Poor White: Chapter 9

Chapter 9

The Woodburns of Columbus were wealthy by the standards of their day. They
lived in a large house and kept two carriages and four servants, but had
no children. Henderson Woodburn was small of stature, wore a gray beard,
and was neat and precise about his person. He was treasurer of the plow
manufacturing company and was also treasurer of the church he and his
wife attended. In his youth he had been called "Hen" Woodburn and had
been bullied by larger boys, and when he grew to be a man and after his
persistent shrewdness and patience had carried him into a position of some
power in the business life of his native city he in turn became something
of a bully to the men beneath him. He thought his wife Priscilla had come
from a better family than his own and was a little afraid of her. When they
did not agree on any subject, she expressed her opinion gently but firmly,
while he blustered for a time and then gave in. After a misunderstanding
his wife put her arms about his neck and kissed the bald spot on the top of
his head. Then the subject was forgotten.

Life in the Woodburn house was lived without words. After the stir and
bustle of the farm, the silence of the house for a long time frightened
Clara. Even when she was alone in her own room she walked about on tiptoe.
Henderson Woodburn was absorbed in his work, and when he came home in the
evening, ate his dinner in silence and then worked again. He brought home
account books and papers from the office and spread them out on a table in
the living room. His wife Priscilla sat in a large chair under a lamp and
knitted children's stockings. They were, she told Clara, for the children
of the poor. As a matter of fact the stockings never left her house. In a
large trunk in her room upstairs lay hundreds of pairs knitted during the
twenty-five years of her family life.

Clara was not very happy in the Woodburn household, but on the other hand,
was not very unhappy. She attended to her studies at the University
passably well and in the late afternoons took a walk with a girl classmate,
attended a matinee at the theater, or read a book. In the evening she sat
with her aunt and uncle until she could no longer bear the silence, and
then went to her own room, where she studied until it was time to go to
bed. Now and then she went with the two older people to a social affair at
the church, of which Henderson Woodburn was treasurer, or accompanied them
to dinners at the homes of other well-to-do and respectable business men.
On several occasions young men, sons of the people with whom the Woodburns
dined, or students at the university, came in the evening to call. On such
an occasion Clara and the young man sat in the parlor of the house and
talked. After a time they grew silent and embarrassed in each other's
presence. From the next room Clara could hear the rustling of the papers
containing the columns of figures over which her uncle was at work. Her
aunt's knitting needles clicked loudly. The young man told a tale of some
football game, or if he had already gone out into the world, talked of his
experiences as a traveler selling the wares manufactured or merchandized by
his father. Such visits all began at the same hour, eight o'clock, and the
young man left the house promptly at ten. Clara grew to feel that she was
being merchandized and that they had come to look at the goods. One evening
one of the men, a fellow with laughing blue eyes and kinky yellow hair,
unconsciously disturbed her profoundly. All the evening he talked just as
the others had talked and got out of his chair to go away at the prescribed
hour. Clara walked with him to the door. She put out her hand, which he
shook cordially. Then he looked at her and his eyes twinkled. "I've had
a good time," he said. Clara had a sudden and almost overpowering desire
to embrace him. She wanted to disturb his assurance, to startle him by
kissing him on the lips or holding him tightly in her arms. Shutting the
door quickly, she stood with her hand on the door-knob, her whole body
trembling. The trivial by-products of her age's industrial madness went
on in the next room. The sheets of paper rustled and the knitting needles
clicked. Clara thought she would like to call the young man back into the
house, lead him to the room where the meaningless industry went endlessly
on and there do something that would shock them and him as they had never
been shocked before. She ran quickly upstairs. "What is getting to be the
matter with me?" she asked herself anxiously.

