Шервуд Андерсон
Windy McPherson's Son
CHAPTER VIII
The blow given the plan of life so carefully thought out and so eagerly accepted by the young McPhersons threw them back upon themselves. For several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves very seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the thought that they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged upon a worthy and ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed in admiration of their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous, disciplined, new life they were to give the world by the combined efficiency of their two bodies and minds they were, at a word and a shake of the head from Doctor Grover, compelled to remake the outline of their future together.
All about them the rush of life went on, vast changes were impending in the industrial life of the people, cities were doubling and tripling their population, a war was being fought, and the flag of their country flew in the ports of strange seas, while American boys pushed their way through the tangled jungles of strange lands carrying in their hands Rainey-Whittaker rifles. And in a huge stone house, set in a broad expanse of green lawns near the shores of Lake Michigan, Sam McPherson sat looking at his wife, who in turn looked at him. He was trying, as she also was trying, to adjust himself to the cheerful acceptance of their new prospect of a childless life.
Looking at Sue across the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for the success of their hopes. But when he remembered her still white face that night in the hospital, her bitter, haunting cry of defeat, he turned with a shudder from the thought, feeling that he could not go with her again through that ordeal; that he could not again allow her to look forward through weeks and months toward the little life that never came to lie upon her breast or to laugh up into her face.
And yet Sam, son of that Jane McPherson who had won the admiration of the men of Caxton by her ceaseless efforts to keep her family afloat and clean handed, could not sit idly by, living upon the income of his own and Sue’s money. The stirring, forward-moving world called to him; he looked about him at the broad, significant movements in business and finance, at the new men coming into prominence and apparently finding a way for the expression of new big ideas, and felt his youth stirring in him and his mind reaching out to new projects and new ambitions.
Given the necessity for economy and a hard long-drawn-out struggle for a livelihood and competence, Sam could conceive of living his life with Sue and deriving something like gratification from just her companionship, and her partnership in his efforts—here and there during the waiting years he had met men who had found such gratification—a foreman in the shops or a tobacconist from whom he bought his cigars—but for himself he felt that he had gone with Sue too far upon another road to turn that way now with anything like mutual zeal or interest. At bottom, his mind did not run strongly toward the idea of the love of women as an end in life; he had loved, and did love, Sue with something approaching religious fervour, but the fervour was more than half due to the ideas she had given him and to the fact that with him she was to have been the instrument for the realisation of those ideas. He was a man with children in his loins and he had given up his struggles for business eminence for the sake of preparing himself for a kind of noble fatherhood of children, many children, strong children, fit gifts to the world for two exceptionally favoured lives. In all of his talks with Sue this idea had been present and dominant. He had looked about him and in the arrogance of his youth and in the pride of his good body and mind had condemned all childless marriages as a selfish waste of good lives. With her he had agreed that such lives were without point and purpose. Now he remembered that in the days of her audacity and daring she had more than once expressed the hope that in case of a childless issue to their marriage one or the other of them would have the courage to cut the knot that tied them and venture into another effort at right living at any cost.
In the months after Sue’s last recovery, and during the long evenings, as they sat together or walked under the stars in the park, the thought of these talks was often in Sam’s mind and he found himself beginning to speculate on her present attitude and to wonder how bravely she would meet the idea of a separation. In the end he decided that no such thought was in her mind, that face to face with the tremendous actuality she clung to him with a new dependence, and a new need of his companionship. The conviction of the absolute necessity of children as a justification for a man and woman living together had, he thought, burned itself more deeply into his brain than into hers; to him it clung, coming back again and again to his mind, causing him to turn here and there restlessly, making readjustments, seeking new light. The old gods being dead he sought new gods.
In the meantime he sat in his house facing his wife, losing himself in the books recommended to him years before by Janet, thinking his own thoughts. Often in the evening he would look up from his book or from his preoccupied staring at the fire to find her eyes looking at him.
“Talk, Sam; talk,” she would say; “do not sit there thinking.”
