Country Town Notes

Reminiscences and Opinions as Engendered in the Atmosphere of a Small Town Print Shop

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

IT seems Mayor Maxwell of Marion, Virginia, and the town council of this fair town recently went Bolshevik on roller skatingRoller skating became for the time and in the minds of the city fathers almost a capital offense. The Watkins boys had a roller skating rink here. Where they came from, we don't know. They were tall young fellows who looked like mountain men to us. Had they confined themselves to roller skating and raking in the shekels, everything might have been all right.

But it seems they were up to other things

—poker playing, for example. One of the

Watkins boys got caught engaged in such a game.

This is said to have been the first poker game ever played in the history of Smyth County, Virginia.

So Mr. Watkins was up before His Honour. "So-and-so many dollars and sixty days in jail," His Honour said—"and you don't need to go to jail if you close the skating rink, get out of town and take your rink out with you."

WHICH was all right and might have been justice. Justice is a thing we know little or nothing about. Often at night we awaken out of a deep sleep, trembling from head to foot for fear justice may be done us.

But to return to our tale. Having soaked the Watkins boys, His Honour and the town council did not stop there. There was a called meeting of the council. They had all become afraid the Watkins boys might transfer their license to run a skating rink to someone else.

You see there had been a slip-up when the Watkins boys got this license. They had got it too cheap. Who knew they were going to rake in all those shekels—who knew that our young blades and ladies were going to flit, night after night, through the mazes of joy— enticed by that tall Watkins, who, Heaven knows, could surely skate—who knew that nickels, dimes, quarters and halves were to fall like gentle snowflakes into the Watkins till? Of course no one knew.

The town, it seems, had gone skate mad. It was a disease, an epidemic. Much good silver was being diverted into these strange coffers —as one might say. Why we even felt this bitterly ourselves. People who might well have been sitting at home, reading our papers and absorbing wisdom, light and mental grace, were up there twining and intertwining themselves around that hall back of that long Watkins.

And to about the worst music we ever heard —we will say that.

We will say more. The town council said more. The special meeting was called by His Honour, but His Honour was not there.

He was at home; he was sick, but his spirit reigned. The council said that the Watkins skating rink license could not be transferred to anyone on the earth, above the sea, or to anyone in the waters under the sea.

But was justice thereby done?

Ah!

Let us pause now and consider this matter. Let us walk under the night skies and think. We are strong for justice for everyone but ourselves. We do not want any justice in our own dish.

We don't want to roller skate either. We never learned. We hate to fall down. We hate to have a certain part of our anatomy bruised. We hate to lose that grace people are accustomed to see in us.

But was justice thereby done?

There are people involved in this whole matter who, by the action of our town council, are hurt, bruised, the joy of their lives taken away—their young hopes crushed.

For example, there is Colonel Stardust Collins.

Here is an exemplary young man, a bachelor—handsome, young, of unimpeachable character. He works in a bank and sleeps upstairs over the bank.

As anyone ought to know, working in a bank is confining, sleeping upstairs over a bank is confining.

A man needs exercise, he needs joy, association with his fellows, both male and female.

And so, for Colonel Stardust, the coming of the Watkins brothers was a joy. Who has not seen the Colonel, in the waning light of a summer evening, walking through the Rialto, his skates in his hand; who has not seen him also in the stress and storm—as one might say—of winter evenings?

IT is said that the Colonel bought himself skates of silver; that he bought himself a season ticket. As a matter of fact by this action of the town council and an irate Mayor he is out $23 and no cents.

But that is not all he is out. Colonel Stardust says—and we think he speaks with sage wisdom—that roller skating never did bring a moral blight upon the souls thus engaged, least of all upon himself. He says that, as a matter of fact, it kept away sinful thoughts. "While skating," says the Colonel, "my mind was full, not of sinful thoughts but of pure ones."

"I thought of birds mating in the spring, of sea gulls on lonely rocks in ocean, of lambs gamboling on the green."

"Not gambling, you understand, with dice or cards, but with their legs—just as I skated."

And so the cry for justice goes up. We think the town council ought to give Jerry Collins his $23 and no cents. We think they ought to take the last, slightest insinuation of sinfulness, by thought or deed, off his name. We think they ought to backtrack this much.

The town thinks so, Wolfe's boarding house—where we eat—thinks so, the Rialto thinks so.

Will the town council act?

If it is not done we think a mass meeting should be held.

II.—It is the man who knows nothing at all of writing who gives most advice to writers; the woman who has never had a child is most likely to speak, or write, about child raising;

I think, in all fairness to them, that it will be admitted that 'most all the bitterness—well, say against the old saloons—came from men and women who were never in a saloon.

Whether they were right or wrong, is another matter. I am thinking of myself writing to farmers, trying to give them advice. The whole thing is a bit absurd.

I was born and raised in a small town, just such a town as Marion, Virginia. My father half ruined himself with drink. He had been born what is called "a gentleman," but had no head for business. Like myself he liked to take life with a certain flourish. I mean, to put the hat on the side, rather than the top of the head, wear a brightly-coloured tie, carry a walking stick.

Poor man, he never did get over loving women, and I dare say I never shall. When a woman makes herself beautiful I am grateful to her. I like to see her walking, beautifully gowned, through the streets. Really, I do not want her to pay any special attention to me.

I AM grateful to her as I am to the man who saves a lovely old building in a town, rather than tear it down to build an ugly, although perhaps more efficient one.

I like men who are manly and frank, women who carry themselves with grace and beauty. My conception of what is nice in life is my own. I stand on it.

