The book she read expressed perhaps the high-school girl’s dream, the dream she had when she married and came to Chicago. Was her dream the same now? I had already, as far as I reacted to the life about me at all, started upon another road, was becoming, a little, the eternal questioner of myself and others. Not for me the standardized little pellets of opinion, the little neatly wrapped packages of sentiment the magazine writers had learned to do up, I told myself. In modern factories food was packed in convenient standard-sized packages and I half suspected that behind the high-sounding labels the food was often enough sawdust or something of the sort. It was apparent publishers also had learned to do up neat packages containing sawdust and put bright-colored labels on them.
Oh, glorious contempt! Seeing the book the woman was reading, knowing she was the wife of another and that never by any chance could we come close to each other, give to each other anything of value, I enjoyed my contempt for an hour and then it faded. I sat as before by my window and held an open book but could not follow the thoughts and ideas of the writer of the book. I sat by my window and she with her book sat by her window.
Was something about to happen that neither of us wanted, of which we were both afraid, that would be without value to either of us?
One evening when I met her in the hallway of the building I stopped before her and we stood thus for a minute facing each other. We both blushed, both felt guilty, and then I tried to say something to her but did not succeed. I stammered out a few words about the weather, saying how hot it was, and hurried away but a week later, when we again met in the same place it was dark and we kissed.
We began then to walk in silence together in the park in the early evenings and sometimes we sat together on a park bench. How careful we were not to be seen by others who lived in our building. Her husband left the house at three in the afternoon and did not return until midnight and when he came home he was tired and discouraged. He scolded at his wife. “He is always scolding,” she said. Well, one wanted to save money, get into business for oneself. And now he had a wife to support and the wages of street-car conductors were not large. The young man who wanted to rise in the world had begun to resent his wife and she felt it vaguely, uneasily. She also was filled with resentment. Did she want revenge? She had no words to express what she felt and I had no way of understanding. Was I not also confused, wanting something very much, that at the same time I did not want? I sat in my room until darkness came holding the book I now could not read and when the darkness had come threw it with a loud bang on a table. The sound had become a signal to her and when I went into the park she came to join me. One evening when we had kissed in the darkness of the park I went home ahead of her but did not close the door of my room. I stood in the darkness by the door waiting. She had to pass along the hallway to reach her own place and I put out my hand and drew her inside.
“I’m afraid,” she kept saying, “I don’t want to. I’m afraid.” What a queer silent frightened love-making it was—no love-making at all. She was afraid and I was afraid, not of her husband but of myself. Later she went away crying silently along the hallway and after that she and I did not sit at our two windows or walk in the park and I returned to my books. Once, on a night two or three weeks later as I lay in my own bedroom, I heard the husband and wife talking together. Something had happened that had pleased and excited her. She had been able to offer something she thought would help her husband and was urging him to give up being a street-car conductor and to go back to the town from which they had come. Her father owned a store there, I gathered, and had objected to her marriage but she had secretly written, perhaps been very humble, and had persuaded her father to take the younger man into partnership in his business. “Don’t be proud now, Jim. I’m not proud any more. Something has happened to me Jim. I’m not proud any more,” I heard her saying as I lay in my own room in the darkness, and I leave the reader to judge whether, under the circumstances, I could be proud. But perhaps after all the woman and I have done something for each other, I thought.
NOTE IX
ON a certain Sunday morning of that summer I found myself sitting in a little garden under apple trees back of a red brick house that had green window blinds and that stood on the side of a hill near the edge of an Illinois town of some five or six thousand people. Sitting by a small table near me was a dark slender man with pale cheeks, a man I had never seen until late on the evening before and who I had half thought would die but a few hours earlier. Now, although the morning was warm, he had a blanket wrapped around him and his thin hands, lying on the table, trembled. Together we were drinking our morning coffee, containing a touch of brandy. A robin hopped on the grass near by and the sunlight falling through the branches of the trees made yellow patches at our feet.
I sat in silence filled with wonder at the strangeness of the circumstances that had brought me to the spot and of my own mood. The garden in which we sat had a gravel path running down through the centre and on one side vegetables grew, with narrow beds of flowers about the vegetable plots. Along the further side against a fence were tall berry bushes and on our side there was grass under the trees and near by a tall hedge of elders. Looking toward the foot of the garden one got a view of a river valley dotted with farmhouses and beyond the elders there was a road that led along a hillside down into town.
The town itself was old, for that Illinois country, and had already had two lives. First, it had been a river town on the banks of a stream that led down into the Mississippi, and now it was a merchandising centre. Later perhaps it would become a factory town. The river life had died, when the railroads came but there still were some remnants of the older place, one or two streets of small log stores and houses standing on a bluff above the river and now used as residences by farm laborers. The old town, left thus off by itself half forgotten by the new town, was picturesque. In the company of my strange new acquaintance and once with his father, an old man who had lived in the river town in the days of its prosperity, I later spent several hours among the old houses. Dogs and pigs wandered through the deep dust of the principal street facing the river or slept in the shade of the old buildings and the old man told me that even in its better days it was a quite terrible place. In the winter, in the early days, the roads were hub deep to the wagons with mud, the houses were small and near each house was an outhouse that smelled horribly in summer and invited millions of flies. Pigs, cows and horses were kept in little sheds near the houses and often diseases, encouraged by the utter lack of sanitation, swept through the town and sometimes carried off whole families.