HORSES AND MEN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------
OTHER BOOKS BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
----------------------------
WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON, A novel
MARCHING MEN, A novel
MID-AMERICAN CHANTS, Chants
WINESBURG, OHIO, A book of tales
POOR WHITE, A novel
THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG, A book of tales
MANY MARRIAGES, A novel
----------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HORSES AND MEN
Tales, long and short, from
our American life
BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
MCMXXIII
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
---
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO THEODORE DREISER
In whose presence I have sometimes had
the same refreshed feeling as when in
the presence of a thoroughbred horse.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some of the tales in this book have been printed in
The Little Review, The New Republic, The Century,
Harper’s, The Dial, The London Mercury and Vanity
Fair, to which magazines the author makes due
acknowledgment.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOREWORD
Did you ever have a notion of this kind—there is an orange, or say an
apple, lying on a table before you. You put out your hand to take it.
Perhaps you eat it, make it a part of your physical life. Have you
touched? Have you eaten? That’s what I wonder about.
The whole subject is only important to me because I want the apple. What
subtle flavors are concealed in it—how does it taste, smell, feel?
Heavens, man, the way the apple feels in the hand is something—isn’t it?
For a long time I thought only of eating the apple. Then later its
fragrance became something of importance too. The fragrance stole out
through my room, through a window and into the streets. It made itself a
part of all the smells of the streets. The devil!—in Chicago or
Pittsburgh, Youngstown or Cleveland it would have had a rough time.
That doesn’t matter.
The point is that after the form of the apple began to take my eye I
often found myself unable to touch at all. My hands went toward the
object of my desire and then came back.
There I sat, in the room with the apple before me, and hours passed. I
had pushed myself off into a world where nothing has any existence. Had
I done that, or had I merely stepped, for the moment, out of the world
of darkness into the light?
It may be that my eyes are blind and that I cannot see.
It may be I am deaf.
My hands are nervous and tremble. How much do they tremble? Now, alas, I
am absorbed in looking at my own hands.
With these nervous and uncertain hands may I really feel for the form of
things concealed in the darkness?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DREISER
_Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head,
Fine, or superfine?_
Theodore Dreiser is old—he is very, very old. I do not know how many
years he has lived, perhaps forty, perhaps fifty, but he is very old.
Something grey and bleak and hurtful, that has been in the world perhaps
forever, is personified in him.
When Dreiser is gone men shall write books, many of them, and in the
books they shall write there will be so many of the qualities Dreiser
lacks. The new, the younger men shall have a sense of humor, and
everyone knows Dreiser has no sense of humor. More than that, American
prose writers shall have grace, lightness of touch, a dream of beauty
breaking through the husks of life.
O, those who follow him shall have many things that Dreiser does not
have. That is a part of the wonder and beauty of Theodore Dreiser, the
things that others shall have, because of him.
Long ago, when he was editor of the _Delineator_, Dreiser went one day,
with a woman friend, to visit an orphan asylum. The woman once told me
the story of that afternoon in the big, ugly grey building, with
Dreiser, looking heavy and lumpy and old, sitting on a platform, folding
and refolding his pocket-handkerchief and watching the children—all in
their little uniforms, trooping in.
“The tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head,” the woman said,
and that is a real picture of Theodore Dreiser. He is old in spirit and
he does not know what to do with life, so he tells about it as he sees
it, simply and honestly. The tears run down his cheeks and he folds and
refolds the pocket-handkerchief and shakes his head.
Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books
to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose.
The feet of Theodore are making a path, the heavy brutal feet. They are
tramping through the wilderness of lies, making a path. Presently the
path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved
spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting,
“Look at me. See what I and my fellows of the new day have
done”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.
The fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow
Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long
but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road
through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced
alone.
_Heavy, heavy, hangs over thy head,
Fine, or superfine?_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TALES OF THE BOOK
Page
ix FOREWORD
xi DREISER
3 I’M A FOOL
21 THE TRIUMPH OF A MODERN
31 “UNUSED”
139 A CHICAGO HAMLET
185 THE MAN WHO BECAME A WOMAN
231 MILK BOTTLES
245 THE SAD HORN BLOWERS
287 THE MAN’S STORY
315 AN OHIO PAGAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’M A FOOL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’M A FOOL
IT was a hard jolt for me, one of the most bitterest I ever had to face.
And it all came about through my own foolishness, too. Even yet
sometimes, when I think of it, I want to cry or swear or kick myself.
Perhaps, even now, after all this time, there will be a kind of
satisfaction in making myself look cheap by telling of it.
It began at three o’clock one October afternoon as I sat in the grand
stand at the fall trotting and pacing meet at Sandusky, Ohio.
