Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson

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"In regard to the letter. In it she, the awakening woman, poured out
her heart. She of course knew nothing of life, but she was a woman. She
lay, I suppose, in her bed feeling nervous and wrought up as I had been
doing. She realized that a great change was about to take place in her
life and was glad and afraid too. There she lay thinking of it all.
Then she got out of bed and began talking to me on the bit of paper.
She told me how afraid she was and how glad too. Like most young women
she had heard things whispered. In the letter she was very sweet and
fine. 'For a long time, after we are married, we will forget we are a
man and woman,' she wrote. 'We will be human beings. You must remember
that I am ignorant and often I will be very stupid. You must love me
and be very patient and kind. When I know more, when after a long time
you have taught me the way of life, I will try to repay you. I will
love you tenderly and passionately. The possibility of that is in me or
I would not want to marry at all. I am afraid but I am also happy. O, I
am so glad our marriage time is near at hand!'

"Now you see clearly enough what a mess I was in. In my office, after I
had read my fiancee's letter, I became at once very resolute and
strong. I remember that I got out of my chair and walked about, proud
of the fact that I was to be the husband of so noble a woman. Right
away I felt concerning her as I had been feeling about myself before I
found out what a weak thing I was. To be sure I took a strong
resolution that I would not be weak. At nine that evening I had planned
to run in to see my fiancee. 'I'm all right now,' I said to myself.
'The beauty of her character has saved me from myself. I will go home
now and send the other woman away.' In the morning I had telephoned to
my servant and told him that I did not want him to be at the apartment
that evening and I now picked up the telephone to tell him to stay at
home.

"Then a thought came to me. 'I will not want him there in any event,' I
told myself. 'What will he think when he sees a woman coming in my
place on the evening before the day I am to be married?' I put the
telephone down and prepared to go home. 'If I want my servant out of
the apartment it is because I do not want him to hear me talk with the
woman. I cannot be rude to her. I will have to make some kind of an
explanation,' I said to myself.

"The woman came at seven o'clock, and, as you may have guessed, I let
her in and forgot the resolution I had made. It is likely I never had
any intention of doing anything else. There was a bell on my door, but
she did not ring, but knocked very softly. It seems to me that
everything she did that evening was soft and quiet, but very determined
and quick. Do I make myself clear? When she came I was standing just
within the door where I had been standing and waiting for a half hour.
My hands were trembling as they had trembled in the morning when her
eyes looked at me and when I tried to put the pennies on the counter in
the store. When I opened the door she stepped quickly in and I took her
into my arms. We stood together in the darkness. My hands no longer
trembled. I felt very happy and strong.

"Although I have tried to make everything clear I have not told you
what the woman I married is like. I have emphasized, you see, the other
woman. I make the blind statement that I love my wife, and to a man of
your shrewdness that means nothing at all. To tell the truth, had I not
started to speak of this matter I would feel more comfortable. It is
inevitable that I give you the impression that I am in love with the
tobacconist's wife. That's not true. To be sure I was very conscious of
her all during the week before my marriage, but after she had come to
me at my apartment she went entirely out of my mind.

"Am I telling the truth? I am trying very hard to tell what happened to
me. I am saying that I have not since that evening thought of the woman
who came to my apartment. Now, to tell the facts of the case, that is
not true. On that evening I went to my fiancee at nine, as she had
asked me to do in her letter. In a kind of way I cannot explain the
other woman went with me. This is what I mean--you see I had been
thinking that if anything happened between me and the tobacconist's
wife I would not be able to go through with my marriage. 'It is one
thing or the other with me,' I had said to myself.

"As a matter of fact I went to see my beloved on that evening filled
with a new faith in the outcome of our life together. I am afraid I
muddle this matter in trying to tell it. A moment ago I said the other
woman, the tobacconist's wife, went with me. I do not mean she went in
fact. What I am trying to say is that something of her faith in her own
desires and her courage in seeing things through went with me. Is that
clear to you? When I got to my fiancee's house there was a crowd of
people standing about. Some were relatives from distant places I had
not seen before. She looked up quickly when I came into the room. My
face must have been radiant. I never saw her so moved. She thought her
letter had affected me deeply, and of course it had. Up she jumped and
ran to meet me. She was like a glad child. Right before the people who
turned and looked inquiringly at us, she said the thing that was in her
mind. 'O, I am so happy,' she cried. 'You have understood. We will be
two human beings. We will not have to be husband and wife.'

"As you may suppose everyone laughed, but I did not laugh. The tears
came into my eyes. I was so happy I wanted to shout. Perhaps you
understand what I mean. In the office that day when I read the letter
my fiancee had written I had said to myself, 'I will take care of the
dear little woman.' There was something smug, you see, about that. In
her house when she cried out in that way, and when everyone laughed,
what I said to myself was something like this: 'We will take care of
ourselves.' I whispered something of the sort into her ears. To tell
you the truth I had come down off my perch. The spirit of the other
woman did that to me. Before all the people gathered about I held my
fiancee close and we kissed. They thought it very sweet of us to be so
affected at the sight of each other. What they would have thought had
they known the truth about me God only knows!

