Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson

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As to what happened downstairs. For some unexplainable reason I know
the story as well as though I had been a witness to my father's
discomfiture. One in time gets to know many unexplainable things. On
that evening young Joe Kane, son of a merchant of Bidwell, came to
Pickleville to meet his father, who was expected on the ten o'clock
evening train from the South. The train was three hours late and Joe
came into our place to loaf about and to wait for its arrival. The
local freight train came in and the freight crew were fed. Joe was left
alone in the restaurant with father.

From the moment he came into our place the Bidwell young man must have
been puzzled by my father's actions. It was his notion that father was
angry at him for hanging around. He noticed that the restaurant keeper
was apparently disturbed by his presence and he thought of going out.
However, it began to rain and he did not fancy the long walk to town
and back. He bought a five-cent cigar and ordered a cup of coffee. He
had a newspaper in his pocket and took it out and began to read. "I'm
waiting for the evening train. It's late," he said apologetically.

For a long time father, whom Joe Kane had never seen before, remained
silently gazing at his visitor. He was no doubt suffering from an
attack of stage fright. As so often happens in life he had thought so
much and so often of the situation that now confronted him that he was
somewhat nervous in its presence.

For one thing, he did not know what to do with his hands. He thrust one
of them nervously over the counter and shook hands with Joe Kane. "How-
de-do," he said. Joe Kane put his newspaper down and stared at him.
Father's eye lighted on the basket of eggs that sat on the counter and
he began to talk. "Well," he began hesitatingly, "well, you have heard
of Christopher Columbus, eh?" He seemed to be angry. "That Christopher
Columbus was a cheat," he declared emphatically. "He talked of making
an egg stand on its end. He talked, he did, and then he went and broke
the end of the egg."

My father seemed to his visitor to be beside himself at the duplicity
of Christopher Columbus. He muttered and swore. He declared it was
wrong to teach children that Christopher Columbus was a great man when,
after all, he cheated at the critical moment. He had declared he would
make an egg stand on end and then when his bluff had been called he had
done a trick. Still grumbling at Columbus, father took an egg from the
basket on the counter and began to walk up and down. He rolled the egg
between the palms of his hands. He smiled genially. He began to mumble
words regarding the effect to be produced on an egg by the electricity
that comes out of the human body. He declared that without breaking its
shell and by virtue of rolling it back and forth in his hands he could
stand the egg on its end. He explained that the warmth of his hands and
the gentle rolling movement he gave the egg created a new centre of
gravity, and Joe Kane was mildly interested. "I have handled thousands
of eggs," father said. "No one knows more about eggs than I do."

He stood the egg on the counter and it fell on its side. He tried the
trick again and again, each time rolling the egg between the palms of
his hands and saying the words regarding the wonders of electricity and
the laws of gravity. When after a half hour's effort he did succeed in
making the egg stand for a moment he looked up to find that his visitor
was no longer watching. By the time he had succeeded in calling Joe
Kane's attention to the success of his effort the egg had again rolled
over and lay on its side.

Afire with the showman's passion and at the same time a good deal
disconcerted by the failure of his first effort, father now took the
bottles containing the poultry monstrosities down from their place on
the shelf and began to show them to his visitor. "How would you like to
have seven legs and two heads like this fellow?" he asked, exhibiting
the most remarkable of his treasures. A cheerful smile played over his
face. He reached over the counter and tried to slap Joe Kane on the
shoulder as he had seen men do in Ben Head's saloon when he was a young
farm-hand and drove to town on Saturday evenings. His visitor was made
a little ill by the sight of the body of the terribly deformed bird
floating in the alcohol in the bottle and got up to go. Coming from
behind the counter father took hold of the young man's arm and led him
back to his seat. He grew a little angry and for a moment had to turn
his face away and force himself to smile. Then he put the bottles back
on the shelf. In an outburst of generosity he fairly compelled Joe Kane
to have a fresh cup of coffee and another cigar at his expense. Then he
took a pan and filling it with vinegar, taken from a jug that sat
beneath the counter, he declared himself about to do a new trick. "I
will heat this egg in this pan of vinegar," he said. "Then I will put
it through the neck of a bottle without breaking the shell. When the
egg is inside the bottle it will resume its normal shape and the shell
will become hard again. Then I will give the bottle with the egg in it
to you. You can take it about with you wherever you go. People will
want to know how you got the egg in the bottle. Don't tell them. Keep
them guessing. That is the way to have fun with this trick."

