bidwell and Will’s father was a house painter. In early February, when there was deep snow on the ground, and a cold bitter wind blew about the houses, Will’s mother suddenly died. He was seventeen years old then, and rather a big fellow for his age.
The mother’s death happened abruptly, without warning, as a sleepy man kills a fly with the hand in a warm room on a summer day. On one February day there she was coming in at the kitchen door of the Appleton’s house, from hanging the wash out on the line in the back yard, and warming her long hands, covered with blue veins, by holding them over the kitchen stove—and then looking about at the children with that half-hidden, shy smile of hers—there she was like that, as the three children had always known her, and then, but a week later, she was cold in death and lying in her coffin in the place vaguely spoken of in the family as “the other room.”
After that, and when summer came and the family was trying hard to adjust itself to the new conditions, there came another disaster. Up to the very moment when it happened it looked as though Tom Appleton, the house painter, was in for a prosperous season. The two boys, Fred and Will, were to be his assistants that year.
To be sure Fred was only fifteen, but he was one to lend a quick alert hand at almost any undertaking. For example, when there was a job of paper hanging to be done, he was the fellow to spread on the paste, helped by an occasional sharp word from his father.
Down off his step ladder Tom Appleton hopped and ran to the long board where the paper was spread out. He liked this business of having two assistants about. Well, you see, one had the feeling of being at the head of something, of managing affairs. He grabbed the paste brush out of Fred’s hand. “Don’t spare the paste,” he shouted. “Slap her on like this. Spread her out—so. Do be sure to catch all the edges.”
It was all very warm, and comfortable, and nice, working at paper-hanging jobs in the houses on the March and April days. When it was cold or rainy outside, stoves were set up in the new houses being built, and in houses already inhabited the folks moved out of the rooms to be papered, spread newspapers on the floors over the carpets and put sheets over the furniture left in the rooms. Outside it rained or snowed, but inside it was warm and cosy.
To the Appletons it seemed, at the time, as though the death of the mother had drawn them closer together. Both Will and Fred felt it, perhaps Will the more consciously. The family was rather in the hole financially—the mother’s funeral had cost a good deal of money, and Fred was being allowed to stay out of school. That pleased him. When they worked in a house where there were other children, they came home from school in the late afternoon and looked in through the door to where Fred was spreading paste over the sheets of wall paper. He made a slapping sound with the brush, but did not look at them. “Ah, go on, you kids,” he thought. This was a man’s business he was up to. Will and his father were on the step ladders, putting the sheets carefully into place on the ceilings and walls. “Does she match down there?” the father asked sharply. “Oh-kay, go ahead,” Will replied. When the sheet was in place Fred ran and rolled out the laps with a little wooden roller. How jealous the kids of the house were. It would be a long time before any of them could stay out of school and do a man’s work, as Fred was doing.
And then in the evening, walking homeward, it was nice, too. Will and Fred had been provided with suits of white overalls that were now covered with dried paste and spots of paint and looked really professional. They kept them on and drew their overcoats on over them. Their hands were stiff with paste, too. On Main Street the lights were lighted, and other men passing called to Tom Appleton. He was called Tony in the town. “Hello, Tony!” some storekeeper shouted. It was rather too bad, Will thought that his father hadn’t more dignity. He was too boyish. Young boys growing up and merging into manhood do not fancy fathers being too boyish. Tom Appleton played a cornet in the Bidwell Silver Cornet Band and didn’t do the job very well—rather made a mess of it, when there was a bit of solo work to be done—but was so well liked by the other members of the band that no one said anything. And then he talked so grandly about music, and about the lip of a cornet player, that everyone thought he must be all right. “He has an education. I tell you what, Tony Appleton knows a lot. He’s a smart one,” the other members of the band were always saying to each other.
“Well, the devil! A man should grow up after a time, perhaps. When a man’s wife had died but such a short time before, it was just as well to walk through Main Street with more dignity—for the time being, anyway.”
