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Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories

S >> Sherwood Anderson >> Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories




On summer afternoons the child often went there to sit alone on the
banks of a tiny stream that wandered away eastward toward Willow Creek,
draining the farmer's fields on the way. The creek had made a slight
depression in the level contour of the land and she sat with her back
against an old apple tree and with her bare feet almost touching the
water. Her mother did not permit her to run bare footed through the
streets but when she got into the orchard she took her shoes off. It
gave her a delightful naked feeling.

Overhead and through the branches the child could see the great sky.
Masses of white clouds broke into fragments and then the fragments came
together again. The sun ran in behind one of the cloud masses and grey
shadows slid silently over the face of distant fields. The world of her
child life, the Wescott household, Melville Stoner sitting in his
house, the cries of other children who lived in her street, all the
life she knew went far away. To be there in that silent place was like
lying awake in bed at night only in some way sweeter and better. There
were no dull household sounds and the air she breathed was sweeter,
cleaner. The child played a little game. All the apple trees in the
orchard were old and gnarled and she had given all the trees names.
There was one fancy that frightened her a little but was delicious too.
She fancied that at night when she had gone to bed and was asleep and
when all the town of Willow Springs had gone to sleep the trees came
out of the ground and walked about. The grasses beneath the trees, the
bushes that grew beside the fence--all came out of the ground and ran
madly here and there. They danced wildly. The old trees, like stately
old men, put their heads together and talked. As they talked their
bodies swayed slightly--back and forth, back and forth. The bushes and
flowering weeds ran in great circles among the little grasses. The
grasses hopped straight up and down.

Sometimes when she sat with her back against the tree on warm bright
afternoons the child Rosalind had played the game of dancing-life until
she grew afraid and had to give it up. Nearby in the fields men were
cultivating corn. The breasts of the horses and their wide strong
shoulders pushed the young corn aside and made a low rustling sound.
Now and then a man's voice was raised in a shout. "Hi, there you Joe!
Get in there Frank!" The widow of the hens owned a little woolly dog
that occasionally broke into a spasm of barking, apparently without
cause, senseless, eager, barking. Rosalind shut all the sounds out. She
closed her eyes and struggled, trying to get into the place beyond
human sounds. After a time her desire was accomplished. There was a low
sweet sound like the murmuring of voices far away. Now the thing was
happening. With a kind of tearing sound the trees came up to stand on
top of the ground. They moved with stately tread toward each other. Now
the mad bushes and the flowering weeds came running, dancing madly, now
the joyful grasses hopped. Rosalind could not stay long in her world of
fancy. It was too mad, too joyful. She opened her eyes and jumped to
her feet. Everything was all right. The trees stood solidly rooted in
the ground, the weeds and bushes had gone back to their places by the
fence, the grasses lay asleep on the ground. She felt that her father
and mother, her brother, everyone she knew would not approve of her
being there among them. The world of dancing life was a lovely but a
wicked world. She knew. Sometimes she was a little mad herself and then
she was whipped or scolded. The mad world of her fancy had to be put
away. It frightened her a little. Once after the thing appeared she
cried, went down to the fence crying. A man who was cultivating corn
came along and stopped his horses. "What's the matter?" he asked
sharply. She couldn't tell him so she told a lie. "A bee stung me," she
said. The man laughed. "It'll get well. Better put on your shoes," he
advised.

The time of the marching trees and the dancing grasses was in
Rosalind's childhood. Later when she had graduated from the Willow
Springs High School and had the three years of waiting about the
Wescott house before she went to the city she had other experiences in
the orchard. Then she had been reading novels and had talked with other
young women. She knew many things that after all she did not know. In
the attic of her mother's house there was a cradle in which she and her
brother had slept when they were babies. One day she went up there and
found it. Bedding for the cradle was packed away in a trunk and she
took it out. She arranged the cradle for the reception of a child. Then
after she did it she was ashamed. Her mother might come up the attic
stairs and see it. She put the bedding quickly back into the trunk and
went down stairs, her cheeks burning with shame.

