Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson

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Rosalind's face had grown chalky white and her hands trembled. They got
off the railroad tracks and into the streets of Willow Springs. A
change came over Melville Stoner. Of a sudden he seemed just a man of
forty, a little embarrassed by the presence of the younger woman, a
little hesitant. "I'm going to the hotel now and I must leave you
here," he said. His feet made a shuffling sound on the sidewalk. "I
intended to tell you why you found me lying out there with my face
buried in the grass," he said. A new quality had come into his voice.
It was the voice of the boy who had called to Rosalind out of the body
of the man as they walked and talked on the tracks. "Sometimes I can't
stand my life here," he said almost fiercely and waved his long arms
about. "I'm alone too much. I grow to hate myself. I have to run out of
town."

The man did not look at Rosalind but at the ground. His big feet
continued shuffling nervously about. "Once in the winter time I thought
I was going insane," he said. "I happened to remember an orchard, five
miles from town where I had walked one day in the late fall when the
pears were ripe. A notion came into my head. It was bitter cold but I
walked the five miles and went into the orchard. The ground was frozen
and covered with snow but I brushed the snow aside. I pushed my face
into the grass. In the fall when I had walked there the ground was
covered with ripe pears. A fragrance arose from them. They were covered
with bees that crawled over them, drunk, filled with a kind of ecstacy.
I had remembered the fragrance. That's why I went there and put my face
into the frozen grass. The bees were in an ecstasy of life and I had
missed life. I have always missed life. It always goes away from me. I
always imagined people walking away. In the spring this year I walked
on the railroad track out to the bridge over Willow Creek. Violets grew
in the grass. At that time I hardly noticed them but today I
remembered. The violets were like the people who walk away from me. A
mad desire to run after them had taken possession of me. I felt like a
bird flying through space. A conviction that something had escaped me
and that I must pursue it had taken possession of me."

Melville Stoner stopped talking. His face also had grown white and his
hands also trembled. Rosalind had an almost irresistible desire to put
out her hand and touch his hand. She wanted to shout, crying--"I am
here. I am not dead. I am alive." Instead she stood in silence, staring
at him, as the widow who owned the high flying hens had stared.
Melville Stoner struggled to recover from the ecstasy into which he had
been thrown by his own words. He bowed and smiled. "I hope you are in
the habit of walking on railroad tracks," he said. "I shall in the
future know what to do with my time. When you come to town I shall camp
on the railroad tracks. No doubt, like the violets, you have left your
fragrance out there." Rosalind looked at him. He was laughing at her as
he had laughed when he talked to the widow standing at his gate. She
did not mind. When he had left her she went slowly through the streets.
The phrase that had come into her mind as they walked on the tracks
came back and she said it over and over. "And God spoke to me out of a
burning bush." She kept repeating the phrase until she got back into
the Wescott house.

* * * * *

Rosalind sat on the front porch of the house where her girlhood had
been spent. Her father had not come home for the evening meal. He was a
dealer in coal and lumber and owned a number of unpainted sheds facing
a railroad siding west of town. There was a tiny office with a stove
and a desk in a corner by a window. The desk was piled high with
unanswered letters and with circulars from mining and lumber companies.
Over them had settled a thick layer of coal dust. All day he sat in his
office looking like an animal in a cage, but unlike a caged animal he
was apparently not discontented and did not grow restless. He was the
one coal and lumber dealer in Willow Springs. When people wanted one of
these commodities they had to come to him. There was no other place to
go. He was content. In the morning as soon as he got to his office he
read the Des Moines paper and then if no one came to disturb him he sat
all day, by the stove in winter and by an open window through the long
hot summer days, apparently unaffected by the marching change of
seasons pictured in the fields, without thought, without hope, without
regret that life was becoming an old worn out thing for him.

In the Wescott house Rosalind's mother had already begun the canning of
which she had several times spoken. She was making gooseberry jam.
Rosalind could hear the pots boiling in the kitchen. Her mother walked
heavily. With the coming of age she was beginning to grow fat.