Tom Appleton had a way of winking at men he passed in the street, as though to say, “Well, now I’ve got my kids with me, and we won’t say anything, but didn’t you and I have the very hell of a time last Wednesday night, eh? Mum’s the word, old pal. Keep everything quiet. There are gay times ahead for you and me. We’ll cut loose, you bet, when you and me are out together next time.”
Will grew a little angry about something he couldn’t exactly understand. His father stopped in front of Jake Mann’s meat market. “You kids go along home. Tell Kate I am bringing a steak. I’ll be right on your heels,” he said.
He would get the steak and then he would go into Alf Geiger’s saloon and get a good, stiff drink of whisky. There would be no one now to bother about smelling it on his breath when he got home later. Not that his wife had ever said anything when he wanted a drink—but you know how a man feels when there’s a woman in the house. “Why, hello, Bildad Smith—how’s the old game leg? Come on, have a little nip with me. Were you on Main Street last band meeting night and did you hear us do that new gallop? It’s a humdinger. Turkey White did that trombone solo simply grand.”
Will and Fred had got beyond Main Street now, and Will took a small pipe with a curved stem out of his overcoat pocket and lighted it. “I’ll bet I could hang a ceiling without father there at all, if only some one would give me a chance,” he said. Now that his father was no longer present to embarrass him with his lack of dignity, he felt comfortable and happy. Also, it was something to be able to smoke a pipe without discomfiture. When mother was alive she was always kissing a fellow when he came home at night, and then one had to be mighty careful about smoking. Now it was different. One had become a man and one accepted manhood with its responsibilities. “Don’t it make you sick at all?” Fred asked. “Huh, naw!” Will answered contemptuously.
The new disaster to the family came late in August, just when the fall work was all ahead, and the prospects good too. A. P. Wrigley, the jeweler, had just built a big, new house and barn on a farm he had bought the year before. It was a mile out of town on the Turner pike.
That would be a job to set the Appletons up for the winter. The house was to have three coats outside, with all the work inside, and the barn was to have two coats—and the two boys were to work with their father and were to have regular wages.
And just to think of the work to be done inside that house made Tom Appleton’s mouth water. He talked of it all the time, and in the evenings liked to sit in a chair in the Appleton’s front yard, get some neighbor over, and then go on about it. How he slung house-painter’s lingo about! The doors and cupboards were to be grained in imitation of weathered oak, the front door was to be curly maple, and there was to be black walnut, too. Well, there wasn’t another painter in the town could imitate all the various kinds of wood as Tom could. Just show him the wood, or tell him—you didn’t have to show him anything. Name what you wanted—that was enough. To be sure a man had to have the right tools, but give him the tools and then just go off and leave everything to him. What the devil! When A. P. Wrigley gave him this new house to do, he showed he was a man who knew what he was doing.
As for the practical side of the matter, everyone in the family knew that the Wrigley job meant a safe winter. There wasn’t any speculation, as when taking work on the contract plan. All work was to be paid for by the day, and the boys were to have their wages, too. It meant new suits for the boys, a new dress and maybe a hat for Kate, the house rent paid all winter, potatoes in the cellar. It meant safety—that was the truth.
In the evenings, sometimes, Tom got out his tools and looked at them. Brushes and graining tools were spread out on the kitchen table, and Kate and the boys gathered about. It was Fred’s job to see that all brushes were kept clean and, one by one, Tom ran his fingers over them, and then worked them back and forth over the palm of his hand. “This is a camel’s hair,” he said, picking a soft fine-haired brush up and handing it to Will. “I paid four dollars and eighty cents for that.” Will also worked it back and forth over the palm of his hand, just as his father had done and then Kate picked it up and did the same thing. “It’s as soft as the cat’s back,” she said. Will thought that rather silly. He looked forward to the day when he would have brushes ladders and pots of his own, and could show them off before people and through his mind went words he had picked up from his father’s talk. One spoke of the “heel” and “toe” of a brush. The way to put on varnish was to “flow” it on. Will knew all the words of his trade now and didn’t have to talk like one of the kind of muts who just does, now and then, a jack job of house painting.
