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by Sherwood Anderson

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Title: Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories

Author: Sherwood Anderson

Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7048]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on February 28, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRIUMPH OF THE EGG ***




This eBook was produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred,
Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team





The Triumph Of The Egg

A Book Of Impressions
From American Life
In Tales And Poems

By
Sherwood Anderson

In Clay By
Tennessee Mitchell

In the fields
Seeds on the air floating.
In the towns
Black smoke for a shroud.
In my breast
Understanding awake.
_Mid American Chants_.

To
Robert And John Anderson




Tales are people who sit on the doorstep of the house of my mind.
It is cold outside and they sit waiting.
I look out at a window.

The tales have cold hands,
Their hands are freezing.

A short thickly-built tale arises and threshes his arms about.
His nose is red and he has two gold teeth.

There is an old female tale sitting hunched up in a cloak.

Many tales come to sit for a few moments on the doorstep
and then go away.
It is too cold for them outside.
The street before the door of the house of my mind is
filled with tales.
They murmur and cry out, they are dying of cold and hunger.

I am a helpless man--my hands tremble.
I should be sitting on a bench like a tailor.
I should be weaving warm cloth out of the threads of thought.
The tales should be clothed.
They are freezing on the doorstep of the house of my mind.

I am a helpless man--my hands tremble.
I feel in the darkness but cannot find the doorknob.
I look out at a window.
Many tales are dying in the street before the house of my mind.

CONTENTS

THE DUMB MAN
I WANT TO KNOW WHY
SEEDS
THE OTHER WOMAN
THE EGG
UNLIGHTED LAMPS
SENILITY
THE MAN IN THE BROWN COAT
BROTHERS
THE DOOR OF THE TRAP
THE NEW ENGLANDER
WAR
MOTHERHOOD
OUT OF NOWHERE INTO NOTHING
THE MAN WITH THE TRUMPET

THE DUMB MAN

There is a story.--I cannot tell it.--I have no words. The story is
almost forgotten but sometimes I remember.

The story concerns three men in a house in a street. If I could say the
words I would sing the story. I would whisper it into the ears of
women, of mothers. I would run through the streets saying it over and
over. My tongue would be torn loose--it would rattle against my teeth.

The three men are in a room in the house. One is young and dandified.
He continually laughs.

There is a second man who has a long white beard. He is consumed with
doubt but occasionally his doubt leaves him and he sleeps.

A third man there is who has wicked eyes and who moves nervously about
the room rubbing his hands together. The three men are waiting--
waiting.

Upstairs in the house there is a woman standing with her back to a
wall, in half darkness by a window.

That is the foundation of my story and everything I will ever know is
distilled in it.

I remember that a fourth man came to the house, a white silent man.
Everything was as silent as the sea at night. His feet on the stone
floor of the room where the three men were made no sound.

The man with the wicked eyes became like a boiling liquid--he ran back
and forth like a caged animal. The old grey man was infected by his
nervousness--he kept pulling at his beard.

The fourth man, the white one, went upstairs to the woman.

There she was--waiting.

How silent the house was--how loudly all the clocks in the neighborhood
ticked. The woman upstairs craved love. That must have been the story.
She hungered for love with her whole being. She wanted to create in
love. When the white silent man came into her presence she sprang
forward. Her lips were parted. There was a smile on her lips.

The white one said nothing. In his eyes there was no rebuke, no
question. His eyes were as impersonal as stars.

Down stairs the wicked one whined and ran back and forth like a little
lost hungry dog. The grey one tried to follow him about but presently
grew tired and lay down on the floor to sleep. He never awoke again.

The dandified fellow lay on the floor too. He laughed and played with
his tiny black mustache.

I have no words to tell what happened in my story. I cannot tell the
story.

The white silent one may have been Death.

The waiting eager woman may have been Life.

Both the old grey bearded man and the wicked one puzzle me. I think and
think but cannot understand them. Most of the time however I do not
think of them at all. I keep thinking about the dandified man who
laughed all through my story.

If I could understand him I could understand everything. I could run
through the world telling a wonderful story. I would no longer be dumb.

Why was I not given words? Why am I dumb?

I have a wonderful story to tell but know no way to tell it.

