Шервуд Андерсон
Poor White
And then in Turner’s Pike something happened. A farmer boy, who had been to town and who had the daughter of a neighbor in his buggy, stopped in front of the house. A long freight train, grinding its way slowly past the station, barred the passage along the road. He held the reins in one hand and put the other about the waist of his companion. The two heads sought each other and lips met. They clung to each other. The same moon that shed its light on Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse lighted the open place where the lovers sat in the buggy in the road. Hugh had to close his eyes and fight to put down an almost overpowering physical hunger in himself. His mind still protested that women were not for him. When his fancy made for him a picture of the school teacher Rose McCoy sleeping in a bed, he saw her only as a chaste white thing to be worshiped from afar and not to be approached, at least not by himself. Again he opened his eyes and looked at the lovers whose lips still clung together. His long slouching body stiffened and he sat up very straight in his chair. Then he closed his eyes again. A gruff voice broke the silence. “That’s for Mike,” it shouted and a great chunk of coal thrown from the train bounded across the potato patch and struck against the back of the house. Downstairs he could hear old Mrs. McCoy getting out of bed to secure the prize. The train passed and the lovers in the buggy sank away from each other. In the silent night Hugh could hear the regular beat of the hoofs of the farmer boy’s horse as it carried him and his woman away into the darkness.
The two people, living in the house with the old woman who had almost finished her life, and themselves trying feebly to reach out to life, never got to anything very definite in relation to each other. One Saturday evening in the late fall the Governor of the State came to Bidwell. There was a parade to be followed by a political meeting and the Governor, who was a candidate for re-election, was to address the people from the steps of the town hall. Prominent citizens were to stand on the steps beside the Governor. Steve and Tom were to be there, and they had asked Hugh to come, but he had refused. He asked Rose McCoy to go to the meeting with him, and they set out from the house at eight o’clock and walked to town. Then they stood at the edge of the crowd in the shadow of a store building and listened to the speech. To Hugh’s amazement his name was mentioned. The Governor spoke of the prosperity of the town, indirectly hinting that it was due to the political sagacity of the party of which he was a representative, and then mentioned several individuals also partly responsible. “The whole country is sweeping forward to new triumphs under our banner,” he declared, “but not every community is so fortunate as I find you here. Labor is employed at good wages. Life here is fruitful and happy. You are fortunate here in having among you such business men as Steven Hunter and Thomas Butterworth; and in the inventor Hugh McVey you have one of the greatest intellects and the most useful men that ever lived to help lift the burden off the shoulder of labor. What his brain is doing for labor, our party is doing in another way. The protective tariff is really the father of modern prosperity.”
The speaker paused and a cheer arose from the crowd. Hugh took hold of the school teacher’s arm and drew her away down a side street. They walked home in silence, but when they got to the house and were about to go in, the school teacher hesitated. She wanted to ask Hugh to walk about in the darkness with her but did not have the courage of her desires. As they stood at the gate and as the tall man with the long serious face looked down at her, she remembered the speaker’s words. “How could he care for me? How could a man like him care anything for a homely little school teacher like me?” she asked herself. Aloud she said something quite different. As they had come along Turner’s Pike she had made up her mind she would boldly suggest a walk under the trees along Turner’s Pike beyond the bridge, and had told herself that she would later lead him to the place beside the stream and in the shadow of the old pickle factory where she and George Pike had come so near being lovers. Instead she hesitated for a moment by the gate and then laughed awkwardly and passed in. “You should be proud. I would be proud if I could be spoken of like that. I don’t see why you keep living here in a cheap little house like ours,” she said.
On a warm spring Sunday night during the year in which Clara Butterworth came back to Bidwell to live, Hugh made what was for him an almost desperate effort to approach the school teacher. It had been a rainy afternoon and Hugh had spent a part of it in the house. He came over from his shop at noon and went to his room. When she was at home the school teacher occupied a room next his own. The mother who seldom left the house had on that day gone to the country to visit a brother. The daughter got dinner for herself and Hugh and he tried to help her wash the dishes. A plate fell out of his hands and its breaking seemed to break the silent, embarrassed mood that had possession of them. For a few minutes they were children and acted like children. Hugh picked up another plate and the school teacher told him to put it down. He refused. “You’re as awkward as a puppy. How you ever manage to do anything over at that shop of yours is more than I know.”