On the fatal evening a surprise party was held for Mr. and Mrs. Bardshare, who lived just across the road from the Appletons on Piety Hill. That was a chance for Tom Appleton. In any such affair he liked to have a hand in the arrangements. “Come on now, we’ll make her go with a bang. They’ll be setting in the house after supper, and Bill Bardshare will be in his stocking feet, and Ma Bardshare washing the dishes. They won’t be expecting nothing, and we’ll slip up, all dressed in our Sundey clothes, and let out a whoop. I’ll bring my cornet and let out a blast on that too. ‘What in Sam Hill is that?’ Say, I can just see Bill Bardshare jumping up and beginning to swear, thinking we’re a gang of kids come to bother him, like Hallowe’en, or something like that. You just get the grub, and I’ll make the coffee over to my house and bring it over hot. I’ll get ahold of two big pots and make a whooping lot of it.”
In the Appleton house all was in a flurry. Tom, Will and Fred were painting a barn, three miles out of town, but they knocked off work at four and Tom got the farmer’s son to drive them to town. He himself had to wash up, take a bath in a tub in the woodshed, shave and everything—just like Sunday. He looked more like a boy than a man when he got all dogged up.
And then the family had to have supper, over and done with, a little after six, and Tom didn’t dare go outside the house until dark. It wouldn’t do to have the Bardshares see him so fixed up. It was their wedding anniversary, and they might suspect something. He kept trotting about the house, and occasionally looked out of the front window toward the Bardshare house. “You kid, you,” Kate said, laughing. Sometimes she talked up to him like that, and after she said it he went upstairs, and getting out his cornet blew on it, so softly, you could hardly hear him downstairs. When he did that you couldn’t tell how badly he played, as when the band was going it on Main Street and he had to carry a passage right through alone. He sat in the room upstairs thinking. When Kate laughed at him it was like having his wife back, alive. There was the same shy sarcastic gleam in her eyes.
Well, it was the first time he had been out anywhere since his wife had died, and there might be some people think it would be better if he stayed at home now—look better, that is. When he had shaved he had cut his chin, and the blood had come. After a time he went downstairs and stood before the looking-glass, hung above the kitchen sink, and dabbed at the spot with the wet end of a towel.
Will and Fred stood about.
Will’s mind was working—perhaps Kate’s, too. “Was there—could it be?—well, at such a party—only older people invited—there were always two or three widow women thrown in for good measure, as it were.”
Kate didn’t want any woman fooling around her kitchen. She was twenty years old.
“And it was just as well not to have any monkey-shine talk about motherless children,” such as Tom might indulge in. Even Fred thought that. There was a little wave of resent against Tom in the house. It was a wave that didn’t make much noise, just crept, as it were softly, up a low sandy beach.
“Widow women went to such places, and then of course, people were always going home in couples.” Both Kate and Will had the same picture in mind. It was late at night and in fancy they were both peeking out at front upper windows of the Appleton house. There were all the people coming out at the front door of the Bardshare house, and Bill Bardshare was standing there and holding the door open. He had managed to sneak away during the evening, and got his Sunday clothes on all right.
And the couples were coming out. “There was that woman now, that widow, Mrs. Childers.” She had been married twice, both husbands dead now, and she lived away over Maumee Pike way. “What makes a woman of her age want to act silly like that? It is the very devil how a woman can keep looking young and handsome after she has buried two men. There are some who say that, even when her last husband was alive—”
“But whether that’s true or not, what makes her want to act and talk silly that way?” Now her face is turned to the light and she is saying to old Bill Bardshare, “Sleep light, sleep tight, sweet dreams to you tonight.”
“It’s only what one may expect when one’s father lacks a sense of dignity. There is that old fool Tom now, hopping out of the Bardshare house like a kid, and running right up to Mrs. Childers. ‘May I see you home?’ he is saying, while all the others are laughing and smiling knowingly. It makes one’s blood run cold to see such a thing.”