What a confusion! One day she went to the house of a schoolgirl friend
who was about to be married. Several other girls came and they were all
taken into a bedroom where the bride's trousseau was laid out on a bed.
What soft lovely things! All the girls went forward and stood over
them, Rosalind among them. Some of the girls were shy, others bold.
There was one, a thin girl who had no breasts. Her body was flat like a
door and she had a thin sharp voice and a thin sharp face. She began to
cry out strangely. "How sweet, how sweet, how sweet," she cried over
and over. The voice was not like a human voice. It was like something
being hurt, an animal in the forest, far away somewhere by itself,
being hurt. Then the girl dropped to her knees beside the bed and began
to weep bitterly. She declared she could not bear the thought of her
schoolgirl friend being married. "Don't do it! O, Mary don't do it!"
she pleaded. The other girls laughed but Rosalind couldn't stand it.
She hurried out of the house.

That was one thing that had happened to Rosalind and there were other
things. Once she saw a young man on the street. He clerked in a store
and Rosalind did not know him. However her fancy played with the
thought that she had married him. Her own thoughts made her ashamed.

Everything shamed her. When she went into the orchard on summer
afternoons she sat with her back against the apple tree and took off
her shoes and stockings just as she had when she was a child, but the
world of her childhood fancy was gone, nothing could bring it back.

Rosalind's body was soft but all her flesh was firm and strong. She
moved away from the tree and lay on the ground. She pressed her body
down into the grass, into the firm hard ground. It seemed to her that
her mind, her fancy, all the life within her, except just her physical
life, went away. The earth pressed upwards against her body. Her body
was pressed against the earth. There was darkness. She was imprisoned.
She pressed against the walls of her prison. Everything was dark and
there was in all the earth silence. Her fingers clutched a handful of
the grasses, played in the grasses.

Then she grew very still but did not sleep. There was something that
had nothing to do with the ground beneath her or the trees or the
clouds in the sky, that seemed to want to come to her, come into her, a
kind of white wonder of life.

The thing couldn't happen. She opened her eyes and there was the sky
overhead and the trees standing silently about. She went again to sit
with her back against one of the trees. She thought with dread of the
evening coming on and the necessity of going out of the orchard and to
the Wescott house. She was weary. It was the weariness that made her
appear to others a rather dull stupid young woman. Where was the wonder
of life? It was not within herself, not in the ground. It must be in
the sky overhead. Presently it would be night and the stars would come
out. Perhaps the wonder did not really exist in life. It had something
to do with God. She wanted to ascend upwards, to go at once up into
God's house, to be there among the light strong men and women who had
died and left dullness and heaviness behind them on the earth. Thinking
of them took some of her weariness away and sometimes she went out of
the orchard in the late afternoon walking almost lightly. Something
like grace seemed to have come into her tall strong body.

* * * * *

Rosalind had gone away from the Wescott house and from Willow Springs,
Iowa, feeling that life was essentially ugly. In a way she hated life
and people. In Chicago sometimes it was unbelievable how ugly the world
had become. She tried to shake off the feeling but it clung to her. She
walked through the crowded streets and the buildings were ugly. A sea
of faces floated up to her. They were the faces of dead people. The
dull death that was in them was in her also. They too could not break
through the walls of themselves to the white wonder of life. After all
perhaps there was no such thing as the white wonder of life. It might
be just a thing of the mind. There was something essentially dirty
about life. The dirt was on her and in her. Once as she walked at
evening over the Rush Street bridge to her room on the North Side she
looked up suddenly and saw the chrysoprase river running inland from
the lake. Near at hand stood a soap factory. The men of the city had
turned the river about, made it flow inland from the lake. Someone had
erected a great soap factory there near the river's entrance to the
city, to the land of men. Rosalind stopped and stood looking along the
river toward the lake. Men and women, wagons, automobiles rushed past
her. They were dirty. She was dirty. "The water of an entire sea and
millions of cakes of soap will not wash me clean," she thought. The
dirtiness of life seemed a part of her very being and an almost
overwhelming desire to climb upon the railing of the bridge and leap
down into the chrysoprase river swept over her. Her body trembled
violently and putting down her head and staring at the flooring of the
bridge she hurried away.

