Poor White. Sherwood Anderson
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purpose of their coming was apparent. The party split itself up into couples and each strove to get as far away as possible from the others. One of the couples came back along the path toward the station and went to the pump in George Pike’s yard. They stood by the pump, laughing and pretending to drink out of a tin cup, and when they got again into the road the others had disappeared. They became silent. Hugh went to the end of the platform and watched as they walked slowly along. He became furiously jealous of the young man who put his arm about the waist of his companion and then, when he turned and saw Hugh staring at him, took it away again.
The telegraph operator went quickly along the platform until he was out of range of the young man’s eyes, and, when he thought the gathering darkness would hide him, returned and crept along the path beside the road after him. Again a hungry desire to enter into the lives of the people about him took possession of the Missourian. To be a young man dressed in a stiff white collar, wearing neatly made clothes, and in the evening to walk about with young girls seemed like getting on the road to happiness. He wanted to run shouting along the path beside the road until he had overtaken the young man and woman, to beg them to take him with them, to accept him as one of themselves, but when the momentary impulse had passed and he returned to the telegraph office and lighted a lamp, he looked at his long awkward body and could not conceive of himself as ever by any chance becoming the thing he wanted to be. Sadness swept over him and his gaunt face, already cut and marked with deep lines, became longer and more gaunt. The old boyhood notion, put into his mind by the words of his foster-mother, Sarah Shepard, that a town and a people could remake him and erase from his body the marks of what he thought of as his inferior birth, began to fade. He tried to forget the people about him and turned with renewed energy to the study of the problems in the books that now lay in a pile upon his desk. His inclination to dreams, balked by the persistent holding of his mind to definite things, began to reassert itself in a new form, and his brain played no more with pictures of clouds and men in agitated movement but took hold of steel, wood, and iron. Dumb masses of materials taken out of the earth and the forests were molded by his mind into fantastic shapes. As he sat in the telegraph office during the day or walked alone through the streets of Bidwell at night, he saw in fancy a thousand new machines, formed by his hands and brain, doing the work that had been done by the hands of men. He had come to Bidwell, not only in the hope that there he would at last find companionship, but also because his mind was really aroused and he wanted leisure to begin trying to do tangible things. When the citizens of Bidwell would not take him into their town life but left him standing to one side, as the tiny dwelling place for men called Pickleville where he lived stood aside out from under the invisible roof of the town, he decided to try to forget men and to express himself wholly in work.
CHAPTER V
Hugh’s first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of Judge Horace Hanby and whose minds had turned toward the arrival of the new forward-pushing impulse in American life thought they saw in Hugh the instrument of its coming to Bidwell. From the day of his coming to live among them, there had been much curiosity in the stores and houses regarding the tall, gaunt, slow-speaking stranger at Pickleville. George Pike had told Birdie Spinks the druggist how Hugh worked all day over books, and how he made drawings for parts of mysterious machines and left them on his desk in the telegraph office. Birdie Spinks told others and the tale grew. When Hugh walked alone in the streets during the evening and thought no one took account of his presence, hundreds of pairs of curious eyes followed him about.
A tradition in regard to the telegraph operator began to grow up. The tradition made Hugh a gigantic figure, one who walked always on a plane above that on which other men lived. In the imagination of his fellow citizens of the Ohio town, he went about always thinking great thoughts, solving mysterious and intricate problems that had to do with the new mechanical age Judge Hanby talked about to the eager listeners in the drug-store. An alert, talkative people saw among them one who could not talk and whose long face was habitually serious, and could not think of him as having daily to face the same kind of minor problems as themselves.
The Bidwell young man who had come down to the Wheeling station with a group of other young men, who had seen the evening train go away to the south, who had met at the station one of the town girls and had, in order to escape the others and be alone with her, taken her to the pump in George Pike’s yard on the pretense of wanting a drink, walked away with her into the darkness of the summer evening with his mind fixed on Hugh. The young man’s name was Ed Hall and he was apprentice to Ben Peeler, the carpenter who had sent his son to Cleveland to a technical school. He wanted to marry the girl he had met at the station and did not see how he could manage it on his salary as a carpenter’s apprentice. When he looked back and saw Hugh standing on the station platform, he took the arm he had put around the girl’s waist quickly away and began to talk. “I’ll tell you what,” he said earnestly, “if things don’t pretty soon get on the stir around here I’m going to get out. I’ll go over by Gibsonburg and get a job in the oil fields, that’s what I’ll do. I got to have more money.” He sighed heavily and looked over the girl’s head into the darkness. “They say that telegraph fellow back there at the station is up to something,” he ventured. “It’s all the talk. Birdie Spinks says he is an inventor; says George Pike told him; says he is working all the time on new inventions to do things by machinery; that his passing off as a telegraph operator is only a bluff. Some think maybe he was sent here to see about starting a factory to make one of his inventions, sent by rich men maybe in Cleveland or some other place. Everybody says they’ll bet there’ll be factories here in Bidwell before very long now. I wish I knew. I don’t want to go away if I don’t have to, but I got to have more money. Ben Peeler won’t never give me a raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that fellow back there so I could ask him what’s up. They say he’s smart. I suppose he wouldn’t tell me nothing. I wish I was smart enough to invent something and maybe get rich. I wish I was the kind of fellow they say he is.”
Ed Hall again put his arm about the girl’s waist and walked away. He forgot Hugh and thought of himself and of how he wanted to marry the girl whose young body nestled close to his own—wanted her to be utterly his. For a few hours he passed out of Hugh’s growing sphere of influence on the collective thought of the town, and lost himself in the immediate deliciousness of kisses.
And as he passed out of Hugh’s influence others came in. On Main Street in the evening every one speculated on the Missourian’s purpose in coming to Bidwell. The forty dollars a month paid him by the Wheeling railroad could not have tempted such a man. They were sure of that. Steve Hunter the jeweler’s son had returned to town from a course in a business college at Buffalo, New York, and hearing the talk became interested. Steve had in him the making of a live man of affairs, and he decided to investigate. It was not, however, Steve’s method to go at things directly, and he was impressed by the notion, then abroad in Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by some one, perhaps by a group of capitalists who intended to start factories there.
Steve thought he would go easy. In Buffalo, where he had gone to the business college, he had met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned a soap factory; had become acquainted with her at church and had been introduced to her father. The soap maker, an assertive positive man who manufactured a product called Horn’s Household Friend Soap, had his own notion of what a young man should be and how he should make his way in the world, and had taken pleasure in talking to Steve. He told the Bidwell jeweler’s son of how he had started his own factory with but little money and had succeeded and gave Steve many practical hints on the organization of companies. He talked a great deal of a thing called “control.” “When you get ready to start for yourself keep that in mind,” he said. “You can sell stock and borrow money at the bank, all you can get, but don’t give up control. Hang on to that. That’s the way I made my success. I always kept the control.”
Steve wanted to marry Ernestine Horn, but felt that he should show what he could do as a business man before he attempted to thrust himself into so wealthy and prominent a family. When he returned to his own town and heard the talk regarding Hugh McVey and his inventive genius, he remembered the soap maker’s words regarding control, and repeated them to himself. One evening he walked along Turner’s Pike and stood in the darkness by the old pickle factory. He saw Hugh at work