I WANT TO KNOW WHY

We got up at four in the morning, that first day in the east. On the
evening before we had climbed off a freight train at the edge of town,
and with the true instinct of Kentucky boys had found our way across
town and to the race track and the stables at once. Then we knew we
were all right. Hanley Turner right away found a nigger we knew. It was
Bildad Johnson who in the winter works at Ed Becker's livery barn in
our home town, Beckersville. Bildad is a good cook as almost all our
niggers are and of course he, like everyone in our part of Kentucky who
is anyone at all, likes the horses. In the spring Bildad begins to
scratch around. A nigger from our country can flatter and wheedle
anyone into letting him do most anything he wants. Bildad wheedles the
stable men and the trainers from the horse farms in our country around
Lexington. The trainers come into town in the evening to stand around
and talk and maybe get into a poker game. Bildad gets in with them. He
is always doing little favors and telling about things to eat, chicken
browned in a pan, and how is the best way to cook sweet potatoes and
corn bread. It makes your mouth water to hear him.

When the racing season comes on and the horses go to the races and
there is all the talk on the streets in the evenings about the new
colts, and everyone says when they are going over to Lexington or to
the spring meeting at Churchhill Downs or to Latonia, and the horsemen
that have been down to New Orleans or maybe at the winter meeting at
Havana in Cuba come home to spend a week before they start out again,
at such a time when everything talked about in Beckersville is just
horses and nothing else and the outfits start out and horse racing is
in every breath of air you breathe, Bildad shows up with a job as cook
for some outfit. Often when I think about it, his always going all
season to the races and working in the livery barn in the winter where
horses are and where men like to come and talk about horses, I wish I
was a nigger. It's a foolish thing to say, but that's the way I am
about being around horses, just crazy. I can't help it.

Well, I must tell you about what we did and let you in on what I'm
talking about. Four of us boys from Beckersville, all whites and sons
of men who live in Beckersville regular, made up our minds we were
going to the races, not just to Lexington or Louisville, I don't mean,
but to the big eastern track we were always hearing our Beckersville
men talk about, to Saratoga. We were all pretty young then. I was just
turned fifteen and I was the oldest of the four. It was my scheme.

I admit that and I talked the others into trying it. There was Hanley
Turner and Henry Rieback and Tom Tumberton and myself. I had thirty-
seven dollars I had earned during the winter working nights and
Saturdays in Enoch Myer's grocery. Henry Rieback had eleven dollars and
the others, Hanley and Tom had only a dollar or two each. We fixed it
all up and laid low until the Kentucky spring meetings were over and
some of our men, the sportiest ones, the ones we envied the most, had
cut out--then we cut out too.

I won't tell you the trouble we had beating our way on freights and
all. We went through Cleveland and Buffalo and other cities and saw
Niagara Falls. We bought things there, souvenirs and spoons and cards
and shells with pictures of the falls on them for our sisters and
mothers, but thought we had better not send any of the things home. We
didn't want to put the folks on our trail and maybe be nabbed.

We got into Saratoga as I said at night and went to the track. Bildad
fed us up. He showed us a place to sleep in hay over a shed and
promised to keep still. Niggers are all right about things like that.
They won't squeal on you. Often a white man you might meet, when you
had run away from home like that, might appear to be all right and give
you a quarter or a half dollar or something, and then go right and give
you away. White men will do that, but not a nigger. You can trust them.
They are squarer with kids. I don't know why.

At the Saratoga meeting that year there were a lot of men from home.
Dave Williams and Arthur Mulford and Jerry Myers and others. Then there
was a lot from Louisville and Lexington Henry Rieback knew but I
didn't. They were professional gamblers and Henry Rieback's father is
one too. He is what is called a sheet writer and goes away most of the
year to tracks. In the winter when he is home in Beckersville he don't
stay there much but goes away to cities and deals faro. He is a nice
man and generous, is always sending Henry presents, a bicycle and a
gold watch and a boy scout suit of clothes and things like that.

My own father is a lawyer. He's all right, but don't make much money
and can't buy me things and anyway I'm getting so old now I don't
expect it. He never said nothing to me against Henry, but Hanley Turner
and Tom Tumberton's fathers did. They said to their boys that money so
come by is no good and they didn't want their boys brought up to hear
gamblers' talk and be thinking about such things and maybe embrace
them.

That's all right and I guess the men know what they are talking about,
but I don't see what it's got to do with Henry or with horses either.
That's what I'm writing this story about. I'm puzzled. I'm getting to
be a man and want to think straight and be O. K., and there's something
I saw at the race meeting at the eastern track I can't figure out.

I can't help it, I'm crazy about thoroughbred horses. I've always been
that way. When I was ten years old and saw I was growing to be big and
couldn't be a rider I was so sorry I nearly died. Harry Hellinfinger in
Beckersville, whose father is Postmaster, is grown up and too lazy to
work, but likes to stand around in the street and get up jokes on boys
like sending them to a hardware store for a gimlet to bore square holes
and other jokes like that. He played one on me. He told me that if I
would eat a half a cigar I would be stunted and not grow any more and
maybe could be a rider. I did it. When father wasn't looking I took a
cigar out of his pocket and gagged it down some way. It made me awful
sick and the doctor had to be sent for, and then it did no good. I kept
right on growing. It was a joke. When I told what I had done and why
most fathers would have whipped me but mine didn't.