* * * * *

And now Rosalind, a grown woman, was in the Wescott house at the supper
table with her father and mother. None of the three people ate. They
fussed about with the food Ma Wescott had prepared. Rosalind looked at
her mother and thought of what Melville Stoner had said.

"If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what everyone thought.
It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh? I would tell what
you have been thinking this afternoon while you walked here on this
railroad track with me. I would tell what your mother has been thinking
at the same time and what she would like to say to you."

What had Rosalind's mother been thinking all through the three days
since her daughter had so unexpectedly come home from Chicago? What did
mothers think in regard to the lives led by their daughters? Had
mothers something of importance to say to daughters and if they did
when did the time come when they were ready to say it?

She looked at her mother sharply. The older woman's face was heavy and
sagging. She had grey eyes like Rosalind's but they were dull like the
eyes of a fish lying on a slab of ice in the window of a city meat
market. The daughter was a little frightened by what she saw in her
mother's face and something caught in her throat. There was an
embarrassing moment. A strange sort of tenseness came into the air of
the room and all three people suddenly got up from the table.

Rosalind went to help her mother with the dishes and her father sat in
a chair by a window and read a paper. The daughter avoided looking
again into her mother's face. "I must gather myself together if I am to
do what I want to do," she thought. It was strange--in fancy she saw
the lean bird-like face of Melville Stoner and the eager tired face of
Walter Sayers floating above the head of her mother who leaned over the
kitchen sink, washing the dishes. Both of the men's faces sneered at
her. "You think you can but you can't. You are a young fool," the men's
lips seemed to be saying.

Rosalind's father wondered how long his daughter's visit was to last.
After the evening meal he wanted to clear out of the house, go up town,
and he had a guilty feeling that in doing so he was being discourteous
to his daughter. While the two women washed the dishes he put on his
hat and going into the back yard began chopping wood. Rosalind went to
sit on the front porch. The dishes were all washed and dried but for a
half hour her mother would putter about in the kitchen. She always did
that. She would arrange and rearrange, pick up dishes and put them down
again. She clung to the kitchen. It was as though she dreaded the hours
that must pass before she could go upstairs and to bed and asleep, to
fall into the oblivion of sleep.

When Henry Wescott came around the corner of the house and confronted
his daughter he was a little startled. He did not know what was the
matter but he felt uncomfortable. For a moment he stopped and looked at
her. Life radiated from her figure. A fire burned in her eyes, in her
grey intense eyes. Her hair was yellow like cornsilk. She was, at the
moment, a complete, a lovely daughter of the cornlands, a being to be
loved passionately, completely by some son of the cornlands--had there
been in the land a son as alive as this daughter it had thrown aside.
The father had hoped to escape from the house unnoticed. "I'm going up
town a little while," he said hesitatingly. Still he lingered a moment.
Some old sleeping thing awoke in him, was awakened in him by the
startling beauty of his daughter. A little fire flared up among the
charred rafters of the old house that was his body. "You look pretty,
girly," he said sheepishly and then turned his back to her and went
along the path to the gate and the street.

Rosalind followed her father to the gate and stood looking as he went
slowly along the short street and around a corner. The mood induced in
her by her talk with Melville Stoner had returned. Was it possible that
her father also felt as Melville Stoner sometimes did? Did loneliness
drive him to the door of insanity and did he also run through the night
seeking some lost, some hidden and half forgotten loveliness?

When her father had disappeared around the corner she went through the
gate and into the street. "I'll go sit by the tree in the orchard until
mother has finished puttering about the kitchen," she thought.

