Small Town Notes

A Sympathetic Reporter Records Some Great Moments in the Lives of the Inconsequential

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

§1

PEOPLE everywhere are up to all sorts of little subterfuges to get through life. City people are not so different from people on farms or in small towns. Few people can be, in themselves, beautiful or feel any beauty or splendour in themselves. They have to create a role for themselves and then try to play it. Most people are drab. There is no colour. They lead drab lives, wear drab clothes, live in drab houses, make drab marriages. There is a kind of terror in the contemplation of drabness coming on.

If you live in any small town you see people often. In the city an endless procession of new faces. In a town the same faces seen day after day.

There is a lawyer in a town in Illinois who is getting old. He belongs to the church and leads outwardly a quiet, orderly life.

In secret he has in his desk, in his rather shabby office, a number of pictures of young and lovely actresses. Sometimes, when there is no one about, he takes them out and looks at them. It is rather heart-breaking to think of the man, who is now so old that his hands tremble, sitting in that place and running through his photographs. I shall never forget the shabbiness of his office, seen once on a summer afternoon as I sat waiting to speak with him. Everything in his office is sharply remembered and will be remembered as long as I live. By an accident he had left a drawer of his desk a little open.

Not that I wouldn't have opened it had I known what was there. I am altogether unscrupulous in my desire to know such things about people.

§2

MY own father was a small town man. He came into Ohio from North Carolina when he was a young man. It may be that his family, like so many Southern families was ruined by the Civil War. I never have looked much into his past.

I am a little afraid it will not be as exciting as my fancy has made it. I would rather leave it as it is, as my own imagination has built it up.

It is very likely that my father's marriage was like most marriages. Any marriage must grow, at times, almost unbearably tiresome to both people involved. How could it be any other way?

It happens that I know something about my own father that is terribly revealing. All of his life he was a great reader of books.

At one time, in his early life, he got hold of a little book of verses. The verses were written by a woman. He kept them by him all the rest of his life.

He had never known the author, had never seen her. She lived in Cincinnati.

When he was a young man and before he married, father went once to Cincinnati to work. He may have hoped to find the woman. He had learned the harness maker's trade and worked there through a winter as a bench workman in a wholesale harness establishment.

This is what had happened.

You see he had got hold of the book of verses at a time when he was young and, I presume, eager for love. He wanted high romance. The verses were written by a Miss White and had been privately printed. Miss White must have been a rather neurotic young thing—if she was young.

Father had got hold of the book by accident, at a very impressionable time in his own life, and as the book called out very loudly for a handsome and noble young lover to come to Miss White out of some far, mysterious place, father had dramatized himself as coming.

It is nothing. How many times have I done the same sort of thing myself.

You see I have to thread my way rather carefully through this tale. It is all built on a single incident. Years later I found that little book of verses hidden over the sill of the door in a woodshed back of a house in which we once lived. I watched and once saw father go into the woodshed and close the door. I went and looked through a crack. Such an odd expression on father's face. There was something touching in the tender way in which he handled the book.

When father went to work in Cincinnati there was, in the same city, a family of some standing by the name of White. There was a Miss Ethel White who was quite lovely. The name of the woman who had written the book was "Ethel White."

Of course father got the two confused in his mind, wanted to get them confused. The Miss White in Cincinnati once had her picture in the society columns of a Cincinnati paper. Father cut it out and pasted it in the front of the book.

The Whites of Cincinnati lived in a grand house on a grand street. The young harness maker may have gone up that way sometimes to walk on Sunday afternoons. He may have seen Miss White drive up to her house in her carriage.

She was young and lovely and I am quite sure the woman who wrote the verses was not. When women are young and lovely they do not need to write verses.

Later my father got married, of course, and had a large family of children. He was in business for a time and then the business failed. Down he went on the social ladder. He became a house painter.