To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish that I should be sitting in
the grand stand at all. During the summer before I had left my home town
with Harry Whitehead and, with a nigger named Burt, had taken a job as
swipe with one of the two horses Harry was campaigning through the fall
race meets that year. Mother cried and my sister Mildred, who wanted to
get a job as a school teacher in our town that fall, stormed and scolded
about the house all during the week before I left. They both thought it
something disgraceful that one of our family should take a place as a
swipe with race horses. I’ve an idea Mildred thought my taking the place
would stand in the way of her getting the job she’d been working so long
for.
But after all I had to work, and there was no other work to be got. A
big lumbering fellow of nineteen couldn’t just hang around the house and
I had got too big to mow people’s lawns and sell newspapers. Little
chaps who could get next to people’s sympathies by their sizes were
always getting jobs away from me. There was one fellow who kept saying
to everyone who wanted a lawn mowed or a cistern cleaned, that he was
saving money to work his way through college, and I used to lay awake
nights thinking up ways to injure him without being found out. I kept
thinking of wagons running over him and bricks falling on his head as he
walked along the street. But never mind him.
I got the place with Harry and I liked Burt fine. We got along splendid
together. He was a big nigger with a lazy sprawling body and soft, kind
eyes, and when it came to a fight he could hit like Jack Johnson. He had
Bucephalus, a big black pacing stallion that could do 2.09 or 2.10, if
he had to, and I had a little gelding named Doctor Fritz that never lost
a race all fall when Harry wanted him to win.
We set out from home late in July in a box car with the two horses and
after that, until late November, we kept moving along to the race meets
and the fairs. It was a peachy time for me, I’ll say that. Sometimes now
I think that boys who are raised regular in houses, and never have a
fine nigger like Burt for best friend, and go to high schools and
college, and never steal anything, or get drunk a little, or learn to
swear from fellows who know how, or come walking up in front of a grand
stand in their shirt sleeves and with dirty horsey pants on when the
races are going on and the grand stand is full of people all dressed
up—What’s the use of talking about it? Such fellows don’t know nothing
at all. They’ve never had no opportunity.
But I did. Burt taught me how to rub down a horse and put the bandages
on after a race and steam a horse out and a lot of valuable things for
any man to know. He could wrap a bandage on a horse’s leg so smooth that
if it had been the same color you would think it was his skin, and I
guess he’d have been a big driver, too, and got to the top like Murphy
and Walter Cox and the others if he hadn’t been black.
Gee whizz, it was fun. You got to a county seat town, maybe say on a
Saturday or Sunday, and the fair began the next Tuesday and lasted until
Friday afternoon. Doctor Fritz would be, say in the 2.25 trot on Tuesday
afternoon and on Thursday afternoon Bucephalus would knock ’em cold in
the “free-for-all” pace. It left you a lot of time to hang around and
listen to horse talk, and see Burt knock some yap cold that got too gay,
and you’d find out about horses and men and pick up a lot of stuff you
could use all the rest of your life, if you had some sense and salted
down what you heard and felt and saw.
And then at the end of the week when the race meet was over, and Harry
had run home to tend up to his livery stable business, you and Burt
hitched the two horses to carts and drove slow and steady across
country, to the place for the next meeting, so as to not over-heat the
horses, etc., etc., you know.
Gee whizz, Gosh amighty, the nice hickorynut and beechnut and oaks and
other kinds of trees along the roads, all brown and red, and the good
smells, and Burt singing a song that was called Deep River, and the
country girls at the windows of houses and everything. You can stick
your colleges up your nose for all me. I guess I know where I got my
education.
Why, one of those little burgs of towns you come to on the way, say now
on a Saturday afternoon, and Burt says, “let’s lay up here.” And you
did.
And you took the horses to a livery stable and fed them, and you got
your good clothes out of a box and put them on.
And the town was full of farmers gaping, because they could see you were
race horse people, and the kids maybe never see a nigger before and was
afraid and run away when the two of us walked down their main street.
And that was before prohibition and all that foolishness, and so you
went into a saloon, the two of you, and all the yaps come and stood
around, and there was always someone pretended he was horsey and knew
things and spoke up and began asking questions, and all you did was to
lie and lie all you could about what horses you had, and I said I owned
them, and then some fellow said “will you have a drink of whiskey” and
Burt knocked his eye out the way he could say, off-hand like, “Oh well,
all right, I’m agreeable to a little nip. I’ll split a quart with you.”
Gee whizz.
* * * * *
But that isn’t what I want to tell my story about. We got home late in
November and I promised mother I’d quit the race horses for good.
There’s a lot of things you’ve got to promise a mother because she don’t
know any better.
And so, there not being any work in our town any more than when I left
there to go to the races, I went off to Sandusky and got a pretty good
place taking care of horses for a man who owned a teaming and delivery
and storage and coal and real-estate business there. It was a pretty
good place with good eats, and a day off each week, and sleeping on a
cot in a big barn, and mostly just shovelling in hay and oats to a lot
of big good-enough skates of horses, that couldn’t have trotted a race
with a toad. I wasn’t dissatisfied and I could send money home.