“Well, fill up the pots. Let’s get the old coffee pots started, Kate. The gang’ll be creeping along up the street pretty soon now,” Tom shouted self-consciously, skipping busily about and breaking the little circle of thoughts in the house.
What happened was that—just as darkness came and when all the people were in the front yard before the Appleton house—Tom went and got it into his head to try to carry his cornet and two big coffee pots at the same time. Why didn’t he leave the coffee until later? There the people were in the dusk outside the house, and there was that kind of low whispering and tittering that always goes on at such a time—and then Tom stuck his head out at the door and shouted, “Let her go!”
And then he must have gone quite crazy, for he ran back into the kitchen and grabbed both of the big coffee pots, hanging on to his cornet at the same time. Of course he stumbled in the darkness in the road outside and fell, and of course all of that boiling hot coffee had to spill right over him.
It was terrible. The flood of boiling hot coffee made steam under his thick clothes, and there he lay screaming with the pain of it. What a confusion! He just writhed and screamed, and the people ran ’round and ’round in the half darkness like crazy things. Was it some kind of joke the crazy fellow was up to at the last minute! Tom always was such a devil to think up things. “You should see him down at Alf Geigers, sometimes on Saturday nights, imitating the way Joe Douglas got out on a limb, and then sawed it off between himself and the tree, and the look on Joe’s face when the limb began to crack. It would make you laugh until you screamed to see him imitate that.”
“But what now? My God!” There was Kate Appleton trying to tear her father’s clothes off, and crying and whimpering, and young Will Appleton knocking people aside. “Say, the man’s hurt! What’s happened? My God! Run for the doctor, someone. He’s burnt, something awful!”
Early in October Will Appleton sat in the smoking car of a day train that runs between Cleveland and Buffalo. His destination was Erie, Pennsylvania, and he had got on the passenger train at Ashtabula, Ohio. Just why his destination was Erie he couldn’t very easily have explained. He was going there anyway, going to get a job in a factory or on the docks there. Perhaps it was just a quirk of the mind that had made him decide upon Erie. It wasn’t as big as Cleveland or Buffalo or Toledo or Chicago, or any one of a lot of other cities to which he might have gone, looking for work.
At Ashtabula he came into the car and slid into a seat beside a little old man. His own clothes were wet and wrinkled, and his hair, eyebrows and ears were black with coal dust.
At the moment, there was in him a kind of bitter dislike of his native town, Bidwell. “Sakes alive, a man couldn’t get any work there—not in the winter.” After the accident to his father, and the spoiling of all the family plans, he had managed to find employment during September on the farms. He worked for a time with a threshing crew, and then got work cutting corn. It was all right. “A man made a dollar a day and board, and as he wore overalls all the time, he didn’t wear out no clothes. Still and all, the time when a fellow could make any money in Bidwell was past now, and the burns on his father’s body had gone pretty deep, and he might be laid up for months.”
Will had just made up his mind one day, after he had tramped about all morning from farm to farm without finding work, and then he had gone home and told Kate. “Dang it all,” he hadn’t intended lighting out right away—had thought he would stay about for a week or two, maybe. Well, he would go up town in the evening, dressed up in his best clothes, and stand around. “Hello, Harry, what you going to do this winter? I thought I would run over to Erie, Pennsylvania. I got an offer in a factory over there. Well, so long—if I don’t see you again.”
Kate hadn’t seemed to understand, had seemed in an almighty hurry about getting him off. It was a shame she couldn’t have a little more heart. Still, Kate was all right—worried a good deal no doubt. After their talk she had just said, “Yes, I think that’s best, you had better go,” and had gone to change the bandages on Tom’s legs and back. The father was sitting among pillows in a rocking chair in the front room.