Well, I didn't get stunted and didn't die. It serves Harry Hellinfinger
right. Then I made up my mind I would like to be a stable boy, but had
to give that up too. Mostly niggers do that work and I knew father
wouldn't let me go into it. No use to ask him.

If you've never been crazy about thoroughbreds it's because you've
never been around where they are much and don't know any better.
They're beautiful. There isn't anything so lovely and clean and full of
spunk and honest and everything as some race horses. On the big horse
farms that are all around our town Beckersville there are tracks and
the horses run in the early morning. More than a thousand times I've
got out of bed before daylight and walked two or three miles to the
tracks. Mother wouldn't of let me go but father always says, "Let him
alone." So I got some bread out of the bread box and some butter and
jam, gobbled it and lit out.

At the tracks you sit on the fence with men, whites and niggers, and
they chew tobacco and talk, and then the colts are brought out. It's
early and the grass is covered with shiny dew and in another field a
man is plowing and they are frying things in a shed where the track
niggers sleep, and you know how a nigger can giggle and laugh and say
things that make you laugh. A white man can't do it and some niggers
can't but a track nigger can every time.

And so the colts are brought out and some are just galloped by stable
boys, but almost every morning on a big track owned by a rich man who
lives maybe in New York, there are always, nearly every morning, a few
colts and some of the old race horses and geldings and mares that are
cut loose.

It brings a lump up into my throat when a horse runs. I don't mean all
horses but some. I can pick them nearly every time. It's in my blood
like in the blood of race track niggers and trainers. Even when they
just go slop-jogging along with a little nigger on their backs I can
tell a winner. If my throat hurts and it's hard for me to swallow,
that's him. He'll run like Sam Hill when you let him out. If he don't
win every time it'll be a wonder and because they've got him in a
pocket behind another or he was pulled or got off bad at the post or
something. If I wanted to be a gambler like Henry Rieback's father I
could get rich. I know I could and Henry says so too. All I would have
to do is to wait 'til that hurt comes when I see a horse and then bet
every cent. That's what I would do if I wanted to be a gambler, but I
don't.

When you're at the tracks in the morning--not the race tracks but the
training tracks around Beckersville--you don't see a horse, the kind
I've been talking about, very often, but it's nice anyway. Any
thoroughbred, that is sired right and out of a good mare and trained by
a man that knows how, can run. If he couldn't what would he be there
for and not pulling a plow?

Well, out of the stables they come and the boys are on their backs and
it's lovely to be there. You hunch down on top of the fence and itch
inside you. Over in the sheds the niggers giggle and sing. Bacon is
being fried and coffee made. Everything smells lovely. Nothing smells
better than coffee and manure and horses and niggers and bacon frying
and pipes being smoked out of doors on a morning like that. It just
gets you, that's what it does.

But about Saratoga. We was there six days and not a soul from home seen
us and everything came off just as we wanted it to, fine weather and
horses and races and all. We beat our way home and Bildad gave us a
basket with fried chicken and bread and other eatables in, and I had
eighteen dollars when we got back to Beckersville. Mother jawed and
cried but Pop didn't say much. I told everything we done except one
thing. I did and saw that alone. That's what I'm writing about. It got
me upset. I think about it at night. Here it is.

At Saratoga we laid up nights in the hay in the shed Bildad had showed
us and ate with the niggers early and at night when the race people had
all gone away. The men from home stayed mostly in the grandstand and
betting field, and didn't come out around the places where the horses
are kept except to the paddocks just before a race when the horses are
saddled. At Saratoga they don't have paddocks under an open shed as at
Lexington and Churchill Downs and other tracks down in our country, but
saddle the horses right out in an open place under trees on a lawn as
smooth and nice as Banker Bohon's front yard here in Beckersville. It's
lovely. The horses are sweaty and nervous and shine and the men come
out and smoke cigars and look at them and the trainers are there and
the owners, and your heart thumps so you can hardly breathe.

Then the bugle blows for post and the boys that ride come running out
with their silk clothes on and you run to get a place by the fence with
the niggers.

I always am wanting to be a trainer or owner, and at the risk of being
seen and caught and sent home I went to the paddocks before every race.
The other boys didn't but I did.