And then, as I started to tell you, the fall races come to Sandusky and
I got the day off and I went. I left the job at noon and had on my good
clothes and my new brown derby hat, I’d just bought the Saturday before,
and a stand-up collar.
First of all I went down-town and walked about with the dudes. I’ve
always thought to myself, “put up a good front” and so I did it. I had
forty dollars in my pocket and so I went into the West House, a big
hotel, and walked up to the cigar stand. “Give me three twenty-five cent
cigars,” I said. There was a lot of horsemen and strangers and
dressed-up people from other towns standing around in the lobby and in
the bar, and I mingled amongst them. In the bar there was a fellow with
a cane and a Windsor tie on, that it made me sick to look at him. I like
a man to be a man and dress up, but not to go put on that kind of airs.
So I pushed him aside, kind of rough, and had me a drink of whiskey. And
then he looked at me, as though he thought maybe he’d get gay, but he
changed his mind and didn’t say anything. And then I had another drink
of whiskey, just to show him something, and went out and had a hack out
to the races, all to myself, and when I got there I bought myself the
best seat I could get up in the grand stand, but didn’t go in for any of
these boxes. That’s putting on too many airs.
And so there I was, sitting up in the grand stand as gay as you please
and looking down on the swipes coming out with their horses, and with
their dirty horsey pants on and the horse blankets swung over their
shoulders, same as I had been doing all the year before. I liked one
thing about the same as the other, sitting up there and feeling grand
and being down there and looking up at the yaps and feeling grander and
more important, too. One thing’s about as good as another, if you take
it just right. I’ve often said that.
Well, right in front of me, in the grand stand that day, there was a
fellow with a couple of girls and they was about my age. The young
fellow was a nice guy all right. He was the kind maybe that goes to
college and then comes to be a lawyer or maybe a newspaper editor or
something like that, but he wasn’t stuck on himself. There are some of
that kind are all right and he was one of the ones.
He had his sister with him and another girl and the sister looked around
over his shoulder, accidental at first, not intending to start
anything—she wasn’t that kind—and her eyes and mine happened to meet.
You know how it is. Gee, she was a peach! She had on a soft dress, kind
of a blue stuff and it looked carelessly made, but was well sewed and
made and everything. I knew that much. I blushed when she looked right
at me and so did she. She was the nicest girl I’ve ever seen in my life.
She wasn’t stuck on herself and she could talk proper grammar without
being like a school teacher or something like that. What I mean is, she
was O. K. I think maybe her father was well-to-do, but not rich to make
her chesty because she was his daughter, as some are. Maybe he owned a
drug store or a drygoods store in their home town, or something like
that. She never told me and I never asked.
My own people are all O. K. too, when you come to that. My grandfather
was Welsh and over in the old country, in Wales he was—But never mind
that.
* * * * *
The first heat of the first race come off and the young fellow setting
there with the two girls left them and went down to make a bet. I knew
what he was up to, but he didn’t talk big and noisy and let everyone
around know he was a sport, as some do. He wasn’t that kind. Well, he
come back and I heard him tell the two girls what horse he’d bet on, and
when the heat was trotted they all half got to their feet and acted in
the excited, sweaty way people do when they’ve got money down on a race,
and the horse they bet on is up there pretty close at the end, and they
think maybe he’ll come on with a rush, but he never does because he
hasn’t got the old juice in him, come right down to it.
And then, pretty soon, the horses came out for the 2.18 pace and there
was a horse in it I knew. He was a horse Bob French had in his string
but Bob didn’t own him. He was a horse owned by a Mr. Mathers down at
Marietta, Ohio.
This Mr. Mathers had a lot of money and owned some coal mines or
something, and he had a swell place out in the country, and he was stuck
on race horses, but was a Presbyterian or something, and I think more
than likely his wife was one, too, maybe a stiffer one than himself. So
he never raced his horses hisself, and the story round the Ohio race
tracks was that when one of his horses got ready to go to the races he
turned him over to Bob French and pretended to his wife he was sold.
So Bob had the horses and he did pretty much as he pleased and you can’t
blame Bob, at least, I never did. Sometimes he was out to win and
sometimes he wasn’t. I never cared much about that when I was swiping a
horse. What I did want to know was that my horse had the speed and could
go out in front, if you wanted him to.
And, as I’m telling you, there was Bob in this race with one of Mr.
Mathers’ horses, was named “About Ben Ahem” or something like that, and
was fast as a streak. He was a gelding and had a mark of 2.21, but could
step in .08 or .09.
Because when Burt and I were out, as I’ve told you, the year before,
there was a nigger, Burt knew, worked for Mr. Mathers and we went out
there one day when we didn’t have no race on at the Marietta Fair and
our boss Harry was gone home.
And so everyone was gone to the fair but just this one nigger and he
took us all through Mr. Mathers’ swell house and he and Burt tapped a
bottle of wine Mr. Mathers had hid in his bedroom, back in a closet,
without his wife knowing, and he showed us this Ahem horse. Burt was
always stuck on being a driver but didn’t have much chance to get to the
top, being a nigger, and he and the other nigger gulped that whole
bottle of wine and Burt got a little lit up.
