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Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories

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




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 fiancée, 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
not sleep and as the fancies that kept crowding in upon him only made
him more excited, he got out of bed and tried to think.

As would be natural under such circumstances, he tried to control his
thoughts, but when he sat by the window and was wide awake a most
unexpected and humiliating thing happened. The night was clear and
fine. There was a moon. He wanted to dream of the woman who was to be
his wife, to think out lines for noble poems or make plans that would
affect his career. Much to his surprise his mind refused to do anything
of the sort.

At a corner of the street where he lived there was a small cigar store
and newspaper stand run by a fat man of forty and his wife, a small
active woman with bright grey eyes. In the morning he stopped there to
buy a paper before going down to the city. Sometimes he saw only the
fat man, but often the man had disappeared and the woman waited on him.
She was, as he assured me at least twenty times in telling me his tale,
a very ordinary person with nothing special or notable about her, but
for some reason he could not explain, being in her presence stirred him
profoundly. During that week in the midst of his distraction she was
the only person he knew who stood out clear and distinct in his mind.
When he wanted so much to think noble thoughts he could think only of
her. Before he knew what was happening his imagination had taken hold
of the notion of having a love affair with the woman.

"I could not understand myself," he declared, in telling me the story.
"At night, when the city was quiet and when I should have been asleep,
I thought about her all the time. After two or three days of that sort
of thing the consciousness of her got into my daytime thoughts. I was
terribly muddled. When I went to see the woman who is now my wife I
found that my love for her was in no way affected by my vagrant
thoughts. There was but one woman in the world I wanted to live with
and to be my comrade in undertaking to improve my own character and my
position in the world, but for the moment, you see, I wanted this other
woman to be in my arms. She had worked her way into my being. On all
sides people were saying I was a big man who would do big things, and
there I was. That evening when I went to the theatre I walked home
because I knew I would be unable to sleep, and to satisfy the annoying
impulse in myself I went and stood on the sidewalk before the tobacco
shop. It was a two story building, and I knew the woman lived upstairs
with her husband. For a long time I stood in the darkness with my body
pressed against the wall of the building, and then I thought of the two
of them up there and no doubt in bed together. That made me furious.

"Then I grew more furious with myself. I went home and got into bed,
shaken with anger. There are certain books of verse and some prose
writings that have always moved me deeply, and so I put several books
on a table by my bed.

"The voices in the books were like the voices of the dead. I did not
hear them. The printed words would not penetrate into my consciousness.
I tried to think of the woman I loved, but her figure had also become
something far away, something with which I for the moment seemed to
have nothing to do. I rolled and tumbled about in the bed. It was a
miserable experience.

"On Thursday morning I went into the store. There stood the woman
alone. I think she knew how I felt. Perhaps she had been thinking of me
as I had been thinking of her. A doubtful hesitating smile played about
the corners of her mouth. She had on a dress made of cheap cloth and
there was a tear on the shoulder. She must have been ten years older
than myself. When I tried to put my pennies on the glass counter,
behind which she stood, my hand trembled so that the pennies made a
sharp rattling noise. When I spoke the voice that came out of my throat
did not sound like anything that had ever belonged to me. It barely
arose above a thick whisper. 'I want you,' I said. 'I want you very
much. Can't you run away from your husband? Come to me at my apartment
at seven tonight.'

"The woman did come to my apartment at seven. That morning she didn't
say anything at all. For a minute perhaps we stood looking at each
other. I had forgotten everything in the world but just her. Then she
nodded her head and I went away. Now that I think of it I cannot
remember a word I ever heard her say. She came to my apartment at seven
and it was dark. You must understand this was in the month of October.
I had not lighted a light and I had sent my servant away.

"During that day I was no good at all. Several men came to see me at my
office, but I got all muddled up in trying to talk with them. They
attributed my rattle-headedness to my approaching marriage and went
away laughing.

"It was on that morning, just the day before my marriage, that I got a
long and very beautiful letter from my fiancée. During the night before
she also had been unable to sleep and had got out of bed to write the
letter. Everything she said in it was very sharp and real, but she
herself, as a living thing, seemed to have receded into the distance.
It seemed to me that she was like a bird, flying far away in distant
skies, and that I was like a perplexed bare-footed boy standing in the
dusty road before a farm house and looking at her receding figure. I
wonder if you will understand what I mean?

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