Or at another time she would come to his room at night and putting her head down on the pillow beside his would spend hours planning, weeping, begging him to give her again his love, his old fervent, devoted love.
This Sam tried earnestly and honestly to do, going with her for long walks when the new call, the business had begun to make to him, would have kept him at his desk, reading aloud to her in the evening, urging her to shake off her old dreams and to busy herself with new work and new interests.
Through the days in the office he went in a kind of half stupor. An old feeling of his boyhood coming back to him, it seemed to him, as it had seemed when he walked aimlessly through the streets of Caxton after the death of his mother, that there remained something to be done, an accounting to be made. Even at his desk with the clatter of typewriters in his ears and the piles of letters demanding his attention, his mind slipped back to the days of his courtship with Sue and to those days in the north woods when life had beat strong within him, and every young, wild thing, every new growth renewed the dream that filled his being. Sometimes on the street, or walking in the park with Sue, the cries of children at play cut across the sombre dulness of his mind and he shrank from the sound and a kind of bitter resentment took possession of him. When he looked covertly at Sue she talked of other things, apparently unconscious of his thoughts.
Then a new phase of life presented itself. To his surprise he found himself looking with more than passing interest at women in the streets, and an old hunger for the companionship of strange women came back to him, in some way coarsened and materialised. One evening at the theatre a woman, a friend of Sue’s and the childless wife of a business friend of his own, sat beside him. In the darkness of the playhouse her shoulder nestled down against his. In the excitement of a crisis on the stage her hand slipped into his and her fingers clutched and held his fingers.
Animal desire seized and shook him, a feeling without sweetness, brutal, making his eyes burn. When between the acts the theatre was again flooded with light he looked up guiltily to meet another pair of eyes equally filled with guilty hunger. A challenge had been given and received.
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.
The speech did not make much of a hit, the fallen women moving restlessly about. A large woman, with an immense nose, did better. She talked with a swift, contagious zeal that was very stirring, and, listening to her, Sam was reminded of the evening when he sat before another zealous talker in the church at Caxton and Jim Williams, the barber, tried to stampede him into the fold with the lambs. While the woman talked a plump little member of the demi monde who sat beside Sam wept copiously, but at the end of the speech he could remember nothing of what had been said and he wondered if the weeping woman would remember.
To express his determination to continue being Sue’s companion and partner, Sam during one winter taught a class of young men at a settlement house in the factory district of the west side. The class in his hands was unsuccessful. He found the young men heavy and stupid with fatigue after the day of labour in the shops and more inclined to fall asleep in their chairs, or wander away, one at a time, to loaf and smoke on a nearby corner, than to stay in the room listening to the man reading or talking before them.
When one of the young women workers came into the room, they sat up and seemed for the moment interested. Once Sam heard a group of them talking of these women workers on a landing in a darkened stairway. The experience startled Sam and he dropped the class, admitting to Sue his failure and his lack of interest and bowing his head before her accusation of a lack of the love of men.
Later by the fire in his own room he tried to draw for himself a moral from the experience.
“Why should I love these men?” he asked himself. “They are what I might have been. Few of the men I have known have loved me and some of the best and cleanest of them have worked vigorously for my defeat. Life is a battle in which few men win and many are defeated and in which hate and fear play their part with love and generosity. These heavy-featured young men are a part of the world as men have made it. Why this protest against their fate when we are all of us making more and more of them with every turn of the clock?”
During the next year, after the fiasco of the settlement house class, Sam found himself drifting more and more rapidly away from Sue and her new viewpoint of life. The growing gulf between them showed itself in a thousand little household acts and impulses, and every time he looked at her he thought her more apart from him and less a part of the real life that went on within him. In the old days there had been something intimate and familiar in her person and in her presence. She had seemed like a part of him, like the room in which he slept or the coat he wore on his back, and he had looked into her eyes as thoughtlessly and with as little fear of what he might find there as he looked at his own hands. Now when his eyes met hers they dropped, and one or the other of them began talking hurriedly like a person who has a consciousness of something he must conceal.
