Book Four: Chapter XII

by Sherwood Anderson

　　After the success of his corn cutting machine and the apparatus forunloading coal cars that brought him a hundred thousand dollars in cash,Hugh could not remain the isolated figure he had been all through the firstseveral years of his life in the Ohio community. From all sides men reachedout their hands to him: and more than one woman thought she would like tobe his wife. All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstandingthey themselves have built, and most: men die in silence and unnoticedbehind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by thepeculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that isimpersonal, useful, and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried overthe walls. His name is shouted and is carried by the wind into the tinyinclosure in which other men live and in which they are for the most partabsorbed in doing some petty task for the furtherance of their own comfort.Men and women stop their complaining about the unfairness and inequality oflife and wonder about the man whose name they have heard.

　　From Bidwell, Ohio, to farms all over the Middle West, Hugh McVey's namehad been carried. His machine for cutting corn was called the McVeyCorn-Cutter. The name was printed in white letters against a background ofred on the side of the machine. Farmer boys in the States of Indiana,Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and all the great corn-growing States sawit and in idle moments wondered what kind of man had invented the machinethey operated. A Cleveland newspaper man came to Bidwell and went toPickleville to see Hugh. He wrote a story telling of Hugh's early povertyand his efforts to become an inventor. When the reporter talked to Hughhe found the inventor so embarrassed and uncommunicative that he gave uptrying to get a story. Then he went to Steve Hunter who talked to him foran hour. The story made Hugh a strikingly romantic figure. His people, thestory said, came out of the mountains of Tennessee, but they were not poorwhites. It was suggested that they were of the best English stock. Therewas a tale of Hugh's having in his boyhood contrived some kind of an enginethat carried water from a valley to a mountain community; another of hishaving seen a clock in a store in a Missouri town and of his having latermade a clock of wood for his parents; and a tale of his having gone intothe forest with his father's gun, shot a wild hog and carried it down themountain side on his shoulder in order to get money to buy school books.After the tale was printed the advertising manager of the corn-cutterfactory got Hugh to go with him one day to Tom Butterworth's farm. Manybushels of corn were brought out of the corn cribs and a great mountain ofcorn was built on the ground at the edge of a field. Back of the mountainof corn was a corn field just coming into tassel. Hugh was told to climbup on the mountain and sit there. Then his picture was taken. It was sentto newspapers all over the West with copies of the biography cut from theCleveland paper. Later both the picture and the biography were used in thecatalogue that described the McVey Corn-Cutter.

　　The cutting of corn and putting it in shocks against the time of thehusking is heavy work. In recent times it has come about that much of thecorn grown on mid-American prairie lands is not cut. The corn is leftstanding in the fields, and men go through it in the late fall to pick theyellow ears. The workers throw the corn over their shoulders into a wagondriven by a boy, who follows them in their slow progress, and it is thenhauled away to the cribs. When a field has been picked, the cattle areturned in and all winter they nibble at the dry corn blades and tramp thestalks into the ground. All day long on the wide western prairies when thegray fall days have come, you may see the men and the horses working theirway slowly through the fields. Like tiny insects they crawl across theimmense landscapes. After them in the late fall and in the winter when theprairies are covered with snow, come the cattle. They are brought from thefar West in cattle cars and after they have nibbled the corn blades allday, are taken to barns and stuffed to bursting with corn. When they arefat they are sent to the great killing-pens in Chicago, the giant city ofthe prairies. In the still fall nights, as you stand on prairie roads or inthe barnyard back of one of the farm houses, you may hear the rustling ofthe dry corn blades and then the crash of the heavy bodies of the beastsgoing forward as they nibble and trample the corn.

　　In earlier days the method of corn harvesting was different. There waspoetry in the operation then as there is now, but it was set to anotherrhythm. When the corn was ripe men went into the fields with heavy cornknives and cut the stalks of corn close to the ground. The stalks were cutwith the right hand swinging the corn knife and carried on the left arm.All day a man carried a heavy load of the stalks from which yellow earshung down. When the load became unbearably heavy it was carried to theshock, and when all the corn was cut in a certain area, the shock was madesecure by binding it with tarred rope or with a tough stalk twisted to takethe place of the rope. When the cutting was done the long rows of stalksstood up in the fields like sentinels, and the men crawled off to thefarmhouses and to bed, utterly weary.