We got to Saratoga on a Friday and on Wednesday the next week the big
Mullford Handicap was to be run. Middlestride was in it and Sunstreak.
The weather was fine and the track fast. I couldn't sleep the night
before.

What had happened was that both these horses are the kind it makes my
throat hurt to see. Middlestride is long and looks awkward and is a
gelding. He belongs to Joe Thompson, a little owner from home who only
has a half dozen horses. The Mullford Handicap is for a mile and
Middlestride can't untrack fast. He goes away slow and is always way
back at the half, then he begins to run and if the race is a mile and a
quarter he'll just eat up everything and get there.

Sunstreak is different. He is a stallion and nervous and belongs on the
biggest farm we've got in our country, the Van Riddle place that
belongs to Mr. Van Riddle of New York. Sunstreak is like a girl you
think about sometimes but never see. He is hard all over and lovely
too. When you look at his head you want to kiss him. He is trained by
Jerry Tillford who knows me and has been good to me lots of times, lets
me walk into a horse's stall to look at him close and other things.
There isn't anything as sweet as that horse. He stands at the post
quiet and not letting on, but he is just burning up inside. Then when
the barrier goes up he is off like his name, Sunstreak. It makes you
ache to see him. It hurts you. He just lays down and runs like a bird
dog. There can't anything I ever see run like him except Middlestride
when he gets untracked and stretches himself.

Gee! I ached to see that race and those two horses run, ached and
dreaded it too. I didn't want to see either of our horses beaten. We
had never sent a pair like that to the races before. Old men in
Beckersville said so and the niggers said so. It was a fact.

Before the race I went over to the paddocks to see. I looked a last
look at Middlestride, who isn't such a much standing in a paddock that
way, then I went to see Sunstreak.

It was his day. I knew when I see him. I forgot all about being seen
myself and walked right up. All the men from Beckersville were there
and no one noticed me except Jerry Tillford. He saw me and something
happened. I'll tell you about that.

I was standing looking at that horse and aching. In some way, I can't
tell how, I knew just how Sunstreak felt inside. He was quiet and
letting the niggers rub his legs and Mr. Van Riddle himself put the
saddle on, but he was just a raging torrent inside. He was like the
water in the river at Niagara Falls just before its goes plunk down.
That horse wasn't thinking about running. He don't have to think about
that. He was just thinking about holding himself back 'til the time for
the running came. I knew that. I could just in a way see right inside
him. He was going to do some awful running and I knew it. He wasn't
bragging or letting on much or prancing or making a fuss, but just
waiting. I knew it and Jerry Tillford his trainer knew. I looked up and
then that man and I looked into each other's eyes. Something happened
to me. I guess I loved the man as much as I did the horse because he
knew what I knew. Seemed to me there wasn't anything in the world but
that man and the horse and me. I cried and Jerry Tillford had a shine
in his eyes. Then I came away to the fence to wait for the race. The
horse was better than me, more steadier, and now I know better than
Jerry. He was the quietest and he had to do the running.

Sunstreak ran first of course and he busted the world's record for a
mile. I've seen that if I never see anything more. Everything came out
just as I expected. Middlestride got left at the post and was way back
and closed up to be second, just as I knew he would. He'll get a
world's record too some day. They can't skin the Beckersville country
on horses.

I watched the race calm because I knew what would happen. I was sure.
Hanley Turner and Henry Rieback and Tom Tumberton were all more excited
than me.

A funny thing had happened to me. I was thinking about Jerry Tillford
the trainer and how happy he was all through the race. I liked him that
afternoon even more than I ever liked my own father. I almost forgot
the horses thinking that way about him. It was because of what I had
seen in his eyes as he stood in the paddocks beside Sunstreak before
the race started. I knew he had been watching and working with
Sunstreak since the horse was a baby colt, had taught him to run and be
patient and when to let himself out and not to quit, never. I knew that
for him it was like a mother seeing her child do something brave or
wonderful. It was the first time I ever felt for a man like that.

After the race that night I cut out from Tom and Hanley and Henry. I
wanted to be by myself and I wanted to be near Jerry Tillford if I
could work it. Here is what happened.

The track in Saratoga is near the edge of town. It is all polished up
and trees around, the evergreen kind, and grass and everything painted
and nice. If you go past the track you get to a hard road made of
asphalt for automobiles, and if you go along this for a few miles there
is a road turns off to a little rummy-looking farm house set in a yard.