Henry Wescott went along the streets until he came to the square about
the court house and then went into Emanuel Wilson's Hardware Store. Two
or three other men presently joined him there. Every evening he sat
among these men of his town saying nothing. It was an escape from his
own house and his wife. The other men came for the same reason. A faint
perverted kind of male fellowship was achieved. One of the men of the
party, a little old man who followed the housepainters trade, was
unmarried and lived with his mother. He was himself nearing the age of
sixty but his mother was still alive. It was a thing to be wondered
about. When in the evening the house painter was a trifle late at the
rendezvous a mild flurry of speculation arose, floated in the air for a
moment and then settled like dust in an empty house. Did the old house
painter do the housework in his own house, did he wash the dishes, cook
the food, sweep and make the beds or did his feeble old mother do these
things? Emanuel Wilson told a story he had often told before. In a town
in Ohio where he had lived as a young man he had once heard a tale.
There was an old man like the house painter whose mother was also still
alive and lived with him. They were very poor and in the winter had not
enough bedclothes to keep them both warm. They crawled into a bed
together. It was an innocent enough matter, just like a mother taking
her child into her bed.

Henry Wescott sat in the store listening to the tale Emanuel Wilson
told for the twentieth time and thought about his daughter. Her beauty
made him feel a little proud, a little above the men who were his
companions. He had never before thought of his daughter as a beautiful
woman. Why had he never before noticed her beauty? Why had she come
from Chicago, there by the lake, to Willow Springs, in the hot month of
August? Had she come home from Chicago because she really wanted to see
her father and mother? For a moment he was ashamed of his own heavy
body, of his shabby clothes and his unshaven face and then the tiny
flame that had flared up within him burned itself out. The house
painter came in and the faint flavor of male companionship to which he
clung so tenaciously was reestablished.

In the orchard Rosalind sat with her back against the tree in the same
spot where her fancy had created the dancing life of her childhood and
where as a young woman graduate of the Willow Springs High School she
had come to try to break through the wall that separated her from life.
The sun had disappeared and the grey shadows of night were creeping
over the grass, lengthening the shadows cast by the trees. The orchard
had long been neglected and many of the trees were dead and without
foliage. The shadows of the dead branches were like long lean arms that
reached out, felt their way forward over the grey grass. Long lean
fingers reached and clutched. There was no wind and the night would be
dark and without a moon, a hot dark starlit night of the plains.

In a moment more it would be black night. Already the creeping shadows
on the grass were barely discernible. Rosalind felt death all about
her, in the orchard, in the town. Something Walter Sayers had once said
to her came sharply back into her mind. "When you are in the country
alone at night sometime try giving yourself to the night, to the
darkness, to the shadows cast by trees. The experience, if you really
give yourself to it, will tell you a startling story. You will find
that, although the white men have owned the land for several
generations now and although they have built towns everywhere, dug coal
out of the ground, covered the land with railroads, towns and cities,
they do not own an inch of the land in the whole continent. It still
belongs to a race who in their physical life are now dead. The red men,
although they are practically all gone still own the American
continent. Their fancy has peopled it with ghosts, with gods and
devils. It is because in their time they loved the land. The proof of
what I say is to be seen everywhere. We have given our towns no
beautiful names of our own because we have not built the towns
beautifully. When an American town has a beautiful name it was stolen
from another race, from a race that still owns the land in which we
live. We are all strangers here. When you are alone at night in the
country, anywhere in America, try giving yourself to the night. You
will find that death only resides in the conquering whites and that
life remains in the red men who are gone."

The spirits of the two men, Walter Sayers and Melville Stoner,
dominated the mind of Rosalind. She felt that. It was as though they
were beside her, sitting beside her on the grass in the orchard. She
was quite certain that Melville Stoner had come back to his house and
was now sitting within sound of her voice, did she raise her voice to
call. What did they want her of her? Had she suddenly begun to love two
men, both older than herself? The shadows of the branches of trees made
a carpet on the floor of the orchard, a soft carpet spun of some
delicate material on which the footsteps of men could make no sound.
The two men were coming toward her, advancing over the carpet. Melville
Stoner was near at hand and Walter Sayers was coming from far away, out
of the distance. The spirit of him was creeping toward her. The two men
were in accord. They came bearing some male knowledge of life,
something they wanted to give her.