Father grinned and winked at his visitor. Joe Kane decided that the man
who confronted him was mildly insane but harmless. He drank the cup of
coffee that had been given him and began to read his paper again. When
the egg had been heated in vinegar father carried it on a spoon to the
counter and going into a back room got an empty bottle. He was angry
because his visitor did not watch him as he began to do his trick, but
nevertheless went cheerfully to work. For a long time he struggled,
trying to get the egg to go through the neck of the bottle. He put the
pan of vinegar back on the stove, intending to reheat the egg, then
picked it up and burned his fingers. After a second bath in the hot
vinegar the shell of the egg had been softened a little but not enough
for his purpose. He worked and worked and a spirit of desperate
determination took possession of him. When he thought that at last the
trick was about to be consummated the delayed train came in at the
station and Joe Kane started to go nonchalantly out at the door. Father
made a last desperate effort to conquer the egg and make it do the
thing that would establish his reputation as one who knew how to
entertain guests who came into his restaurant. He worried the egg. He
attempted to be somewhat rough with it. He swore and the sweat stood
out on his forehead. The egg broke under his hand. When the contents
spurted over his clothes, Joe Kane, who had stopped at the door, turned
and laughed.

A roar of anger rose from my father's throat. He danced and shouted a
string of inarticulate words. Grabbing another egg from the basket on
the counter, he threw it, just missing the head of the young man as he
dodged through the door and escaped.

Father came upstairs to mother and me with an egg in his hand. I do not
know what he intended to do. I imagine he had some idea of destroying
it, of destroying all eggs, and that he intended to let mother and me
see him begin. When, however, he got into the presence of mother
something happened to him. He laid the egg gently on the table and
dropped on his knees by the bed as I have already explained. He later
decided to close the restaurant for the night and to come upstairs and
get into bed. When he did so he blew out the light and after much
muttered conversation both he and mother went to sleep. I suppose I
went to sleep also, but my sleep was troubled.

I awoke at dawn and for a long time looked at the egg that lay on the
table. I wondered why eggs had to be and why from the egg came the hen
who again laid the egg. The question got into my blood. It has stayed
there, I imagine, because I am the son of my father. At any rate, the
problem remains unsolved in my mind. And that, I conclude, is but
another evidence of the complete and final triumph of the egg--at
least as far as my family is concerned.

UNLIGHTED LAMPS

Mary Cochran went out of the rooms where she lived with her father,
Doctor Lester Cochran, at seven o'clock on a Sunday evening. It was
June of the year nineteen hundred and eight and Mary was eighteen years
old. She walked along Tremont to Main Street and across the railroad
tracks to Upper Main, lined with small shops and shoddy houses, a
rather quiet cheerless place on Sundays when there were few people
about. She had told her father she was going to church but did not
intend doing anything of the kind. She did not know what she wanted to
do. "I'll get off by myself and think," she told herself as she walked
slowly along. The night she thought promised to be too fine to be spent
sitting in a stuffy church and hearing a man talk of things that had
apparently nothing to do with her own problem. Her own affairs were
approaching a crisis and it was time for her to begin thinking
seriously of her future.

The thoughtful serious state of mind in which Mary found herself had
been induced in her by a conversation had with her father on the
evening before. Without any preliminary talk and quite suddenly and
abruptly he had told her that he was a victim of heart disease and
might die at any moment. He had made the announcement as they stood
together in the Doctor's office, back of which were the rooms in which
the father and daughter lived.

