Book V: Chapter I

by Sherwood Anderson

　　Margaret Ormsby was a natural product of her age and of Americansocial life in our times. As an individual she was lovely. Althoughher father David Ormsby the plough king had come up to his positionand his wealth out of obscurity and poverty and had known during hisearly life what it was to stand face to face with defeat, he had madeit his business to see that his daughter had no such experience. Thegirl had been sent to Vassar, she had been taught to catch the finedistinction between clothes that are quietly and beautifully expensiveand clothes that merely look expensive, she knew how to enter a roomand how to leave a room and had also a strong well trained body and anactive mind. Added to these things she had, without the leastknowledge of life, a vigorous and rather high handed confidence in herability to meet life.

　　During the years spent in the eastern college Margaret had made up hermind that whatever happened she was not going to let her life be dullor uninteresting. Once when a girl friend from Chicago came to thecollege to visit her the two went for a day out of doors and sat downupon a hillside to talk things over. "We women have been fools,"Margaret had declared. "If Father and Mother think that I am going tocome home and marry some stick of a man they are mistaken. I havelearned to smoke cigarettes and have had my share of a bottle of wine.That may not mean anything to you. I do not think it amounts to mucheither but it expresses something. It fairly makes me ill when I thinkof how men have always patronised women. They want to keep evil thingsaway from us--Bah! I am sick of that idea and a lot of the other girlshere feel the same way. What right have they? I suppose some day somelittle whiffit of a business man will set himself up to take care ofme. He had better not. I tell you there is a new kind of women growingup and I am going to be one of them. I am going to adventure, to tastelife strongly and deeply. Father and Mother might as well make uptheir minds to that."

　　The excited girl had walked up and down before her companion, a mildlooking young woman with blue eyes, and had raised her hands above herhead as though to strike a blow. Her body was like the body of a fineyoung animal standing alert to meet an enemy and her eyes reflectedthe intoxication of her mood. "I want all of life," she cried; "I wantthe lust and the strength and the evil of it. I want to be one of thenew women, the saviours of our sex."

　　Between David Ormsby and his daughter there was an unusual bond. Sixfoot three, blue eyed, broad shouldered, his presence had a strengthand dignity which marked him out among men and the daughter sensed hisstrength. She was right in that. In his way the man was inspired.Under his eye the trivialities of plough-making had become the detailsof a fine art. In the factory he never lost the air of command whichinspires confidence. Foremen running into the office filled withexcitement because of a break in the machinery or an accident to aworkman returned to do his bidding quietly and efficiently. Salesmengoing from village to village to sell ploughs became under hisinfluence filled with the zeal of missionaries carrying the gospel tothe unenlightened. Stockholders of the plough company rushing to himwith rumours of coming business disaster stayed to write checks fornew assessments on their stock. He was a man who gave men back theirfaith in business and their faith in men.

　　To David plough-making was an end in life. Like other men of his typehe had other interests but they were secondary. In secret he thoughtof himself as capable of a broader culture than most of his dailyassociates and without letting it interfere with his efficiency triedto keep in touch with the thoughts and movements of the world byreading. After the longest and hardest day in the office he sometimesspent half the night over a book in his room.

　　As Margaret Ormsby grew into womanhood she was a constant source ofanxiety to her father. To him it seemed that she had passed from anawkward and rather jolly girlhood into a peculiarly determined newkind of womanhood over night. Her adventurous spirit worried him. Oneday he had sat in his office reading a letter announcing herhomecoming. The letter seemed no more than a characteristic outburstfrom an impulsive girl who had but yesterday fallen asleep at eveningin his arms. It confused him to think that an honest ploughmakershould have a letter from his little girl talking of the kind ofliving that he believed could only lead a woman to destruction.

　　And then the next day there sat beside him at his table a new andcommanding figure demanding his attention. David got up from the tableand hurried away to his room. He wanted to readjust his thoughts. Onhis desk was a photograph brought home by the daughter from school. Hehad the common experience of being told by the photograph what he hadbeen trying to grasp. Instead of a wife and child there were two womenin the house with him.

