Book Five: Chapter XXIII

by Sherwood Anderson

　　One day in the month of October, four years after the time of his firstmotor ride with Clara and Tom, Hugh went on a business trip to the cityof Pittsburgh. He left Bidwell in the morning and got to the steel cityat noon. At three o'clock his business was finished and he was ready toreturn.

　　Although he had not yet realized it, Hugh's career as a successful inventorhad received a sharp check. The trick of driving directly at the point, ofbecoming utterly absorbed in the thing before him, had been lost. He wentto Pittsburgh to see about the casting of new parts for the hay-loadingmachine, but what he did in Pittsburgh was of no importance to the men whowould manufacture and sell that worthy, labor-saving tool. Although he didnot know it, a young man from Cleveland, in the employ of Tom and Steve,had already done what Hugh was striving half-heartedly to do. The machinehad been finished and ready to market in October three years before, andafter repeated tests a lawyer had made formal application for patent. Thenit was discovered that an Iowa man had already made application for andbeen granted a patent on a similar apparatus.

　　When Tom came to the shop and told him what had happened Hugh had beenready to drop the whole matter, but that was not Tom's notion. "The devil!"he said. "Do you think we're going to waste all this money and labor?"

　　Drawings of the Iowa man's machine were secured, and Tom set Hugh at thetask of doing what he called "getting round" the other fellow's patents."Do the best you can and we'll go ahead," he said. "You see we've got themoney and that means power. Make what changes you can and then we'll go onwith our manufacturing plans. We'll whipsaw this other fellow through thecourts. We'll fight him till he's sick of fight and then we'll buy himout cheap. I've had the fellow looked up and he hasn't any money and is aboozer besides. You go ahead. We'll get that fellow all right."

　　Hugh had tried valiantly to go along the road marked out for him by hisfather-in-law and had put aside other plans to rebuild the machine he hadthought of as completed and out of the way. He made new parts, changedother parts, studied the drawings of the Iowa man's machine, did what hecould to accomplish his task.

　　Nothing happened. A conscientious determination not to infringe on the workof the Iowa man stood in his way.

　　Then something did happen. At night as he sat alone in his shop after along study of the drawings of the other man's machine, he put them asideand sat staring into the darkness beyond the circle of light cast by hislamp. He forgot the machine and thought of the unknown inventor, the manfar away over forests, lakes and rivers, who for months had worked on thesame problem that had occupied his mind. Tom had said the man had no moneyand was a boozer. He could be defeated, bought cheap. He was himself atwork on the instrument of the man's defeat.

　　Hugh left his shop and went for a walk, and the problem connected with thetwisting of the iron and steel parts of the hay-loading apparatus into newforms was again left unsolved. The Iowa man had become a distinct, almostunderstandable personality to Hugh. Tom had said he drank, got drunk. Hisown father had been a drunkard. Once a man, the very man who had been theinstrument of his own coming to Bidwell, had taken it for granted he was adrunkard. He wondered if some twist of life might not have made him one.

　　Thinking of the Iowa man, Hugh began to think of other men. He thought ofhis father and of himself. When he was striving to come out of the filth,the flies, the poverty, the fishy smells, the shadowy dreams of his lifeby the river, his father had often tried to draw him back into that life.In imagination he saw before him the dissolute man who had bred him. Onafternoons of summer days in the river town, when Henry Shepard was notabout, his father sometimes came to the station where he was employed. Hehad begun to earn a little money and his father wanted it to buy drinks.Why?

　　There was a problem for Hugh's mind, a problem that could not be solved inwood and steel. He walked and thought about it when he should have beenmaking new parts for the hay-loading apparatus. He had lived but little inthe life of the imagination, had been afraid to live that life, had beenwarned and re-warned against living it. The shadowy figure of the unknowninventor in the state of Iowa, who had been brother to himself, who hadworked on the same problems and had come to the same conclusions, slippedaway, followed by the almost equally shadowy figure of his father. Hughtried to think of himself and his own life.