　　Hugh's machine took all of the heavier part of the work away. It cut thecorn near the ground and bound it into bundles that fell upon a platform.Two men followed the machine, one to drive the horses and the other toplace the bundles of stalks against the shocks and to bind the completedshocks. The men went along smoking their pipes and talking. The horsesstopped and the driver stared out over the prairies. His arms did not achewith weariness and he had time to think. The wonder and mystery of the wideopen places got a little into his blood. At night when the work was doneand the cattle fed and made comfortable in the barns, he did not go at onceto bed but sometimes went out of his house and stood for a moment under thestars.

　　This thing the brain of the son of a mountain man, the poor white of theriver town, had done for the people of the plains. The dreams he had triedso hard to put away from him and that the New England woman Sarah Shepardhad told him would lead to his destruction had come to something. Thecar-dumping apparatus, that had sold for two hundred thousand dollars, hadgiven Steve Hunter money to buy the plant-setting machine factory, and withTom Butterworth to start manufacturing the corn-cutters, had affected thelives of fewer people, but it had carried the Missourian's name into otherplaces and had also made a new kind of poetry in railroad yards and alongrivers at the back of cities where ships are loaded. On city nights as youlie in your houses you may hear suddenly a long reverberating roar. It is agiant that has cleared his throat of a carload of coal. Hugh McVey helpedto free the giant. He is still doing it. In Bidwell, Ohio, he is still atit, making new inventions, cutting the bands that have bound the giant. Heis one man who had not been swept aside from his purpose by the complexityof life.

　　That, however, came near happening. After the coming of his success, athousand little voices began calling to him. The soft hands of womenreached out of the masses of people about him, out of the old dwellers andnew dwellers in the city that was growing up about the factories wherehis machines were being made in ever increasing numbers. New houses wereconstantly being built along Turner's Pike that led down to his workshop atPickleville. Beside Allie Mulberry a dozen mechanics were now employed inhis experimental shop. They helped Hugh with a new invention, a hay-loadingapparatus on which he was at work, and also made special tools for use inthe corn-cutter factory and the new bicycle factory. A dozen new houseshad been built in Pickleville itself. The wives of the mechanics lived inthe houses and occasionally one of them came to see her husband at Hugh'sshop. He found it less and less difficult to talk to people. The workmen,themselves not given to the use of many words, did not think his habitualsilence peculiar. They were more skilled than Hugh in the use of tools andthought it rather an accident that he had done what they had not done. Ashe had grown rich by that road they also tried their hand at inventions.One of them made a patent door hinge that Steve sold for ten thousanddollars, keeping half the money for his services, as he had done in thecase of Hugh's car-dumping apparatus. At the noon hour the men hurried totheir houses to eat and then came back to loaf before the factory andsmoke their noonday pipes. They talked of money-making, of the price offood stuffs, of the advisability of a man's buying a house on the partialpayment plan. Sometimes they talked of women and of their adventures withwomen. Hugh sat by himself inside the door of the shop and listened. Atnight after he had gone to bed he thought of what they had said. He livedin a house belonging to a Mrs. McCoy, the widow of a railroad section handkilled in a railroad accident, who had a daughter. The daughter, RoseMcCoy, taught a country school and most of the year was away from home fromMonday morning until late on Friday afternoon. Hugh lay in bed thinking ofwhat his workmen had said of women and heard the old housekeeper movingabout down stairs. Sometimes he got out of bed to sit by an open window.Because she was the woman whose life touched his most closely, he thoughtoften of the school teacher. The McCoy house, a small frame affair with apicket fence separating it from Turner's Pike, stood with its back doorfacing the Wheeling Railroad. The section hands on the railroad rememberedtheir former fellow workman, Mike McCoy, and wanted to be good to hiswidow. They sometimes dumped half decayed railroad ties over the fence intoa potato patch back of the house. At night, when heavily loaded coal trainsrumbled past, the brakemen heaved large chunks of coal over the fence. Thewidow awoke whenever a train passed. When one of the brakemen threw a chunkof coal he shouted and his voice could be heard above the rumble of thecoal cars. "That's for Mike," he cried. Sometimes one of the chunks knockeda picket out of the fence and the next day Hugh put it back again. When thetrain had passed the widow got out of bed and brought the coal into thehouse. "I don't want to give the boys away by leaving it lying aroundin the daylight," she explained to Hugh. On Sunday mornings Hugh took acrosscut saw and cut the railroad ties into lengths that would go into thekitchen stove. Slowly his place in the McCoy household had become fixed,and when he received the hundred thousand dollars and everybody, even themother and daughter, expected him to move, he did not do so. He triedunsuccessfully to get the widow to take more money for his board and whenthat effort failed, life in the McCoy household went as it had when he wasa telegraph operator receiving forty dollars a month.