So the nigger let Burt take this About Ben Ahem and step him a mile in a
track Mr. Mathers had all to himself, right there on the farm. And Mr.
Mathers had one child, a daughter, kinda sick and not very good looking,
and she came home and we had to hustle and get About Ben Ahem stuck back
in the barn.
* * * * *
I’m only telling you to get everything straight. At Sandusky, that
afternoon I was at the fair, this young fellow with the two girls was
fussed, being with the girls and losing his bet. You know how a fellow
is that way. One of them was his girl and the other his sister. I had
figured that out.
“Gee whizz,” I says to myself, “I’m going to give him the dope.”
He was mighty nice when I touched him on the shoulder. He and the girls
were nice to me right from the start and clear to the end. I’m not
blaming them.
And so he leaned back and I give him the dope on About Ben Ahem. “Don’t
bet a cent on this first heat because he’ll go like an oxen hitched to a
plow, but when the first heat is over go right down and lay on your
pile.” That’s what I told him.
Well, I never saw a fellow treat any one sweller. There was a fat man
sitting beside the little girl, that had looked at me twice by this
time, and I at her, and both blushing, and what did he do but have the
nerve to turn and ask the fat man to get up and change places with me so
I could set with his crowd.
Gee whizz, craps amighty. There I was. What a chump I was to go and get
gay up there in the West House bar, and just because that dude was
standing there with a cane and that kind of a necktie on, to go and get
all balled-up and drink that whiskey, just to show off.
Of course she would know, me setting right beside her and letting her
smell of my breath. I could have kicked myself right down out of that
grand stand and all around that race track and made a faster record than
most of the skates of horses they had there that year.
Because that girl wasn’t any mutt of a girl. What wouldn’t I have give
right then for a stick of chewing gum to chew, or a lozenger, or some
liquorice, or most anything. I was glad I had those twenty-five cent
cigars in my pocket and right away I give that fellow one and lit one
myself. Then that fat man got up and we changed places and there I was,
plunked right down beside her.
They introduced themselves and the fellow’s best girl, he had with him,
was named Miss Elinor Woodbury, and her father was a manufacturer of
barrels from a place called Tiffin, Ohio. And the fellow himself was
named Wilbur Wessen and his sister was Miss Lucy Wessen.
I suppose it was their having such swell names got me off my trolley. A
fellow, just because he has been a swipe with a race horse, and works
taking care of horses for a man in the teaming, delivery, and storage
business, isn’t any better or worse than any one else. I’ve often
thought that, and said it too.
But you know how a fellow is. There’s something in that kind of nice
clothes, and the kind of nice eyes she had, and the way she had looked
at me, awhile before, over her brother’s shoulder, and me looking back
at her, and both of us blushing.
I couldn’t show her up for a boob, could I?
I made a fool of myself, that’s what I did. I said my name was Walter
Mathers from Marietta, Ohio, and then I told all three of them the
smashingest lie you ever heard. What I said was that my father owned the
horse About Ben Ahem and that he had let him out to this Bob French for
racing purposes, because our family was proud and had never gone into
racing that way, in our own name, I mean. Then I had got started and
they were all leaning over and listening, and Miss Lucy Wessen’s eyes
were shining, and I went the whole hog.
I told about our place down at Marietta, and about the big stables and
the grand brick house we had on a hill, up above the Ohio River, but I
knew enough not to do it in no bragging way. What I did was to start
things and then let them drag the rest out of me. I acted just as
reluctant to tell as I could. Our family hasn’t got any barrel factory,
and, since I’ve known us, we’ve always been pretty poor, but not asking
anything of any one at that, and my grandfather, over in Wales—but never
mind that.
We set there talking like we had known each other for years and years,
and I went and told them that my father had been expecting maybe this
Bob French wasn’t on the square, and had sent me up to Sandusky on the
sly to find out what I could.
And I bluffed it through I had found out all about the 2.18 pace, in
which About Ben Ahem was to start.
I said he would lose the first heat by pacing like a lame cow and then
he would come back and skin ’em alive after that. And to back up what I
said I took thirty dollars out of my pocket and handed it to Mr. Wilbur
Wessen and asked him, would he mind, after the first heat, to go down
and place it on About Ben Ahem for whatever odds he could get. What I
said was that I didn’t want Bob French to see me and none of the swipes.
* * * * *
Sure enough the first heat come off and About Ben Ahem went off his
stride, up the back stretch, and looked like a wooden horse or a sick
one, and come in to be last. Then this Wilbur Wessen went down to the
betting place under the grand stand and there I was with the two girls,
and when that Miss Woodbury was looking the other way once, Lucy Wessen
kinda, with her shoulder you know, kinda touched me. Not just tucking
down, I don’t mean. You know how a woman can do. They get close, but not
getting gay either. You know what they do. Gee whizz.