* * * * *

One evening in the month of May, during her third year at the University,
Clara sat on the bank of a tiny stream by a grove of trees, far out on the
edge of a suburban village north of Columbus. Beside her sat a young man
named Frank Metcalf whom she had known for a year and who had once been a
student in the same classes with herself. He was the son of the president
of the plow manufacturing company of which her uncle was treasurer. As they
sat together by the stream the afternoon light began to fade and darkness
came on. Before them across an open field stood a factory, and Clara
remembered that the whistle had long since blown and the men from the
factory had gone home. She grew restless and sprang to her feet. Young
Metcalf who had been talking very earnestly arose and stood beside her.
"I can't marry for two years, but we can be engaged and that will be all
the same thing as far as the right and wrong of what I want and need is
concerned. It isn't my fault I can't ask you to marry me now," he declared.
"In two years now, I'll inherit eleven thousand dollars. My aunt left it to
me and the old fool went and fixed it so I don't get it if I marry before
I'm twenty-four. I want that money. I've got to have it, but I got to have
you too."

Clara looked away into the evening darkness and waited for him to finish
his speech. All afternoon he had been making practically the same speech,
over and over. "Well, I can't help it, I'm a man," he said doggedly. "I
can't help it, I want you. I can't help it, my aunt was an old fool." He
began to explain the necessity of remaining unmarried in order that he
could receive the eleven thousand dollars. "If I don't get that money I'll
be just the same as I am now," he declared. "I won't be any good." He grew
angry and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, stared also across the
field into the darkness. "Nothing keeps me satisfied," he said. "I hate
being in my father's business and I hate going to school. In only two years
I'll get the money. Father can't keep it from me. I'll take it and light
out. I don't know just what I'll do. I'm going maybe to Europe, that's what
I'm going to do. Father wants me to stay here and work in his office. To
hell with that. I want to travel. I'll be a soldier or something. Anyway
I'll get out of here and go somewhere and do something exciting, something
alive. You can go with me. We'll cut out together. Haven't you got the
nerve? Why don't you be my woman?"

Young Metcalf took hold of Clara's shoulder and tried to take her into his
arms. For a moment they struggled and then, in disgust, he stepped away
from her and again began to scold.

Clara walked away across two or three vacant lots and got into a street of
workingmen's houses, the man following at her heels. Night had come and the
people in the street facing the factory had already disposed of the evening
meal. Children and dogs played in the road and a strong smell of food hung
in the air. To the west across the fields, a passenger train ran past going
toward the city. Its light made wavering yellow patches against the bluish
black sky. Clara wondered why she had come to the out of the way place with
Frank Metcalf. She did not like him, but there was a restlessness in him
that was like the restless thing in herself. He did not want stupidly to
accept life, and that fact made him brother to herself. Although he was but
twenty-two years old, he had already achieved an evil reputation. A servant
in his father's house had given birth to a child by him, and it had cost a
good deal of money to get her to take the child and go away without making
an open scandal. During the year before he had been expelled from the
University for throwing another young man down a flight of stairs, and it
was whispered about among the girl students that he often got violently
drunk. For a year he had been trying to ingratiate himself with Clara, had
written her letters, sent flowers to her house, and when he met her on the
street had stopped to urge that she accept his friendship. On the day in
May she had met him on the street and he had begged that she give him one
chance to talk things out with her. They had met at a street crossing where
cars went past into the suburban villages that lay about the city. "Come
on," he had urged, "let's take a street car ride, let's get out of the
crowds, I want to talk to you." He had taken hold of her arm and fairly
dragged her to a car. "Come and hear what I have to say," he had urged,
"then if you don't want to have anything to do with me, all right. You
can say so and I'll let you alone." After she had accompanied him to the
suburb of workingmen's houses, in the vicinity of which they had spent the
afternoon in the fields, Clara had found he had nothing to urge upon her
except the needs of his body. Still she felt there was something he wanted
to say that had not been said. He was restless and dissatisfied with his
life, and at bottom she felt that way about her own life. During the last
three years she had often wondered why she had come to the school and what
she was to gain by learning things out of books. The days and months went
past and she knew certain rather uninteresting facts she had not known
before. How the facts were to help her to live, she couldn't make out.
They had nothing to do with such problems as her attitude toward men like
John May the farm hand, the school teacher who had taught her something by
holding her in his arms and kissing her, and the dark sullen young man who
now walked beside her and talked of the needs of his body. It seemed to
Clara that every additional year spent at the University but served to
emphasize its inadequacy. It was so also with the books she read and the
thoughts and actions of the older people about her. Her aunt and uncle
did not talk much, but seemed to take it for granted she wanted to live
such another life as they were living. She thought with horror of the
probability of marrying a maker of plows or of some other dull necessity
of life and then spending her days in the making of stockings for babies
that did not come, or in some other equally futile manifestation of her
dissatisfaction. She realized with a shudder that men like her uncle, who
spent their lives in adding up rows of figures or doing over and over some
tremendously trivial thing, had no conception of any outlook for their
women beyond living in a house, serving them physically, wearing perhaps
good enough clothes to help them make a show of prosperity and success, and
drifting finally into a stupid acceptance of dullness--an acceptance that
both she and the passionate, twisted man beside her were fighting against.

