He said no more and both men went away, the father toward the distant fields and the son toward the house. Mary was afterwards quite sure that nothing more was ever said.
What had the father meant?
“When it is yours you can be boss.” It was too much for the child. Knowledge comes slowly. It meant:
“You will be in command, and for you, in your turn, it will be necessary to assert.
“Such men as we are cannot fool with delicate stuff. Some men are meant to command and others must obey. You can make them obey in your turn.
“There is a kind of death.
“Something in you must die before you can possess and command.”
There was, so obviously, more than one kind of death. For Don Grey one kind and for the younger brother Ted, soon now perhaps, another.
Mary ran out of the barn that day, wanting eagerly to get out into the light, and afterwards, for a long time, she did not try to think her way through what had happened. She and her brother Ted did, however, afterwards, before he died, discuss quite often the two trees. They went on a cold day and put their fingers on the stumps, but the stumps were cold. Ted kept asserting that only men got their legs and arms cut off, and she protested. They continued doing things that had been forbidden Ted to do, but no one protested, and, a year or two later, when he died, he died during the night in his bed.
But while he lived, there was always, Mary afterwards thought, a curious sense of freedom, something that belonged to him that made it good, a great happiness, to be with him. It was, she finally thought, because having to die his kind of death, he never had to make the surrender his brother had made—to be sure of possessions, success, his time to command—would never have to face the more subtle and terrible death that had come to his older brother.
UNCOLLECTED STORIES
Sister
* * *
THE young artist is a woman, and at evening she comes to talk to me in my room. She is my sister, but long ago she has forgotten that and I have forgotten.
Neither my sister nor I live in our father’s house, and among all my brothers and sisters I am conscious only of her. The others have positions in the city and in the evening go home to the house where my sister and I once lived. My father is old and his hands tremble. He is not concerned about me, but my sister who lives alone in a room in a house on North Dearborn Street has caused him much unhappiness.
Into my room in the evening comes my sister and sits upon a low couch by the door. She sits cross-legged and smokes cigarettes. When she comes it is always the same—she is embarrassed and I am embarrassed.
Since she has been a small girl my sister has always been very strange. When she was quite young she was awkward and boyish and tore her clothes climbing trees. It was after that her strangeness began to be noticed. Day after day she would slip away from the house and go to walk in the streets. She became a devout student and made such rapid strides in her classes that my mother—who to tell the truth is fat and uninteresting—spent the days worrying. My sister, she declared, would end by having brain fever.
When my sister was fifteen years old she announced to the family that she was about to take a lover. I was away from home at the time, on one of the wandering trips that have always been a passion with me.
My sister came into the house, where the family were seated at the table, and, standing by the door, said she had decided to spend the night with a boy of sixteen who was the son of a neighbor.
The neighbor boy knew nothing of my sister’s intentions. He was at home from college, a tall, quiet, blue-eyed fellow, with his mind set upon foot-ball. To my family my sister explained that she would go to the boy and tell him of her desires. Her eyes flashed and she stamped with her foot upon the floor.
My father whipped my sister. Taking her by the arm he led her into the stable at the back of the house. He whipped her with a long black whip that always stood upright in the whip-socket of the carriage in which, on Sundays, my mother and father drove about the streets of our suburb. After the whipping my father was ill.
I am wondering how I know so intimately all the details of the whipping of my sister. Neither my father nor my sister have told me of it. Perhaps sometime, as I sat dreaming in a chair, my mother gossiped of the whipping. It would be like her to do that, and it is a trick of my mind never to remember her figure in connection with the things she has told me.
After the whipping in the stable my sister was quite changed. The family sat tense and quiet at the table and when she came into the house she laughed and went upstairs to her own room. She was very quiet and well-behaved for several years and when she was twenty-one inherited some money and went to live alone in the house on North Dearborn Street. I have a feeling that the walls of our house told me the story of the whipping. I could never live in the house afterwards and came away at once to this room where I am now and where my sister comes to visit me.
And so there is my sister in my room and we are embarrassed. I do not look at her but turn my back and begin writing furiously. Presently she is on the arm of my chair with her arm about my neck.
I am the world and my sister is the young artist in the world. I am afraid the world will destroy her. So furious is my love of her that the touch of her hand makes me tremble.
My sister would not write as I am now writing. How strange it would seem to see her engaged in anything of the kind. She would never give the slightest bit of advice to any one. If you were dying and her advice would save you she would say nothing.
My sister is the most wonderful artist in the world, but when she is with me I do not remember that. When she has talked of her adventures, up from the chair I spring and go ranting about the room. I am half blind with anger, thinking perhaps that strange, furtive looking youth, with whom I saw her walking yesterday in the streets, has had her in his arms. The flesh of my sister is sacred to me. If anything were to happen to her body I think I should kill myself in sheer madness.