And then they give me a jolt. What they had done, when I didn’t know,
was to get together, and they had decided Wilbur Wessen would bet fifty
dollars, and the two girls had gone and put in ten dollars each, of
their own money, too. I was sick then, but I was sicker later.
About the gelding, About Ben Ahem, and their winning their money, I
wasn’t worried a lot about that. It come out O.K. Ahem stepped the next
three heats like a bushel of spoiled eggs going to market before they
could be found out, and Wilbur Wessen had got nine to two for the money.
There was something else eating at me.
Because Wilbur come back, after he had bet the money, and after that he
spent most of his time talking to that Miss Woodbury, and Lucy Wessen
and I was left alone together like on a desert island. Gee, if I’d only
been on the square or if there had been any way of getting myself on the
square. There ain’t any Walter Mathers, like I said to her and them, and
there hasn’t ever been one, but if there was, I bet I’d go to Marietta,
Ohio, and shoot him tomorrow.
There I was, big boob that I am. Pretty soon the race was over, and
Wilbur had gone down and collected our money, and we had a hack
down-town, and he stood us a swell supper at the West House, and a
bottle of champagne beside.
And I was with that girl and she wasn’t saying much, and I wasn’t saying
much either. One thing I know. She wasn’t stuck on me because of the lie
about my father being rich and all that. There’s a way you know....
Craps amighty. There’s a kind of girl, you see just once in your life,
and if you don’t get busy and make hay, then you’re gone for good and
all, and might as well go jump off a bridge. They give you a look from
inside of them somewhere, and it ain’t no vamping, and what it means
is—you want that girl to be your wife, and you want nice things around
her like flowers and swell clothes, and you want her to have the kids
you’re going to have, and you want good music played and no rag time.
Gee whizz.
There’s a place over near Sandusky, across a kind of bay, and it’s
called Cedar Point. And after we had supper we went over to it in a
launch, all by ourselves. Wilbur and Miss Lucy and that Miss Woodbury
had to catch a ten o’clock train back to Tiffin, Ohio, because, when
you’re out with girls like that you can’t get careless and miss any
trains and stay out all night, like you can with some kinds of Janes.
And Wilbur blowed himself to the launch and it cost him fifteen cold
plunks, but I wouldn’t never have knew if I hadn’t listened. He wasn’t
no tin horn kind of a sport.
Over at the Cedar Point place, we didn’t stay around where there was a
gang of common kind of cattle at all.
There was big dance halls and dining places for yaps, and there was a
beach you could walk along and get where it was dark, and we went there.
She didn’t talk hardly at all and neither did I, and I was thinking how
glad I was my mother was all right, and always made us kids learn to eat
with a fork at table, and not swill soup, and not be noisy and rough
like a gang you see around a race track that way.
Then Wilbur and his girl went away up the beach and Lucy and I sat down
in a dark place, where there was some roots of old trees, the water had
washed up, and after that the time, till we had to go back in the launch
and they had to catch their trains, wasn’t nothing at all. It went like
winking your eye.
Here’s how it was. The place we were setting in was dark, like I said,
and there was the roots from that old stump sticking up like arms, and
there was a watery smell, and the night was like—as if you could put
your hand out and feel it—so warm and soft and dark and sweet like an
orange.
I most cried and I most swore and I most jumped up and danced, I was so
mad and happy and sad.
When Wilbur come back from being alone with his girl, and she saw him
coming, Lucy she says, “we got to go to the train now,” and she was most
crying too, but she never knew nothing I knew, and she couldn’t be so
all busted up. And then, before Wilbur and Miss Woodbury got up to where
we was, she put her face up and kissed me quick and put her head up
against me and she was all quivering and—Gee whizz.
* * * * *
Sometimes I hope I have cancer and die. I guess you know what I mean. We
went in the launch across the bay to the train like that, and it was
dark, too. She whispered and said it was like she and I could get out of
the boat and walk on the water, and it sounded foolish, but I knew what
she meant.
And then quick we were right at the depot, and there was a big gang of
yaps, the kind that goes to the fairs, and crowded and milling around
like cattle, and how could I tell her? “It won’t be long because you’ll
write and I’ll write to you.” That’s all she said.
I got a chance like a hay barn afire. A swell chance I got.
And maybe she would write me, down at Marietta that way, and the letter
would come back, and stamped on the front of it by the U.S.A. “there
ain’t any such guy,” or something like that, whatever they stamp on a
letter that way.
And me trying to pass myself off for a bigbug and a swell—to her, as
decent a little body as God ever made. Craps amighty—a swell chance I
got!
And then the train come in, and she got on it, and Wilbur Wessen he come
and shook hands with me, and that Miss Woodbury was nice too and bowed
to me, and I at her, and the train went and I busted out and cried like
a kid.
Gee, I could have run after that train and made Dan Patch look like a
freight train after a wreck but, socks amighty, what was the use? Did
you ever see such a fool?