Hugh tried to keep hold of the plate which the school teacher tried to snatch away and for a few minutes they struggled laughing. Her cheeks were flushed and Hugh thought she looked bewitching. An impulse he had never had before came to him. He wanted to shout at the top of his lungs, throw the plate at the ceiling, sweep all of the dishes off the table and hear them crash on the floor, play like some huge animal loose in a tiny world. He looked at Rose and his hands trembled from the strength of the strange impulse. As he stood staring she took the plate out of his hand and went into the kitchen. Not knowing what else to do he put on his hat and went for a walk. Later he went to the shop and tried to work, but his hand trembled when he tried to hold a tool and the hay-loading apparatus on which he was at work seemed suddenly a very trivial and unimportant thing.
At four o’clock Hugh got back to the house and found it apparently empty, although the door leading to Turner’s Pike was open. The rain had stopped falling and the sun struggled to work its way through the clouds. He went upstairs to his own room and sat on the edge of his bed. The conviction that the daughter of the house was in her room next door came to him, and although the thought violated all the beliefs he had ever held regarding women in relation to himself, he decided that she had gone to her room to be near him when he came in. For some reason he knew that if he went to her door and knocked she would not be surprised and would not refuse him admission. He took off his shoes and set them gently on the floor. Then he went on tiptoes out into the little hallway. The ceiling was so low that he had to stoop to avoid knocking his head against it. He raised his hand intending to knock on the door, and then lost courage. Several times he went into the hallway with the same intent, and each time returned noiselessly to his own room. He sat in the chair by the window and waited. An hour passed. He heard a noise that indicated that the school teacher had been lying on her bed. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs, and presently saw her go out of the house and go along Turner’s Pike. She did not go toward town but over the bridge past his shop and into the country. Hugh drew himself back out of sight. He wondered where she could be going. “The roads are muddy. Why does she go out? Is she afraid of me?” he asked himself. When he saw her turn at the bridge and look back toward the house, his hands trembled again. “She wants me to follow. She wants me to go with her,” he thought.
Hugh did presently go out of the house and along the road but did not meet the school teacher. She had in fact crossed the bridge and had gone along the bank of the creek on the farther side. Then she crossed over again on a fallen log and went to stand by the wall of the pickle factory. A lilac bush grew beside the wall and she stood out of sight behind it. When she saw Hugh in the road her heart beat so heavily that she had difficulty in breathing. He went along the road and presently passed out of sight, and a great weakness took possession of her. Although the grass was wet she sat on the ground against the wall of the building and closed her eyes. Later she put her face in her hands and wept.
The perplexed inventor did not get back to his boarding house until late that night, and when he did he was unspeakably glad that he had not knocked on the door of Rose McCoy’s room. He had decided during the walk that the whole notion that she had wanted him had been born in his own brain. “She’s a nice woman,” he had said to himself over and over during the walk, and thought that in coming to that conclusion he had swept away all possibilities of anything else in her. He was tired when he got home and went at once to bed. The old woman came home from the country and her brother sat in his buggy and shouted to the school teacher, who came out of her room and ran down the stairs. He heard the two women carry something heavy into the house and drop it on the floor. The farmer brother had given Mrs. McCoy a bag of potatoes. Hugh thought of the mother and daughter standing together downstairs and was unspeakably glad he had not given way to his impulse toward boldness. “She would be telling her now. She is a good woman and would be telling her now,” he thought.
At two o’clock that night Hugh got out of bed. In spite of the conviction that women were not for him, he had found himself unable to sleep. Something that shone in the eyes of the school teacher, when she struggled with him for the possession of the plate, kept calling to him and he got up and went to the window. The clouds had all gone out of the sky and the night was clear. At the window next his own sat Rose McCoy. She was dressed in a night gown and was looking away along Turner’s Pike to the place where George Pike the station master lived with his wife. Without giving himself time to think, Hugh knelt on the floor and with his long arm reached across the space between the two windows. His fingers had almost touched the back of the woman’s head and ached to play in the mass of red hair that fell down over her shoulders, when again self-consciousness overcame him. He drew his arm quickly back and stood upright in the room. His head banged against the ceiling and he heard the window of the room next door go softly down. With a conscious effort he took himself in hand. “She’s a good woman. Remember, she’s a good woman,” he whispered to himself, and when he got again into his bed he refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts of the school teacher, but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems he still had to face before he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. “You tend to your business and don’t be going off on that road any more,” he said, as though speaking to another person. “Remember she’s a good woman and you haven’t the right. That’s all you have to do. Remember you haven’t the right,” he added with a ring of command in his voice.