The daughter was weary from much thinking. It had been a day of many
emotions. She took off her hat and laid it on the porch beside her.
Melville Stoner's house next door had windows that were like eyes
staring at her, accusing her. "Well now, you see, you have gone too
fast," the house declared. It sneered at her. "You thought you knew
about people. After all you knew nothing." Rosalind held her head in
her hands. It was true she had misunderstood. The man who lived in the
house was no doubt like other people in Willow Springs. He was not, as
she had smartly supposed, a dull citizen of a dreary town, one who knew
nothing of life. Had he not said words that had startled her, torn her
out of herself?

Rosalind had an experience not uncommon to tired nervous people. Her
mind, weary of thinking, did not stop thinking but went on faster than
ever. A new plane of thought was reached. Her mind was like a flying
machine that leaves the ground and leaps into the air.

It took hold upon an idea expressed or implied in something Melville
Stoner had said. "In every human being there are two voices, each
striving to make itself heard."

A new world of thought had opened itself before her. After all human
beings might be understood. It might be possible to understand her
mother and her mother's life, her father, the man she loved, herself.
There was the voice that said words. Words came forth from lips. They
conformed, fell into a certain mold. For the most part the words had no
life of their own. They had come down out of old times and many of them
were no doubt once strong living words, coming out of the depth of
people, out of the bellies of people. The words had escaped out of a
shut-in place. They had once expressed living truth. Then they had gone
on being said, over and over, by the lips of many people, endlessly,
wearily.

She thought of men and women she had seen together, that she had heard
talking together as they sat in the street cars or in apartments or
walked in a Chicago park. Her brother, the traveling salesman, and his
wife had talked half wearily through the long evenings she had spent
with them in their apartment. It was with them as with the other
people. A thing happened. The lips said certain words but the eyes of
the people said other words. Sometimes the lips expressed affection
while hatred shone out of the eyes. Sometimes it was the other way
about. What a confusion!

It was clear there was something hidden away within people that could
not get itself expressed except accidentally. One was startled or
alarmed and then the words that fell from the lips became pregnant
words, words that lived.

The vision that had sometimes visited her in her girlhood as she lay in
bed at night came back. Again she saw the people on the marble
stairway, going down and away, into infinity. Her own mind began to
make words that struggled to get themselves expressed through her lips.
She hungered for someone to whom to say the words and half arose to go
to her mother, to where her mother was making gooseberry jam in the
kitchen, and then sat down again. "They were going down into the hall
of the hidden voices," she whispered to herself. The words excited and
intoxicated her as had the words from the lips of Melville Stoner. She
thought of herself as having quite suddenly grown amazingly,
spiritually, even physically. She felt relaxed, young, wonderfully
strong. She imagined herself as walking, as had the young girl she had
seen in the vision, with swinging arms and shoulders, going down a
marble stairway--down into the hidden places in people, into the hall
of the little voices. "I shall understand after this, what shall I not
understand?" she asked herself.

Doubt came and she trembled a little. As she walked with him on the
railroad track Melville Stoner had gone down within herself. Her body
was a house, through the door of which he had walked. He had known
about the night noises in her father's house--her father at the well
by the kitchen door, the slap of the spilled water on the floor. Even
when she was a young girl and had thought herself alone in the bed in
the darkness in the room upstairs in the house before which she now
sat, she had not been alone. The strange bird-like man who lived in the
house next door had been with her, in her room, in her bed. Years later
he had remembered the terrible little noises of the house and had known
how they had terrified her.

There was something terrible in his knowledge too. He had spoken, given
forth his knowledge, but as he did so there was laughter in his eyes,
perhaps a sneer.

In the Wescott house the sounds of housekeeping went on. A man who had
been at work in a distant field, who had already begun his fall
plowing, was unhitching his horses from the plow. He was far away,
beyond the street's end, in a field that swelled a little out of the
plain. Rosalind stared. The man was hitching the horses to a wagon. She
saw him as through the large end of a telescope. He would drive the
horses away to a distant farmhouse and put them into a barn. Then he
would go into a house where there was a woman at work. Perhaps the
woman like her mother would be making gooseberry jam. He would grunt as
her father did when at evening he came home from the little hot office
by the railroad siding. "Hello," he would say, flatly, indifferently,
stupidly. Life was like that.

