Poor White. Sherwood Anderson
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his fellows. Hoping to fathom Hugh’s silence he abused the town in which they both lived. “Well,” he began, “I guess I understand how you feel. You want to get out of this place.” He explained his own predicament in life. “I got married,” he said. “Already I have three children. Out here a man can make more money railroading than he can in my state, and living is pretty cheap. Just to-day I had an offer of a job in a good town near my own place in Ohio, but I can’t take it. The job only pays forty a month. The town’s all right, one of the best in the northern part of the State, but you see the job’s no good. Lord, I wish I could go. I’d like to live again among people such as live in that part of the country.”
The railroad man and Hugh walked along the street that ran from the station up into the main street of the town. Wanting to meet the advances that had been made by his companion and not knowing how to go about it, Hugh adopted the method he had heard his fellow laborers use with one another. “Well,” he said slowly, “come have a drink.”
The two men went into a saloon and stood by the bar. Hugh made a tremendous effort to overcome his embarrassment. As he and the railroad man drank foaming glasses of beer he explained that he also had once been a railroad man and knew telegraphy, but that for several years he had been doing other work. His companion looked at his shabby clothes and nodded his head. He made a motion with his head to indicate that he wanted Hugh to come with him outside into the darkness. “Well, well,” he exclaimed, when they had again got outside and had started along the street toward the station. “I understand now. They’ve all been wondering about you and I’ve heard lots of talk. I won’t say anything, but I’m going to do something for you.”
Hugh went to the station with his new-found friend and sat down in the lighted office. The railroad man got out a sheet of paper and began to write a letter. “I’m going to get you that job,” he said. “I’m writing the letter now and I’ll get it off on the midnight train. You’ve got to get on your feet. I was a boozer myself, but I cut it all out. A glass of beer now and then, that’s my limit.”
He began to talk of the town in Ohio where he proposed to get Hugh the job that would set him up in the world and save him from the habit of drinking, and described it as an earthly paradise in which lived bright, clear-thinking men and beautiful women. Hugh was reminded sharply of the talk he had heard from the lips of Sarah Shepard, when in his youth she spent long evenings telling him of the wonder of her own Michigan and New England towns and people, and contrasted the life lived there with that lived by the people of his own place.
Hugh decided not to try to explain away the mistake made by his new acquaintance, and to accept the offer of assistance in getting the appointment as telegraph operator.
The two men walked out of the station and stood again in the darkness. The railroad man felt like one who has been given the privilege of plucking a human soul out of the darkness of despair. He was full of words that poured from his lips and he assumed a knowledge of Hugh and his character entirely unwarranted by the circumstances. “Well,” he exclaimed heartily, “you see I’ve given you a send-off. I have told them you’re a good man and a good operator, but that you will take the place with its small salary because you’ve been sick and just now can’t work very hard.” The excited man followed Hugh along the street. It was late and the store lights had been put out. From one of the town’s two saloons that lay in their way arose a clatter of voices. The old boyhood dream of finding a place and a people among whom he could, by sitting still and inhaling the air breathed by others, come into a warm closeness with life, came back to Hugh. He stopped before the saloon to listen to the voices within, but the railroad man plucked at his coat sleeve and protested. “Now, now, you’re going to cut it out, eh?” he asked anxiously and then hurriedly explained his anxiety. “Of course I know what’s the matter with you. Didn’t I tell you I’ve been there myself? You’ve been working around. I know why that is. You don’t have to tell me. If there wasn’t something the matter with him, no man who knows telegraphy would work in a sawmill.
“Well, there’s no good talking about it,” he added thoughtfully. “I’ve given you a send-off. You’re going to cut it out, eh?”
Hugh tried to protest and to explain that he was not addicted to the habit of drinking, but the Ohio man would not listen. “It’s all right,” he said again, and then they came to the hotel where Hugh lived and he turned to go back to the station and wait for the midnight train that would carry the letter away and that would, he felt, carry also his demand that a fellow-human, who had slipped from the modern path of work and progress should be given a new chance. He felt magnanimous and wonderfully gracious. “It’s all right, my boy,” he said heartily. “No use talking to me. To-night when you came to the station to ask the fare to that hole of a place in Michigan I saw you were embarrassed. ‘What’s the matter with that fellow?’ I said to myself. I got to thinking. Then I came up town with you and right away you bought me a drink. I wouldn’t have thought anything about that if I hadn’t been there myself. You’ll get on your feet. Bidwell, Ohio, is full of good men. You get in with them and they’ll help you and stick by you. You’ll like those people. They’ve got get-up to them. The place you’ll work at there is far out of town. It’s away out about a mile at a little kind of outside-like place called Pickleville. There used to be a saloon there and a factory for putting up cucumber pickles, but they’ve both gone now. You won’t be tempted to slip in that place. You’ll have a chance to get on your feet. I’m glad I thought of sending you there.”
The Wheeling and Lake Erie ran along a little wooded depression that cut across the wide expanse of open farm lands north of the town of Bidwell. It brought coal from the hill country of West Virginia and southeastern Ohio to ports on Lake Erie, and did not pay much attention to the carrying of passengers. In the morning a train consisting of a combined express and baggage car and two passenger coaches went north and west toward the lake, and in the evening the same train returned, bound southeast into the Hills, The Bidwell station of the road was, in an odd way, detached from the town’s life. The invisible roof under which the life of the town and the surrounding country was lived did not cover it. As the Indiana railroad man had told Hugh, the station itself stood on a spot known locally as Pickleville. Back of the station there was a small building for the storage of freight and near at hand four or five houses facing Turner’s Pike. The pickle factory, now deserted and with its windows gone, stood across the tracks from the station and beside a small stream that ran under a bridge and across country through a grove of trees to the river. On hot summer days a sour, pungent smell arose from the old factory, and at night its presence lent a ghostly flavor to the tiny corner of the world in which lived perhaps a dozen people.
All day and at night an intense persistent silence lay over Pickleville, while in Bidwell a mile away the stir of new life began. In the evenings and on rainy afternoons when men could not work in the fields, old Judge Hanby went along Turner’s Pike and across the wagon bridge into Bidwell and sat in a chair at the back of Birdie Spink’s drug store. He talked. Men came in to listen to him and went out. New talk ran through the town. A new force that was being born into American life and into life everywhere all over the world was feeding on the old dying individualistic life. The new force stirred and aroused the people. It met a need that was universal. It was meant to seal men together, to wipe out national lines, to walk under seas and fly through the air, to change the entire face of the world in which men lived. Already the giant that was to be king in the place of old kings was calling his servants and his armies to serve him. He used the methods of old kings and promised his followers booty and gain. Everywhere he went unchallenged, surveying the land, raising a new class of men to positions of power. Railroads had already been pushed out across the plains; great coal fields from which was to be taken food to warm the blood in the body of the giant were being opened up; iron fields were being discovered; the roar and clatter of the breathing of the terrible new thing, half hideous, half beautiful in its possibilities, that was for so long to drown the voices and confuse the thinking of men, was heard not only in the towns but even in lonely farm houses, where its willing servants, the newspapers and magazines, had begun to circulate in ever increasing numbers. At the town of Gibsonville, near Bidwell, Ohio, and at Lima and Finley, Ohio, oil and gas fields were discovered. At Cleveland, Ohio, a precise, definite-minded man named Rockefeller bought and sold oil. From the first he served the new thing well and