Poor White: A Novel

by Sherwood Anderson

For a long time he struggled with that thought. Tom, Steve, all the Bidwell men with whom he had been associated, had a philosophy into which the thought did not fit. “When you put your hand to the plow do not turn back,” they said. Their language was full of such sayings. To attempt to do a thing and fail was the great crime, the sin against the Holy Ghost. There was unconscious defiance of a whole civilization in Hugh's attitude toward the completion of the parts that would help Tom and his business associates “get around” the Iowa man's patent.

The train from Pittsburgh went through northern Ohio to a junction where Hugh would get another train for Bidwell. Great booming towns, Youngstown, Akron, Canton, Massillon—manufacturing towns all—lay along the way. In the smoker Hugh sat, again playing with the colored stones held in his hand. There was relief for his mind in the stones. The light continually played about them, and their color shifted and changed. One could look at the stones and get relief from thoughts. Raising his eyes he looked out of the car window. The train was passing through Youngstown. His eyes looked along grimy streets of worker's houses clustered closely about huge mills. The same light that had played over the stones in his hand began to play over his mind, and for a moment he became not an inventor but a poet. The revolution within had really begun. A new declaration of independence wrote itself within him. “The gods have thrown the towns like stones over the flat country, but the stones have no color. They do not burn and change in the light,” he thought.

Two men who sat in a seat in the westward bound train began to talk, and Hugh listened. One of them had a son in college. “I want him to be a mechanical engineer,” he said. “If he doesn't do that I'll get him started in business. It's a mechanical age and a business age. I want to see him succeed. I want him to keep in the spirit of the times.”

Hugh's train was due in Bidwell at ten, but did not arrive until half after eleven. He walked from the station through the town toward the Butterworth farm.

At the end of their first year of marriage a daughter had been born to Clara, and some time before his trip to Pittsburgh she had told him she was again pregnant. “She may be sitting up. I must get home,” he thought, but when he got to the bridge near the farmhouse, the bridge on which he had stood beside Clara that first time they were together, he got out of the road and went to sit on a fallen log at the edge of a grove of trees.

“How quiet and peaceful the night!” he thought and leaning forward held his long, troubled face in his hands. He wondered why peace and quiet would not come to him, why life would not let him alone. “After all, I've lived a simple life and have done good work,” he thought. “Some of the things they've said about me are true enough. I've invented machines that save useless labor, I've lightened men's labor.”

Hugh tried to cling to that thought, but it would not stay in his mind. All the thoughts that gave his mind peace and quiet flew away like birds seen on a distant horizon at evening. It had been so ever since that night when he was suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by the crazed harness maker in the motor. Before that his mind had often been unsettled, but he knew what he wanted. He wanted men and women and close association with men and women. Often his problem was yet more simple. He wanted a woman, one who would love him and lie close to him at night. He wanted the respect of his fellows in the town where he had come to live his life. He wanted to succeed at the particular task to which he had set his hand.

The attack made upon him by the insane harness maker had at first seemed to settle all his problems. At the moment when the frightened and desperate man sank his teeth and fingers into Hugh's neck, something had happened to Clara. It was Clara who, with a strength and quickness quite amazing, had torn the insane man away. All through that evening she had been hating her husband and father, and then suddenly she loved Hugh. The seeds of a child were already alive in her, and when the body of her man was furiously attacked, he became also her child. Swiftly, like the passing of a shadow over the surface of a river on a windy day, the change in her attitude toward her husband took place. All that evening she had been hating the new age she had thought so perfectly personified in the two men, who talked of the making of machines while the beauty of the night was whirled away into the darkness with the cloud of dust thrown into the air by the flying motor. She had been hating Hugh and sympathizing with the dead past he and other men like him were destroying, the past that was represented by the figure of the old harness maker who wanted to do his work by hand in the old way, by the man who had aroused the scorn and derision of her father.

And then the past rose up to strike. It struck with claws and teeth, and the claws and teeth sank into Hugh's flesh, into the flesh of the man whose seed was already alive within her.

At that moment the woman who had been a thinker stopped thinking. Within her arose the mother, fierce, indomitable, strong with the strength of the roots of a tree. To her then and forever after Hugh was no hero, remaking the world, but a perplexed boy hurt by life. He never again escaped out of boyhood in her consciousness of him. With the strength of a tigress she tore the crazed harness maker away from Hugh, and with something of the surface brutality of another Ed Hall, threw him to the floor of the car. When Ed and the policeman, assisted by several bystanders, came running forward, she waited almost indifferently while they forced the screaming and kicking man through the crowd and in at the door of the police station.