　　In the spring or fall, as he sat by his window at night, and when the mooncame up and the dust in Turner's Pike was silvery white, Hugh thought ofRose McCoy, sleeping in some farmer's house. It did not occur to him thatshe might also be awake and thinking. He imagined her lying very still inbed. The section hand's daughter was a slender woman of thirty with tiredblue eyes and red hair. Her skin had been heavily freckled in her youth andher nose was still freckled. Although Hugh did not know it, she had oncebeen in love with George Pike, the Wheeling station agent, and a day hadbeen set for the marriage. Then a difficulty arose in regard to religiousbeliefs and George Pike married another woman. It was then she became aschool teacher. She was a woman of few words and she and Hugh had neverbeen alone together, but as Hugh sat by the window on fall evenings, shelay awake in a room in the farmer's house, where she was boarding duringthe school season, and thought of him. She thought that had Hugh remained atelegraph operator at forty dollars a month something might have happenedbetween them. Then she had other thoughts, or rather, sensations that hadlittle to do with thoughts. The room in which she lay was very still anda streak of moonlight came in through the window. In the barn back of thefarmhouse she could hear the cattle stirring about. A pig grunted and inthe stillness that followed she could hear the farmer, who lay in thenext room with his wife, snoring gently. Rose was not very strong and thephysical did not rule in her nature, but she was very lonely and thoughtthat, like the farmer's wife, she would like to have a man to lie with her.Warmth crept over her body and her lips became dry so that she moistenedthem with her tongue. Had you been able to creep unobserved into the room,you might have thought her much like a kitten lying by a stove. She closedher eyes and gave herself over to dreams. In her conscious mind she dreamedof being the wife of the bachelor Hugh McVey, but deep within her there wasanother dream, a dream having its basis in the memory of her one physicalcontact with a man. When they were engaged to be married George had oftenkissed her. On one evening in the spring they had gone to sit together onthe grassy bank beside the creek in the shadow of the pickle factory, thendeserted and silent, and had come near to going beyond kissing. Why nothingelse had happened Rose did not exactly know. She had protested, but herprotest had been feeble and had not expressed what she felt. George Pikehad desisted in his effort to press love upon her because they were to bemarried, and he did not think it right to do what he thought of as takingadvantage of a girl.

　　At any rate he did desist and long afterward, as she lay in the farmhouseconsciously thinking of her mother's bachelor boarder, her thoughts becameless and less distinct and when she had slipped off into sleep, George Pikecame back to her. She stirred uneasily in bed and muttered words. Rough butgentle hands touched her cheeks and played in her hair. As the night woreon and the position of the moon shifted, the streak of moonlight lightedher face. One of her hands reached up and seemed to be caressing themoonbeams. The weariness had all gone out of her face. "Yes, George, I loveyou, I belong to you," she whispered.

　　Had Hugh been able to creep like the moonbeam into the presence of thesleeping school teacher, he must inevitably have loved her. Also he wouldperhaps have understood that it is best to approach human beings directlyand boldly as he had approached the mechanical problems by which his dayswere filled. Instead he sat by his window in the presence of the moonlitnight and thought of women as beings utterly unlike himself. Words droppedby Sarah Shepard to the awakening boy came creeping back to his mind. Hethought women were for other men but not for him, and told himself he didnot want a woman.