That night after the race I went along that road because I had seen
Jerry and some other men go that way in an automobile. I didn't expect
to find them. I walked for a ways and then sat down by a fence to
think. It was the direction they went in. I wanted to be as near Jerry
as I could. I felt close to him. Pretty soon I went up the side road--I
don't know why--and came to the rummy farm house. I was just lonesome
to see Jerry, like wanting to see your father at night when you are a
young kid. Just then an automobile came along and turned in. Jerry was
in it and Henry Rieback's father, and Arthur Bedford from home, and
Dave Williams and two other men I didn't know. They got out of the car
and went into the house, all but Henry Rieback's father who quarreled
with them and said he wouldn't go. It was only about nine o'clock, but
they were all drunk and the rummy looking farm house was a place for
bad women to stay in. That's what it was. I crept up along a fence and
looked through a window and saw.

It's what give me the fantods. I can't make it out. The women in the
house were all ugly mean-looking women, not nice to look at or be near.
They were homely too, except one who was tall and looked a little like
the gelding Middlestride, but not clean like him, but with a hard ugly
mouth. She had red hair. I saw everything plain. I got up by an old
rose bush by an open window and looked. The women had on loose dresses
and sat around in chairs. The men came in and some sat on the women's
laps. The place smelled rotten and there was rotten talk, the kind a
kid hears around a livery stable in a town like Beckersville in the
winter but don't ever expect to hear talked when there are women
around. It was rotten. A nigger wouldn't go into such a place.

I looked at Jerry Tillford. I've told you how I had been feeling about
him on account of his knowing what was going on inside of Sunstreak in
the minute before he went to the post for the race in which he made a
world's record.

Jerry bragged in that bad woman house as I know Sunstreak wouldn't
never have bragged. He said that he made that horse, that it was him
that won the race and made the record. He lied and bragged like a fool.
I never heard such silly talk.

And then, what do you suppose he did! He looked at the woman in there,
the one that was lean and hard-mouthed and looked a little like the
gelding Middlestride, but not clean like him, and his eyes began to
shine just as they did when he looked at me and at Sunstreak in the
paddocks at the track in the afternoon. I stood there by the window--
gee!--but I wished I hadn't gone away from the tracks, but had stayed
with the boys and the niggers and the horses. The tall rotten looking
woman was between us just as Sunstreak was in the paddocks in the
afternoon.

Then, all of a sudden, I began to hate that man. I wanted to scream and
rush in the room and kill him. I never had such a feeling before. I was
so mad clean through that I cried and my fists were doubled up so my
finger nails cut my hands.

And Jerry's eyes kept shining and he waved back and forth, and then he
went and kissed that woman and I crept away and went back to the tracks
and to bed and didn't sleep hardly any, and then next day I got the
other kids to start home with me and never told them anything I seen.

I been thinking about it ever since. I can't make it out. Spring has
come again and I'm nearly sixteen and go to the tracks mornings same as
always, and I see Sunstreak and Middlestride and a new colt named
Strident I'll bet will lay them all out, but no one thinks so but me
and two or three niggers.

But things are different. At the tracks the air don't taste as good or
smell as good. It's because a man like Jerry Tillford, who knows what
he does, could see a horse like Sunstreak run, and kiss a woman like
that the same day. I can't make it out. Darn him, what did he want to
do like that for? I keep thinking about it and it spoils looking at
horses and smelling things and hearing niggers laugh and everything.
Sometimes I'm so mad about it I want to fight someone. It gives me the
fantods. What did he do it for? I want to know why.

SEEDS

He was a small man with a beard and was very nervous. I remember how
the cords of his neck were drawn taut.

For years he had been trying to cure people of illness by the method
called psychoanalysis. The idea was the passion of his life. "I came
here because I am tired," he said dejectedly. "My body is not tired but
something inside me is old and worn-out. I want joy. For a few days or
weeks I would like to forget men and women and the influences that make
them the sick things they are."

There is a note that comes into the human voice by which you may know
real weariness. It comes when one has been trying with all his heart
and soul to think his way along some difficult road of thought. Of a
sudden he finds himself unable to go on. Something within him stops. A
tiny explosion takes place. He bursts into words and talks, perhaps
foolishly. Little side currents of his nature he didn't know were there
run out and get themselves expressed. It is at such times that a man
boasts, uses big words, makes a fool of himself in general.

And so it was the doctor became shrill. He jumped up from the steps
where we had been sitting, talking and walked about. "You come from the
West. You have kept away from people. You have preserved yourself--damn
you! I haven't--" His voice had indeed become shrill. "I have entered
into lives. I have gone beneath the surface of the lives of men and
women. Women especially I have studied--our own women, here in
America."

"You have loved them?" I suggested.