Rosalind became weary of thinking. The man in the distant field had got
into his wagon and was driving away. In a moment there would be nothing
left of him but a thin cloud of dust that floated in the air. In the
house the gooseberry jam had boiled long enough. Her mother was
preparing to put it into glass jars. The operation produced a new
little side current of sounds. She thought again of Melville Stoner.
For years he had been sitting, listening to sounds. There was a kind of
madness in it.

She had got herself into a half frenzied condition. "I must stop it,"
she told herself. "I am like a stringed instrument on which the strings
have been tightened too much." She put her face into her hands,
wearily.

And then a thrill ran through her body. There was a reason for Melville
Stoner's being what he had become. There was a locked gateway leading
to the marble stairway that led down and away, into infinity, into the
hall of the little voices and the key to the gateway was love. Warmth
came back into Rosalind's body. "Understanding need not lead to
weariness," she thought. Life might after all be a rich, a triumphant
thing. She would make her visit to Willow Springs count for something
significant in her life. For one thing she would really approach her
mother, she would walk into her mother's life. "It will be my first
trip down the marble stairway," she thought and tears came to her eyes.
In a moment her father would be coming home for the evening meal but
after supper he would go away. The two women would be alone together.
Together they would explore a little into the mystery of life, they
would find sisterhood. The thing she had wanted to talk about with
another understanding woman could be talked about then. There might yet
be a beautiful outcome to her visit to Willow Springs and to her
mother.

II

The story of Rosalind's six years in Chicago is the story of thousands
of unmarried women who work in offices in the city. Necessity had not
driven her to work nor kept her at her task and she did not think of
herself as a worker, one who would always be a worker. For a time after
she came out of the stenographic school she drifted from office to
office, acquiring always more skill, but with no particular interest in
what she was doing. It was a way to put in the long days. Her father,
who in addition to the coal and lumber yards owned three farms, sent
her a hundred dollars a month. The money her work brought was spent for
clothes so that she dressed better than the women she worked with.

Of one thing she was quite sure. She did not want to return to Willow
Springs to live with her father and mother, and after a time she knew
she could not continue living with her brother and his wife. For the
first time she began seeing the city that spread itself out before her
eyes. When she walked at the noon hour along Michigan Boulevard or went
into a restaurant or in the evening went home in the street car she saw
men and women together. It was the same when on Sunday afternoons in
the summer she walked in the park or by the lake. On a street car she
saw a small round-faced woman put her hand into the hand of her male
companion. Before she did it she looked cautiously about. She wanted to
assure herself of something. To the other women in the car, to Rosalind
and the others the act said something. It was as though the woman's
voice had said aloud, "He is mine. Do not draw too close to him."

There was no doubt that Rosalind was awakening out of the Willow
Springs torpor in which she had lived out her young womanhood. The city
had at least done that for her. The city was wide. It flung itself out.
One had but to let his feet go thump, thump upon the pavements to get
into strange streets, see always new faces.

On Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday one did not work. In the
summer it was a time to go to places--to the park, to walk among the
strange colorful crowds in Halsted Street, with a half dozen young
people from the office, to spend a day on the sand dunes at the foot of
Lake Michigan. One got excited and was hungry, hungry, always hungry--
for companionship. That was it. One wanted to possess something--a man
--to take him along on jaunts, be sure of him, yes--own him.

She read books--always written by men or by manlike women. There was an
essential mistake in the viewpoint of life set forth in the books. The
mistake was always being made. In Rosalind's time it grew more
pronounced. Someone had got hold of a key with which the door to the
secret chamber of life could be unlocked. Others took the key and
rushed in. The secret chamber of life was filled with a noisy vulgar
crowd. All the books that dealt with life at all dealt with it through
the lips of the crowd that had newly come into the sacred place. The
writer had hold of the key. It was his time to be heard. "Sex," he
cried. "It is by understanding sex I will untangle the mystery."

