The cry in thenight

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

A writer in quest of the truth about women and machines, hears the answer in a Southern cotton mill

The man, the young mill superintendent, and I, went into the mill. There was a little hallway and we stopped for a moment in there. I had the feeling we were staring at each other.

There would be that question in his head:

What does he want here?

Men and women are coming into factories. They are escorted. Such factories as the huge Ford plant at Detroit make a specialty of escorting people through.

They come in, farmers from their farms, town people, merchants and lawyers. Society women come. They walk through in their soft fluffy dresses.

They are in a world of which they know little and sense less and still they are impressed.

The workmen and the workwomen at the machines stare up at them.

Why, there is a world, a life here, of which those who come thus into the great rooms know nothing. The machines are doing something.

The machines are weaving stockings, they weave cloth, they shape iron. Shoes are shaped in machines.

The visitor sees before him a great machine. Inside the mill all is in order and outside, often, all is disorder. In a certain cotton mill town in the South, at the end of a peculiarly disorderly street, I saw piles of old tin cans along a roadway as I drove down to the mill. There were weed-grown fields and women and men were shuffling aimlessly through the street.

The morning was a dull rainy one. The wife of one of the owners of the mill had taken me there . . .

Inside the mill I saw a Barker-Coleman Spooler Warper.

It was a machine just introduced into that factory, an extension of the thought, of the imagination, of some man, a machine that threw many men out of work.

The factory superintendent at that place told me it cost twenty thousand dollars. -

He said that its introduction into the mill did away with the labor of a certain number of hands.

That statement did not at the time impress me much. The machine is pushing men aside. That is going on everywhere. "Let it," I said to myself that morning.

I stood before the machine. It was a mass of moving parts. Its movements were as delicately balanced as those of a fine watch.

It was huge. It would have filled to the last inch this room in which I now sit writing of it.

But can I write of it? I cannot say how many parts the machine had, perhaps a thousand, perhaps ten thousand.

It had Herculean legs.

It unwound thread from one sized ball and wound it onto another. The white balls of thread moved about, up and down along hallways of steel. They were moving at unbelievable speed. As the thread wound and unwound, the balls moving thus gayly along steel hallways, dancing there, being playful there, being touched here and there by little steel hands directing their course, so delicately touched . . .

So delicately directed... . .

Bobbins being loaded with thread ... I dare say bobbins being loaded with many colored threads . . .

Perhaps some silk, some rayon, some cotton.

I may, for the time, have stepped outside the province of this particular machine.

I remember a woman, a mill owner's wife or daughter, tall and delicately gowned, standing near me. I remember two mill girls, one with a mass of yellow hair. No, it was just off yellow, with streaks of gold in it . . .

Her fingers were doing things rapidly, with precision. I did not understand what she did.

I remember thinking rebel thoughts, to me new thoughts.

I must have stared at the woman who brought me there and at an alert blueeyed superintendent.

Thinking of artists, striving blunderingly, as I am doing here, to express something.

No accuracy to their movements—if they be writers no words coming from under their flying fingers with such beautiful precision.

There, in that machine, what seemed at first disorder in movement becoming a vast, a beautiful order.

Why, a man goes a little daft.

A thousand, perhaps in the life of such a machine a hundred million, white balls, each containing to the hundreth part of an inch, the same yardage of slender thread . . .

They dancing down steel hallways, every hop, every skip calculated, they landing at little steel doors, never missing . . .

They being touched, handled, directed by fingers of steel.

Never harshly to break thread that I could break easily between my two fingers.

Thread flying, at blinding speed off one spool and onto another.

These handled, something done to these. In this shape, this form, they are serving some obscure purpose ... in this vast modern passion of goods making.

I am describing this particular machine in a room far away from it, in a quiet room, no technical description of the machine before me, the accuracy of my description mattering nothing . . .

• An impression sought, something beautiful, something in movement beautiful.

Something in tone beautiful, in sound beautiful.

Why, there is power here. Here is the almost god.

A crazy new grace—

Steel fingers jerking—in movements, calculated, never varied . . .

Great arms moving . . .

Materials touched with such delicacy of touch as I can never know.

• I remember standing in that place, that time. I shall never forget that.

I remember thinking of men of my time, thoughtful men, earnest men, who would have destroyed all machines.

I remember there had been such thoughts in me.

I think it must have been the vast order in the mass of steel parts, all in movements, that had caught and held me so.