I’ll bet you what—if I had an arm broke right now or a train had run
over my foot—I wouldn’t go to no doctor at all. I’d go set down and let
her hurt and hurt—that’s what I’d do.
I’ll bet you what—if I hadn’t a drunk that booze I’d a never been such a
boob as to go tell such a lie—that couldn’t never be made straight to a
lady like her.
I wish I had that fellow right here that had on a Windsor tie and
carried a cane. I’d smash him for fair. Gosh darn his eyes. He’s a big
fool—that’s what he is.
And if I’m not another you just go find me one and I’ll quit working and
be a bum and give him my job. I don’t care nothing for working, and
earning money, and saving it for no such boob as myself.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TRIUMPH OF A MODERN
OR, SEND FOR THE LAWYER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TRIUMPH OF A MODERN
OR, SEND FOR THE LAWYER
INASMUCH as I have put to myself the task of trying to tell you a
curious story in which I am myself concerned—in a strictly secondary way
you must of course understand—I will begin by giving you some notion of
myself.
Very well then, I am a man of thirty-two, rather small in size, with
sandy hair. I wear glasses. Until two years ago I lived in Chicago,
where I had a position as clerk in an office that afforded me a good
enough living. I have never married, being somewhat afraid of women—in
the flesh, in a way of speaking. In fancy and in my imagination I have
always been very bold but in the flesh women have always frightened me
horribly. They have a way of smiling quietly as though to say——. But we
will not go into that now.
Since boyhood I have had an ambition to be a painter, not, I will
confess, because of a desire to produce some great masterpiece of the
arts, but simply and solely because I have always thought the life
painters lead would appeal to me.
I have always liked the notion (let’s be honest if we can) of going
about, wearing a hat, tipped a little to the side of my head, sporting a
moustache, carrying a cane and speaking in an off-hand way of such
things as form, rhythm, the effects of light and masses, surfaces, etc.,
etc. During my life I have read a good many books concerning painters
and their work, their friendships and their loves and when I was in
Chicago and poor and was compelled to live in a small room alone, I
assure you I carried off many a dull weary evening by imagining myself a
painter of wide renown in the world.
It was afternoon and having finished my day’s work I went strolling off
to the studio of another painter. He was still at work and there were
two models in the room, women in the nude sitting about. One of them
smiled at me, I thought a little wistfully, but pshaw, I am too blasé
for anything of that sort.
I go across the room to my friend’s canvas and stand looking at it.
Now he is looking at me, a little anxiously. I am the greater man, you
understand. That is frankly and freely acknowledged. Whatever else may
be said against my friend he never claimed to be my equal. In fact it is
generally understood, wherever I go, that I am the greater man.
“Well?” says my friend. You see he is fairly hanging on my words, as the
saying goes; in short, he is waiting for me to speak with the air of one
about to be hanged.
Why? The devil! Why does he put everything up to me? One gets tired
carrying such responsibility upon one’s shoulders. A painter should be
the judge of his own work and not embarrass his fellow painters by
asking questions. That is my method.
Very well then. If I speak sharply you have only yourself to blame. “The
yellow you have been using is a little muddy. The arm of this woman is
not felt. In painting one should feel the arm of a woman. What I advise
is that you change your palette. You have scattered too much. Pull it
together. A painting should stick together as a wet snow ball thrown by
a boy clings to a wall.”
When I had reached the age of thirty, that is to say two years ago, I
received from my aunt, the sister of my father to be exact, a small
fortune I had long been dreaming I might possibly inherit.
My aunt I had never seen, but I had always been saying to myself, “I
must go see my aunt. The old lady will be sore at me and when she dies
will not leave me a cent.”
And then, lucky fellow that I am, I did go to see her just before she
died.
Filled with determination to put the thing through I set out from
Chicago, and it is not my fault that I did not spend the day with her.
Even although my aunt is (as I am not fool enough not to know that you
know) a woman I would have spent the day with her but that it was
impossible.
She lived at Madison, Wisconsin, and I went there on Saturday morning.
The house was locked and the windows boarded up. Fortunately, at just
that moment, a mail carrier came along and, upon my telling him that I
was my aunt’s nephew, gave me her address. He also gave me some news
concerning her.
For years she had been a sufferer from hay-fever and every summer had to
have a change of climate.
That was an opportunity for me. I went at once to a hotel and wrote her
a letter telling of my visit and expressing, to the utmost of my
ability, my sorrow in not having found her at home. “I have been a long
time doing this job but now that I am at it I fancy I shall do it rather
well,” I said to myself.
A sort of feeling came into my hand, as it were. I can’t just say what
it was but as soon as I sat down I knew very well I should be eloquent.
For the moment I was positively a poet.