It was growing dark outside when she came into the office and found him
sitting alone. The office and living rooms were on the second floor of
an old frame building in the town of Huntersburg, Illinois, and as the
Doctor talked he stood beside his daughter near one of the windows that
looked down into Tremont Street. The hushed murmur of the town's
Saturday night life went on in Main Street just around a corner, and
the evening train, bound to Chicago fifty miles to the east, had just
passed. The hotel bus came rattling out of Lincoln Street and went
through Tremont toward the hotel on Lower Main. A cloud of dust kicked
up by the horses' hoofs floated on the quiet air. A straggling group of
people followed the bus and the row of hitching posts on Tremont Street
was already lined with buggies in which farmers and their wives had
driven into town for the evening of shopping and gossip.

After the station bus had passed three or four more buggies were driven
into the street. From one of them a young man helped his sweetheart to
alight. He took hold of her arm with a certain air of tenderness, and a
hunger to be touched thus tenderly by a man's hand, that had come to
Mary many times before, returned at almost the same moment her father
made the announcement of his approaching death.

As the Doctor began to speak Barney Smithfield, who owned a livery barn
that opened into Tremont Street directly opposite the building in which
the Cochrans lived, came back to his place of business from his evening
meal. He stopped to tell a story to a group of men gathered before the
barn door and a shout of laughter arose. One of the loungers in the
street, a strongly built young man in a checkered suit, stepped away
from the others and stood before the liveryman. Having seen Mary he was
trying to attract her attention. He also began to tell a story and as
he talked he gesticulated, waved his arms and from time to time looked
over his shoulder to see if the girl still stood by the window and if
she were watching.

Doctor Cochran had told his daughter of his approaching death in a cold
quiet voice. To the girl it had seemed that everything concerning her
father must be cold and quiet. "I have a disease of the heart," he said
flatly, "have long suspected there was something of the sort the matter
with me and on Thursday when I went into Chicago I had myself examined.
The truth is I may die at any moment. I would not tell you but for one
reason--I will leave little money and you must be making plans for the
future."

The Doctor stepped nearer the window where his daughter stood with her
hand on the frame. The announcement had made her a little pale and her
hand trembled. In spite of his apparent coldness he was touched and
wanted to reassure her. "There now," he said hesitatingly, "it'll
likely be all right after all. Don't worry. I haven't been a doctor for
thirty years without knowing there's a great deal of nonsense about
these pronouncements on the part of experts. In a matter like this,
that is to say when a man has a disease of the heart, he may putter
about for years." He laughed uncomfortably. "I've even heard it said
that the best way to insure a long life is to contract a disease of the
heart."

With these words the Doctor had turned and walked out of his office,
going down a wooden stairway to the street. He had wanted to put his
arm about his daughter's shoulder as he talked to her, but never having
shown any feeling in his relations with her could not sufficiently
release some tight thing in himself.

Mary had stood for a long time looking down into the street. The young
man in the checkered suit, whose name was Duke Yetter, had finished
telling his tale and a shout of laughter arose. She turned to look
toward the door through which her father had passed and dread took
possession of her. In all her life there had never been anything warm
and close. She shivered although the night was warm and with a quick
girlish gesture passed her hand over her eyes.

The gesture was but an expression of a desire to brush away the cloud
of fear that had settled down upon her but it was misinterpreted by
Duke Yetter who now stood a little apart from the other men before the
livery barn. When he saw Mary's hand go up he smiled and turning
quickly to be sure he was unobserved began jerking his head and making
motions with his hand as a sign that he wished her to come down into
the street where he would have an opportunity to join her.

* * * * *

On the Sunday evening Mary, having walked through Upper Main, turned
into Wilmott, a street of workmens' houses. During that year the first
sign of the march of factories westward from Chicago into the prairie
towns had come to Huntersburg. A Chicago manufacturer of furniture had
built a plant in the sleepy little farming town, hoping thus to escape
the labor organizations that had begun to give him trouble in the city.
At the upper end of town, in Wilmott, Swift, Harrison and Chestnut
Streets and in cheap, badly-constructed frame houses, most of the
factory workers lived. On the warm summer evening they were gathered on
the porches at the front of the houses and a mob of children played in
the dusty streets. Red-faced men in white shirts and without collars
and coats slept in chairs or lay sprawled on strips of grass or on the
hard earth before the doors of the houses. The laborers' wives had
gathered in groups and stood gossiping by the fences that separated the
yards. Occasionally the voice of one of the women arose sharp and
distinct above the steady flow of voices that ran like a murmuring
river through the hot little streets.

