Just Walking

An Anecdote of a Strangely Memorable Evening in a Small Middle Western Town

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

WHAT I was doing in that particular Middle Western town I can't remember. There was a murder trial on. It must have been a county seat. Maybe I was trying to sell something or get advertising for some newspaper or magazine. I worked at a lot of things about that time and lost a lot of jobs.

That evening I was coming along a rainwashed street and saw Fred Downie. Fred was working as reporter for one of the Chicago dailies. He was down there with three or four other men on the murder case.

It was one of the kind of murders that gets spread out, all over the pages of all the papers. Why some murders get all the attention they do, while others get none, I do not know. Fred and the others talked about it that evening. I remember a fellow named Jim Gore getting all worked up. "You take a guy that goes to all the trouble to commit a murder now," he said, "a guy like that, furnishing all the good reading he does, and maybe getting hung for it, and then they pass him up. He don't get any publicity at all."

No one knows why some murders get all the attention they do. I suppose they are worked up. There must be at least some uncertainty. "Uncertainty whether they can get a conviction or not," I remember Fred's saying. He said that a murder story, to make a really good spread for the dailies, must be one in which the public is pretty well convinced the authorities have got their hands on the right people. After that it becomes a game. Can the authorities prove their case? Now let's see who has the foxiest brains, the defense or the state. "What the murderer did is pretty much forgotten," Fred said. If the murderer gets convicted and hung, everyone is shocked. They had forgotten everything in their interest in the game.

BUT I did not start to speak of murders but of nights. I remember some of the nights in Middle Western towns. I may have had a dozen such nights as that one, perhaps not so many. It was in the late fall that time I saw Fred but the nights were still warm. In those days, when I was traveling about, trying to pick up a living, my real interest was in writing, just as it is now. I would get myself sent to some town. Some firm would give me a job and expense money. Very likely I would get into a room in a hotel in the town and begin to write. A lot of stuff I wrote wasn't any good but it excited me. I would stay in the town until I was broke, forgetting what I had been sent for. Perhaps the firm that had sent me out had sent also several telegrams and I hadn't bothered to open them. That's the kind of fellow I was. It isn't any wonder I lost jobs.

And then sometimes, when I had been in a country hotel, writing away like that, there would come an evening, I would go out of the hotel room and walk.

Something in the air, in the faces of the people passed in the streets. If I went out of the town and walked on a country road something happened to me. It is pretty hard to describe.

There was a kind of sweeping acceptance of life. Something is singing inside you at such times. It is the same way when you are in love but in a love affair there is a woman involved. With a woman you are likely at any moment to get too definite—if you know what I mean.

But when you are alone, or with another man who feels as you do.

I remember once being in the city of New York. That was in the winter. I went to a party. There was some drinking but that had nothing to do with what I am talking about.

That night in New York it snowed, a soft, clinging snow. I had never seen New York like that. It excited me almost unbearably. The soft snow had clung to everything. I had come out of the party at three o'clock in the morning. There was a tall man came out the door at the same moment. It had been a large party and if I had met the man during the evening I didn't remember.

I didn't even know his name. Anyway we came out together into the soft quiet of that night. There was an odd blue light. As by a common impulse the tall man and I began walking together. I remember his long face and the peculiar long stride with which he walked.

E walked for hours, not saying much to each other. Here was a strange city indeed. Everything was absolutely white, the city outlined in white against that blue night sky and unbelievably lovely.

The man and I walking thus in the quiet city, saying nothing to each other, feeling the same thing—just the beauty of the night, I presume. We went far uptown and then downtown to the Battery. I do not believe we said a dozen words to each other during the hours we were together.

But to go back now to that time I saw Fred Downie out in the Middle Western town. He took me to his hotel. There were other men there, friends of his. I do not remember their names so I will call them George and Frank and Tom. Oh, yes, there was that Jim Gore.

Of course Fred introduced me and there was talk of how we should spend the evening. A poker game was proposed. We might have done that. I hardly know why that poker game never started. We might have spent the evening in a hot little hotel room, sitting around a table, the air full of tobacco smoke, drinking strong liquor, too. We didn't.

One of Fred's friends, it was the one named Jim Gore—said, "Let's go walk." It might have been nine o'clock. We started.

It was just one of the kind of nights that excite a man. There had been the rain in the late afternoon. It was, as I have said, late fall but the night was warm. I was walking with a man named Tom and the others were coming along behind. First we walked for an hour in the residence streets of the town. Although it wasn't late, as things go in larger places, a good many of the houses were already dark.

The night itself was lovely. After the rain the air was peculiarly clean on the lips and up in the sky there were great banks of dead white clouds, hurrying along. Between the clouds spots of clear blue.

There was an insane asylum in the town. I had not known it until that evening. I knew very little about the town. I presume I had been staying in my hotel room, writing— nonsense more than likely.

The five of us were walking and came to the buildings of the asylum on a hill. There was a small river ran along the edge of the town. Beyond the river and the hill, on the far side, an open country. You could see quite a long ways across country in that light.

There were a lot of great brick buildings. We were all curious and as the grounds were open went in and stood quite close to one of them. The one we came to first had bars over the windows. I remember now that in the murder case the men I was with were down there covering, a woman was trying to get herself clear by proving she was insane. If she succeeded she would be brought, I fancied, to the very building we were now standing before.

As we stood there someone inside laughed. It was a nerve-shaking laugh, heard thus in the night. It went on and on, a seemingly endless outbreak of clear girlish laughter. It broke finally. Then a gigglish voice began to chatter. There was something being said about an organization called the B. P. O. E. What it is I don't know. The voice just kept saying—"and so you were at the B. P. O. E. He was at the B. P. O. E. Do you hear that? He was at the B. P. O. E."