In the first place, and as one should in writing a letter to a lady, I
spoke of the sky. “The sky is full of mottled clouds,” I said. Then, and
I frankly admit in a brutally casual way, I spoke of myself as one
practically prostrated with grief. To tell the truth I did not just know
what I was doing. I had got the fever for writing words, you see. They
fairly flowed out of my pen.
I had come, I said, on a long and weary journey to the home of my only
female relative, and here I threw into the letter some reference to the
fact that I was an orphan. “Imagine,” I wrote, “the sorrow and
desolation in my heart at finding the house unoccupied and the windows
boarded up.”
It was there, sitting in the hotel at Madison, Wisconsin, with the pen
in my hand, that I made my fortune. Something bold and heroic came into
my mood and, without a moment’s hesitation, I mentioned in my letter
what should never be mentioned to a woman, unless she be an elderly
woman of one’s own family, and then only by a physician perhaps—I spoke
of my aunt’s breasts, using the plural.
I had hoped, I said, to lay my tired head on her breasts. To tell the
truth I had become drunken with words and now, how glad I am that I did.
Mr. George Moore, Clive Bell, Paul Rosenfeld, and others of the most
skillful writers of our English speech, have written a great deal about
painters and, as I have already explained, there was not a book or
magazine article in English and concerning painters, their lives and
works, procurable in Chicago, I had not read.
What I am now striving to convey to you is something of my own pride in
my literary effort in the hotel at Madison, Wisconsin, and surely, if I
was, at that moment an artist, no other artist has ever had such quick
and wholehearted recognition.
Having spoken of putting my tired head on my aunt’s breasts (poor woman,
she died, never having seen me) I went on to give the general
impression—which by the way was quite honest and correct—of a somewhat
boyish figure, rather puzzled, wandering in a confused way through life.
The imaginary but correct enough figure of myself, born at the moment in
my imagination, had made its way through dismal swamps of gloom, over
the rough hills of adversity and through the dry deserts of loneliness,
toward the one spot in all this world where it had hoped to find rest
and peace—that is to say upon the bosom of its aunt. However, as I have
already explained, being a thorough modern and full of the modern
boldness, I did not use the word bosom, as an old-fashioned writer might
have done. I used the word breasts. When I had finished writing tears
were in my eyes.
The letter I wrote on that day covered some seven sheets of hotel
paper—finely written to the margins—and cost four cents to mail.
“Shall I mail it or shall I not?” I said to myself as I came out of the
hotel office and stood before a mail box. The letter was balanced
between my finger and thumb.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
Catch a nigger by the toe.”
The forefinger of my left hand—I was holding the letter in my right
hand—touched my nose, mouth, forehead, eyes, chin, neck, shoulder, arm,
hand and then tapped the letter itself. No doubt I fully intended, from
the first, to drop it. I had been doing the work of an artist. Well,
artists are always talking of destroying their own work but few do it,
and those who do are perhaps the real heroes of life.
And so down into the mail box it went with a thud and my fortune was
made. The letter was received by my aunt, who was lying abed of an
illness that was to destroy her—she had, it seems, other things beside
hay-fever the matter with her—and she altered her will in my favor. She
had intended leaving her money, a tidy sum yielding an income of five
thousand a year, to a fund to be established for the study of methods
for the cure of hay-fever—that is to say, really you see, to her fellow
sufferers—but instead left it to me. My aunt could not find her
spectacles and a nurse—may the gods bring her bright days and a good
husband—read the letter aloud. Both women were deeply touched and my
aunt wept. I am only telling you the facts, you understand, but I would
like to suggest that this whole incident might well be taken as proof of
the power of modern art. From the first I have been a firm believer in
the moderns. I am one who, as an art critic might word it, has been
right down through the movements. At first I was an impressionist and
later a cubist, a post-impressionist, and even a vorticist. Time after
time, in my imaginary life, as a painter, I have been quite swept off my
feet. For example I remember Picasso’s blue period ... but we’ll not go
into that.
What I am trying to say is that, having this faith in modernity, if one
may use the word thus, I did find within myself a peculiar boldness as I
sat in the hotel writing room at Madison, Wisconsin. I used the word
breasts (in the plural, you understand) and everyone will admit that it
is a bold and modern word to use in a letter to an aunt one has never
seen. It brought my aunt and me into one family. Her modesty never could
have admitted anything else.
And then, my aunt was really touched. Afterward I talked to the nurse
and made her a rather handsome present for her part in the affair. When
the letter had been read my aunt felt overwhelmingly drawn to me. She
turned her face to the wall and her shoulders shook. Do not think that I
am not also touched as I write this. “Poor lad,” my aunt said to the
nurse, “I will make things easier for him. Send for the lawyer.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“UNUSED”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“UNUSED”
A TALE OF LIFE IN OHIO
“UNUSED,” that was one of the words the Doctor used that day in speaking
of her. He, the doctor, was an extraordinarily large and immaculately
clean man, by whom I was at that time employed. I swept out his office,
mowed the lawn before his residence, took care of the two horses in his
stable and did odd jobs about the yard and kitchen—such as bringing in
firewood, putting water in a tub in the sun behind a grape arbor for the
doctor’s bath and even sometimes, during his bath, scrubbing for him
those parts of his broad back he himself could not reach.