"Yes," he said. "Yes--you are right there. I have done that. It is the
only way I can get at things. I have to try to love. You see how that
is? It's the only way. Love must be the beginning of things with me."

I began to sense the depths of his weariness. "We will go swim in the
lake," I urged.

"I don't want to swim or do any damn plodding thing. I want to run and
shout," he declared. "For awhile, for a few hours, I want to be like a
dead leaf blown by the winds over these hills. I have one desire and
one only--to free myself."

We walked in a dusty country road. I wanted him to know that I thought
I understood, so I put the case in my own way.

When he stopped and stared at me I talked. "You are no more and no
better than myself," I declared. "You are a dog that has rolled in
offal, and because you are not quite a dog you do not like the smell of
your own hide."

In turn my voice became shrill. "You blind fool," I cried impatiently.
"Men like you are fools. You cannot go along that road. It is given to
no man to venture far along the road of lives."

I became passionately in earnest. "The illness you pretend to cure is
the universal illness," I said. "The thing you want to do cannot be
done. Fool--do you expect love to be understood?"

We stood in the road and looked at each other. The suggestion of a
sneer played about the corners of his mouth. He put a hand on my
shoulder and shook me. "How smart we are--how aptly we put things!"

He spat the words out and then turned and walked a little away. "You
think you understand, but you don't understand," he cried. "What you
say can't be done can be done. You're a liar. You cannot be so definite
without missing something vague and fine. You miss the whole point. The
lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked
by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by
dead men. I am myself covered by crawling creeping vines that choke
me."

He laughed bitterly. "And that's why I want to run and play," he said.
"I want to be a leaf blown by the wind over hills. I want to die and be
born again, and I am only a tree covered with vines and slowly dying. I
am, you see, weary and want to be made clean. I am an amateur venturing
timidly into lives," he concluded. "I am weary and want to be made
clean. I am covered by creeping crawling things."

* * * * *

A woman from Iowa came here to Chicago and took a room in a house on
the west-side. She was about twenty-seven years old and ostensibly she
came to the city to study advanced methods for teaching music.

A certain young man also lived in the west-side house. His room faced a
long hall on the second floor of the house and the one taken by the
woman was across the hall facing his room.

In regard to the young man--there is something very sweet in his
nature. He is a painter but I have often wished he would decide to
become a writer. He tells things with understanding and he does not
paint brilliantly.

And so the woman from Iowa lived in the west-side house and came home
from the city in the evening. She looked like a thousand other women
one sees in the streets every day. The only thing that at all made her
stand out among the women in the crowds was that she was a little lame.
Her right foot was slightly deformed and she walked with a limp. For
three months she lived in the house--where she was the only woman
except the landlady--and then a feeling in regard to her began to grow
up among the men of the house.

The men all said the same thing concerning her. When they met in the
hallway at the front of the house they stopped, laughed and whispered.
"She wants a lover," they said and winked. "She may not know it but a
lover is what she needs."

One knowing Chicago and Chicago men would think that an easy want to be
satisfied. I laughed when my friend--whose name is LeRoy--told me the
story, but he did not laugh. He shook his head. "It wasn't so easy," he
said. "There would be no story were the matter that simple."

LeRoy tried to explain. "Whenever a man approached her she became
alarmed," he said. Men kept smiling and speaking to her. They invited
her to dinner and to the theatre, but nothing would induce her to walk
in the streets with a man. She never went into the streets at night.
When a man stopped and tried to talk with her in the hallway she turned
her eyes to the floor and then ran into her room. Once a young drygoods
clerk who lived there induced her to sit with him on the steps before
the house.

He was a sentimental fellow and took hold of her hand. When she began
to cry he was alarmed and arose. He put a hand on her shoulder and
tried to explain, but under the touch of his fingers her whole body
shook with terror. "Don't touch me," she cried, "don't let your hands
touch me!" She began to scream and people passing in the street stopped
to listen. The drygoods clerk was alarmed and ran upstairs to his own
room. He bolted the door and stood listening. "It is a trick," he
declared in a trembling voice. "She is trying to make trouble. I did
nothing to her. It was an accident and anyway what's the matter? I only
touched her arm with my fingers."

Perhaps a dozen times LeRoy has spoken to me of the experience of the
Iowa woman in the west-side house. The men there began to hate her.
Although she would have nothing to do with them she would not let them
alone. In a hundred ways she continually invited approaches that when
made she repelled. When she stood naked in the bathroom facing the
hallway where the men passed up and down she left the door slightly
ajar. There was a couch in the living room down stairs, and when men
were present she would sometimes enter and without saying a word throw
herself down before them. On the couch she lay with lips drawn slightly
apart. Her eyes stared at the ceiling. Her whole physical being seemed
to be waiting for something. The sense of her filled the room. The men
standing about pretended not to see. They talked loudly. Embarrassment
took possession of them and one by one they crept quietly away.