"Twice now I have said that after that evening I never thought of the
other woman at all. That is partially true but, sometimes in the
evening when I am walking alone in the street or in the park as we are
walking now, and when evening comes softly and quickly as it has come
to-night, the feeling of her comes sharply into my body and mind. After
that one meeting I never saw her again. On the next day I was married
and I have never gone back into her street. Often however as I am
walking along as I am doing now, a quick sharp earthy feeling takes
possession of me. It is as though I were a seed in the ground and the
warm rains of the spring had come. It is as though I were not a man but
a tree.

"And now you see I am married and everything is all right. My marriage
is to me a very beautiful fact. If you were to say that my marriage is
not a happy one I could call you a liar and be speaking the absolute
truth. I have tried to tell you about this other woman. There is a kind
of relief in speaking of her. I have never done it before. I wonder why
I was so silly as to be afraid that I would give you the impression I
am not in love with my wife. If I did not instinctively trust your
understanding I would not have spoken. As the matter stands I have a
little stirred myself up. To-night I shall think of the other woman.
That sometimes occurs. It will happen after I have gone to bed. My wife
sleeps in the next room to mine and the door is always left open. There
will be a moon to-night, and when there is a moon long streaks of light
fall on her bed. I shall awake at midnight to-night. She will be lying
asleep with one arm thrown over her head.

"What is it that I am now talking about? A man does not speak of his
wife lying in bed. What I am trying to say is that, because of this
talk, I shall think of the other woman to-night. My thoughts will not
take the form they did during the week before I was married. I will
wonder what has become of the woman. For a moment I will again feel
myself holding her close. I will think that for an hour I was closer to
her than I have ever been to anyone else. Then I will think of the time
when I will be as close as that to my wife. She is still, you see, an
awakening woman. For a moment I will close my eyes and the quick,
shrewd, determined eyes of that other woman will look into mine. My
head will swim and then I will quickly open my eyes and see again the
dear woman with whom I have undertaken to live out my life. Then I will
sleep and when I awake in the morning it will be as it was that evening
when I walked out of my dark apartment after having had the most
notable experience of my life. What I mean to say, you understand is
that, for me, when I awake, the other woman will be utterly gone."

THE EGG

My father was, I am sure, intended by nature to be a cheerful, kindly
man. Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farm-hand for a
man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell,
Ohio. He had then a horse of his own and on Saturday evenings drove
into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farm-
hands. In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben
Head's saloon--crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farm-hands.
Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar. At ten o'clock father
drove home along a lonely country road, made his horse comfortable for
the night and himself went to bed, quite happy in his position in life.
He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.

It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my
mother, then a country school-teacher, and in the following spring I
came wriggling and crying into the world. Something happened to the two
people. They became ambitious. The American passion for getting up in
the world took possession of them.

It may have been that mother was responsible. Being a school-teacher
she had no doubt read books and magazines. She had, I presume, read of
how Garfield, Lincoln, and other Americans rose from poverty to fame
and greatness and as I lay beside her--in the days of her lying-in--she
may have dreamed that I would some day rule men and cities. At any rate
she induced father to give up his place as a farm-hand, sell his horse
and embark on an independent enterprise of his own. She was a tall
silent woman with a long nose and troubled grey eyes. For herself she
wanted nothing. For father and myself she was incurably ambitious.

The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly. They
rented ten acres of poor stony land on Griggs's Road, eight miles from
Bidwell, and launched into chicken raising. I grew into boyhood on the
place and got my first impressions of life there. From the beginning
they were impressions of disaster and if, in my turn, I am a gloomy man
inclined to see the darker side of life, I attribute it to the fact
that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood
were spent on a chicken farm.

One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic
things that can happen to a chicken. It is born out of an egg, lives
for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on
Easter cards, then becomes hideously naked, eats quantities of corn and
meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow, gets diseases called
pip, cholera, and other names, stands looking with stupid eyes at the
sun, becomes sick and dies. A few hens, and now and then a rooster,
intended to serve God's mysterious ends, struggle through to maturity.
The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful
cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex. Most
philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so
much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens,
just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and
they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people
they mix one up in one's judgments of life. If disease does not kill
them they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then
walk under the wheels of a wagon--to go squashed and dead back to their
maker. Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for
curative powders. In later life I have seen how a literature has been
built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of
chickens. It is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is a hopeful literature
and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a
few hens. Do not be led astray by it. It was not written for you. Go
hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Alaska, put your faith in the
honesty of a politician, believe if you will that the world is daily
growing better and that good will triumph over evil, but do not read
and believe the literature that is written concerning the hen. It was
not written for you.

