Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam’s mind leaped back to those first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had left behind him in Caxton.

“You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than that painter’s son of Caxton,” he reminded himself, “and yet he embraced vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the lips-that-touch-liquor-shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was reserved for the lips that did not invite.”

He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business men of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of himself, quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and to shout the innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in Chicago barrooms. Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one to keep himself to himself. But on these carouses he let himself go, and got a reputation for daring audacity by slapping men on the back and singing songs with them. A glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for a time he had really believed there was such a thing as high flying vice that glistens in the sun.

Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city’s streets, he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.

He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at the windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams, and cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the place; men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their faces; sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were locked out.

He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from farms and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men believers in the golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that lurked at the bottom of men’s tales of the submerged world. He wanted his golden girl. He was like the naïve German lad in the South Water Street warehouses who had once said to him—he was a frugal soul—“I would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who will be my mistress and not charge anything.”

Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not be made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks of vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no housecleaning days in the tenderloin?

During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary decent social life could not go on without it. Often during the past year Sam had thought of the man’s talk and his brain had reeled before the thought. In towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little girls come laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered which of them would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in his hour of depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table might be made to walk with him and to share with him his thoughts.

Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam continued his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and soothed his mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought with gratitude that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of faces rolling up to him under the lights filled him with peace. “There is so much of life,” he thought, “it must come to some end.”

Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose, the faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on which the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers ached to get a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas in enduring pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able to say, “Here are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves and for your children.”