　　For a time that seemed a simple and easy way out of the new and intricatetask he had set for his mind. His own life was a matter of history. Heknew about himself. Having walked far out of town, he turned and went backtoward his shop. His way led through the new city that had grown up sincehis coming to Bidwell. Turner's Pike that had been a country road alongwhich on summer evenings lovers strolled to the Wheeling station andPickleville was now a street. All that section of the new city was givenover to workers' homes and here and there a store had been built. The WidowMcCoy's place was gone and in its place was a warehouse, black and silentunder the night sky. How grim the street in the late night! The berrypickers who once went along the road at evening were now gone forever. LikeEzra French's sons they had perhaps become factory hands. Apple and cherrytrees once grew along the road. They had dropped their blossoms on theheads of strolling lovers. They also were gone. Hugh had once crept alongthe road at the heels of Ed Hall, who walked with his arm about a girl'swaist. He had heard Ed complaining of his lot in life and crying out fornew times. It was Ed Hall who had introduced the piecework plan in thefactories of Bidwell and brought about the strike, during which three menhad been killed and ill-feeling engendered in hundreds of silent workers.That strike had been won by Tom and Steve and they had since that time beenvictorious in a larger and more serious strike. Ed Hall was now at the headof a new factory being built along the Wheeling tracks. He was growing fatand was prosperous.

　　When Hugh got to his shop he lighted his lamp and again got out thedrawings he had come from home to study. They lay unnoticed on the desk.He looked at his watch. It was two o'clock. "Clara may be awake. I must gohome," he thought vaguely. He now owned his own motor car and it stood inthe road before the shop. Getting in he drove away into the darkness overthe bridge, out of Turner's Pike and along a street lined with factoriesand railroad sidings. Some of the factories were working and were ablazewith lights. Through lighted windows he could see men stationed alongbenches and bending over huge, iron machines. He had come from home thatevening to study the work of an unknown man from the far away state ofIowa, to try to circumvent that man. Then he had gone to walk and to thinkof himself and his own life. "The evening has been wasted. I have donenothing," he thought gloomily as his car climbed up a long street linedwith the homes of the wealthier citizens of his town and turned into theshort stretch of Medina Road still left between the town and theButterworth farmhouse.

　　* * * * *On the day when he went to Pittsburgh, Hugh got to the station where he wasto take the homeward train at three, and the train did not leave untilfour. He went into a big waiting-room and sat on a bench in a corner. Aftera time he arose and going to a stand bought a newspaper, but did not readit. It lay unopened on the bench beside him. The station was filled withmen, women, and children who moved restlessly about. A train came in and aswarm of people departed, were carried into faraway parts of the country,while new people came into the station from a nearby street. He looked atthose who were going out into the train shed. "It may be that some of themare going to that town in Iowa where that fellow lives," he thought. It wasodd how thoughts of the unknown Iowa man clung to him.

　　One day, during the same summer and but a few months earlier, Hugh had goneto the town of Sandusky, Ohio, on the same mission that had brought him toPittsburgh. How many parts for the hay-loading machine had been cast andlater thrown away! They did the work, but he decided each time that he hadinfringed on the other man's machine. When that happened he did not consultTom. Something within him warned him against doing that. He destroyed thepart. "It wasn't what I wanted," he told Tom who had grown discouraged withhis son-in-law but did not openly voice his dissatisfaction. "Oh, well,he's lost his pep, marriage has taken the life out of him. We'll have toget some one else on the job," he said to Steve, who had entirely recoveredfrom the wound received at the hands of Joe Wainsworth.

　　On that day when he went to Sandusky, Hugh had several hours to wait forhis homebound train and went to walk by the shores of a bay. Some brightlycolored stones attracted his attention and he picked several of them up andput them in his pockets. In the station at Pittsburgh he took them out andheld them in his hand. A light came in at a window, a long, slanting lightthat played over the stones. His roving, disturbed mind was caught andheld. He rolled the stones back and forth. The colors blended and thenseparated again. When he raised his eyes, a woman and a child on a nearbybench, also attracted by the flashing bit of color held like a flame in hishand, were looking at him intently.

　　He was confused and walked out of the station into the street. "What asilly fellow I have become, playing with colored stones like a child," hethought, but at the same time put the stones carefully into his pockets.

　　Ever since that night when he had been attacked in the motor, the sense ofsome indefinable, inner struggle had been going on in Hugh, as it went onthat day in the station at Pittsburgh and on the night in the shop, when hefound himself unable to fix his attention on the prints of the Iowa man'smachine. Unconsciously and quite without intent he had come into a newlevel of thought and action. He had been an unconscious worker, a doerand was now becoming something else. The time of the comparatively simplestruggle with definite things, with iron and steel, had passed. He foughtto accept himself, to understand himself, to relate himself with the lifeabout him. The poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the river, whohad forced himself in advance of his fellows along the road of mechanicaldevelopment, was still in advance of his fellows of the growing Ohio towns.The struggle he was making was the struggle his fellows of anothergeneration would one and all have to make.

　　Hugh got into his home-bound train at four o'clock and went into thesmoking car. The somewhat distorted and twisted fragment of thoughts thathad all day been playing through his mind stayed with him. "What differencedoes it make if the new parts I have ordered for the machine have to bethrown away?" he thought. "If I never complete the machine, it's all right.The one the Iowa man had made does the work."