In a class in the University Clara had met, during that her third year
there, a woman named Kate Chanceller, who had come to Columbus with her
brother from a town in Missouri, and it was this woman who had given her
thoughts form, who had indeed started her thinking of the inadequacy of
her life. The brother, a studious, quiet man, worked as a chemist in a
manufacturing plant somewhere at the edge of town. He was a musician and
wanted to become a composer. One evening during the winter his sister Kate
had brought Clara to the apartment where the two lived, and the three had
become friends. Clara had learned something there that she did not yet
understand and never did get clearly into her consciousness. The truth was
that the brother was like a woman and Kate Chanceller, who wore skirts and
had the body of a woman, was in her nature a man. Kate and Clara spent many
evenings together later and talked of many things not usually touched on by
girl students. Kate was a bold, vigorous thinker and was striving to grope
her way through her own problem in life and many times, as they walked
along the street or sat together in the evening, she forgot her companion
and talked of herself and the difficulties of her position in life. "It's
absurd the way things are arranged," she said. "Because my body is made
in a certain way I'm supposed to accept certain rules for living. The
rules were not made for me. Men manufactured them as they manufacture
can-openers, on the wholesale plan." She looked at Clara and laughed. "Try
to imagine me in a little lace cap, such as your aunt wears about the
house, and spending my days knitting baby stockings," she said.

The two women had spent hours talking of their lives and in speculating
on the differences in their natures. The experience had been tremendously
educational for Clara. As Kate was a socialist and Columbus was rapidly
becoming an industrial city, she talked of the meaning of capital and labor
and the effect of changing conditions on the lives of men and women. To
Kate, Clara could talk as to a man, but the antagonism that so often exists
between men and women did not come into and spoil their companionship. In
the evening when Clara went to Kate's house her aunt sent a carriage to
bring her home at nine. Kate rode home with her. They got to the Woodburn
house and went in. Kate was bold and free with the Woodburns, as with her
brother and Clara. "Come," she said laughing, "put away your figures and
your knitting. Let's talk." She sat in a large chair with her legs crossed
and talked with Henderson Woodburn of the affairs of the plow company. The
two got into a discussion of the relative merits of the free trade and
protection ideas. Then the two older people went to bed and Kate talked to
Clara. "Your uncle is an old duffer," she said. "He knows nothing about the
meaning of what he's doing in life." When she started home afoot across the
city, Clara was alarmed for her safety. "You must get a cab or let me wake
up uncle's man; something may happen," she said. Kate laughed and went off,
striding along the street like a man. Sometimes she thrust her hands into
her skirt pockets, that were like the trouser pockets of a man, and it was
difficult for Clara to remember that she was a woman. In Kate's presence
she became bolder than she had ever been with any one. One evening she told
the story of the thing that had happened to her that afternoon long before
on the farm, the afternoon when, her mind having been inflamed by the words
of Jim Priest regarding the sap that goes up the tree and by the warm
sensuous beauty of the day, she had wanted so keenly to draw close to some
one. She explained to Kate how she had been so brutally jarred out of the
feeling in herself that she felt was at bottom all right. "It was like a
blow in the face at the hand of God," she said.

