Short Stories

III

Rosalind’s life in Chicago had been like a stream that apparently turns back toward its source.  It ran forward, then stopped, turned, twisted.  At just the time when her awakening became a half realized thing she went to work at a new place, a piano factory on the Northwest Side facing a branch of the Chicago River.  She became secretary to a man who was treasurer of the company.  He was a slender, rather small man of thirty-eight with thin white restless hands and with gray eyes that were clouded and troubled.  For the first time she became really interested in the work that ate up her days.  Her employer was charged with the responsibility of passing upon the credit of the firm’s customers and was unfitted for the task.  He was not shrewd and within a short time had made two costly mistakes by which the company had lost money.  “I have too much to do.  My time is too much taken up with details.  I need help here,” he had explained, evidently irritated, and Rosalind had been engaged to relieve him of details.

Her new employer, named Walter Sayers, was the only son of a man who in his time had been well known in Chicago’s social and club life.  Everyone had thought him wealthy and he had tried to live up to people’s estimate of his fortune.  His son Walter had wanted to be a singer and had expected to inherit a comfortable fortune.  At thirty he had married and three years later when his father died he was already the father of two children.

And then suddenly he had found himself quite penniless.  He could sing but his voice was not large.  It wasn’t an instrument with which one could make money in any dignified way.  Fortunately his wife had some money of her own.  It was her money, invested in the piano manufacturing business, that had secured him the position as treasurer of the company.  With his wife he withdrew from social life and they went to live in a comfortable house in a suburb.

Walter Sayers gave up music, apparently surrendered even his interest in it.  Many men and women from his suburb went to hear the orchestra on Friday afternoons but he did not go.  “What’s the use of torturing myself and thinking of a life I cannot lead?” he said to himself.  To his wife he pretended a growing interest in his work at the factory.  “It’s really fascinating.  It’s a game, like moving men back and forth on a chess board.  I shall grow to love it,” he said.

He had tried to build up interest in his work but had not been successful.  Certain things would not get into his consciousness.  Although he tried hard he could not make the fact that profit or loss to the company depended upon his judgment seem important to himself.  It was a matter of money lost or gained and money meant nothing to him.  “It’s father’s fault,” he thought.  “While he lived money never meant anything to me.  I was brought up wrong.  I am ill prepared for the battle of life.”  He became too timid and lost business that should have come to the company quite naturally.  Then he became too bold in the extension of credit and other losses followed.

His wife was quite happy and satisfied with her life.  There were four or five acres of land about the suburban house and she became absorbed in the work of raising flowers and vegetables.  For the sake of the children she kept a cow.  With a young negro gardener she puttered about all day, digging in the earth, spreading manure about the roots of bushes and shrubs, planting and transplanting.  In the evening when he had come home from his office in his car she took him by the arm and led him eagerly about.  The two children trotted at their heels.  She talked glowingly.  They stood at a low spot at the foot of the garden and she spoke of the necessity of putting in tile.  The prospect seemed to excite her.  “It will be the best land on the place when it’s drained,” she said.  She stooped and with a trowel turned over the soft black soil.  An odor arose.  “See!  Just see how rich and black it is!” she exclaimed eagerly.  “It’s a little sour now because water has stood on it.”  She seemed to be apologizing as for a wayward child.  “When it’s drained I shall use lime to sweeten it,” she added.  She was like a mother leaning over the cradle of a sleeping babe.  Her enthusiasm irritated him.

When Rosalind came to take the position in his office the slow fires of hatred that had been burning beneath the surface of Walter Savers’ life had already eaten away much of his vigor and energy.  His body sagged in the office chair and there were heavy sagging lines at the corners of his mouth.  Outwardly he remained always kindly and cheerful but back of the clouded, troubled eyes the fires of hatred burned slowly, persistently.  It was as though he was trying to awaken from a troubled dream that gripped him, a dream that frightened a little, that was unending.  He had contracted little physical habits.  A sharp paper cutter lay on his desk.  As he read a letter from one of the firm’s customers he took it up and jabbed little holes in the leather cover of his desk.  When he had several letters to sign he took up his pen and jabbed it almost viciously into the inkwell.  Then before signing he jabbed it in again.  Sometimes he did the thing a dozen times in succession.