Will went up stairs and put his things, overalls and a few shirts, into a bundle. Then he went down stairs and took a walk—went out along a road that led into the country, and stopped on a bridge. It was near a place where he and other kids used to come swimming on summer afternoons. A thought had come into his head. There was a young fellow worked in Pawsey’s jewelry store came to see Kate sometimes on Sunday evenings and they went off to walk together. “Did Kate want to get married?” If she did his going away now might be for good. He hadn’t thought about that before. On that afternoon, and quite suddenly, all the world outside of Bidwell seemed huge and terrible to him and a few secret tears came into his eyes, but he managed to choke them back. For just a moment his mouth opened and closed queerly, like the mouth of a fish, when you take it out of the water and hold it in your hand.
When he returned to the house at supper time things were better. He had left his bundle on a chair in the kitchen and Kate had wrapped it more carefully, and had put in a number of things he had forgotten. His father called him into the front room. “It’s all right, Will. Every young fellow ought to take a whirl out in the world. I did it myself, at about your age,” Tom had said, a little pompously.
Then supper was served, and there was apple pie. That was a luxury the Appletons had perhaps better not have indulged in at that time, but Will knew Kate had baked it during the afternoon,—it might be as a way of showing him how she felt. Eating two large slices had rather set him up.
And then, before he realized how the time was slipping away, ten o’clock had come, and it was time for him to go. He was going to beat his way out of town on a freight train, and there was a local going toward Cleveland at ten o’clock. Fred had gone off to bed, and his father was asleep in the rocking chair in the front room. He had picked up his bundle, and Kate had put on her hat. “I’m going to see you off,” she had said.
Will and Kate had walked in silence along the streets to where he was to wait, in the shadow of Whaley’s Warehouse, until the freight came along. Later when he thought back over that evening he was glad, that although she was three years older, he was taller than Kate.
How vividly everything that happened later stayed in his mind. After the train came, and he had crawled into an empty coal car, he sat hunched up in a corner. Overhead he could see the sky, and when the train stopped at towns there was always the chance the car in which he was concealed would be shoved into a siding, and left. The brakemen walked along the tracks beside the car shouting to each other and their lanterns made little splashes of light in the darkness.
“How black the sky!” After a time it began to rain. “His suit would be in a pretty mess. After all a fellow couldn’t come right out and ask his sister if she intended to marry. If Kate married, then his father would also marry again. It was all right for a young woman like Kate, but for a man of forty to think of marriage—the devil! Why didn’t Tom Appleton have more dignity? After all, Fred was only a kid and a new woman coming in, to be his mother—that might be all right for a kid.”
All during that night on the freight train Will had thought a good deal about marriage—rather vague thoughts—coming and going like birds flying in and out of a bush. It was all a matter—this business of man and woman—that did not touch him very closely—not yet. The matter of having a home—that was something else. A home was something at a fellow’s back. When one went off to work all week at some farm, and at night maybe went into a strange room to sleep, there was always the Appleton house—floating as it were, like a picture at the back of the mind—the Appleton house, and Kate moving about. She had been up town, and now had come home and was going up the stairs. Tom Appleton was fussing about in the kitchen. He liked a bite before he went off to bed for the night but presently he would go up stairs and into his own room. He liked to smoke his pipe before he slept and sometimes he got out his cornet and blew two or three soft sad notes.
At Cleveland Will had crawled off of the freight train and had gone across the city in a street-car. Workingmen were just going to the factories and he passed among them unnoticed. If his clothes were crumpled and soiled, their clothes weren’t so fine. The workingmen were all silent, looking at the car floor, or out at the car windows. Long rows of factories stood along the streets through which the car moved.
He had been lucky, and had caught another freight out of a place called Collinswood at eight, but at Ashtabula had made up his mind it would be better to drop off the freight and take a passenger train. If he was to live in Erie it would be just as well to arrive, looking more like a gentleman and having paid his fare.
As he sat in the smoking car of the train he did not feel much like a gentleman. The coal dust had got into his hair and the rain had washed it in long dirty streaks down over his face. His clothes were badly soiled and wanted cleaning and brushing and the paper package, in which his overalls and shirts were tied, had become torn and dirty.
Outside the train window the sky was grey, and no doubt the night was going to turn cold. Perhaps there would be a cold rain.