　　And then in Turner's Pike something happened. A farmer boy, who had beento town and who had the daughter of a neighbor in his buggy, stopped infront of the house. A long freight train, grinding its way slowly past thestation, barred the passage along the road. He held the reins in one handand put the other about the waist of his companion. The two heads soughteach other and lips met. They clung to each other. The same moon that shedits light on Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse lighted the open placewhere the lovers sat in the buggy in the road. Hugh had to close his eyesand fight to put down an almost overpowering physical hunger in himself.His mind still protested that women were not for him. When his fancy madefor him a picture of the school teacher Rose McCoy sleeping in a bed, hesaw her only as a chaste white thing to be worshiped from afar and not tobe approached, at least not by himself. Again he opened his eyes and lookedat the lovers whose lips still clung together. His long slouching bodystiffened and he sat up very straight in his chair. Then he closed his eyesagain. A gruff voice broke the silence. "That's for Mike," it shouted and agreat chunk of coal thrown from the train bounded across the potato patchand struck against the back of the house. Downstairs he could hear old Mrs.McCoy getting out of bed to secure the prize. The train passed and thelovers in the buggy sank away from each other. In the silent night Hughcould hear the regular beat of the hoofs of the farmer boy's horse as itcarried him and his woman away into the darkness.

　　The two people, living in the house with the old woman who had almostfinished her life, and themselves trying feebly to reach out to life, nevergot to anything very definite in relation to each other. One Saturdayevening in the late fall the Governor of the State came to Bidwell. Therewas a parade to be followed by a political meeting and the Governor, whowas a candidate for re-election, was to address the people from the stepsof the town hall. Prominent citizens were to stand on the steps beside theGovernor. Steve and Tom were to be there, and they had asked Hugh to come,but he had refused. He asked Rose McCoy to go to the meeting with him, andthey set out from the house at eight o'clock and walked to town. Then theystood at the edge of the crowd in the shadow of a store building andlistened to the speech. To Hugh's amazement his name was mentioned. TheGovernor spoke of the prosperity of the town, indirectly hinting thatit was due to the political sagacity of the party of which he was arepresentative, and then mentioned several individuals also partlyresponsible. "The whole country is sweeping forward to new triumphs underour banner," he declared, "but not every community is so fortunate as Ifind you here. Labor is employed at good wages. Life here is fruitful andhappy. You are fortunate here in having among you such business men asSteven Hunter and Thomas Butterworth; and in the inventor Hugh McVey youhave one of the greatest intellects and the most useful men that ever livedto help lift the burden off the shoulder of labor. What his brain is doingfor labor, our party is doing in another way. The protective tariff isreally the father of modern prosperity."

　　The speaker paused and a cheer arose from the crowd. Hugh took hold of theschool teacher's arm and drew her away down a side street. They walked homein silence, but when they got to the house and were about to go in, theschool teacher hesitated. She wanted to ask Hugh to walk about in thedarkness with her but did not have the courage of her desires. As theystood at the gate and as the tall man with the long serious face lookeddown at her, she remembered the speaker's words. "How could he care for me?How could a man like him care anything for a homely little school teacherlike me?" she asked herself. Aloud she said something quite different. Asthey had come along Turner's Pike she had made up her mind she would boldlysuggest a walk under the trees along Turner's Pike beyond the bridge, andhad told herself that she would later lead him to the place beside thestream and in the shadow of the old pickle factory where she and GeorgePike had come so near being lovers. Instead she hesitated for a moment bythe gate and then laughed awkwardly and passed in. "You should be proud. Iwould be proud if I could be spoken of like that. I don't see why you keepliving here in a cheap little house like ours," she said.

　　On a warm spring Sunday night during the year in which Clara Butterworthcame back to Bidwell to live, Hugh made what was for him an almostdesperate effort to approach the school teacher. It had been a rainyafternoon and Hugh had spent a part of it in the house. He came over fromhis shop at noon and went to his room. When she was at home the schoolteacher occupied a room next his own. The mother who seldom left the househad on that day gone to the country to visit a brother. The daughter gotdinner for herself and Hugh and he tried to help her wash the dishes. Aplate fell out of his hands and its breaking seemed to break the silent,embarrassed mood that had possession of them. For a few minutes they werechildren and acted like children. Hugh picked up another plate and theschool teacher told him to put it down. He refused. "You're as awkward as apuppy. How you ever manage to do anything over at that shop of yours ismore than I know."

　　Hugh tried to keep hold of the plate which the school teacher tried tosnatch away and for a few minutes they struggled laughing. Her cheeks wereflushed and Hugh thought she looked bewitching. An impulse he had never hadbefore came to him. He wanted to shout at the top of his lungs, throw theplate at the ceiling, sweep all of the dishes off the table and hear themcrash on the floor, play like some huge animal loose in a tiny world. Helooked at Rose and his hands trembled from the strength of the strangeimpulse. As he stood staring she took the plate out of his hand and wentinto the kitchen. Not knowing what else to do he put on his hat and wentfor a walk. Later he went to the shop and tried to work, but his handtrembled when he tried to hold a tool and the hay-loading apparatus onwhich he was at work seemed suddenly a very trivial and unimportant thing.

