Small Town Notes

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Thoughts on the Seasons, and the Moods of Spring—All of Which Accounts for a Story

SPRING'S coming does something to people in small towns. It is a little hard to define. In some years Spring, in all the central parts of America, breaks cold, raw and wet. We all live in a violent climate.

It grows warm about the middle of April. The warm sun comes out and there are a few warm rains.

As I write this the wild flowers are coming out in the woods. I will not attempt to list them, being no naturalist.

There are white ones that nod in the wind; others cling to stones on hillsides; others thrive in the deep wood.

Now also the fruit trees are putting forth blossoms. Farmers are plowing and town people are going fishing.

Everyone wants to be outdoors. It is wonderful now to be young and to be in love. What is lovely in nature, in the Spring, is ten times more lovely if felt through another.

Now lovers who go out in automobiles do not talk much.

A young boy sits beside a girl dumbly. They hold hands and look out across the country. I am taking it for granted they have driven up to some high hill. The hill may be above the very town in which they live.

WELL, we are making this picture—let us go on with it. I like to think there is also a cemetery on the hill. There are new graves there. In a town a good many old people seem to like to die just before the Spring comes.

There will be no deaths for weeks and then, suddenly, many deaths. You may well fancy it is like this. A lot of older people have just been holding onto life for a long time. Disease is eating at them. They hold on and hold on.

Then suddenly they let go. They die. There are new graves scattered over the hill. You see little mounds of fresh earth.

To the left, around a hill from the town, a valley opens out. An apple orchard is in the valley and climbs up a hillside.

A road goes down the valley and winds and twists out of sight among distant hills. Many of the hills are wooded and now show a faint flush of green—the Spring coming up there too.

Along the valley road there are houses. Working people must live down there. The houses are small, poor little things but they look nice and comfortable from this distant spot.

On the hillsides open plowed fields—houses far away up along the valley, clinging to hillsides. How nice houses are thus clinging to hillsides.

We were speaking of young people in an automobile on such a hill, on such a Spring day. I would rather not have the sun shining. A warm mist-drizzle of rain, grey mist lying far up the valley. In such an atmosphere the colours come out more strongly. The wetness acts like varnish on the fading canvas of a painter.

I see many such couples in the Spring and Summer in my town and on the roads about town and others must see them too.

I know how they talk. People are always speaking of the younger generation, shaking their heads. "They do so and so. Isn't it terrible?"

They can't be doing that all the time.

I am very sure sometimes they are just silent, clinging to each other's hands, dumb, tender-hearted.

Because everything is so lovely sometimes and they are not.

Who can be as lovely as the Spring—or the Autumn, or the Summer, or the Winter?

MAN relationships are very difficult. It is hard even to have a friend of your own sex, to get at all close to your own son, or your own daughter.

Or a wife—someone you live all the time with, in a house, eat breakfast with, sit with in the evening.

There are men, and women too, who think such a life isn't respectable. They say, "It can't be done. I have to dull something in myself to pull it off."

And the other one growing dull, too—a person you once thought lovely growing less lovely. Who wants anything to grow less lovely?

Do they think of such things, all these people you see in a town? What do people feel, young people, sitting out on hillsides as I have described them—in Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter days?

Ralph Richardson has just been in here, in my room, talking to me. He is a young man. He clerks in a hardware store.

Sometimes people begin talking strangely. I do not know this man so well.

Yesterday it rained. Ralph says he went, in the afternoon, to deliver some goods to a farmer, four miles from town. I am writing now in early Summer. A moment ago I was writing of Spring. I presume that what I am trying to convey is a sense of the effect of nature on people.

Moods, in the Spring, in the Autumn, in the Summer, in the Winter—moods in nature, in everything, carried into people.

Ralph came home from delivering these goods, he says, in the early evening. It kept on raining—softly, quietly. He put his truck away.

He said it was an open truck and he was wet through. On the way home he had stopped on a hill.

A valley had opened out before his eyes.

Our town lies at the foot of the valley.