It was an odd thing about the towns through which the train kept passing—all of the houses in all the towns looked cold and forbidding. “Dang it all.” In Bidwell, before the night when his father got so badly burned being such a fool about old Bill Bardshare’s party—all the houses had always seemed warm cozy places. When one was alone, one walked along the streets whistling. At night warm lights shone through the windows of the houses. “John Wyatt, the drayman, lives in that house. His wife has a wen on her neck. In that barn over there old Doctor Musgrave keeps his bony old white horse. The horse looks like the devil, but you bet he can go.”
Will squirmed about on the car seat. The old man who sat beside him was small, almost as small as Fred, and he wore a queer-looking suit. The pants were brown, and the coat checked, grey and black. There was a small leather case on the floor at his feet.
Long before the man spoke Will knew what would happen. It was bound to turn out that such a fellow played a cornet. He was a man, old in years, but there was no dignity in him. Will remembered his father’s marchings through the main street of Bidwell with the band. It was some great day, Fourth of July, perhaps, and all the people were assembled and there was Tony Appleton, making a show of blowing his cornet at a great rate. Did all the people along the street know how badly he played and was there a kind of conspiracy, that kept grown men from laughing at each other? In spite of the seriousness of his own situation a smile crept over Will’s face.
The little man at his side smiled in return.
“Well,” he began, not stopping for anything but plunging headlong into a tale concerning some dissatisfaction he felt with life, “well, you see before you a man who is up against it, young fellow.” The old man tried to laugh at his own words, but did not make much of a success of it. His lip trembled. “I got to go home like a dog, with my tail ’twixt my legs,” he declared abruptly.
The old man balanced back and forth between two impulses. He had met a young man on a train, and hungered for companionship and one got oneself in with others by being jolly, a little gay perhaps. When one met a stranger on a train one told a story—“By the way, Mister, I heard a new one the other day—perhaps you haven’t heard it? It’s about the miner up in Alaska who hadn’t seen a woman for years.” One began in that way, and then later perhaps, spoke of oneself, and one’s affairs.
But the old man wanted to plunge at once into his own story. He talked, saying sad discouraged words, while his eyes kept smiling with a peculiar appealing little smile. “If the words uttered by my lips annoy or bore you, do not pay any attention to them. I am really a jolly fellow although I am an old man, and not of much use any more,” the eyes were saying. The eyes were pale blue and watery. How strange to see them set in the head of an old man. They belonged in the head of a lost dog. The smile was not really a smile. “Don’t kick me, young fellow. If you can’t give me anything to eat, scratch my head. At least show you are a fellow of good intentions. I’ve been kicked about quite enough.” It was so very evident the eyes were speaking a language of their own.
Will found himself smiling sympathetically. It was true there was something dog-like in the little old man and Will was pleased with himself for having so quickly caught the sense of him. “One who can see things with his eyes will perhaps get along all right in the world, after all,” he thought. His thoughts wandered away from the old man. In Bidwell there was an old woman lived alone and owned a shepherd dog. Every summer she decided to cut away the dog’s coat, and then—at the last moment and after she had in fact started the job—she changed her mind. Well, she grasped a long pair of scissors firmly in her hand and started on the dog’s flanks. Her hand trembled a little. “Shall I go ahead, or shall I stop?” After two minutes she gave up the job. “It makes him look too ugly,” she thought, justifying her timidity.
Later the hot days came, the dog went about with his tongue hanging out and again the old woman took the scissors in her hand. The dog stood patiently waiting but, when she had cut a long wide furrow through the thick hair of his back, she stopped again. In a sense, and to her way of looking at the matter, cutting away his splendid coat was like cutting away a part of himself. She couldn’t go on. “Now there—that made him look worse than ever,” she declared to herself. With a determined air she put the scissors away, and all summer the dog went about looking a little puzzled and ashamed.
Will kept smiling and thinking of the old woman’s dog and then looked again at his companion of the train. The variegated suit the old man wore gave him something of the air of the half-sheared shepherd dog. Both had the same puzzled, ashamed air.