　　For a long time he struggled with that thought. Tom, Steve, all the Bidwellmen with whom he had been associated, had a philosophy into which thethought did not fit. "When you put your hand to the plow do not turn back,"they said. Their language was full of such sayings. To attempt to do athing and fail was the great crime, the sin against the Holy Ghost. Therewas unconscious defiance of a whole civilization in Hugh's attitude towardthe completion of the parts that would help Tom and his business associates"get around" the Iowa man's patent.

　　The train from Pittsburgh went through northern Ohio to a junction whereHugh would get another train for Bidwell. Great booming towns, Youngstown,Akron, Canton, Massillon--manufacturing towns all--lay along the way. Inthe smoker Hugh sat, again playing with the colored stones held in hishand. There was relief for his mind in the stones. The light continuallyplayed about them, and their color shifted and changed. One could look atthe stones and get relief from thoughts. Raising his eyes he looked out ofthe car window. The train was passing through Youngstown. His eyes lookedalong grimy streets of worker's houses clustered closely about huge mills.The same light that had played over the stones in his hand began to playover his mind, and for a moment he became not an inventor but a poet. Therevolution within had really begun. A new declaration of independence wroteitself within him. "The gods have thrown the towns like stones over theflat country, but the stones have no color. They do not burn and change inthe light," he thought.

　　Two men who sat in a seat in the westward bound train began to talk, andHugh listened. One of them had a son in college. "I want him to be amechanical engineer," he said. "If he doesn't do that I'll get him startedin business. It's a mechanical age and a business age. I want to see himsucceed. I want him to keep in the spirit of the times."

　　Hugh's train was due in Bidwell at ten, but did not arrive until half aftereleven. He walked from the station through the town toward the Butterworthfarm.

　　At the end of their first year of marriage a daughter had been born toClara, and some time before his trip to Pittsburgh she had told him she wasagain pregnant. "She may be sitting up. I must get home," he thought, butwhen he got to the bridge near the farmhouse, the bridge on which he hadstood beside Clara that first time they were together, he got out of theroad and went to sit on a fallen log at the edge of a grove of trees.

　　"How quiet and peaceful the night!" he thought and leaning forward held hislong, troubled face in his hands. He wondered why peace and quiet wouldnot come to him, why life would not let him alone. "After all, I've liveda simple life and have done good work," he thought. "Some of the thingsthey've said about me are true enough. I've invented machines that saveuseless labor, I've lightened men's labor."

　　Hugh tried to cling to that thought, but it would not stay in his mind. Allthe thoughts that gave his mind peace and quiet flew away like birds seenon a distant horizon at evening. It had been so ever since that night whenhe was suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by the crazed harness maker inthe motor. Before that his mind had often been unsettled, but he knew whathe wanted. He wanted men and women and close association with men andwomen. Often his problem was yet more simple. He wanted a woman, one whowould love him and lie close to him at night. He wanted the respect of hisfellows in the town where he had come to live his life. He wanted tosucceed at the particular task to which he had set his hand.

　　The attack made upon him by the insane harness maker had at first seemed tosettle all his problems. At the moment when the frightened and desperateman sank his teeth and fingers into Hugh's neck, something had happened toClara. It was Clara who, with a strength and quickness quite amazing, hadtorn the insane man away. All through that evening she had been hating herhusband and father, and then suddenly she loved Hugh. The seeds of a childwere already alive in her, and when the body of her man was furiouslyattacked, he became also her child. Swiftly, like the passing of a shadowover the surface of a river on a windy day, the change in her attitudetoward her husband took place. All that evening she had been hating the newage she had thought so perfectly personified in the two men, who talkedof the making of machines while the beauty of the night was whirled awayinto the darkness with the cloud of dust thrown into the air by the flyingmotor. She had been hating Hugh and sympathizing with the dead past he andother men like him were destroying, the past that was represented by thefigure of the old harness maker who wanted to do his work by hand in theold way, by the man who had aroused the scorn and derision of her father.

　　And then the past rose up to strike. It struck with claws and teeth, andthe claws and teeth sank into Hugh's flesh, into the flesh of the man whoseseed was already alive within her.

　　At that moment the woman who had been a thinker stopped thinking. Withinher arose the mother, fierce, indomitable, strong with the strength of theroots of a tree. To her then and forever after Hugh was no hero, remakingthe world, but a perplexed boy hurt by life. He never again escaped out ofboyhood in her consciousness of him. With the strength of a tigress shetore the crazed harness maker away from Hugh, and with something of thesurface brutality of another Ed Hall, threw him to the floor of the car.When Ed and the policeman, assisted by several bystanders, came runningforward, she waited almost indifferently while they forced the screamingand kicking man through the crowd and in at the door of the police station.