I, however, digress. My tale does not primarily concern itself with the
hen. If correctly told it will centre on the egg. For ten years my
father and mother struggled to make our chicken farm pay and then they
gave up that struggle and began another. They moved into the town of
Bidwell, Ohio and embarked in the restaurant business. After ten years
of worry with incubators that did not hatch, and with tiny--and in
their own way lovely--balls of fluff that passed on into semi-naked
pullethood and from that into dead hen-hood, we threw all aside and
packing our belongings on a wagon drove down Griggs's Road toward
Bidwell, a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to
start on our upward journey through life.

We must have been a sad looking lot, not, I fancy, unlike refugees
fleeing from a battlefield. Mother and I walked in the road. The wagon
that contained our goods had been borrowed for the day from Mr. Albert
Griggs, a neighbor. Out of its sides stuck the legs of cheap chairs and
at the back of the pile of beds, tables, and boxes filled with kitchen
utensils was a crate of live chickens, and on top of that the baby
carriage in which I had been wheeled about in my infancy. Why we stuck
to the baby carriage I don't know. It was unlikely other children would
be born and the wheels were broken. People who have few possessions
cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make
life so discouraging.

Father rode on top of the wagon. He was then a bald-headed man of
forty-five, a little fat and from long association with mother and the
chickens he had become habitually silent and discouraged. All during
our ten years on the chicken farm he had worked as a laborer on
neighboring farms and most of the money he had earned had been spent
for remedies to cure chicken diseases, on Wilmer's White Wonder Cholera
Cure or Professor Bidlow's Egg Producer or some other preparations that
mother found advertised in the poultry papers. There were two little
patches of hair on father's head just above his ears. I remember that
as a child I used to sit looking at him when he had gone to sleep in a
chair before the stove on Sunday afternoons in the winter. I had at
that time already begun to read books and have notions of my own and
the bald path that led over the top of his head was, I fancied,
something like a broad road, such a road as Caesar might have made on
which to lead his legions out of Rome and into the wonders of an
unknown world. The tufts of hair that grew above father's ears were, I
thought, like forests. I fell into a half-sleeping, half-waking state
and dreamed I was a tiny thing going along the road into a far
beautiful place where there were no chicken farms and where life was a
happy eggless affair.

One might write a book concerning our flight from the chicken farm into
town. Mother and I walked the entire eight miles--she to be sure that
nothing fell from the wagon and I to see the wonders of the world. On
the seat of the wagon beside father was his greatest treasure. I will
tell you of that.

On a chicken farm where hundreds and even thousands of chickens come
out of eggs surprising things sometimes happen. Grotesques are born out
of eggs as out of people. The accident does not often occur--perhaps
once in a thousand births. A chicken is, you see, born that has four
legs, two pairs of wings, two heads or what not. The things do not
live. They go quickly back to the hand of their maker that has for a
moment trembled. The fact that the poor little things could not live
was one of the tragedies of life to father. He had some sort of notion
that if he could but bring into henhood or roosterhood a five-legged
hen or a two-headed rooster his fortune would be made. He dreamed of
taking the wonder about to county fairs and of growing rich by
exhibiting it to other farm-hands.

At any rate he saved all the little monstrous things that had been born
on our chicken farm. They were preserved in alcohol and put each in its
own glass bottle. These he had carefully put into a box and on our
journey into town it was carried on the wagon seat beside him. He drove
the horses with one hand and with the other clung to the box. When we
got to our destination the box was taken down at once and the bottles
removed. All during our days as keepers of a restaurant in the town of
Bidwell, Ohio, the grotesques in their little glass bottles sat on a
shelf back of the counter. Mother sometimes protested but father was a
rock on the subject of his treasure. The grotesques were, he declared,
valuable. People, he said, liked to look at strange and wonderful
things.

Did I say that we embarked in the restaurant business in the town of
Bidwell, Ohio? I exaggerated a little. The town itself lay at the foot
of a low hill and on the shore of a small river. The railroad did not
run through the town and the station was a mile away to the north at a
place called Pickleville. There had been a cider mill and pickle
factory at the station, but before the time of our coming they had both
gone out of business. In the morning and in the evening busses came
down to the station along a road called Turner's Pike from the hotel on
the main street of Bidwell. Our going to the out of the way place to
embark in the restaurant business was mother's idea. She talked of it
for a year and then one day went off and rented an empty store building
opposite the railroad station. It was her idea that the restaurant
would be profitable. Travelling men, she said, would be always waiting
around to take trains out of town and town people would come to the
station to await incoming trains. They would come to the restaurant to
buy pieces of pie and drink coffee. Now that I am older I know that she
had another motive in going. She was ambitious for me. She wanted me to
rise in the world, to get into a town school and become a man of the
towns.