Down town Sam took up anew his old friendship and intimacy with Jack Prince, going with him to clubs and drinking places and often spending evenings among the clever, money-wasting young men who laughed and made deals and talked their way through life at Jack’s side. Among these young men a business associate of Jack’s caught his attention and in a few weeks an intimacy had sprung up between Sam and this man.
Maurice Morrison, Sam’s new friend, had been discovered by Jack Prince working as a sub-editor on a country daily down the state. There was, Sam thought, something of the Caxton dandy, Mike McCarthy, in the man, combined with prolonged and fervent, although somewhat periodic attacks of industry. In his youth he had written poetry and at one time had studied for the ministry, and in Chicago, under Jack Prince, he had developed into a money maker and led the life of a talented, rather unscrupulous man of the world. He kept a mistress, often overdrank, and Sam thought him the most brilliant and convincing talker he had ever heard. As Jack Prince’s assistant he had charge of the Rainey Company’s large advertising expenditure, and the two men being thrown often together a mutual regard grew up between them. Sam believed him to be without moral sense; he knew him to be able and honest and he found in the association with him a fund of odd little sweetnesses of character and action that lent an inexpressible charm to the person of his friend.
It was through Morrison that Sam had his first serious misunderstanding with Sue. One evening the brilliant young advertising man dined at the McPhersons’. The table, as usual, was filled with Sue’s new friends, among them a tall, gaunt man who, with the arrival of the coffee, began in a high-pitched, earnest voice to talk of the coming social revolution. Sam looked across the table and saw a light dancing in Morrison’s eyes. Like a hound unleashed he sprang among Sue’s friends, tearing the rich to pieces, calling for the onward advance of the masses, quoting odds and ends of Shelley and Carlyle, peering earnestly up and down the table, and at the end quite winning the hearts of the women by a defence of fallen women that stirred the blood of even his friend and host.
Sam was amused and a trifle annoyed. The whole thing was, he knew, no more than a piece of downright acting with just the touch of sincerity in it that was characteristic of the man but that had no depth or real meaning. During the rest of the evening he watched Sue, wondering if she too had fathomed Morrison and what she thought of his having taken the role of star from the long gaunt man, who had evidently been booked for that part and who sat at the table and wandered afterward among the guests, annoyed and disconcerted.
Late that night Sue came into his room and found him reading and smoking by the fire.
“Cheeky of Morrison, dimming your star,” he said, looking at her and laughing apologetically.
Sue looked at him doubtfully.
“I came in to thank you for bringing him,” she said; “I thought him splendid.”
Sam looked at her and for a moment was tempted to let the matter pass. And then his old inclination to be always open and frank with her asserted itself and he closed the book and rising stood looking down at her.
“The little beast was guying your crowd,” he said, “but I do not want him to guy you. Not that he wouldn’t try. He has the audacity for anything.”
A flush arose to her cheeks and her eyes gleamed.
“That is not true, Sam,” she said coldly. “You say that because you are becoming hard and cold and cynical. Your friend Morrison talked from his heart. It was beautiful. Men like you, who have a strong influence over him, may lead him away, but in the end a man like that will come to give his life to the service of society. You should help him; not assume an attitude of unbelief and laugh at him.”
Sam stood upon the hearth smoking his pipe and looking at her. He was thinking how easy it would have been in the first year after their marriage to have explained Morrison. Now he felt that he was but making a bad matter worse, but went on determined to stick to his policy of being entirely honest with her.
“Look here, Sue,” he began quietly, “be a good sport. Morrison was joking. I know the man. He is the friend of men like me because he wants to be and because it pays him to be. He is a talker, a writer, a talented, unscrupulous word-monger. He is making a big salary by taking the ideas of men like me and expressing them better than we can ourselves. He is a good workman and a generous, open-hearted fellow with a lot of nameless charm in him, but a man of convictions he is not. He could talk tears into the eyes of your fallen women, but he would be a lot more likely to talk good women into their state.”