Only last Sunday I was walking in Marion with Mr. Funk, the prosecuting attorney. We passed two negro children. They had nice faces and skins that would have made a painter mad with joy. 0, the loveliness of the coppery browns and reds in the negro children's faces! I had no way of knowing whether or not Mr. Funk saw what I saw. Probably not. I have thought about painting all my life. I wanted to be a painter but did not make it, so became a scribbler.

My father's drinking made our family poor, often we suffered extreme poverty, but afterward, a long time afterward, I did not blame him. Life was dull to him. Drink, I think, inflamed his imagination. He used to sing and tell marvelous stories to us children when he was drinking. Sober, he was often dull, sad and heavy. In his cups he gathered us about his knees. He would read some old tale and expound it. He read us Robinson Crusoe and some of the Shakespearean comedies. He imagined himself Falstaff, although he was a lean, not a fat man. He walked up and down the floor. There was no butter in the house. For weeks sometimes we lived on corn meal mush. "Man does not live by bread alone," he said. It was hard on mother to be sure. We were, however, a family of boys. "Women do not understand the needs of us men," he said, with a flourish of his hand.

How many charming memories I have of the man. One night we went swimming in a pond. It was called "Fenn's Pond" and was at the edge of town. We went there on a rainy night.

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So there we were at the pond's edge in the darkness. Black clouds raced across the sky. Father was a strong swimmer. "It is nice to swim naked," he said, "that is why I brought you here tonight."

"If you feel yourself tiring," said he, "put your hand on my shoulder."

And so, stripping ourselves and leaving our clothes on the bank in the rain, we plunged in. I remember his

broad white shoulders gleaming in the darkness, his strong man's arms flashing out. How small and weak my own arms seemed.

And now we had reached the further shore and had drawn ourselves up on the wet grass. This was in the summer and the rain was warm. We lay there a long time.

In his grand eloquent way father spoke of the sky. It was, I thought, very black but we could see places where the black was denser. It stopped raining. "The sky is not black, it is deep purple," said my father.

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He called attention to the deeper purple of the water. Near the shore, where we were lying together naked on the grass, it was actually black.

I remember also the lightning playing across the sky, the rumble of distant thunder.

Again—I am a newsboy on the streets of our town. A strange lady, beautifully clad, has come to town. She is changing cars there, getting off a Lake Shore and Michigan Southern train to take the I. B. & W. The I. B.

& W. later became the Big Four—a branch of that system.

I am a newsboy, a slip of a boy at the railroad station and there is that lady. My father comes into the railroad station, a little drunk. "Do you suppose she could be a princess?" I asked. Another man would have laughed at me but not father. "I think very likely she is," he said. We walked together up and down the railroad station platform looking at the lady. He discovered a principality for her, I remember, in a strange green land, far away over seas. There was a white castle on the side of a hill.

And so my father drank, and we ate corn meal mush, and mother sorrowed often but two of my brothers painted and a sister, who later died, wrote sometimes rather delicate little verses, that never got printed.

But what has all this to do with farmers?

Just this. I fell to thinking of my childhood, sitting in my little print shop in Marion, Virginia, and of the farmers who come in here. I was thinking of how, as a boy, I went often with my brothers to work on farms. We set out cabbage plants, acres of them, and later cut and hauled cabbage to market; we hoed, cut and shucked corn, we picked strawberries in a strawberry field, cut firewood in the forest in the winter, helped to pick and pack apples in the fall.

I am thinking only that imagination can be applied to the land as well as to my own trade of writing.

Here we have politicians talking of "Farm Relief." Well! Farmers going on in a set way all their lives. They plant corn—if all their neighbours plant corn, or cabbage, or cotton. Once they begin to plant one crop, they go on and on.

I think my own father did, for all his faults, of which I myself have

more—teach his children a kind of self-reliance. "Use your imaginations. Stand on your own feet."

"Trust God and give 'em Long Melford," said old George Borrow, a manly man who knew a lot. By "Long Melford" he meant an unexpected punch with the left.

And so I am thinking that every farmer should have on his farm a few experimental acres. He should talk these experimental acres over with his sons, with his hired men, as my father talked to me of the colour of a nightsky over Fenn's Pond in Ohio.

"We are raising corn, wheat, cotton, tobacco—what-not." Let us set these few acres aside. We will play with them, experiment with them.

"We will throw manure on this land, plow it deep."

Why should every farm not be a college, too? O, the nonsense talked about education!

Books, books, I am weary of books. I am weary of the gabble of congressmen and presidents.

My own education was got on the farm, on the night streets of a town, in factories, with women I have loved. Nearly everything I have learned— and I have not learned much yet—has come by a thrust out into an experimental field.

For example, my running these country weekly papers in a Virginia town, has been an experiment in my life. I do not know how much the people here have got from them but I have got a lot.

They have been experimental acres on the farm that is my life. I have plowed deep, put in this crop and that. I myself have never been much of a farmer, but I have always loved the land. Many of my best friends are farmers. I think the modern age has sold the farmer out. The industrialists have got—from government—a lot, labor has got something, the farmer has got talk, nothing else.

I think he will continue to get—talk. The farmer is an individualist like the artist. His one chance, I believe, is in experimenting. As I have said, every farm should also be a college.

A few acres should be set aside each year for Experimental Land Education. It should be the land on which the imaginations of the farmer, his wife, his sons, his hired man, are let loose, as my father let loose my imagination, swimming at night in Fenn's Pond and walking near a railroad station in a town in Ohio.