At Pickleville father and mother worked hard as they always had done.
At first there was the necessity of putting our place into shape to be
a restaurant. That took a month. Father built a shelf on which he put
tins of vegetables. He painted a sign on which he put his name in large
red letters. Below his name was the sharp command--"EAT HERE"--that was
so seldom obeyed. A show case was bought and filled with cigars and
tobacco. Mother scrubbed the floor and the walls of the room. I went to
school in the town and was glad to be away from the farm and from the
presence of the discouraged, sad-looking chickens. Still I was not very
joyous. In the evening I walked home from school along Turner's Pike
and remembered the children I had seen playing in the town school yard.
A troop of little girls had gone hopping about and singing. I tried
that. Down along the frozen road I went hopping solemnly on one leg.
"Hippity Hop To The Barber Shop," I sang shrilly. Then I stopped and
looked doubtfully about. I was afraid of being seen in my gay mood. It
must have seemed to me that I was doing a thing that should not be done
by one who, like myself, had been raised on a chicken farm where death
was a daily visitor.

Mother decided that our restaurant should remain open at night. At ten
in the evening a passenger train went north past our door followed by a
local freight. The freight crew had switching to do in Pickleville and
when the work was done they came to our restaurant for hot coffee and
food. Sometimes one of them ordered a fried egg. In the morning at four
they returned north-bound and again visited us. A little trade began to
grow up. Mother slept at night and during the day tended the restaurant
and fed our boarders while father slept. He slept in the same bed
mother had occupied during the night and I went off to the town of
Bidwell and to school. During the long nights, while mother and I
slept, father cooked meats that were to go into sandwiches for the
lunch baskets of our boarders. Then an idea in regard to getting up in
the world came into his head. The American spirit took hold of him. He
also became ambitious.

In the long nights when there was little to do father had time to
think. That was his undoing. He decided that he had in the past been an
unsuccessful man because he had not been cheerful enough and that in
the future he would adopt a cheerful outlook on life. In the early
morning he came upstairs and got into bed with mother. She woke and the
two talked. From my bed in the corner I listened.

It was father's idea that both he and mother should try to entertain
the people who came to eat at our restaurant. I cannot now remember his
words, but he gave the impression of one about to become in some
obscure way a kind of public entertainer. When people, particularly
young people from the town of Bidwell, came into our place, as on very
rare occasions they did, bright entertaining conversation was to be
made. From father's words I gathered that something of the jolly inn-
keeper effect was to be sought. Mother must have been doubtful from the
first, but she said nothing discouraging. It was father's notion that a
passion for the company of himself and mother would spring up in the
breasts of the younger people of the town of Bidwell. In the evening
bright happy groups would come singing down Turner's Pike. They would
troop shouting with joy and laughter into our place. There would be
song and festivity. I do not mean to give the impression that father
spoke so elaborately of the matter. He was as I have said an
uncommunicative man. "They want some place to go. I tell you they want
some place to go," he said over and over. That was as far as he got. My
own imagination has filled in the blanks.

For two or three weeks this notion of father's invaded our house. We
did not talk much, but in our daily lives tried earnestly to make
smiles take the place of glum looks. Mother smiled at the boarders and
I, catching the infection, smiled at our cat. Father became a little
feverish in his anxiety to please. There was no doubt, lurking
somewhere in him, a touch of the spirit of the showman. He did not
waste much of his ammunition on the railroad men he served at night but
seemed to be waiting for a young man or woman from Bidwell to come in
to show what he could do. On the counter in the restaurant there was a
wire basket kept always filled with eggs, and it must have been before
his eyes when the idea of being entertaining was born in his brain.
There was something pre-natal about the way eggs kept themselves
connected with the development of his idea. At any rate an egg ruined
his new impulse in life. Late one night I was awakened by a roar of
anger coming from father's throat. Both mother and I sat upright in our
beds. With trembling hands she lighted a lamp that stood on a table by
her head. Downstairs the front door of our restaurant went shut with a
bang and in a few minutes father tramped up the stairs. He held an egg
in his hand and his hand trembled as though he were having a chill.
There was a half insane light in his eyes. As he stood glaring at us I
was sure he intended throwing the egg at either mother or me. Then he
laid it gently on the table beside the lamp and dropped on his knees
beside mother's bed. He began to cry like a boy and I, carried away by
his grief, cried with him. The two of us filled the little upstairs
room with our wailing voices. It is ridiculous, but of the picture we
made I can remember only the fact that mother's hand continually
stroked the bald path that ran across the top of his head. I have
forgotten what mother said to him and how she induced him to tell her
of what had happened downstairs. His explanation also has gone out of
my mind. I remember only my own grief and fright and the shiny path
over father's head glowing in the lamp light as he knelt by the bed.

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