Sam put a hand upon her shoulder.
“Be sensible and do not be offended,” he went on: “take the fellow for what he is and be glad for him. He hurts little and cheers a lot. He could make a convincing argument in favour of civilisation’s return to cannibalism, but really, you know, he spends most of his time thinking and writing of washing machines and ladies’ hats and liver pills, and most of his eloquence after all only comes down to ‘Send for catalogue, Department K’ in the end.”
Sue’s voice was colourless with passion when she replied.
“This is unbearable. Why did you bring the fellow here?”
Sam sat down and picked up his book. In his impatience he lied to her for the first time since their marriage.
“First, because I like him and second, because I wanted to see if I couldn’t produce a man who could outsentimentalise your socialist friends,” he said quietly.
Sue turned and walked out of the room. In a way the action was final and marked the end of understanding between them. Putting down his book Sam watched her go and some feeling he had kept for her and that had differentiated her from all other women died in him as the door closed between them. Throwing the book aside he sprang to his feet and stood looking at the door.
“The old goodfellowship appeal is dead,” he thought. “From now on we will have to explain and apologise like two strangers. No more taking each other for granted.”
Turning out the light he sat again before the fire to think his way through the situation that faced him. He had no thought that she would return. That last shot of his own had crushed the possibility of that.
The fire was getting low in the grate and he did not renew it. He looked past it toward the darkened windows and heard the hum of motor cars along the boulevard below. Again he was the boy of Caxton hungrily seeking an end in life. The flushed face of the woman in the theatre danced before his eyes. He remembered with shame how he had, a few days before, stood in a doorway and followed with his eyes the figure of a woman who had lifted her eyes to him as they passed in the street. He wished that he might go out of the house for a walk with John Telfer and have his mind filled with eloquence of the standing corn, or sit at the feet of Janet Eberly as she talked of books and of life. He got up and turning on the lights began preparing for bed.
“I know what I will do,” he said, “I will go to work. I will do some real work and make some more money. That’s the place for me.”
And to work he went, real work, the most sustained and clearly thought-out work he had done. For two years he was out of the house at dawn for a long bracing walk in the fresh morning air, to be followed by eight, ten and even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours in which he drove the Rainey Arms Company’s organisation mercilessly and, taking openly every vestige of the management out of the hands of Colonel Tom, began the plans for the consolidation of the American firearms companies that later put his name on the front pages of the newspapers and got him the title of a Captain of Finance.
There is a widespread misunderstanding abroad regarding the motives of many of the American millionaires who sprang into prominence and affluence in the days of change and sudden bewildering growth that followed the close of the Spanish War. They were, many of them, not of the brute trader type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted quickly and with a daring and audacity impossible to the average mind. They wanted power and were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but for the most part they were men with a fire burning within them, men who became what they were because the world offered them no better outlet for their vast energies.
Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard, quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there in the city. He had turned aside from money getting when he heard what he took to be a call to a better way of life. Now with the fires of youth still in him and with the training and discipline that had come from two years of reading, of comparative leisure and of thought, he was prepared to give the Chicago business world a display of that tremendous energy that was to write his name in the industrial history of the city as one of the first of the western giants of finance.
Going to Sue, Sam told her frankly of his plans.
“I want a free hand in the handling of your stock in the company,” he said. “I cannot lead this new life of yours. It may help and sustain you but it gets no hold on me. I want to be myself now and lead my own life in my own way. I want to run the company, really run it. I cannot stand idly by and let life go past. I am hurting myself and you standing here looking on. Also I am in a kind of danger of another kind that I want to avoid by throwing myself into hard, constructive work.”
Without question Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her old frankness toward him came back.
“I do not blame you, Sam,” she said, smiling bravely. “Things have not gone right, as we both know, but if we cannot work together at least let us not hurt each other.”