In the roadway two children had got into a fight. A thick-shouldered
red-haired boy struck another boy who had a pale sharp-featured face, a
blow on the shoulder. Other children came running. The mother of the
red-haired boy brought the promised fight to an end. "Stop it Johnny, I
tell you to stop it. I'll break your neck if you don't," the woman
screamed.

The pale boy turned and walked away from his antagonist. As he went
slinking along the sidewalk past Mary Cochran his sharp little eyes,
burning with hatred, looked up at her.

Mary went quickly along. The strange new part of her native town with
the hubbub of life always stirring and asserting itself had a strong
fascination for her. There was something dark and resentful in her own
nature that made her feel at home in the crowded place where life
carried itself off darkly, with a blow and an oath. The habitual
silence of her father and the mystery concerning the unhappy married
life of her father and mother, that had affected the attitude toward
her of the people of the town, had made her own life a lonely one and
had encouraged in her a rather dogged determination to in some way
think her own way through the things of life she could not understand.

And back of Mary's thinking there was an intense curiosity and a
courageous determination toward adventure. She was like a little animal
of the forest that has been robbed of its mother by the gun of a
sportsman and has been driven by hunger to go forth and seek food.
Twenty times during the year she had walked alone at evening in the new
and fast growing factory district of her town. She was eighteen and had
begun to look like a woman, and she felt that other girls of the town
of her own age would not have dared to walk in such a place alone. The
feeling made her somewhat proud and as she went along she looked boldly
about.

Among the workers in Wilmott Street, men and women who had been brought
to town by the furniture manufacturer, were many who spoke in foreign
tongues. Mary walked among them and liked the sound of the strange
voices. To be in the street made her feel that she had gone out of her
town and on a voyage into a strange land. In Lower Main Street or in
the residence streets in the eastern part of town where lived the young
men and women she had always known and where lived also the merchants,
the clerks, the lawyers and the more well-to-do American workmen of
Huntersburg, she felt always a secret antagonism to herself. The
antagonism was not due to anything in her own character. She was sure
of that. She had kept so much to herself that she was in fact but
little known. "It is because I am the daughter of my mother," she told
herself and did not walk often in the part of town where other girls of
her class lived.

Mary had been so often in Wilmott Street that many of the people had
begun to feel acquainted with her. "She is the daughter of some farmer
and has got into the habit of walking into town," they said. A red-
haired, broad-hipped woman who came out at the front door of one of the
houses nodded to her. On a narrow strip of grass beside another house
sat a young man with his back against a tree. He was smoking a pipe,
but when he looked up and saw her he took the pipe from his mouth. She
decided he must be an Italian, his hair and eyes were so black. "Ne
bella! si fai un onore a passare di qua," he called waving his hand and
smiling.

Mary went to the end of Wilmott Street and came out upon a country
road. It seemed to her that a long time must have passed since she left
her father's presence although the walk had in fact occupied but a few
minutes. By the side of the road and on top of a small hill there was a
ruined barn, and before the barn a great hole filled with the charred
timbers of what had once been a farmhouse. A pile of stones lay beside
the hole and these were covered with creeping vines. Between the site
of the house and the barn there was an old orchard in which grew a mass
of tangled weeds.

Pushing her way in among the weeds, many of which were covered with
blossoms, Mary found herself a seat on a rock that had been rolled
against the trunk of an old apple tree. The weeds half concealed her
and from the road only her head was visible. Buried away thus in the
weeds she looked like a quail that runs in the tall grass and that on
hearing some unusual sound, stops, throws up its head and looks sharply
about.