CHAPTER XIII
Hugh first saw Clara Butterworth one day in July when she had been at home for a month. She came to his shop late one afternoon with her father and a man who had been employed to manage the new bicycle factory. The three got out of Tom’s buggy and came into the shop to see Hugh’s new invention, the hay-loading apparatus. Tom and the man named Alfred Buckley went to the rear of the shop, and Hugh was left alone with the woman. She was dressed in a light summer gown and her cheeks were flushed. Hugh stood by a bench near an open window and listened while she talked of how much the town had changed in the three years she had been away. “It is your doing, every one says that,” she declared.
Clara had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to Hugh. She began asking questions regarding his work and what was to come of it. “When everything is done by machines, what are people to do?” she asked. She seemed to take it for granted that the inventor had thought deeply on the subject of industrial development, a subject on which Kate Chanceller had often talked during a whole evening. Having heard Hugh spoken of as one who had a great brain, she wanted to see the brain at work.
Alfred Buckley came often to her father’s house and wanted to marry Clara. In the evening the two men sat on the front porch of the farmhouse and talked of the town and the big things that were to be done there. They spoke of Hugh, and Buckley, an energetic, talkative fellow with a long jaw and restless gray eyes who had come from New York City, suggested schemes for using him. Clara gathered that there was a plan on foot to get control of Hugh’s future inventions and thereby gain an advantage over Steve Hunter.
The whole matter puzzled Clara. Alfred Buckley had asked her to marry him and she had put the matter off. The proposal had been a formal thing, not at all what she had expected from a man she was to take as a partner for life, but Clara was at the moment very seriously determined upon marriage. The New York man was at her father’s house several evenings every week. She had never walked about with him nor had they in any way come close to each other. He seemed too much occupied with work to be personal and had proposed marriage by writing her a letter. Clara got the letter from the post-office and it upset her so that she felt she could not for a time go into the presence of any one she knew. “I am unworthy of you, but I want you to be my wife. I will work for you. I am new here and you do not know me very well. All I ask is the privilege of proving my merit. I want you to be my wife, but before I dare come and ask you to do me so great an honor I feel I must prove myself worthy,” the letter said.
Clara had driven into town alone on the day when she received it and later got into her buggy and drove south past the Butterworth farm into the hills. She forgot to go home to lunch or to the evening meal. The horse jogged slowly along, protesting and trying to turn back at every cross road, but she kept on and did not get home until midnight. When she reached the farmhouse her father was waiting. He went with her into the barnyard and helped unhitch the horse. Nothing was said, and after a moment’s conversation having nothing to do with the subject that occupied both their minds, she went upstairs and tried to think the matter out. She became convinced that her father had something to do with the proposal of marriage that he knew about it and had waited for her to come home in order to see how it had affected her.
Clara wrote a reply that was as non-committal as the proposal itself. “I do not know whether I want to marry you or not. I will have to become acquainted with you. I however thank you for the offer of marriage and when you feel that the right time has come, we will talk about it,” she wrote.
After the exchange of letters, Alfred Buckley came to her father’s house more often than before, but he and Clara did not become better acquainted. He did not talk to her, but to her father. Although she did not know it, the rumor that she was to marry the New York man had already run about town. She did not know whether her father or Buckley had told the tale.
On the front porch of the farmhouse through the summer evenings the two men talked of the progress, of the town and the part they were taking and hoped to take in its future growth. The New York man had proposed a scheme to Tom. He was to go to Hugh and propose a contract giving the two men an option on all his future inventions. As the inventions were completed they were to be financed in New York City, and the two men would give up manufacture and make money much more rapidly as promoters. They hesitated because they were afraid of Steve Hunter, and because Tom was afraid Hugh would not fall in with their plan. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Steve already had such a contract with him. He’s a fool if he hasn’t,” the older man said.
Evening after evening the two men talked and Clara sat in the deep shadows at the back of the porch and listened. The enmity that had existed between herself and her father seemed to be forgotten. The man who had asked her to marry him did not look at her, but her father did. Buckley did most of the talking and spoke of New York City business men, already famous throughout the Middle West as giants of finance, as though they were his life-long friends. “They’ll put over anything I ask them to,” he declared.