She arose and stood by the tree, trembling. Into what a state she had
got herself! How long would it endure? Into what knowledge of life and
death was she being led? She had come home on a simple mission. She
loved Walter Sayers, wanted to offer herself to him but before doing so
had felt the call to come home to her mother. She had thought she would
be bold and would tell her mother the story of her love. She would tell
her and then take what the older woman offered. If her mother
understood and sympathized, well that would be a beautiful thing to
have happen. If her mother did not understand--at any rate she would
have paid some old debt, would have been true to some old, unexpressed
obligation.

The two men--what did they want of her? What had Melville Stoner to do
with the matter? She put the figure of him out of her mind. In the
figure of the other man, Walter Sayers, there was something less
aggressive, less assertive. She clung to that.

She put her arm about the trunk of the old apple tree and laid her
cheek against its rough bark. Within herself she was so intense, so
excited that she wanted to rub her cheeks against the bark of the tree
until the blood came, until physical pain came to counteract the
tenseness within that had become pain.

Since the meadow between the orchard and the street end had been
planted to corn she would have to reach the street by going along a
lane, crawling under a wire fence and crossing the yard of the widowed
chicken raiser. A profound silence reigned over the orchard and when
she had crawled under the fence and reached the widow's back yard she
had to feel her way through a narrow opening between a chicken house
and a barn by running her fingers forward over the rough boards.

Her mother sat on the porch waiting and on the narrow porch before his
house next door sat Melville Stoner. She saw him as she hurried past
and shivered slightly. "What a dark vulture-like thing he is! He lives
off the dead, off dead glimpses of beauty, off dead old sounds heard at
night," she thought. When she got to the Wescott house she threw
herself down on the porch and lay on her back with her arms stretched
above her head. Her mother sat on a rocking chair beside her. There was
a street lamp at the corner at the end of the street and a little light
came through the branches of trees and lighted her mother's face. How
white and still and death-like it was. When she had looked Rosalind
closed her eyes. "I mustn't. I shall lose courage," she thought.

There was no hurry about delivering the message she had come to
deliver. It would be two hours before her father came home. The silence
of the village street was broken by a hubbub that arose in the house
across the street. Two boys playing some game ran from room to room
through the house, slamming doors, shouting. A baby began to cry and
then a woman's voice protested. "Quit it! Quit it!" the voice called.
"Don't you see you have wakened the baby? Now I shall have a time
getting him to sleep again."

Rosalind's fingers closed and her hands remained clenched. "I came home
to tell you something. I have fallen in love with a man and can't marry
him. He is a good many years older than myself and is already married.
He has two children. I love him and I think he loves me--I know he
does. I want him to have me too. I wanted to come home and tell you
before it happened," she said speaking in a low clear voice. She
wondered if Melville Stoner could hear her declaration.

Nothing happened. The chair in which Rosalind's mother sat had been
rocking slowly back and forth and making a slight creaking sound. The
sound continued. In the house across the street the baby stopped
crying. The words Rosalind had come from Chicago to say to her mother
were said and she felt relieved and almost happy. The silence between
the two women went on and on. Rosalind's mind wandered away. Presently
there would be some sort of reaction from her mother. She would be
condemned. Perhaps her mother would say nothing until her father came
home and would then tell him. She would be condemned as a wicked woman,
ordered to leave the house. It did not matter.

Rosalind waited. Like Walter Sayers, sitting in his garden, her mind
seemed to float away, out of her body. It ran away from her mother to
the man she loved.

One evening, on just such another quiet summer evening as this one, she
had gone into the country with Walter Sayers. Before that he had talked
to her, at her, on many other evenings and during long hours in the
office. He had found in her someone to whom he could talk, to whom he
wanted to talk. What doors of life he had opened for her! The talk had
gone on and on. In her presence the man was relieved, he relaxed out of
the tenseness that had become the habit of this body. He had told her
of how he had wanted to be a singer and had given up the notion. "It
isn't my wife's fault nor the children's fault," he had said. "They
could have lived without me. The trouble is I could not have lived
without them. I am a defeated man, was intended from the first to be a
defeated man and I needed something to cling to, something with which
to justify my defeat. I realize that now. I am a dependent. I shall
never try to sing now because I am one who has at least one merit. I
know defeat. I can accept defeat."

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