It was all very well and sometimes interesting but one grew tired of
the subject.

She lay abed in her room at her brother's house on a Sunday night in
the summer. During the afternoon she had gone for a walk and on a
street on the Northwest Side had come upon a religious procession. The
Virgin was being carried through the streets. The houses were decorated
and women leaned out at the windows of houses. Old priests dressed in
white gowns waddled along. Strong young men carried the platform on
which the Virgin rested. The procession stopped. Someone started a
chant in a loud clear voice. Other voices took it up. Children ran
about gathering in money. All the time there was a loud hum of ordinary
conversation going on. Women shouted across the street to other women.
Young girls walked on the sidewalks and laughed softly as the young men
in white, clustered about the Virgin, turned to stare at them. On every
street corner merchants sold candies, nuts, cool drinks--

In her bed at night Rosalind put down the book she had been reading.
"The worship of the Virgin is a form of sex expression," she read.

"Well what of it? If it be true what does it matter?"

She got out of bed and took off her nightgown. She was herself a
virgin. What did that matter? She turned herself slowly about, looking
at her strong young woman's body. It was a thing in which sex lived. It
was a thing upon which sex in others might express itself. What did it
matter?

There was her brother sleeping with his wife in another room near at
hand. In Willow Springs, Iowa, her father was at just this moment
pumping a pail of water at the well by the kitchen door. In a moment he
would carry it into the kitchen to set it on the box by the kitchen
sink.

Rosalind's cheeks were flushed. She made an odd and lovely figure
standing nude before the glass in her room there in Chicago. She was so
much alive and yet not alive. Her eyes shone with excitement. She
continued to turn slowly round and round twisting her head to look at
her naked back. "Perhaps I am learning to think," she decided. There
was some sort of essential mistake in people's conception of life.
There was something she knew and it was of as much importance as the
things the wise men knew and put into books. She also had found out
something about life. Her body was still the body of what was called a
virgin. What of it? "If the sex impulse within it had been gratified in
what way would my problem be solved? I am lonely now. It is evident
that after that had happened I would still be lonely."

III

Rosalind's life in Chicago had been like a stream that apparently turns
back toward its source. It ran forward, then stopped, turned, twisted.
At just the time when her awakening became a half realized thing she
went to work at a new place, a piano factory on the Northwest Side
facing a branch of the Chicago River. She became secretary to a man who
was treasurer of the company. He was a slender, rather small man of
thirty-eight with thin white restless hands and with gray eyes that
were clouded and troubled. For the first time she became really
interested in the work that ate up her days. Her employer was charged
with the responsibility of passing upon the credit of the firm's
customers and was unfitted for the task. He was not shrewd and within a
short time had made two costly mistakes by which the company had lost
money. "I have too much to do. My time is too much taken up with
details. I need help here," he had explained, evidently irritated, and
Rosalind had been engaged to relieve him of details.

Her new employer, named Walter Sayers, was the only son of a man who in
his time had been well known in Chicago's social and club life.
Everyone had thought him wealthy and he had tried to live up to
people's estimate of his fortune. His son Walter had wanted to be a
singer and had expected to inherit a comfortable fortune. At thirty he
had married and three years later when his father died he was already
the father of two children.

And then suddenly he had found himself quite penniless. He could sing
but his voice was not large. It wasn't an instrument with which one
could make money in any dignified way. Fortunately his wife had some
money of her own. It was her money, invested in the piano manufacturing
business, that had secured him the position as treasurer of the
company. With his wife he withdrew from social life and they went to
live in a comfortable house in a suburb.

Walter Sayers gave up music, apparently surrendered even his interest
in it. Many men and women from his suburb went to hear the orchestra on
Friday afternoons but he did not go. "What's the use of torturing
myself and thinking of a life I cannot lead?" he said to himself. To
his wife he pretended a growing interest in his work at the factory.
"It's really fascinating. It's a game, like moving men back and forth
on a chess board. I shall grow to love it," he said.