Kate Chanceller was excited as Clara told the tale and listened with a
fiery light burning in her eyes. Something in her manner encouraged Clara
to tell also of her experiments with the school teacher and for the first
time she got a sense of justice toward men by talking to the woman who was
half a man. "I know that wasn't square," she said. "I know now, when I talk
to you, but I didn't know then. With the school teacher I was as unfair as
John May and my father were with me. Why do men and women have to fight
each other? Why does the battle between them have to go on?"

Kate walked up and down before Clara and swore like a man. "Oh, hell," she
exclaimed, "men are such fools and I suppose women are as bad. They are
both too much one thing. I fall in between. I've got my problem too, but
I'm not going to talk about it. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to
find some kind of work and do it." She began to talk of the stupidity of
men in their approach to women. "Men hate such women as myself," she said.
"They can't use us, they think. What fools! They should watch and study us.
Many of us spend our lives loving other women, but we have skill. Being
part women, we know how to approach women. We are not blundering and crude.
Men want a certain thing from you. It is delicate and easy to kill. Love
is the most sensitive thing in the world. It's like an orchid. Men try to
pluck orchids with ice tongs, the fools."

Walking to where Clara stood by a table, and taking her by the shoulder,
the excited woman stood for a long time looking at her. Then she picked up
her hat, put it on her head, and with a flourish of her hand started for
the door. "You can depend on my friendship," she said. "I'll do nothing to
confuse you. You'll be in luck if you can get that kind of love or
friendship from a man."

Clara kept thinking of the words of Kate Chanceller on the evening when she
walked through the streets of the suburban village with Frank Metcalf, and
later as the two sat on the car that took them back to the city. With the
exception of another student named Phillip Grimes, who had come to see her
a dozen times during her second year in the University, young Metcalf was
the only one of perhaps a dozen men she had met since leaving the farm who
had been attracted to her. Phillip Grimes was a slender young fellow with
blue eyes, yellow hair and a not very vigorous mustache. He was from a
small town in the northern end of the State, where his father published a
weekly newspaper. When he came to see Clara he sat on the edge of his chair
and talked rapidly. Some person he had seen in the street had interested
him. "I saw an old woman on the car," he began. "She had a basket on her
arm. It was filled with groceries. She sat beside me and talked aloud to
herself." Clara's visitor repeated the words of the old woman on the car.
He speculated about her, wondered what her life was like. When he had
talked of the old woman for ten or fifteen minutes, he dropped the subject
and began telling of another experience, this time with a man who sold
fruit at a street crossing. It was impossible to be personal with Phillip
Grimes. Nothing but his eyes were personal. Sometimes he looked at Clara in
a way that I made her feel that her clothes were being stripped from her
body, and that she was being made to stand naked in the room before her
visitor. The experience, when it came, was not entirely a physical one. It
was only in part that. When the thing happened Clara saw her whole life
being stripped bare. "Don't look at me like that," she once said somewhat
sharply, when his eyes had made her so uncomfortable she could no longer
remain silent. Her remark had frightened Phillip Grimes away. He got up at
once, blushed, stammered something about having another engagement, and
hurried away.

In the street car, homeward bound beside Frank Metcalf, Clara thought of
Phillip Grimes and wondered whether or not he would have stood the test of
Kate Chanceller's speech regarding love and friendship. He had confused
her, but that was perhaps her own fault. He had not insisted on himself
at all. Frank Metcalf had done nothing else. "One should be able," she
thought, "to find somewhere a man who respects himself and his own desires
but can understand also the desires and fears of a woman." The street car
went bouncing along over railroad crossings and along residence streets.
Clara looked at her companion, who stared straight ahead, and then turned
to look out of the car window. The window was open and she could see the
interiors of the laborers' houses along the streets. In the evening with
the lamps lighted they seemed cosy and comfortable. Her mind ran back to
the life in her father's house and its loneliness. For two summers she had
escaped going home. At the end of her first year in school she had made an
illness of her uncle's an excuse for spending the summer in Columbus, and
at the end of the second year she had found another excuse for not going.
This year she felt she would have to go home. She would have to sit day
after day at the farm table with the farm hands. Nothing would happen. Her
father would remain silent in her presence. She would become bored and
weary of the endless small talk of the town girls. If one of the town boys
began to pay her special attention, her father would become suspicious and
that would lead to resentment in herself. She would do something she did
not want to do. In the houses along the streets through which the car
passed, she saw women moving about. Babies cried and men came out of the
doors and stood talking to one another on the sidewalks. She decided
suddenly that she was taking the problem of her own life too seriously.
"The thing to do is to get married and then work things out afterward," she
told herself. She made up her mind that the puzzling, insistent antagonism
that existed between men and women was altogether due to the fact that they
were not married and had not the married people's way of solving such
problems as Frank Metcalf had been talking about all afternoon. She wished
she were with Kate Chancellor so that she could discuss with her this new
viewpoint. When she and Frank Metcalf got off the car she was no longer in
a hurry to go home to her uncle's house. Knowing she did not want to marry
him, she thought that in her turn she would talk, that she would try to
make him see her point of view as all the afternoon he had been trying to
make her see his.