　　Margaret had come out of college a thing of beauty in face and figure.Her tall straight well-trained body, her coal-black hair, her softbrown eyes, the air she had of being prepared for life's challengecaught and held the attention of men. There was in the girl somethingof her father's bigness and not a little of the secret blind desiresof her mother. To an attentive household on the night of her arrivalshe announced her intention of living her life fully and vividly. "Iam going to know things I can not get from books," she said. "I amgoing to touch life at many corners, getting the taste of things in mymouth. You thought me a child when I wrote home saying that I wouldn'tbe cooped up in the house and married to a tenor in the church choiror to an empty-headed young business man but now you are going to see.I am going to pay the price if necessary, but I am going to live."

　　In Chicago Margaret set about the business of living as though nothingwere needed but strength and energy. In a characteristic American wayshe tried to hustle life. When the men in her own set looked confusedand shocked by the opinions she expressed she got out of her set andmade the common mistake of supposing that those who do not work andwho talk rather glibly of art and of freedom are by that token freemen and artists.

　　Still she loved and respected her father. The strength in him made anappeal to the native strong-thing in her. To a young socialist writerwho lived in the settlement house where she presently went to live andwho sought her out to sit by her desk berating men of wealth andposition she showed the quality of her ideals by pointing to DavidOrmsby. "My father, the leader of an industrial trust, is a better manthan all of the noisy reformers that ever lived," she declared. "Hemakes ploughs anyway--makes them well--millions of them. He does notspend his time talking and running his ringers through his hair. Heworks and his work has lightened the labours of millions while thetalkers sit thinking noisy thoughts and getting round-shouldered."

　　In truth Margaret Ormsby was puzzled. Had she been allowed by a commonfellowship in living to be a real sister to all other women and toknow their common heritage of defeat, had she like her father when hewas a boy but known what it was to walk utterly broken and beaten inthe face of men and then to rise again and again to battle with lifeshe would have been splendid.

　　She did not know. To her mind any kind of defeat had in it a touch ofsomething like immorality. When she saw all about her only a vast mobof defeated and confused human beings trying to make headway in themidst of a confused social organisation she was beside herself withimpatience.

　　The distraught girl turned to her father and tried to get hold of thekeynote of his life; "I want you to tell me things," she said, but thefather not understanding only shook his head. It did not occur to himto talk to her as to a fine man friend and a kind of bantering halfserious companionship sprang up between them. The ploughmaker washappy in the thought that the jolly girl he had known before hisdaughter went to college had come back to live with him.

　　After Margaret went to the settlement house she lunched with herfather almost every day. The hour together in the midst of the dinthat filled their lives became for them both a treasured privilege.Day after day they sat for an hour in a fashionable down-town eatingplace renewing and strengthening their comradeship, laughing andtalking amid the crowds, delightful in their intimacy. With each otherthey playfully took on the air of the two men of affairs, each in turntreating the work of the other as something to be passed over lightly.Secretly neither believed as he talked.

　　In her effort to get hold of and move the sordid human wrecks floatingin and out of the door of the settlement house Margaret thought of herfather at his desk directing the making of ploughs. "It is clean andimportant work," she thought. "He is a big and effective man."

　　At his desk in the office of the plough trust David thought of hisdaughter in the settlement house at the edge of the First Ward. "Sheis a white shining thing amid dirt and ugliness," he thought "Herwhole life is like the life of her mother during the hours when sheonce lay bravely facing death for the sake of a new life."

　　On the day of her meeting with McGregor, father and daughter sat asusual in the restaurant. Men and women passed up and down the longcarpeted aisles and looked at them admiringly. A waiter stood atOrmsby's shoulder anxious for the generous tip. Into the air that hungover them, the little secret atmosphere of comradeship they cherishedso carefully, was thrust the sense of a new personality. Floating inMargaret's mind beside the quiet noble face of her father, with itsstamp of ability and kindliness, was another face--the face of the manwho had talked to her in the settlement house, not as Margaret Ormsbydaughter of David Ormsby of the plough trust but as a woman who couldserve his ends and whom he meant should serve. The vision in her mindhaunted her and she listened indifferently to the talk of her father.She felt that the stern face of the young lawyer with its strong mouthand its air of command was as something impending and tried to getback the feeling of dislike she had felt when first he thrust himselfin at the settlement house door. She succeeded only in recallingcertain firm lines of purpose that offset and tempered the brutalityof his face.

　　Sitting there in the restaurant opposite her father, where day afterday they had tried so hard to build a real partnership in existence,Margaret suddenly burst into tears.

　　"I have met a man who has compelled me to do what I did not want todo," she explained to the astonished man and then smiled at himthrough the tears that glistened in her eyes.