I, all my life, a lover of artists and their work . . . men working at least toward order.

Thinking—"these men who designed and built this machine may some day be known to be as important in the life swing of mankind, as the man who built the Cathedral of Chartres."

Whispering to myself—"They may be the real artists of our time.

"We in America may be, unknowingly, in one of the great forward-thrusting times of the world."

Thinking also of that woman standing there beside me as I looked at the machine, it in some new way exciting me . . .

A sardonic thought. I am sure I said no rude words to the delicately bodied, delicately gowned rich woman who brought me into that mill.

I thought suddenly, staring hard at her.

"Hell," I remember thinking, "you are a woman delicate and lovely, but you will never find you a lover who will touch that body of yours with the delicacy and strength with which those white balls of cotton are being touched."

Thinking:

"Is blood necessary, is flesh necessary?"

"We humans are but little bundles of nerves. Our nerves betray us..

"We think we think.

"In the machine we have made a thing infinitely more masterful than ourselves."

It was a moment of pure machine worship. 1 ivas on my knees before the new god, the American god.

Myself not hysterical, not made hysterical by the wonder of that particular machine . . .

I have felt dimly the same vast order sometimes in the stars, walking at night on some country road.

I have felt it in rivers.

• I have felt impotence too. This is not a feeling individual in me. I challenge any painter, song-maker, word-arranger, any poet, to go stand where I stood.

A Barker-Coleman Spooler Warper in a cotton mill will do. It is enough.

Why, if he, the artist, had made it . . .

Let him stand as I did, not having made it, never in his whole life having made anything that moved forward, doing its work, with perfect order . . .

Never having loved perfectly, created perfectly . . .

• Let him be a workman at such a machine.

The man, the workman, does little but start and stop it.

It works outside him . . .

I, a man, can go blunderingly into blundering other lives.

I can fail because you who read fail also. Your whole life is a story of failure.

• As for myself, all of my success as a writer has been in telling the story of failure.

I have told that story and told it well because I know failure.

The machine does not fail.

• I ask you men who read to follow me.

As yourself . . .

"What will it do to me, as a man, to stand, pulling a lever, let us say, to a machine that does not fail?

"Can man actually stand, naked in his inefficiency before the efficient machine?"

• Men, you know it cannot quite be done, not yet in any event.

We know this—impotence comes from the fear of impotence.

In our machine age can we help fearing?

• Why, I was in an American Cotton Mill at night. There was a mill superintendent with me. I think I ought to tell you, who have not been in such a mill, either in the daytime or at night, a little of how cotton from the farms is made into thread and then of how, in the great loom rooms, it is woven into cloth.

The cotton mill is a complex thing like all modern mills. It has been built up slowly from small rude beginnings. Here is this cotton, brought into the mill in its bales. It comes from the fields.

There is a story there too, the story of Southern cotton fields, but it cannot be told here.

In the mills the machines begin to handle the cotton. They roll and toss it. Now it has begun to move forward in the mill, a moving snowy mass.

As it moves forward the machines caress it, they stir it—iron fingers reach softly and tenderly down to it.

The cotton has come into the mill still impregnated with the dust of the fields. There are innumerable little black and brown specks in it. Tiny particles of trash from the fields, bits of the dry brown cotton boll, cling to it, tiny ends of sticks are enmeshed in it.

The cotton gin has removed the seed but there are these particles left.

The fibre of the cotton is delicate and short.

Here is a great machine, weighing tons. See the great wheels, the iron arms moving, feel the vibrations in the air now, all the little iron fingers moving. See how delicately the fingers caress the moving mass. They shake it, they comb it, they caress it.

• Every movement here is designed to cleanse the cotton, making it always whiter

and cleaner, and to lay the delicate fibres of the mass, more and more, into parallel lines.

Why, this cotton is already on the road to becoming. It is becoming goods. It moves with roaring speed toward that end.

• Long months spent making this cotton in the fields. All the danger of bad weather,

boll weevil, drought.

Hope coming, despair ... a farmer's whole family spending months making a bale of cotton. See how nonchalantly the machines eat it up.

And now it is clean and has begun to emerge from the larger machines in a thin film. You have been in the fields in the early morning and have seen how the dew on the spider webs, spun from weed-top to weed-top, shines and glistens in the morning sun. See how delicate and fragile it is.

But not more delicate or film-like, not more diaphanous than the thin sheet now emerging from yonder huge machine. You may pass your hand under the moving sheet. Look through it and you may see the lines in the palm of your hand.