One evening the woman was ordered to leave the house. Someone, perhaps
the drygoods clerk, had talked to the landlady and she acted at once.
"If you leave tonight I shall like it that much better," LeRoy heard
the elder woman's voice saying. She stood in the hallway before the
Iowa woman's room. The landlady's voice rang through the house.

LeRoy the painter is tall and lean and his life has been spent in
devotion to ideas. The passions of his brain have consumed the passions
of his body. His income is small and he has not married. Perhaps he has
never had a sweetheart. He is not without physical desire but he is not
primarily concerned with desire.

On the evening when the Iowa woman was ordered to leave the west-side
house, she waited until she thought the landlady had gone down stairs,
and then went into LeRoy's room. It was about eight o'clock and he sat
by a window reading a book. The woman did not knock but opened the
door. She said nothing but ran across the floor and knelt at his feet.
LeRoy said that her twisted foot made her run like a wounded bird, that
her eyes were burning and that her breath came in little gasps. "Take
me," she said, putting her face down upon his knees and trembling
violently. "Take me quickly. There must be a beginning to things. I
can't stand the waiting. You must take me at once."

You may be quite sure LeRoy was perplexed by all this. From what he has
said I gathered that until that evening he had hardly noticed the
woman. I suppose that of all the men in the house he had been the most
indifferent to her. In the room something happened. The landlady
followed the woman when she ran to LeRoy, and the two women confronted
him. The woman from Iowa knelt trembling and frightened at his feet.
The landlady was indignant. LeRoy acted on impulse. An inspiration came
to him. Putting his hand on the kneeling woman's shoulder he shook her
violently. "Now behave yourself," he said quickly. "I will keep my
promise." He turned to the landlady and smiled. "We have been engaged
to be married," he said. "We have quarreled. She came here to be near
me. She has been unwell and excited. I will take her away. Please don't
let yourself be annoyed. I will take her away."

When the woman and LeRoy got out of the house she stopped weeping and
put her hand into his. Her fears had all gone away. He found a room for
her in another house and then went with her into a park and sat on a
bench.

* * * * *

Everything LeRoy has told me concerning this woman strengthens my
belief in what I said to the man that day in the mountains. You cannot
venture along the road of lives. On the bench he and the woman talked
until midnight and he saw and talked with her many times later. Nothing
came of it. She went back, I suppose, to her place in the West.

In the place from which she had come the woman had been a teacher of
music. She was one of four sisters, all engaged in the same sort of
work and, LeRoy says, all quiet capable women. Their father had died
when the eldest girl was not yet ten, and five years later the mother
died also. The girls had a house and a garden.

In the nature of things I cannot know what the lives of the women were
like but of this one may be quite certain--they talked only of women's
affairs, thought only of women's affairs. No one of them ever had a
lover. For years no man came near the house.

Of them all only the youngest, the one who came to Chicago, was visibly
affected by the utterly feminine quality of their lives. It did
something to her. All day and every day she taught music to young girls
and then went home to the women. When she was twenty-five she began to
think and to dream of men. During the day and through the evening she
talked with women of women's affairs, and all the time she wanted
desperately to be loved by a man. She went to Chicago with that hope in
mind. LeRoy explained her attitude in the matter and her strange
behavior in the west-side house by saying she had thought too much and
acted too little. "The life force within her became decentralized," he
declared. "What she wanted she could not achieve. The living force
within could not find expression. When it could not get expressed in
one way it took another. Sex spread itself out over her body. It
permeated the very fibre of her being. At the last she was sex
personified, sex become condensed and impersonal. Certain words, the
touch of a man's hand, sometimes even the sight of a man passing in the
street did something to her."

* * * * *

Yesterday I saw LeRoy and he talked to me again of the woman and her
strange and terrible fate.

We walked in the park by the lake. As we went along the figure of the
woman kept coming into my mind. An idea came to me.

"You might have been her lover," I said. "That was possible. She was
not afraid of you."

LeRoy stopped. Like the doctor who was so sure of his ability to walk
into lives he grew angry and scolded. For a moment he stared at me and
then a rather odd thing happened. Words said by the other man in the
dusty road in the hills came to LeRoy's lips and were said over again.
The suggestion of a sneer played about the corners of his mouth. "How
smart we are. How aptly we put things," he said.

