Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

In their car, homeward bound, Sam put the thoughts of the woman away from him and taking Sue in his arms prayed silently for some help against he knew not what.

“I think I will go to Caxton in the morning and have a talk with Mary Underwood,” he said.

After his return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to occupy Sue’s mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their jokes and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from them for his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked, Sam getting forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly lecture on his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed the point. She had seemed to suppose that the loss of the children had fallen singly upon Sue. She had not counted upon him, and he had depended upon her doing just that. He had come as a boy to his mother wanting to talk of himself and she had wept at the thought of the childless wife and had told him how to set about making her happy.

“Well, I will set about it,” he thought on the train coming home; “I will find for her this new interest and make her less dependent upon me. Then I also will take hold anew and work out for myself a programme for a way of life.”

One afternoon when he came home from the office he found Sue filled indeed with a new idea. With glowing cheeks she sat beside him through the evening and talked of the beauties of a life devoted to social service.

“I have been thinking things out,” she said, her eyes shining. “We must not allow ourselves to become sordid. We must keep to the vision. We must together give the best in our lives and our fortunes to mankind. We must make ourselves units in the great modern movements for social uplift.”

Sam looked at the fire and a chill feeling of doubt ran through him. He could not see himself as a unit in anything. His mind did not run out toward the thought of being one of the army of philanthropists or rich social uplifters he had met talking and explaining in the reading rooms of clubs. No answering flame burned in his heart as it had burned that evening by the bridle path in Jackson Park when she had expounded another idea. But the thought of a need of new interest for her coming to him, he turned to her smiling.

“It sounds all right but I know nothing of such things,” he said.

After that evening Sue began to get a hold upon herself. The old fire came back into her eyes and she went about the house with a smile upon her face and talked through the evenings to her silent, attentive husband of the life of usefulness, the full life. One day she told him of her election to the presidency of a society for the rescue of fallen women, and he began seeing her name in the newspapers in connection with various charity and civic movements. At the house a new sort of men and women began appearing at the dinner table; a strangely earnest, feverish, half fanatical people, Sam thought, with an inclination toward corsetless dresses and uncut hair, who talked far into the night and worked themselves into a sort of religious zeal over what they called their movement. Sam found them likely to run to startling statements, noticed that they sat on the edges of their chairs when they talked, and was puzzled by their tendency toward making the most revolutionary statements without pausing to back them up. When he questioned a statement made by one of these people, he came down upon him with a rush that quite carried him away and then, turning to the others, looked at them wisely like a cat that has swallowed a mouse. “Ask us another question if you dare,” their faces seemed to be saying, while their tongues declared that they were but students of the great problem of right living.

With these new people Sam never made any progress toward real understanding and friendship. For a time he tried honestly to get some of their own fervent devotions to their ideas and to be impressed by what they said of their love of man, even going with them to some of their meetings, at one of which he sat among the fallen women gathered in, and listened to a speech by Sue.