He clung however to his book of verses. It was on the sill over the door in the woodshed for a time and then it disappeared from there. Father was carrying it about in his pocket. He had handled it sometimes when his hands were covered with barn paint. The pages were badly soiled. After a time he did not read it. He merely liked to touch it with his fingers.

§3

It is quite possible to see and feel life as you would a novel.

The most adaptable man gets close to but few people. People everywhere are essentially lonely.

Now that I have come back to live in a small town I realize it all anew.

When I was a boy I lived in just such a town as I am in now. Well, that was a Northern town and this town is Southern.

Except the negroes, they are the same kind of people.

I remember as a boy I used to go about distributing newspapers. I was even then curious about people. You know how a boy likes short cuts.

I went through alleyways, climbed fences. The town became like a play to me. The drama unrolled slowly.

In the spring, fall and winter it was already dark when the train from Cleveland came in, bringing my evening papers. It took only a few minutes to run through Main Street and leave my papers there.

Then I began my trip through the streets and alleyways of the town.

What things did I not see. There is material for a hundred novels and stories stored away somewhere in my memory.

I became something of a jack-the-peeper. There was a woman working in a kitchen and talking to herself. People talking aloud to themselves leave a strange, uncanny impression on the mind.

There is something coming up out of the unconscious mind—listen.

On such occasions I used to creep close to the kitchen doors.

It may be the woman in there alone was just scolding. She thought some injustice had been done her.

She was having an imaginary conversation. "Now, I tell you, I have stood all I will stand. I work and work. What do I get out of life?

"Here I am, doing that man's cooking. I mend his clothes. He comes home here, eats his supper and then lights out up town."

The woman was thinking of the days of her girlhood. She had become a drab creature. On every street, of every city, long rows of houses and apartments filled with drab women. In towns the same sort of thing.

Drabness going on as a quality in life.

The drab woman does not think of herself so. The wife of a railroad section hand, working in her husband's kitchen, is thinking of her girlhood.

Sometime, for at least a night, say at a country dance, she, a young woman then, felt beauty and youth in herself. She clings to that.

And there was the time when she got married and was first made love to.

That may have turned out badly.

She clings to what she was. She is indignant that beauty did not stay in her.

She must blame someone.

After hearing such a woman talking to herself in a kitchen—standing by the kitchen door to listen—I slipped away.

In the darkness of the little street outside I met the labourer coming home, heavy footed. I hid behind a tree.

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And there was the labourer also talking to himself.

The labourer goes into his houseand sits heavily down to read his paper. I creep back to see what happens. The man and his wife merely eat in silence. If they have children, the children are frightened into silence.

§4

There was a school teacher who never married. She lived with her mother in a little house at the edge of town. I used to go with my papers out to the end of a street and then cut through fields to another street and there, on a spring night, I saw the school teacher walking about in the fields.

She frightened me a little when I came upon her and afterwards she was afraid of what I might think of her.

She was afraid I would think she had gone into the field to meet some man.

One evening she kept me after school. It was hard for her to say what was on her mind. I was sitting at my desk in the schoolroom and she kept walking up and down. Tears came into her eyes.

She told me she had once met Christ in the field. First of all she made me promise to tell no one and then she told me that one evening—it was a spring evening she said and she had gone to bed. She said it was quite late. She was restless and could not sleep.

Suddenly she heard a voice calling her. The voice told her to get up and dress and go into the field. She said she did that and then something, a kind of inner voice, told her to lie down in the field.

She said she did lie down and that it was a bright, moonlit night, but at that moment a cloud passed across the face of the moon.

She closed her eyes and Christ appeared to her. She had always been hoping it would happen again but it never did. She said Christ was young and was dressed in a long white robe, and that he stepped so lightly that his feet barely bent the grass, and that he came quite close to her and touched her with his finger.

She opened her eyes then, had to, she said. The touch of Christ's finger had given her such an odd feeling. It had thrilled her through and through.

When she opened her eyes she saw the figure for a fraction of a second quite plainly and then, like a flash, it was blown away.