The voice of the young man who walked with me in the park by the lake
in the city became shrill. I sensed the weariness in him. Then he
laughed and said quietly and softly, "It isn't so simple. By being sure
of yourself you are in danger of losing all of the romance of life. You
miss the whole point. Nothing in life can be settled so definitely. The
woman--you see--was like a young tree choked by a climbing vine. The
thing that wrapped her about had shut out the light. She was a
grotesque as many trees in the forest are grotesques. Her problem was
such a difficult one that thinking of it has changed the whole current
of my life. At first I was like you. I was quite sure. I thought I
would be her lover and settle the matter."

LeRoy turned and walked a little away. Then he came back and took hold
of my arm. A passionate earnestness took possession of him. His voice
trembled. "She needed a lover, yes, the men in the house were quite
right about that," he said. "She needed a lover and at the same time a
lover was not what she needed. The need of a lover was, after all, a
quite secondary thing. She needed to be loved, to be long and quietly
and patiently loved. To be sure she is a grotesque, but then all the
people in the world are grotesques. We all need to be loved. What would
cure her would cure the rest of us also. The disease she had is, you
see, universal. We all want to be loved and the world has no plan for
creating our lovers."

LeRoy's voice dropped and he walked beside me in silence. We turned
away from the lake and walked under trees. I looked closely at him. The
cords of his neck were drawn taut. "I have seen under the shell of life
and I am afraid," he mused. "I am myself like the woman. I am covered
with creeping crawling vine-like things. I cannot be a lover. I am not
subtle or patient enough. I am paying old debts. Old thoughts and
beliefs--seeds planted by dead men--spring up in my soul and choke me."

For a long time we walked and LeRoy talked, voicing the thoughts that
came into his mind. I listened in silence. His mind struck upon the
refrain voiced by the man in the mountains. "I would like to be a dead
dry thing," he muttered looking at the leaves scattered over the grass.
"I would like to be a leaf blown away by the wind." He looked up and
his eyes turned to where among the trees we could see the lake in the
distance. "I am weary and want to be made clean. I am a man covered by
creeping crawling things. I would like to be dead and blown by the wind
over limitless waters," he said. "I want more than anything else in the
world to be clean."

THE OTHER WOMAN

"I am in love with my wife," he said--a superfluous remark, as I had
not questioned his attachment to the woman he had married. We walked
for ten minutes and then he said it again. I turned to look at him. He
began to talk and told me the tale I am now about to set down.

The thing he had on his mind happened during what must have been the
most eventful week of his life. He was to be married on Friday
afternoon. On Friday of the week before he got a telegram announcing
his appointment to a government position. Something else happened that
made him very proud and glad. In secret he was in the habit of writing
verses and during the year before several of them had been printed in
poetry magazines. One of the societies that give prizes for what they
think the best poems published during the year put his name at the head
of its list. The story of his triumph was printed in the newspapers of
his home city and one of them also printed his picture.

As might have been expected he was excited and in a rather highly
strung nervous state all during that week. Almost every evening he went
to call on his fiancee, the daughter of a judge. When he got there the
house was filled with people and many letters, telegrams and packages
were being received. He stood a little to one side and men and women
kept coming up to speak to him. They congratulated him upon his success
in getting the government position and on his achievement as a poet.
Everyone seemed to be praising him and when he went home and to bed he
could not sleep. On Wednesday evening he went to the theatre and it
seemed to him that people all over the house recognized him. Everyone
nodded and smiled. After the first act five or six men and two women
left their seats to gather about him. A little group was formed.
Strangers sitting along the same row of seats stretched their necks and
looked. He had never received so much attention before, and now a fever
of expectancy took possession of him.

As he explained when he told me of his experience, it was for him an
altogether abnormal time. He felt like one floating in air. When he got
into bed after seeing so many people and hearing so many words of
praise his head whirled round and round. When he closed his eyes a
crowd of people invaded his room. It seemed as though the minds of all
the people of his city were centred on himself. The most absurd fancies
took possession of him. He imagined himself riding in a carriage
through the streets of a city. Windows were thrown open and people ran
out at the doors of houses. "There he is. That's him," they shouted,
and at the words a glad cry arose. The carriage drove into a street
blocked with people. A hundred thousand pairs of eyes looked up at him.
"There you are! What a fellow you have managed to make of yourself!"
the eyes seemed to be saying.

My friend could not explain whether the excitement of the people was
due to the fact that he had written a new poem or whether, in his new
government position, he had performed some notable act. The apartment
where he lived at that time was on a street perched along the top of a
cliff far out at the edge of his city, and from his bedroom window he
could look down over trees and factory roofs to a river. As he could