In the evening after my sister is gone I do not try to work any more. I pull my couch to the opening by the window and lie down. It is then a little that I begin to understand my sister. She is the artist right to adventure in the world, to be destroyed in the adventure, if that be necessary, and I, on my couch, am the worker in the world, blinking up at the stars that can be seen from my window when my couch is properly arranged.
The White Streak
I
* * *
HE IS old now and looks old, but when this story begins he was a man of twenty-five. His father, a commission merchant dealing in poultry, butter and eggs, had an office in South Water Street in the City of Chicago.
He was married to the daughter of a respectable merchant and had bought a white frame house in a suburb. He went into his father’s business and for a time things went well with him. Then something happened. He grew weary of the selling of butter and eggs and of living in a suburb. Something like a revolution went on in his soul. His boyish blue eyes were clouded and as he went up and down in the noisy, crowded street where he was employed and heard men higgling and quarreling over the price to be paid for a shipment of butter, he trembled with anger. He began to hate the other men in the office, and in a fury of hatred ran out of the narrow, dirty street filled with wagons piled high with food stuffs. Running around the corner he stood under the elevated railroad at Lake and State Streets. His body trembled and he looked about with wild eyes. In State Street he saw thousands of men, women and children going into stores to buy clothes.
“The world is mad,” he muttered to himself. “If people are not thinking of the clothes they wear they are thinking and talking of food. Am I to spend my life in the silly business of seeing that people are fed?”
The young man, whose name was Bushnell, could not understand what had happened to him. He tried to discuss the matter with his wife but wasn’t very clear, and his wife did not know what he was talking about. Like thousands of other young people who live in respectable
suburbs, Bushnell and his wife had been married because of a situation founded on emotional hunger. They had met at a dinner party given at the house of a mutual friend and had wanted each other. When the hunger within became too persistent to be quieted, the young man blurted out a proposal. For months before their marriage they spent their evenings together, sitting in silence, each tremendously conscious of the other. After marriage they found they had little to say to each other.
It was during the third summer after his marriage that the revolution took place in the soul of young Bushnell. In the evening when he went home from the office in the elevated train he put his head out of the car window and tried to reason with himself.
“Everyone has to work,” he thought. “It does not make any difference what a man does.”
He looked at the long rows of grim brick buildings past which the train hurried and thought of the millions who, like himself, must be employed in dark ugly places.
“It is what life is like,” he muttered to himself. “It cannot be helped.”
The whole city was, he thought, given over to ugliness and the people who rode with him on the trains were ugly in the dreary sameness of their lives and their thoughts. The men and women sitting in the car homeward bound from the city talked of their affairs. It seemed to young Bushnell that the women talked always of clothes and the men of the buying and selling of foods. He dreaded the thought of going into his own house and sitting at table. His wife, he was afraid, would talk of the buying and cooking of food. The street in which his house stood was lined with shade trees and he liked to walk under the trees, but he decided he did not like the people who lived in the houses.
The suburb in which young Bushnell lived was called Evanston. There were many newly married young people living in white houses on tree lined streets in Evanston, and the Bushnells became part of a group of young people who spent their evenings together. There was a man who lived across the street and who made his living in the advertising business. He was forever planning to put on the market some new kind of foodstuff. He specialized in that. When he went into a new project he asked young Bushnell’s advice.
“You are connected with the selling of foods. Give me the dope,” he begged. “You know better than I what people think about foods.”
Young Bushnell hated the advertising man and he hated also the retail merchant, the lawyer and the man who dealt in real estate who helped to make up the neighboring group. On the evenings when they with their wives came to his house he wanted to cry out against them, to tell them to go away and never come back. He said nothing of the sort because he could think of no possible excuse for so unexpected and unexplainable an outburst.
The summer during which all this occurred was unusually hot. Young Bushnell was tired. All the time he wanted to fight or to cry. His wife had a guest at the house, a young woman cousin who taught school in some town in the East. When she came the young man paid no attention to her, but after she had been at the house for two or three weeks he noted that she was habitually silent. He began to be attracted to her.
In the evening, when people of the neighborhood came to sit and talk with him and his wife on the front porch of their house, he remained silent and looked at the school teacher. He thought the talk and the laughter of all the men and women sitting about sounded like the croaking of frogs in a pond late at night. He looked over their heads and shuddered. Then he looked at the school teacher clad in a white dress and persistently silent. He wondered what she was thinking about.