Now Will had begun using the old man for his own ends. There was something inside himself that wanted facing, he didn’t want to face—not yet. Ever since he had left home, in fact ever since that day when he had come home from the country and had told Kate of his intention to set out into the world, he had been dodging something. If one thought of the little old man, and of the half-sheared dog, one did not have to think of oneself.
One thought of Bidwell on a summer afternoon. There was the old woman, who owned the dog, standing on the porch of her house, and the dog had run down to the gate. In the winter, when his coat had again fully grown, the dog would bark and make a great fuss about a boy passing in the street but now he started to bark and growl, and then stopped. “I look like the devil, and I’m attracting unnecessary attention to myself,” the dog seemed to have decided suddenly. He ran furiously down to the gate, opened his mouth to bark, and then, quite abruptly, changed his mind and trotted back to the house with his tail between his legs.
Will kept smiling at his own thoughts. For the first time since he had left Bidwell he felt quite cheerful.
And now the old man was telling a story of himself and his life, but Will wasn’t listening. Within the young man a cross-current of impulses had been set up and he was like one standing silently in the hallway of a house, and listening to two voices, talking at a distance. The voices came from two widely separated rooms of the house and one couldn’t make up one’s mind to which voice to listen.
To be sure the old man was another cornet player like his father—he was a horn blower. That was his horn in the little worn leather case on the car floor.
And after he had reached middle age, and after his first wife had died, he had married again. He had a little property then and, in a foolish moment, went and made it all over to his second wife, who was fifteen years younger than himself. She took the money and bought a large house in the factory district of Erie, and then began taking in boarders.
There was the old man, feeling lost, of no account in his own house. It just came about. One had to think of the boarders—their wants had to be satisfied. His wife had two sons, almost fully grown now, both of whom worked in a factory.
Well, it was all right—everything on the square—the sons paid board all right. Their wants had to be thought of, too. He liked blowing his cornet a while in the evenings, before he went to bed, but it might disturb the others in the house. One got rather desperate going about saying nothing, keeping out of the way and he had tried getting work in a factory himself, but they wouldn’t have him. His grey hairs stood in his way, and so one night he had just got out, had gone to Cleveland, where he had hoped to get a job in a band, in a movie theatre perhaps. Anyway it hadn’t turned out and now he was going back to Erie and to his wife. He had written and she had told him to come on home.
“They didn’t turn me down back there in Cleveland because I’m old. It’s because my lip is no good any more,” he explained. His shrunken old lip trembled a little.
Will kept thinking of the old woman’s dog. In spite of himself, and when the old man’s lip trembled, his lip also trembled.
What was the matter with him?
He stood in the hallway of a house hearing two voices. Was he trying to close his ears to one of them? Did the second voice, the one he had been trying all day, and all the night before, not to hear, did that have something to do with the end of his life in the Appleton house at Bidwell? Was the voice trying to taunt him, trying to tell him that now he was a thing swinging in air, that there was no place to put down his feet? Was he afraid? Of what was he afraid? He had wanted so much to be a man, to stand on his own feet and now what was the matter with him? Was he afraid of manhood?
He was fighting desperately now. There were tears in the old man’s eyes, and Will also began crying silently and that was the one thing he felt he must not do.
The old man talked on and on, telling the tale of his troubles, but Will could not hear his words. The struggle within was becoming more and more definite. His mind clung to the life of his boyhood, to the life in the Appleton house in Bidwell.
There was Fred, standing in the field of his fancy now, with just the triumphant look in his eyes that came when other boys saw him doing a man’s work. A whole series of pictures floated up before Will’s mind. He and his father and Fred were painting a barn and two farmer boys had come along a road and stood looking at Fred, who was on a ladder, putting on paint. They shouted, but Fred wouldn’t answer. There was a certain air Fred had—he slapped on the paint, and then turning his head, spat on the ground. Tom Appleton’s eyes looked into Will’s and there was a smile playing about the corners of the father’s eyes and the son’s eyes too. The father and his oldest son were like two men, two workmen, having a delicious little secret between them. They were both looking lovingly at Fred. “Bless him! He thinks he’s a man already.”