Yonder great ponderous machine did that. Man made that machine. He made it to do that thing. There is something blind or dead in those of us who do not see and feel the wonder of it.

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What delicacy of adjustment, what strength with delicacy! Do you wonder that the little mill girls—half children, some of them—that' the women who work in the mills—many of them I have seen with such amazingly delicate and sensitive faces—do you wonder that they are half in love with the machines that they tend, as modern boys are half in love with the automobiles they drive?

The mill superintendent's voice went on, explaining things to me. My nerves tingling.

The reason they run the mills at night it seems is this—well, all this machinery costs tremendously. Suppose you have an investment of a million dollars in machinery.

A million dollars, it seems, cannot stand idle. It must work, work, work.

Men like myself, who will never understand finance, cannot comprehend this. If someone gave me a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, a million dollars, I would lay the dollars aside in a heap, I would think of them as so many dollars lying there, waiting to be spent.

But it seems money isn't like that.

Money is power. Power must be used. The mill costs too much. It cannot stand idle.

Idleness would destroy it. The cost of the money that bought the machinery would consume the machinery.

There is something very complex here too, a thing called finance.

The machinery must run, run, run. It must work, work, work. People must run the machines.

Night does not matter. Time exists during the night too.

I think it is time now for women to come into power in the western world, to take over the power, the control of life. Perhaps they have already taken it. There is plenty of evidence that they have.

To be sure there are all sorts of women, but we should not be confused by that fact. That there are plenty of silly women in the world means little. The world has always been run by leaders in any event, and it seems to me that the new leaders must be women . . .

Because, as I have already tried to point out, the woman, at her best, is and will remain being untouched by the machine. It may, if she becomes a machine operator, tire her physically but it cannot paralyze or make impotent her spirit. She remains, as she will remain, a being with a hidden inner life. The machine can never bring children into the world.

"Nor can women," someone says, "without the assistance of the male."

Well, there is the rub. There is where our hope lies. If these machines, brought by man, so casually into the world—they, the machines being what they are—such amazing, such beautiful manifestations of man's imaginative power—they at the same time having this power to destroy man, if these machines are ever to be controlled, so that their power to hurt men, by making them impotent, is checked, women will have to do it.

They will have to do it perhaps to get men back, so that they may continue to be fertilized, to produce men.

There is a cry going up out of present-day men to the women but there is a cry coming from the women too.

I heard it that night when I went to visit the factory.

The machines in that factory were doing their work. I was caught up fascinated by what was going on in the room into which I had come, as I have always been caught up, swept out of myself, by what I have seen and felt in modern factories.

I was in the factory that night and thoughts went on in me. Perhaps I had gone a bit daft. The machinery in the great room was going at terrific speed. The night also helped to make it a strange world into which I had come.

I had gone to stand by myself on a little raised platform, the young mill superintendent having left me there, when an odd thing happened. There was an accident. The lights in the great room in which I stood suddenly went out. The room was plunged into darkness.

There was no stopping of the machinery. It was as I have explained, a room in which cloth was woven. The machine in there went on weaving cloth. How long they could have continued to do it, I don't know.

In the factory that night, when the lights went out, I stood trembling on the little raised platform to which I had climbed and tried to stare down into the roaring darkness below. There were people, workers, men and women, down in there. The darkness in the mill lasted but a few minutes.

I have already told of how voices can carry through the terrific roar of the mills. The voices find the little crevice in the sustained roar. There were voices that night.

It began with a woman's voice. She laughed hysterically, I thought. It was a young girl's laughter. "Kiss me," she cried. Was she calling to the machines? Machines do not kiss. She laughed again. "Kiss me while the lights are out," the voice said. A male voice from far across the room answered, wearily I thought.

The male voice was not much. "Who? Me?" it asked wearily.

"No, not you."

There was a little chorus of male voices.

"Me?"

"Me?"

"Me?"

"Me?"

(hopefully)

"No, not you. None of you."

"I want a man," the girl's voice said. It was a clear young voice.

There was an outburst of laughter from many women—ironic laughter it was, down there in the darkness—and then the lights came on again.

The mill was as it was before. It roared on. Men and women workers in the room were staring at one another. "The women often do that sort of thing," the young mill superintendent afterward said to me.

"Why?"

"Oh,, they are making fun of the men," he said coldly enough.