The doctor's daughter had been to the decayed old orchard many times
before. At the foot of the hill on which it stood the streets of the
town began, and as she sat on the rock she could hear faint shouts and
cries coming out of Wilmott Street. A hedge separated the orchard from
the fields on the hillside. Mary intended to sit by the tree until
darkness came creeping over the land and to try to think out some plan
regarding her future. The notion that her father was soon to die seemed
both true and untrue, but her mind was unable to take hold of the
thought of him as physically dead. For the moment death in relation to
her father did not take the form of a cold inanimate body that was to
be buried in the ground, instead it seemed to her that her father was
not to die but to go away somewhere on a journey. Long ago her mother
had done that. There was a strange hesitating sense of relief in the
thought. "Well," she told herself, "when the time comes I also shall be
setting out, I shall get out of here and into the world." On several
occasions Mary had gone to spend a day with her father in Chicago and
she was fascinated by the thought that soon she might be going there to
live. Before her mind's eye floated a vision of long streets filled
with thousands of people all strangers to herself. To go into such
streets and to live her life among strangers would be like coming out
of a waterless desert and into a cool forest carpeted with tender young
grass.

In Huntersburg she had always lived under a cloud and now she was
becoming a woman and the close stuffy atmosphere she had always
breathed was becoming constantly more and more oppressive. It was true
no direct question had ever been raised touching her own standing in
the community life, but she felt that a kind of prejudice against her
existed. While she was still a baby there had been a scandal involving
her father and mother. The town of Huntersburg had rocked with it and
when she was a child people had sometimes looked at her with mocking
sympathetic eyes. "Poor child! It's too bad," they said. Once, on a
cloudy summer evening when her father had driven off to the country and
she sat alone in the darkness by his office window, she heard a man and
woman in the street mention her name. The couple stumbled along in the
darkness on the sidewalk below the office window. "That daughter of Doc
Cochran's is a nice girl," said the man. The woman laughed. "She's
growing up and attracting men's attention now. Better keep your eyes in
your head. She'll turn out bad. Like mother, like daughter," the woman
replied.

For ten or fifteen minutes Mary sat on the stone beneath the tree in
the orchard and thought of the attitude of the town toward herself and
her father. "It should have drawn us together," she told herself, and
wondered if the approach of death would do what the cloud that had for
years hung over them had not done. It did not at the moment seem to her
cruel that the figure of death was soon to visit her father. In a way
Death had become for her and for the time a lovely and gracious figure
intent upon good. The hand of death was to open the door out of her
father's house and into life. With the cruelty of youth she thought
first of the adventurous possibilities of the new life.

Mary sat very still. In the long weeds the insects that had been
disturbed in their evening song began to sing again. A robin flew into
the tree beneath which she sat and struck a clear sharp note of alarm.
The voices of people in the town's new factory district came softly up
the hillside. They were like bells of distant cathedrals calling people
to worship. Something within the girl's breast seemed to break and
putting her head into her hands she rocked slowly back and forth. Tears
came accompanied by a warm tender impulse toward the living men and
women of Huntersburg.

And then from the road came a call. "Hello there kid," shouted a voice,
and Mary sprang quickly to her feet. Her mellow mood passed like a puff
of wind and in its place hot anger came.

In the road stood Duke Yetter who from his loafing place before the
livery barn had seen her set out for the Sunday evening walk and had
followed. When she went through Upper Main Street and into the new
factory district he was sure of his conquest. "She doesn't want to be
seen walking with me," he had told himself, "that's all right. She
knows well enough I'll follow but doesn't want me to put in an
appearance until she is well out of sight of her friends. She's a
little stuck up and needs to be brought down a peg, but what do I care?
She's gone out of her way to give me this chance and maybe she's only
afraid of her dad."

Duke climbed the little incline out of the road and came into the
orchard, but when he reached the pile of stones covered by vines he
stumbled and fell. He arose and laughed. Mary had not waited for him to
reach her but had started toward him, and when his laugh broke the
silence that lay over the orchard she sprang forward and with her open
hand struck him a sharp blow on the cheek. Then she turned and as he
stood with his feet tangled in the vines ran out to the road. "If you
follow or speak to me I'll get someone to kill you," she shouted.

Mary walked along the road and down the hill toward Wilmott Street.
Broken bits of the story concerning her mother that had for years
circulated in town had reached her ears. Her mother, it was said, had
disappeared on a summer night long ago and a young town rough, who had
been in the habit of loitering before Barney Smithfield's Livery Barn,
had gone away with her. Now another young rough was trying to make up
to her. The thought made her furious.

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