舍伍德安德森经典The Triumph of the Egg

"The Triumph of the Egg"

Sherwood Anderson

1920

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 farmhand 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 farmhands. In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood

about in Ben Head's saloon-crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting

farmhands. 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 schoolteacher, 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 schoolteacher she had

no doubt read books and magazines. She had, I presume, read of how Garfield, Fin

coin, 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 Someday

rule men and cities. At any rate she induced father to give up his place as a farmhand,

sell his horse, and embark on an independent enterprise of his own. She was a tall

silent woman with a long nose and troubled gray 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 Grigg'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, in' tended 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 center on the egg. For ten years my father and mother struggled

to make our chicken farm pay and then they gave up their 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 pullet

hood and from that into dead henhood, we threw all aside and, packing our belongings

on a wagon, drove down Grigg'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 side

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 baldheaded 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 on 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 egg less 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 the county fairs and of

growing rich by exhibiting it to other farmhands.

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 car

tied 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 buses 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. Traveling 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 showcase was bought and filled

with cigars and tobacco. Mother scrubbed the floors and the walls of the room. I

went to school in the town and was glad to be away from the farm, 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 resumed 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 innkeeper

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 lamplight as he knelt by the bed.

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 eyes 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 back and forth in his hands, he could stand the egg on its

head. He explained that the warmth of his hands and the gentle rolling movement he

gave the egg created a new center 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 farmhand 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.

— Sherwood Anderson, 1920