　　For Clara the thing for which she had hungered had, she thought, happened.In quick, sharp tones she ordered her father to drive the car to a doctor'shouse and later stood by while the torn and lacerated flesh of Hugh'scheek and neck was bandaged. The thing for which Joe Wainsworth stood andthat she had thought was so precious to herself no longer existed in herconsciousness, and if later she was for some weeks nervous and half ill, itwas not because of any thought given to the fate of the old harness maker.

　　The sudden attack out of the town's past had brought Hugh to Clara, hadmade him a living if not quite satisfying companion to her, but it hadbrought something quite different to Hugh. The bite of the man's teeth andthe torn places on his cheeks left by the tense fingers had mended, leavingbut a slight scar; but a virus had got into his veins. The disease ofthinking had upset the harness maker's mind and the germ of that diseasehad got into Hugh's blood. It had worked up into his eyes and ears. Wordsmen dropped thoughtlessly and that in the past had been blown past hisears, as chaff is blown from wheat in the harvest, now stayed to echo andre-echo in his mind. In the past he had seen towns and factories grow andhad accepted without question men's word that growth was invariably good.Now his eyes looked at the towns, at Bidwell, Akron, Youngstown, and allthe great, new towns scattered up and down mid-western America as on thetrain and in the station at Pittsburgh he had looked at the colored stonesheld in his hand. He looked at the towns and wanted light and color to playover them as they played over the stones, and when that did not happen,his mind, filled with strange new hungers engendered by the disease ofthinking, made up words over which lights played. "The gods have scatteredtowns over the flat lands," his mind had said, as he sat in the smokingcar of the train, and the phrase came back to him later, as he sat in thedarkness on the log with his head held in his hands. It was a good phraseand lights could play over it as they played over the colored stones, butit would in no way answer the problem of how to "get around" the Iowa's manpatent on the hay loading device.

　　Hugh did not get to the Butterworth farmhouse until two o'clock in themorning, but when he got there his wife was awake and waiting for him. Sheheard his heavy, dragging footsteps in the road as he turned in at the farmgate, and getting quickly out of bed, threw a cloak over her shoulders andcame out to the porch facing the barns. A late moon had come up and thebarnyard was washed with moonlight. From the barns came the low, sweetsound of contented animals nibbling at the hay in the mangers before them,from a row of sheds back of one of the barns came the soft bleating ofsheep and in a far away field a calf bellowed loudly and was answered byits mother.

　　When Hugh stepped into the moonlight around the corner of the house, Clararan down the steps to meet him, and taking his arm, led him past the barnsand over the bridge where as a child she had seen the figures of her fancyadvancing towards her. Sensing his troubled state her mother spirit wasaroused. He was unfilled by the life he led. She understood that. It was sowith her. By a lane they went to a fence where nothing but open fields laybetween the farm and the town far below. Although she sensed his troubledstate, Clara was not thinking of Hugh's trip to Pittsburgh nor of theproblems connected with the completion of the hay-loading machine. It maybe that like her father she had dismissed from her mind all thoughts of himas one who would continue to help solve the mechanical problems of his age.Thoughts of his continued success had never meant much to her, but duringthe evening something had happened to Clara and she wanted to tell himabout it, to take him into the joy of it. Their first child had been a girland she was sure the next would be a man child. "I felt him to-night," shesaid, when they had got to the place by the fence and saw below the lightsof the town. "I felt him to-night," she said again, "and oh, he was strong!He kicked like anything. I am sure this time it's a boy."

　　For perhaps ten minutes Clara and Hugh stood by the fence. The disease ofthinking that was making Hugh useless for the work of his age had sweptaway many old things within him and he was not self-conscious in thepresence of his woman. When she told him of the struggle of the man ofanother generation, striving to be born he put his arm about her and heldher close against his long body. For a time they stood in silence, and thenstarted to return to the house and sleep. As they went past the barns andthe bunkhouse where several men now slept they heard, as though coming outof the past, the loud snoring of the rapidly ageing farm hand, Jim Priest,and then above that sound and above the sound of the animals stirring inthe barns arose another sound, a sound shrill and intense, greetingsperhaps to an unborn Hugh McVey. For some reason, perhaps to announce ashift in crews, the factories of Bidwell that were engaged in night workset up a great whistling and screaming. The sound ran up the hillside andrang in the ears of Hugh as, with his arm about Clara's shoulders, he wentup the steps and in at the farmhouse door.