　　At four o'clock Hugh got back to the house and found it apparently empty,although the door leading to Turner's Pike was open. The rain had stoppedfalling and the sun struggled to work its way through the clouds. He wentupstairs to his own room and sat on the edge of his bed. The convictionthat the daughter of the house was in her room next door came to him, andalthough the thought violated all the beliefs he had ever held regardingwomen in relation to himself, he decided that she had gone to her room tobe near him when he came in. For some reason he knew that if he went toher door and knocked she would not be surprised and would not refuse himadmission. He took off his shoes and set them gently on the floor. Then hewent on tiptoes out into the little hallway. The ceiling was so low thathe had to stoop to avoid knocking his head against it. He raised his handintending to knock on the door, and then lost courage. Several timeshe went into the hallway with the same intent, and each time returnednoiselessly to his own room. He sat in the chair by the window and waited.An hour passed. He heard a noise that indicated that the school teacher hadbeen lying on her bed. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs, and presentlysaw her go out of the house and go along Turner's Pike. She did not gotoward town but over the bridge past his shop and into the country. Hughdrew himself back out of sight. He wondered where she could be going."The roads are muddy. Why does she go out? Is she afraid of me?" he askedhimself. When he saw her turn at the bridge and look back toward the house,his hands trembled again. "She wants me to follow. She wants me to go withher," he thought.

　　Hugh did presently go out of the house and along the road but did not meetthe school teacher. She had in fact crossed the bridge and had gone alongthe bank of the creek on the farther side. Then she crossed over again ona fallen log and went to stand by the wall of the pickle factory. A lilacbush grew beside the wall and she stood out of sight behind it. When shesaw Hugh in the road her heart beat so heavily that she had difficulty inbreathing. He went along the road and presently passed out of sight, and agreat weakness took possession of her. Although the grass was wet she saton the ground against the wall of the building and closed her eyes. Latershe put her face in her hands and wept.

　　The perplexed inventor did not get back to his boarding house until latethat night, and when he did he was unspeakably glad that he had not knockedon the door of Rose McCoy's room. He had decided during the walk thatthe whole notion that she had wanted him had been born in his own brain."She's a nice woman," he had said to himself over and over during thewalk, and thought that in coming to that conclusion he had swept away allpossibilities of anything else in her. He was tired when he got home andwent at once to bed. The old woman came home from the country and herbrother sat in his buggy and shouted to the school teacher, who came out ofher room and ran down the stairs. He heard the two women carry somethingheavy into the house and drop it on the floor. The farmer brother had givenMrs. McCoy a bag of potatoes. Hugh thought of the mother and daughterstanding together downstairs and was unspeakably glad he had not given wayto his impulse toward boldness. "She would be telling her now. She is agood woman and would be telling her now," he thought.

　　At two o'clock that night Hugh got out of bed. In spite of the convictionthat women were not for him, he had found himself unable to sleep.Something that shone in the eyes of the school teacher, when she struggledwith him for the possession of the plate, kept calling to him and he gotup and went to the window. The clouds had all gone out of the sky and thenight was clear. At the window next his own sat Rose McCoy. She was dressedin a night gown and was looking away along Turner's Pike to the place whereGeorge Pike the station master lived with his wife. Without giving himselftime to think, Hugh knelt on the floor and with his long arm reached acrossthe space between the two windows. His fingers had almost touched the backof the woman's head and ached to play in the mass of red hair that felldown over her shoulders, when again self-consciousness overcame him. Hedrew his arm quickly back and stood upright in the room. His head bangedagainst the ceiling and he heard the window of the room next door go softlydown. With a conscious effort he took himself in hand. "She's a good woman.Remember, she's a good woman," he whispered to himself, and when he gotagain into his bed he refused to let his mind linger on the thoughts ofthe school teacher, but compelled them to turn to the unsolved problems hestill had to face before he could complete his hay-loading apparatus. "Youtend to your business and don't be going off on that road any more," hesaid, as though speaking to another person. "Remember she's a good womanand you haven't the right. That's all you have to do. Remember you haven'tthe right," he added with a ring of command in his voice.