When Sam returned to give himself again to affairs, the country was just at the beginning of the great wave of consolidation which was finally to sweep all of the financial power of the country into a dozen pairs of competent and entirely efficient hands. With the sure instinct of the born trader Sam had seen this movement coming and had studied it. Now he began to act. Going to that same swarthy-faced lawyer who had drawn the contract for him to secure control of the medical student’s twenty thousand dollars and who had jokingly invited him to become one of a band of train robbers, he told him of his plans to begin working toward a consolidation of all the firearms companies of the country.
Webster wasted no time in joking now. He laid out the plans, adjusted and readjusted them to suit Sam’s shrewd suggestions, and when a fee was mentioned shook his head.
“I want in on this,” he said. “You will need me. I am made for this game and have been waiting for a chance to get at it. Just count me in as one of the promoters if you will.”
Sam nodded his head. Within a week he had formed a pool of his own company’s stock controlling, as he thought, a safe majority and had begun working to form a similar pool in the stock of his only big western rival.
This last job was not an easy one. Lewis, the Jew, had been making constant headway in that company just as Sam had made headway in the Rainey Company. He was a money maker, a sales manager of rare ability, and, as Sam knew, a planner and executor of business coups of the first class.
Sam did not want to deal with Lewis. He had respect for the man’s ability in driving sharp bargains and felt that he would like to have the whip in his own hands when it came to the point of dealing with him. To this end he began visiting bankers and the men who were head of big western trust companies in Chicago and St. Louis. He went about his work slowly, feeling his way and trying to get at each man by some effective appeal, buying the use of vast sums of money by a promise of common stock, the bait of a big active bank account, and, here and there, by the hint of a directorship in the big new consolidated company.
For a time the project moved slowly; indeed there were weeks and months when it did not appear to move at all. Working in secret and with extreme caution Sam encountered many discouragements and went home in the evening day after day to sit among Sue’s guests with a mind filled with his own plans and with an indifferent ear turned to the talk of revolution, social unrest, and the new class consciousness of the masses, that rattled and crackled up and down his dinner table. He thought that it must be trying to Sue. He was so evidently not interested in her interests. At the same time he thought that he was working toward what he wanted out of life and went to bed at night believing that he was finding, and would find, a kind of peace in just thinking clearly along one line day after day.
One day Webster, who had wanted to be in on the deal, came to Sam’s office and gave his project its first great boost toward success. He, like Sam, thought he saw clearly the tendencies of the times, and was greedy for the block of common stock that Sam had promised should come to him with the completion of the enterprise.
“You are not using me,” he said, sitting down before Sam’s desk. “What is blocking the deal?”
Sam began to explain and when he had finished Webster laughed.
“Let’s get at Tom Edwards of the Edward Arms Company direct,” he said, and then, leaning over the desk, “Edwards is a vain little peacock and a second rate business man,” he declared emphatically. “Get him afraid and then flatter his vanity. He has a new wife with blonde hair and big soft blue eyes. He wants prominence. He is afraid to venture upon big things himself but is hungry for the reputation and gain that comes through big deals. Use the method the Jew has used; show him what it means to the yellow-haired woman to be the wife of the president of the big consolidated Arms Company. THE EDWARDS CONSOLIDATED, eh? Get at Edwards. Bluff him and flatter him and he is your man.”
Sam wondered. Edwards was a small grey-haired man of sixty with something dry and unresponsive about him. Being a silent man, he had created an impression of remarkable shrewdness and ability. After a lifetime spent in hard labour and in the practice of the most rigid economy he had come up to wealth, and had got into the firearms business through Lewis, and it was counted one of the brightest stars in that brilliant Hebrew’s crown that he had been able to lead Edwards with him in his daring and audacious handling of the company’s affairs.
Sam looked at Webster across the desk and thought of Tom Edwards as the figurehead of the firearms trust.
“I was saving the frosting on the cake for my own Tom,” he said; “it was a thing I wanted to hand the colonel.”
