A story teller's story

by Sherwood Anderson

I returned the stare directed at me and hesitated a moment. The sick drunken man sitting among the others had a large roll of bills held in his left hand that hung at his side, and his right elbow was on the table.

What a look of suffering in his face! From time to time the others ordered drinks brought from the bar and the sick man took a bill from the roll and threw it on the table. When the change was brought by the bartender one of his companions put it in his pocket. They were taking turns, it was apparent, in robbing the man and as I looked an idea came to me. Was it true that the bartender, a more out-and-out fellow than the others, was disgusted at this slow and comparatively painless method of committing robbery? Did I see in his eyes a kind of sympathy for the man being robbed?

It was a ticklish moment for me. Having been thinking so grandiloquently of Cæsar Borgia, Lorenzo the Magnificent and other grand and courageous personages of my world of books, having just been gazing at my own hands and wondering why they would not or could not do some act of personal courage that would make me think better of myself, having these thoughts, I of a sudden wanted to rescue the man with the roll of bills but I did not want to make a fool of myself. I have always wanted not to be a fool and have been a fool so often!

I had decided to perform a certain act and at the same time began laughing at myself, not thinking I would be foolish enough to attempt it. One of these conflicts between myself, as I live in my fancy, and myself as I exist in fact, that have been going on in me since I was a child had now started. It is the sort of thing that makes autobiography, even of the half-playful sort I am now attempting, so difficult to manage. One wants to treat oneself as a person of more dignity and worth than one has the courage to attempt. Among advertising men with whom I later associated we managed things better. We took turns doing what we called “staging” each other. I was to speak highly of Smith who in turn did the same of me. The trick is not unknown to literary men, but it is difficult to manage in autobiography. The self of the fancy persists in laughing at the self of fact and does it sometimes at unfortunate moments. Also the fancy is a great liar. How often later, when I became a man of business, I did in fancy some shrewd or notable act that was never done in fact at all, but that seemed so real that it was difficult not to believe in it as a fact. I had been talking with a certain man and later thought of a number of brilliant things I might have said. Then I met a friend and told him of the conversation, putting the brilliant things in. The story several times repeated became a part of the history of my life and nothing would have later so amazed me as to have been compelled to face the facts of the conversation and the figure I had cut in it.

Was the thing I now thought myself about to do in the saloon a fact or was it but another of the fanciful acts, created in my own imagination, I might and no doubt would later relate as a fact? Would it not be better not to attempt to rescue the man in the room and later just to say I had and in the end make myself believe I had?

There was little doubt I could do the thing more gaudily in fancy. The place in which I sat was in a part of the city little frequented at night. Near it were only vacant lots and rows of dark and now empty factory buildings. It was unlikely there were any policemen in the neighborhood and in case of need and if a policeman did appear what sort of fellow was he likely to be—a fellow really appointed to the district to knock aside such interfering fools as myself? As for the men seated at the table, if they were cowards it was unlikely the bartender was one.

I kept smiling to myself, at my own thoughts, at my trick of always threshing my acts out in advance and in the end doing nothing except to create later the fiction of an act performed. “My book reading and my conversations with such fellows as Judge Turner are making a bigger fool of me than I need be,” I told myself, still looking at the empty hands lying on the table before me. What really empty things they were, those same hands of mine. They had never grasped anything, never fulfilled any purpose for me. So many fingers, so many pads of flesh in the palms, so many little muscles to grasp things, to lay hold of some situation, to drive a knife into an enemy, to lift a friend, to make love to a woman, hands to become servants of the brain and to make their owner something other than a meaningless thing of words and fancies drifting through life with millions of other meaningless men. I really thought at that time I had a brain. It is an illusion that I believe almost everyone has.

In disgust of myself my eyes stopped looking at my empty hands and looked instead about the room. What seemed to me a stream of deliciously romantic notions now came. There was no doubt the man sitting with the crew from the city’s underworld was very ill. One might have said he was about to die. A chalky pallor had spread over his face and except for his eyes everything about his face and figure expressed utter weariness. It was so people looked when they were about to die, when they were through with life, done for, glad to throw life aside.

The face and figure of the man were like that but the eyes were not. They were alive and only seemed curious and puzzled. As they looked at me from out the pale face I had the curious illusion of a voice speaking, speaking as though out of a coffin or a cavern.

Now the man’s eyes were looking from my eyes to the eyes of the bartender. Was there something commanding in them? Had the sick man, in his helpless position, the power to command the two men in the room who might conceivably be of use to him? The man had been drunk for several days, and now he was not drinking but the poison from the vile stuff he had taken had permeated his system. The same eyes had looked at the men among whom he sat and his brain had come to a decision concerning them. Men’s eyes could be impersonal sometimes. The other men at the table were of no value, had been thrown aside as useless. One fancied a thin sick body going on for days, eyes not looking about, eyes alive in a corner of the head of a man waiting for a moment of sanity.