He had tried to build up interest in his work but had not been
successful. Certain things would not get into his consciousness.
Although he tried hard he could not make the fact that profit or loss
to the company depended upon his judgment seem important to himself. It
was a matter of money lost or gained and money meant nothing to him.
"It's father's fault," he thought. "While he lived money never meant
anything to me. I was brought up wrong. I am ill prepared for the
battle of life." He became too timid and lost business that should have
come to the company quite naturally. Then he became too bold in the
extension of credit and other losses followed.

His wife was quite happy and satisfied with her life. There were four
or five acres of land about the suburban house and she became absorbed
in the work of raising flowers and vegetables. For the sake of the
children she kept a cow. With a young negro gardener she puttered about
all day, digging in the earth, spreading manure about the roots of
bushes and shrubs, planting and transplanting. In the evening when he
had come home from his office in his car she took him by the arm and
led him eagerly about. The two children trotted at their heels. She
talked glowingly. They stood at a low spot at the foot of the garden
and she spoke of the necessity of putting in tile. The prospect seemed
to excite her. "It will be the best land on the place when it's
drained," she said. She stooped and with a trowel turned over the soft
black soil. An odor arose. "See! Just see how rich and black it is!"
she exclaimed eagerly. "It's a little sour now because water has stood
on it." She seemed to be apologizing as for a wayward child. "When it's
drained I shall use lime to sweeten it," she added. She was like a
mother leaning over the cradle of a sleeping babe. Her enthusiasm
irritated him.

When Rosalind came to take the position in his office the slow fires of
hatred that had been burning beneath the surface of Walter Savers' life
had already eaten away much of his vigor and energy. His body sagged in
the office chair and there were heavy sagging lines at the corners of
his mouth. Outwardly he remained always kindly and cheerful but back of
the clouded, troubled eyes the fires of hatred burned slowly,
persistently. It was as though he was trying to awaken from a troubled
dream that gripped him, a dream that frightened a little, that was
unending. He had contracted little physical habits. A sharp paper
cutter lay on his desk. As he read a letter from one of the firm's
customers he took it up and jabbed little holes in the leather cover of
his desk. When he had several letters to sign he took up his pen and
jabbed it almost viciously into the inkwell. Then before signing he
jabbed it in again. Sometimes he did the thing a dozen times in
succession.

Sometimes the things that went on beneath the surface of Walter Sayers
frightened him. In order to do what he called "putting in his Saturday
afternoons and Sundays" he had taken up photography. The camera took
him away from his own house and the sight of the garden where his wife
and the negro were busy digging, and into the fields and into stretches
of woodland at the edge of the suburban village. Also it took him away
from his wife's talk, from her eternal planning for the garden's
future. Here by the house tulip bulbs were to be put in in the fall.
Later there would be a hedge of lilac bushes shutting off the house
from the road. The men who lived in the other houses along the suburban
street spent their Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings tinkering
with motor cars. On Sunday afternoons they took their families driving,
sitting up very straight and silent at the driving wheel. They consumed
the afternoon in a swift dash over country roads. The car ate up the
hours. Monday morning and the work in the city was there, at the end of
the road. They ran madly toward it.

For a time the use of the camera made Walter Sayers almost happy. The
study of light, playing on the trunk of a tree or over the grass in a
field appealed to some instinct within. It was an uncertain delicate
business. He fixed himself a dark room upstairs in the house and spent
his evenings there. One dipped the films into the developing liquid,
held them to the light and then dipped them again. The little nerves
that controlled the eyes were aroused. One felt oneself being enriched,
a little--

One Sunday afternoon he went to walk in a strip of woodland and came
out upon the slope of a low hill. He had read somewhere that the low
hill country southwest of Chicago, in which his suburb lay, had once
been the shore of Lake Michigan. The low hills sprang out of the flat
land and were covered with forests. Beyond them the flat lands began
again. The prairies went on indefinitely, into infinity. People's lives
went on so. Life was too long. It was to be spent in the endless doing
over and over of an unsatisfactory task. He sat on the slope and looked
out across the land.

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