Clara tried to think of Alfred Buckley as a husband. Like Hugh McVey he was tall and gaunt but unlike the inventor, whom she had seen two or three times on the street, he was not carelessly dressed. There was something sleek about him, something that suggested a well-bred dog, a hound perhaps. As he talked he leaned forward like a greyhound in pursuit of a rabbit. His hair was carefully parted and his clothes fitted him like the skin of an animal. He wore a diamond scarf pin. His long jaw, it seemed to her, was always wagging. Within a few days after the receipt of his letter she had made up her mind that she did not want him as a husband, and she was convinced he did not want her. The whole matter of marriage had, she was sure, been in some way suggested by her father. When she came to that conclusion she was both angry and in an odd way touched. She did not interpret it as fear of some sort of indiscretion on her part, but thought that her father wanted her to marry because he wanted her to be happy. As she sat in the darkness on the front porch of the farmhouse the voices of the two men became indistinct. It was as though her mind went out of her body and like a living thing journeyed over the world. Dozens of men she had seen and had casually addressed, young fellows attending school at Columbus and boys of the town with whom she had gone to parties and dances when she was a young girl, came to stand before her. She saw their figures distinctly, but remembered them at some advantageous moment of her contact with them. At Columbus there was a young man from a town in the southern end of the State, one of the sort that is always in love with a woman. During her first year in school he had noticed Clara, had been undecided as to whether he had better pay attention to her or to a little black-eyed town girl who was in their classes. Several times he walked down the college hill and along the street with Clara. The two stood at a street crossing where she was in the habit of taking a car. Several cars went by as they stood together by a bush that grew by a high stone wall. They talked of trivial matters, a comedy club that had been organized in the school, the chances of victory for the football team. The young man was one of the actors in a play to be given by the comedy club and told Clara of his experiences at rehearsals. As he talked his eyes began to shine and he seemed to be looking, not at her face or body, but at something within her. For a time, perhaps for fifteen minutes, there was a possibility that the two people would love each other. Then the young man went away and later she saw him walking under the trees on the college campus with the little black-eyed town girl.
As she sat on the porch in the darkness in the summer evenings, Clara thought of the incident and of dozens of other swift-passing contacts she had made with men. The voices of the two men talking of money-making went on and on. Whenever she came back out of her introspective world of thought, Alfred Buckley’s long jaw was wagging. He was always at work, steadily, persistently urging something on her father. It was difficult for Clara to think of her father as a rabbit, but the notion that Alfred Buckley was like a hound stayed with her. “The wolf and the wolfhound,” she thought absent-mindedly.
Clara was twenty-three and seemed to herself mature. She did not intend wasting any more time going to school and did not want to be a professional woman, like Kate Chanceller. There was something she did want and in a way some man, she did not know what man it would be, was concerned in the matter. She was very hungry for love, but might have got that from another woman. Kate Chanceller would have loved her. She was not unconscious of the fact that their friendship had been something more than friendship. Kate loved to hold Clara’s hand and wanted to kiss and caress her. The inclination had been put down by Kate herself, a struggle had gone on in her, and Clara had been dimly conscious of it and had respected Kate for making it.
Why? Clara asked herself that question a dozen times during the early weeks of that summer. Kate Chanceller had taught her to think. When they were together Kate did both the thinking and the talking, but now Clara’s mind had a chance. There was something back of her desire for a man. She wanted something more than caresses. There was a creative impulse in her that could not function until she had been made love to by a man. The man she wanted was but an instrument she sought in order that she might fulfill herself. Several times during those evenings in the presence of the two men, who talked only of making money out of the products of another man’s mind, she almost forced her mind out into a concrete thought concerning women, and then it became again befogged.
Clara grew tired of thinking, and listened to the talk. The name of Hugh McVey played through the persistent conversation like a refrain. It became fixed in her mind. The inventor was not married. By the social system under which she lived that and that only made him a possibility for her purposes. She began to think of the inventor, and her mind, weary of playing about her own figure, played about the figure of the tall, serious-looking man she had seen on Main Street. When Alfred Buckley had driven away to town for the night, she went upstairs to her own room but did not get into bed. Instead, she put out her light and sat by an open window that looked out upon the orchard and from which she could see a little stretch of the road that ran past the farm house toward town. Every evening before Alfred Buckley went away, there was a little scene on the front porch. When the visitor got up to go, her father made some excuse for going indoors or around the corner of the house into the barnyard. “I will have Jim Priest hitch up your horse,” he said and hurried away. Clara was left in the company of the man who had pretended he wanted to marry her, and who, she was convinced, wanted nothing of the kind. She was not embarrassed, but could feel his embarrassment and enjoyed it. He made formal speeches.