One evening when it seemed to him that the talk of his wife and his friends had become utterly meaningless, he arose from his chair and went unobserved into the house. On an impulse he crept upstairs and went stealthily into the room occupied by his wife’s guest. Standing in the darkness he tried to think what he wanted to do. Then going to a closet door he opened it and saw hanging there one of the white dresses worn by the woman. It made a white streak in the darkness, just as the silent white-clad woman made a white streak in the darkness of his mind. Dropping to his knees he laid his cheek against the soft cloth of the dress. Tears came into his eyes. Although he had never given the subject of marriage much thought, he was sure that his wife, because of her marriage to him, would not have understood what he was doing. The thought made him blindly resentful. In the darkness he muttered words concerning the matter. Holding the white dress tightly against his cheek he declared his love for the silent woman who had worn it and would wear it again.
“She’s beautiful because she has kept herself to herself,” he declared. “She has let herself stand alone and far off. She has dignity and does not talk of food and of clothes. It is wonderful to have her here and not know what she is thinking about.”
II
The man who went into his father’s commission business in South Water Street is now at the head of the firm. He is sixty years old and has prospered. His father is dead. On the whole he is happy enough. When he and his wife had been married for a long time she gave birth to a daughter who is now a young woman at school in the East. The feeling he once had in regard to the buying and selling of foods has gone quite away. He is a prominent member of a church in Evanston and stands very well in that respectable suburb.
As for the school teacher who is his wife’s cousin and who once came to visit at his house, he has forgotten her name. He only thinks of her once in a long time.
Sometimes when business is unusually heavy he works over his books in the office at night. He has dinner at one of the big restaurants in the city and then hurries away to the office. Although he has prospered, his office, like most of the offices in South Water Street in Chicago, is a small dirty affair upstairs over a storeroom. At the back of the office there is a window that looks out over the Chicago River.
As Bushnell walks at night through the dark silent streets he is reminded of the feeling he once had in regard to the buying and selling of foods. As he is now an old man he stumbles a little. He is bald and a nervous disease had twisted his head to one side. As he hurries along he peers into the darkness and shudders.
During the day South Water Street, where rations for millions of people are handed about, is the busiest place in Chicago, but at night it is dark, lonely and dreary. The roar of the voices of innumerable hucksters has drifted away and the multitude of wagons loaded with boxes and bales that all day blocked the roadway have disappeared into the darkness. In the dim light at the edge of the sidewalks huge iron cans are heaped high with half decayed fruit and vegetables. A sour pungent smell greets the nostrils. Decrepit old women wander about, creeping here and there in the darkness. In their arms they carry baskets which they fill with frozen potatoes and spoiled bananas, apples and oranges.
The merchant goes into his office and bends over his books. He tries not to think. On summer evenings when it is very hot he opens the window that looks out over the river. When his work is done and he has put on his coat he stands for a moment looking into the darkness. As when he was a young comely man he thinks of a life spent in the buying and selling of food with a shudder.
At night the Chicago River, a grey stream running under ugly bridges out of the lake into the land, is transformed. It becomes at times, when the night is clear and the surface of the river is stirred by night winds, utterly lovely. Looking down at it, a sense of mystery with dread creeps over the old merchant. He forgets his old wife and his daughter and feels suddenly young and alone in the world. On the river below a boat passes making a white streak in the darkness and he is reminded of the time long ago when a silent, white-clad woman sat among the chattering people on the porch of his house. He wants to put his cheek against the sides of the boat as he once put his cheek against the white gown that had been worn by the woman. For a moment his mind, that for years has been quite normal and sure of itself, is confused. He walks up and down in the office and opens and closes his fists. Although the river is close at hand and although it is within a stone’s throw of the dark evil-smelling street,
in which the horrible old women go up and down, it seems to him strangely remote and unreal.
“It stands alone and far off,” he whispers.
He tries to reason with himself and tells himself that the stream is in reality a sewer, that it is not love at all.
“I am becoming a doddering old fool,” he declares, and closing the window, hurries away.
In spite of himself the merchant remembers the school teacher. He decides that she is the most beautiful thing that ever came into his life. Overcome with emotion he wanders about muttering and talking aloud. He decides to do something desperate to find and to declare his love for the woman in white, but when he gets into a lighted street and sees his reflection in a store window, his desperate mood passes away. The figure he sees reflected in the window of the stores is old, twisted and worn. It is like the old women who salvage spoiled fruit in the street out of which he has come.
In the mind of the merchant, the school teacher, whom he has not seen for twenty-five years, will always remain young, silent and lovely. She is for him a white streak in the dark places of life, something far off and beautifully strange, something to dream of but not to be touched.
On summer evenings the merchant goes home to his suburb lost in reflection. He is depressed but on the streets of Evanston he meets men and women who speak to him with respect. The mood he was in when he came out of his office passes away. The reappearance of the white streak has no outward effect on his mind. However, for several days after a night in the office he is somewhat more tender and thoughtful in his attitude toward the fat, grey-haired old woman who is his wife and toward his daughter in school when she comes into his mind.