For an hour the two people walked about and Clara talked. She forgot about
the passage of time and the fact that she had not dined. Not wishing to
talk of marriage, she talked instead of the possibility of friendship
between men and women. As she talked her own mind seemed to her to have
become clearer. "It's all foolishness your going on as you have," she
declared. "I know how dissatisfied and unhappy you sometimes are. I often
feel that way myself. Sometimes I think it's marriage I want. I really
think I want to draw close to some one. I believe every one is hungry for
that experience. We all want something we are not willing to pay for. We
want to steal it or have it given us. That's what's the matter with me, and
that's what's the matter with you."

They came to the Woodburn house, and turning in stood on a porch in the
darkness by the front door. At the back of the house Clara could see
a light burning. Her aunt and uncle were at the eternal figuring and
knitting. They were finding a substitute for living. It was the thing Frank
Metcalf was protesting against and was the real reason for her own constant
secret protest. She took hold of the lapel of his coat, intending to make a
plea, to urge upon him the idea of a friendship that would mean something
to them both. In the darkness she could not see his rather heavy, sullen
face. The maternal instinct became strong in her and she thought of him
as a wayward, dissatisfied boy, wanting love and understanding as she had
wanted to be loved and understood by her father when life in the moment of
the awakening of her womanhood seemed ugly and brutal. With her free hand
she stroked the sleeve of his coat. Her gesture was misunderstood by the
man who was not thinking of her words but of her body and of his hunger
to possess it. He took her into his arms and held her tightly against his
breast. She tried to struggle, to tear herself away but, although she was
strong and muscular, she found herself unable to move. As he held her
uncle, who had heard the two people come up the steps to the door, threw it
open. Both he and his wife had on several occasions warned Clara to have
nothing to do with young Metcalf. One day when he had sent flowers to the
house, her aunt had urged her to refuse to receive them. "He's a bad,
dissipated, wicked man," she had said. "Have nothing to do with him." When
he saw his niece in the arms of the man who had been the subject of so much
discussion in his own house and in every respectable house in Columbus,
Henderson Woodburn was furious. He forgot the fact that young Metcalf was
the son of the president of the company of which he was treasurer. It
seemed to him that some sort of a personal insult had been thrown at him by
a common ruffian. "Get out of here," he screamed. "What do you mean, you
nasty villain? Get out of here."

Frank Metcalf went off along the street laughing defiantly, and Clara went
into the house. The sliding doors that led into the living room had been
thrown open and the light from a hanging lamp streamed in upon her. Her
hair was disheveled and her hat twisted to one side. The man and woman
stared at her. The knitting needles and a sheet of paper held in their
hands suggested what they had been doing while Clara was getting another
lesson from life. Her aunt's hands trembled and the knitting needles
clicked together. Nothing was said and the confused and angry girl ran up a
stairway to her own room. She locked herself in and knelt on the floor by
the bed. She did not pray. Her association with Kate Chanceller had given
her another outlet for her feelings. Pounding with her fists on the bed
coverings, she swore. "Fools, damned fools, the world is filled with
nothing but a lot of damned fools."

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