So he came on in, got on dry clothes, had his dinner. He turned the radio on. He read the newspaper.

His children went to bed.

He was sitting alone with his wife. They were about to go to bed. Suddenly he got ashamed.

Why?

It is a puzzling question.

He told his wife he had forgotten something at the store, wanting to get away from her.

You are to understand he has just been telling me all this. I am only writing down what he said. He has been talking to me for thirty minutes perhaps and has just goneout.

He came into this room, where I am sitting now, joked a little, had a cigarette with me and began to talk.

He said, in substance, that last night, suddenly, he was ashamed that he was not finer, in some way more dignified and nice in the eyes of his wife, and that she was not more lovely in his eyes.

He made an excuse and went down-town.

The town was nearly all closed up. There were a few men in the drug store. He went in there. Our druggist does not sell whiskey on doctor's prescriptions. The druggist could get the privilege from the government by applying.

He would make a good deal of money.

Lots of people in town would be sore if he did it. He would lose some trade.

Would he gain or would he lose? They were discussing this question in the drug store.. Some of the men in there were advising the druggist to do it while others were advising him to let it alone.

The point is that Ralph Richardson listened a moment and went out feeling queer, he says, feeling lonely, feeling ashamed.

For himself and everyone else.

THE whole of the business part of town was quite dark. He walked about, he says, in several streets.

He was noticing things. There was a porch of a house, about to fall down. There was a lilac bush in a yard. There was a cat creeping along a fence.

And so and so. He got into the lower end of town. There was a light in a window, upstairs in a building.

It was a lawyer's office. Ralph said he knew the man. He went up there.

The lawyer was making out papers for a divorce.

That was all of that.

The lawyer was making out papers and he talked a little about the case.

A man had been up to something. He had gone creeping into another man's house and had got caught.

The woman in the other man's house was about to have a child.

Her husband asked her—"Is it my child or is it his?"

She was defiant. "It is his child and I will have other children by him if I please. I will have as many children by him as I want to have. I love him, not you."

Just that—Ralph Richardson, who told me all this, and the lawyer, a man I do not know, speaking of it.

Ralph says they got to talking. "A lot of life is pretty second class, eh?" the lawyer said.

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"Yes."

"I wonder why it has to be so."

"It just is."

"I am that way myself a lot."

"So am I."

"I am always doing things of which I am ashamed."

"Me too."

"It isn't things people call bad."

"I know."

"It's just things I do, thoughts I have. They are so second-class."

"There's a lot of shoddiness about."

"A heap of it."

A sudden outburst of intimate talk, getting nowhere, Ralph said. He said he and the lawyer, the man I do not know, went out of the office and walked about.

He said the sky had got quite clear and that the stars had come out.

Ralph walked with the lawyer down to his house. It was on a street that crossed a bridge and there were dark houses everywhere along the street. Then the lawyer walked part way back, toward the centre of town, with Ralph.

They got to the bridge, Ralph said, and stood there a long while, saying nothing. He said it was nice there. There were bushes growing along a creek that went under the bridge and the creek made a pleasant sound.

Both men stood listening to the sound made by the creek, they smelled flowers growing on bushes.

They felt the night damp and the sky over their heads.

"We didn't talk anymore," Ralph said. I will have to leave it to the reader to figure out what he was trying to convey.

What he said was that he wanted to talk all night to that man—a man he did not know very well, and that the man wanted to keep on talking to him.

About feelings, perhaps.

They couldn't.

"Good night," the man said.

"Good night," Ralph Richardson said.

He, Ralph Richardson, said he went on home. His wife was in bed asleep. There was a dim light burning in another room.

He undressed quietly, he said, without awakening his wife.

Then he went in to where she was. He tried to tell me something, how oddly aware he was.

Just of the room, the bed, his wife, things in the room.

"I was ashamed," he said.

He thought it was queer, he said, that, at times, even things in a room, chairs, tables and such things, the walls of a room, what a man knew w:as outside the room, in the darkness outside, were like other people in the way they made a man ashamed of himself.