Sometimes the things that went on beneath the surface of Walter Sayers frightened him.  In order to do what he called “putting in his Saturday afternoons and Sundays” he had taken up photography.  The camera took him away from his own house and the sight of the garden where his wife and the negro were busy digging, and into the fields and into stretches of woodland at the edge of the suburban village.  Also it took him away from his wife’s talk, from her eternal planning for the garden’s future.  Here by the house tulip bulbs were to be put in in the fall.  Later there would be a hedge of lilac bushes shutting off the house from the road.  The men who lived in the other houses along the suburban street spent their Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings tinkering with motor cars.  On Sunday afternoons they took their families driving, sitting up very straight and silent at the driving wheel.  They consumed the afternoon in a swift dash over country roads.  The car ate up the hours.  Monday morning and the work in the city was there, at the end of the road.  They ran madly toward it.

For a time the use of the camera made Walter Sayers almost happy.  The study of light, playing on the trunk of a tree or over the grass in a field appealed to some instinct within.  It was an uncertain delicate business.  He fixed himself a dark room upstairs in the house and spent his evenings there.  One dipped the films into the developing liquid, held them to the light and then dipped them again.  The little nerves that controlled the eyes were aroused.  One felt oneself being enriched, a little—­

One Sunday afternoon he went to walk in a strip of woodland and came out upon the slope of a low hill.  He had read somewhere that the low hill country southwest of Chicago, in which his suburb lay, had once been the shore of Lake Michigan.  The low hills sprang out of the flat land and were covered with forests.  Beyond them the flat lands began again.  The prairies went on indefinitely, into infinity.  People’s lives went on so.  Life was too long.  It was to be spent in the endless doing over and over of an unsatisfactory task.  He sat on the slope and looked out across the land.

He thought of his wife.  She was back there, in the suburb in the hills, in her garden making things grow.  It was a noble sort of thing to be doing.  One shouldn’t be irritated.

Well he had married her expecting to have money of his own.  Then he would have worked at something else.  Money would not have been involved in the matter and success would not have been a thing one must seek.  He had expected his own life would be motivated.  No matter how much or how hard he worked he would not have been a great singer.  What did that matter?  There was a way to live—­a way of life in which such things did not matter.  The delicate shades of things might be sought after.  Before his eyes, there on the grass covered flat lands, the afternoon light was playing.  It was like a breath, a vapor of color blown suddenly from between red lips out over the grey dead burned grass.  Song might be like that.  The beauty might come out of himself, out of his own body.

Again he thought of his wife and the sleeping light in his eyes flared up, it became a flame.  He felt himself being mean, unfair.  It didn’t matter.  Where did the truth lie?  Was his wife, digging in her garden, having always a succession of small triumphs, marching forward with the seasons—­well, was she becoming a little old, lean and sharp, a little vulgarized?

It seemed so to him.  There was something smug in the way in which she managed to fling green growing flowering things over the black land.  It was obvious the thing could be done and that there was satisfaction in doing it.  It was a little like running a business and making money by it.  There was a deep seated vulgarity involved in the whole matter.  His wife put her hands into the black ground.  They felt about, caressed the roots of the growing things.  She laid hold of the slender trunk of a young tree in a certain way—­as though she possessed it.

One could not deny that the destruction of beautiful things was involved.  Weeds grew in the garden, delicate shapely things.  She plucked them out without thought.  He had seen her do it.

As for himself, he also had been pulled out of something.  Had he not surrendered to the fact of a wife and growing children?  Did he not spend his days doing work he detested?  The anger within him burned bright.  The fire came into his conscious self.  Why should a weed that is to be destroyed pretend to a vegetable existence?  As for puttering about with a camera—­was it not a form of cheating?  He did not want to be a photographer.  He had once wanted to be a singer.

He arose and walked along the hillside, still watching the shadows play over the plains below.  At night—­in bed with his wife—­well, was she not sometimes with him as she was in the garden?  Something was plucked out of him and another thing grew in its place—­something she wanted to have grow.  Their love making was like his puttering with a camera—­to make the weekends pass.  She came at him a little too determinedly—­ sure.  She was plucking delicate weeds in order that things she had determined upon—­“vegetables,” he exclaimed in disgust—­in order that vegetables might grow.  Love was a fragrance, the shading of a tone over the lips, out of the throat.  It was like the afternoon light on the burned grass.  Keeping a garden and making flowers grow had nothing to do with it.

Walter Sayers’ fingers twitched.  The camera hung by a strap over his shoulder.  He took hold of the strap and walked to a tree.  He swung the box above his head and brought it down with a thump against the tree trunk.  The sharp breaking sound—­the delicate parts of the machine being broken—­was sweet to his ears.  It was as though a song had come suddenly from between his lips.  Again he swung the box and again brought it down against the tree trunk.