“Well, the night is fine,” he said. Clara hugged the thought that he was uncomfortable. “He has taken me for a green country girl, impressed with him because he is from the city and dressed in fine clothes,” she thought. Sometimes her father stayed away five or ten minutes and she did not say a word. When her father returned Alfred Buckley shook hands with him and then turned to Clara, apparently now quite at his ease. “We have bored you, I’m afraid,” he said. He took her hand and leaning over, kissed the back of it ceremoniously. Her father looked away. Clara went upstairs and sat by the window. She could hear the two men continuing their talk in the road before the house. After a time the front door banged, her father came into the house and the visitor drove away. Everything became quiet and for a long time she could hear the hoofs of Alfred Buckley’s horse beating a rapid tattoo on the road that led down into town.
Clara thought of Hugh McVey. Alfred Buckley had spoken of him as a backwoodsman with a streak of genius. He constantly harped on the notion that he and Tom could use the man for their own ends, and she wondered if both of the men were making as great a mistake about the inventor as they were about her. In the silent summer night, when the sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away and when her father had quit stirring about the house, she heard another sound. The corn-cutting machine factory was very busy and had put on a night shift. When the night was still, or when there was a slight breeze blowing up the hill from town, there was a low rumbling sound coming from many machines working in wood and steel, followed at regular intervals by the steady breathing of a steam engine.
The woman at the window, like every one else in her town and in all the towns of the mid-western country, became touched with the idea of the romance of industry. The dreams of the Missouri boy that he had fought, had by the strength of his persistency twisted into new channels so that they had expressed themselves in definite things, in corn-cutting machines and in machines for unloading coal cars and for gathering hay out of a field and loading it on wagons without aid of human hands, were still dreams and capable of arousing dreams in others. They awoke dreams in the mind of the woman. The figures of other men that had been playing through her mind slipped away and but the one figure remained. Her mind made up stories concerning Hugh. She had read the absurd tale that had been printed in the Cleveland paper and her fancy took hold of it. Like every other citizen of America she believed in heroes. In books and magazines she had read of heroic men who had come up out of poverty by some strange alchemy to combine in their stout persons all of the virtues. The broad, rich land demanded gigantic figures, and the minds of men had created the figures. Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and a half dozen other men were something more than human in the minds of the generation that came immediately after the days of their stirring performance. Already industry was creating a new set of semi-mythical figures. The factory at work in the night-time in the town of Bidwell became, to the mind of the woman sitting by the window in the farm house, not a factory but a powerful animal, a powerful beast-like thing that Hugh had tamed and made useful to his fellows. Her mind ran forward and took the taming of the beast for granted. The hunger of her generation found a voice in her. Like every one else she wanted heroes, and Hugh, to whom she had never talked and about whom she knew nothing, became a hero. Her father, Alfred Buckley, Steve Hunter and the rest were after all pigmies. Her father was a schemer; he had even schemed to get her married, perhaps to further his own plans. In reality his schemes were so ineffective that she did not need to be angry with him. There was but one man of them all who was not a schemer. Hugh was what she wanted to be. He was a creative force. In his hands dead inanimate things became creative forces. He was what she wanted not herself but perhaps a son, to be. The thought, at last definitely expressed, startled Clara, and she arose from the chair by the window and prepared to go to bed. Something within her body ached, but she did not allow herself to pursue further the thoughts she had been having.
On the day when she went with her father and Alfred Buckley to visit Hugh’s shop, Clara knew that she wanted to marry the man she would see there. The thought was not expressed in her but slept like a seed newly planted in fertile soil. She had herself managed that she be taken to the factory and had also managed that she be left with Hugh while the two men went to look at the half-completed hay-loader at the back of the shop.
She had begun talking to Hugh while the four people stood on the little grass plot before the shop. They went inside and her father and Buckley went through a door toward the rear. She stopped by a bench and as she continued talking Hugh was compelled to stop and stand beside her. She asked questions, paid him vague compliments, and as he struggled, trying to make conversation, she studied him. To cover his confusion he half turned away and looked out through a window into Turner’s Pike. His eyes, she decided, were nice. They were somewhat small, but there was something gray and cloudy in them, and the gray cloudiness gave her confidence in the person behind the eyes. She could, she felt, trust him. There was something in his eyes that was like the things most grateful to her own nature, the sky seen across an open stretch of country or over a river that ran straight away into the distance. Hugh’s hair was coarse like the mane of a horse, and his nose was like the nose of a horse. He was, she decided, very like a horse; an honest, powerful horse, a horse that was humanized by the mysterious, hungering thing that expressed itself through his eyes. “If I have to live with an animal; if, as Kate Chanceller once said, we women have to decide what other animal we are to live with before we can begin being humans, I would rather live with a strong, kindly horse than a wolf or a wolfhound,” she found herself thinking.