SENSELESS lot of words surely. The voice said them over and over. Then the laughter came again. We were all huddled together in silence on the lawn. We had unconsciously drawn close together thus. Someone walked down a corridor inside the building and a man's voice spoke. The laughter came once more. It was low and sweet now.

We all went silently away.

We had been feeling something and I presume that thing happening made us feel it more. A man couldn't of course help having thoughts about the woman in that place and some man—a lover or a husband. What had he done? What had she done? "And so you were at the B. P. O. E., eh?" Every man has had bad moments with some woman. There are plenty of President Hardings in this world.

We went walking out into the country. We were silent. There was a road running along the crest of the hill. It was a nice road to follow because there was the flat land spread out before our eyes. After the rain the road was muddy. It was a road not much used. Down below, in the flat land, there was a highway. We could see the white thread of it running away into the darkness. It went the same way we were going but was beyond the little river. Now and then we saw the moving lights of automobiles.

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Why we were walking like that no one knew. Where we were going no one cared. No one offered to turn hack. What I think is that the fellows I was with were just fed up, being day after day in a crowded court room hearing a murder trial, seeing the game going on that Fred had talked to me about, later writing and sending in their murder stories for the newspapers. They had all done it that evening before I saw them.

We walked and walked and the man named Tom, I had never seen before that evening, was beside me and we must have got some ways ahead of the others. Suddenly he began to talk. His talk was about another walk he had taken on another evening. He began to talk about it. He said he was in Chicago and it was spring. He had been sent out on some assignment. Why he had so hated to cover it he couldn't remember. It was some messy affair, a divorce or something, if he remembered rightly. It was late afternoon, he said, and he was walking along State Street in Chicago.

First, he said, he met a man who was the father of another reporter he knew. The man was an old Jew'. This fellow, named Tom, had met him with his son. That, he said, was at State and Madison Streets in Chicago. He said he was going along the street when this man, the old one, suddenly plucked at his coat and when he turned around the old man put a hand on his arm and pulled him over against a building.

Nothing special about the encounter. It, however, upset Tom. He said hearing the old Jew talk was like hearing the woman laugh in the building for housing the insane.

The man in the street with Tom pressed him against the building and began to talk. He was a cutter for some big tailoring establishment. He wanted to tell Tom that he was an artist at his trade. He kept telling him that, insisting on it. You understand Tom had seen the man but once before and then quite casually. He knew nothing of the man's ability, didn't care, he said. It w!as an odd thing to have happen in Chicago, on State Street, you'll admit that. At first Tom thought the man was drunk. He wasn't.

After be got aw'ay from that one Tom went along the street and met another man. It w'as a fellow7 he knew but slightly. This one, he said, worked in an office where he had once gone to get a story. The second man suddenly made a proposal. "I'll tell you what," he said, "let's, you and I, get out of town."

It was an odd proposal surely but Tom said he took it up. What induced him to do it he did not know. He said he and the man went to a railroad station and got on a train and that they rode until dark and then got off.

They began to walk. That was all to it. The man named Tom told me he had never spoken to anyone of what happened that night. Tt had all seemed too queer and crazy.

He and the man he hardly knew had just walked and walked. He said the man could sing. They kept passing through little industrial towns, such as are scattered over the prairies, about Chicago. When they came to a town the man with him began to sing in a fine baritone voice. Once they were stopped by a policeman in a town, who asked them what they were up to, and the man with Tom laughed and said "just singing."

They walked all night and in the morning took a train back to the city. Tom almost got fired because he hadn't tended up to his assignment. He did not know what else to say so he said he had been drunk. He said nothing else happened.

As for our crowd, we had a singer with us, too. I am talking now of the evening I w-alked with the newspaper men, the time we walked in that road along the crest of the hill. The road kept getting worse and worse. Pretty soon there seemed to be no road at all. We stopped.

It w-as then our singer began to sing. By that time it might have been twelve o'clock. There was a small house just below us at the foot of the hill on which we stood and on the bank of the little river. At first we did not know the house was there.

We stood on the hill and the man with us—it was the one named George, a little, red-headed man I hadn't noticed before—began to sing in what seemed to the rest of us a really lovely voice. I don't know how long he sang but as he sang we all became conscious of the house below at the foot of the hill.

We became conscious of it because people began coming out of the house. Whoever they were, and they were no doubt farming people, there might have been some five or six of them.

You know how a man's eyes become accustomed to the light when he is out at night like that. First we, standing on the hill and listening to our man sing, saw the house and then we saw the people come out and stand and look up the hill to where we were.

George quit singing presently and there was silence. We began drifting off along the hillside road toward town. I hardly know how far w7e went.

Then the thing happened that put a sort of finishing touch to our walk. There was a singer down there among the farming people, too, a woman singer. We could still see the group of people standing before the house and then the voice of their singer came up to us. Whoever it was sang only one song, and then we all w'alked back along the road and past the insane asylum and to the hotel where the newspaper men were staying. I went to my own hotel. Tt wras just a night and a walk, such a thing as sometimes happens. Why it seems important I can't say. The next day when I went back to Chicago I had lost my job. The newspaper men stayed on their jobs. They went right on finishing up that murder trial. I can't even remember whether or not the woman who was on trial and who was trying to get out of killing some man by proving herself insane did it or not. When I saw Frank Downie again I never even took the trouble to ask.