And now Tom Appleton was standing in the kitchen of his house, and his brushes were laid out on the kitchen table. Kate was rubbing a brush back and forth over the palm of her hand. “It’s as soft as the cat’s back,” she was saying.
Something gripped at Will’s throat. As in a dream, he saw his sister Kate walking off along the street on Sunday evening with that young fellow who clerked in the jewelry store. They were going to church. Her being with him meant—well, it perhaps meant the beginning of a new home—it meant the end of the Appleton home.
Will started to climb out of the seat beside the old man in the smoking car of the train. It had grown almost dark in the car. The old man was still talking, telling his tale over and over. “I might as well not have any home at all,” he was saying. Was Will about to begin crying aloud on a train, in a strange place, before many strange men. He tried to speak, to make some commonplace remark, but his mouth only opened and closed like the mouth of a fish taken out of the water.
And now the train had run into a train shed, and it was quite dark. Will’s hand clutched convulsively into the darkness and alighted upon the old man’s shoulder.
Then suddenly, the train had stopped, and the two stood half embracing each other. The tears were quite evident in Will’s eyes, when a brakeman lighted the overhead lamps in the car, but the luckiest thing in the world had happened. The old man, who had seen Will’s tears, thought they were tears of sympathy for his own unfortunate position in life and a look of gratitude came into his blue watery eyes. Well, this was something new in life for him, too. In one of the pauses, when he had first begun telling his tale, Will had said he was going to Erie to try to get work in some factory and now, as they got off the train, the old man clung to Will’s arm. “You might as well come live at our house,” he said. A look of hope flared up in the old man’s eyes. If he could bring home with him, to his young wife, a new boarder, the gloom of his own home-coming would be somewhat lightened. “You come on. That’s the best thing to do. You just come on with me to our house,” he plead, clinging to Will.
Two weeks had passed and Will had, outwardly, and to the eyes of the people about him, settled into his new life as a factory hand at Erie, Pennsylvania.
Then suddenly, on a Saturday evening, the thing happened that he had unconsciously been expecting and dreading ever since the moment when he climbed aboard the freight train in the shadow of Whaley’s Warehouse at Bidwell. A letter, containing great news, had come from Kate.
At the moment of their parting, and before he settled himself down out of sight in a corner of the empty coal car, on that night of his leaving, he had leaned out for a last look at his sister. She had been standing silently in the shadows of the warehouse, but just as the train was about to start, stepped toward him and a light from a distant street lamp fell on her face.
Well, the face did not jump toward Will, but remained dimly outlined in the uncertain light.
Did her lips open and close, as though in an effort to say something to him, or was that an effect produced by the distant, uncertain and wavering light? In the families of working people the dramatic and vital moments of life are passed over in silence. Even in the moments of death and birth, little is said. A child is born to a laborer’s wife and he goes into the room. She is in bed with the little red bundle of new life beside her and her husband stands a moment, fumblingly, beside the bed. Neither he or his wife can look directly into each other’s eyes. “Take care of yourself, Ma. Have a good rest,” he says, and hurries out of the room.
In the darkness by the warehouse at Bidwell Kate had taken two or three steps toward Will, and then had stopped. There was a little strip of grass between the warehouse and the tracks, and she stood upon it. Was there a more final farewell trembling on her lips at the moment? A kind of dread had swept over Will, and no doubt Kate had felt the same thing. At the moment she had become altogether the mother, in the presence of her child, and the thing within that wanted utterance became submerged. There was a word to be said that she could not say. Her form seemed to sway a little in the darkness and, to Will’s eyes, she became a slender indistinct thing. “Goodbye,” he had whispered into the darkness, and perhaps her lips had formed the same words. Outwardly there had been only the silence, and in the silence she had stood as the train rumbled away.
And now, on the Saturday evening, Will had come home from the factory 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