The doctor had a passion in life with which he early infected me. He
loved fishing and as he knew all of the good places in the river,
several miles west of town, and in Sandusky Bay, some nineteen or twenty
miles to the north, we often went off for long delightful days together.
It was late in the afternoon of such a fishing day in the late June,
when the doctor and I were together in a boat on the bay, that a farmer
came running to the shore, waving his arms and calling to the doctor.
Little May Edgley’s body had been found floating near a river’s mouth
half a mile away, and, as she had been dead for several days, as the
doctor had just had a good bite, and as there was nothing he could do
anyway, it was all nonsense, his being called. I remembered how he
growled and grumbled. He did not then know what had happened but the
fish were just beginning to bite splendidly, I had just landed a fine
bass and the good evening’s fishing was all ahead of us. Well, you know
how it is—a doctor is always at everyone’s beck and call.
“Dang it all! That’s the way it always goes! Here we are—as good a
fishing evening as we’ll find this summer—wind just right and the sky
clouding over—and will you look at my dang luck? A doctor in the
neighborhood and that farmer knows it and so, just to accommodate me, he
goes and stubs his toe, like as not, or his boy falls out of a barn
loft, or his old woman gets the toothache. Like as not it’s one of his
women folks. I know ’em! His wife’s got an unmarried sister living with
her. Dang sentimental old maid! She’s got a nervous complaint—gets all
worked up and thinks she’s going to die. Die nothing! I know that kind.
Lots of ’em like to have a doctor fooling around. Let a doctor come
near, so they can get him alone in a room, and they’ll spend hours
talking about themselves—if he’ll let ’em.”
The doctor was reeling in his line, grumbling and complaining as he did
so and then, suddenly, with the characteristic cheerfulness that I had
seen carry him with a smile on his lips through whole days and nights of
work and night driving over rough frozen earth roads in the winter, he
picked up the oars and rowed vigorously ashore. When I offered to take
the oars he shook his head. “No kid, it’s good for the figure,” he said,
looking down at his huge paunch. He smiled. “I got to keep my figure. If
I don’t I’ll be losing some of my practice among the unmarried women.”
As for the business ashore—there was May Edgley, of our town, drowned in
that out of the way place, and her body had been in the water several
days. It had been found among some willows that grew near the mouth of a
deep creek that emptied into the bay, had lodged in among the roots of
the willows, and when we got ashore the farmer, his son and the hired
man, had got it out and had laid it on some boards near a barn that
faced the bay.
That was my own first sight of death and I shall not forget the moment
when I followed the doctor in among the little group of silent people
standing about and saw the dead, discolored and bloated body of the
woman lying there.
The doctor was used to that sort of thing, but to me it was all new and
terrifying. I remember that I looked once and then ran away. Dashing
into the barn I went to lean against the feedbox of a stall, where an
old farm-horse was eating hay. The warm day outside had suddenly seemed
cold and chill but in the barn it was warm again. Oh, what a lovely
thing to a boy is a barn, with the rich warm comforting smell of the
cured hay and the animal life, lying like a soft bed over it all. At the
doctor’s house, while I lived and worked there, the doctor’s wife used
to put on my bed, on winter nights, a kind of soft warm bed cover called
a “comfortable.” That’s what it was like to me that day in the barn when
we had just found May Edgley’s body.
As for the body—well, May Edgley had been a small woman with small firm
hands and in one of her hands, tightly gripped, when they had found her,
was a woman’s hat—a great broad-brimmed gaudy thing it must have been,
and there had been a huge ostrich feather sticking out of the top, such
an ostrich feather as you see sometimes sticking out of the hat of a
kind of big flashy woman at the horse races or at second-rate summer
resorts near cities.
It stayed in my mind, that bedraggled ostrich feather, little May
Edgley’s hand had gripped so determinedly when death came, and as I
stood shivering in the barn I could see it again, as I had so often seen
it perched on the head of big bold Lil Edgley, May Edgley’s sister, as
she went, half-defiantly always, through the streets of our town,
Bidwell, Ohio.
And then as I stood shivering with boyish dread of death in that old
barn, the farm-horse put his head through an opening at the front of the
stall and rubbed his soft warm nose against my cheek. The farmer, on
whose place we were, must have been one who was kind to his animals. The
old horse rubbed his nose up and down my cheek. “You are a long ways
from death, my lad, and when the time comes for you you won’t shiver so
much. I am old and I know. Death is a kind comforting thing to those who
are through with their lives.”
Something of that sort the old farm-horse seemed to be saying and at any
rate he quieted me, took the fear and the chill all out of me.
It was when the doctor and I were driving home together that evening in
the dusk, and after all arrangements for sending May Edgley’s body back
to town and to her people had been made, that he spoke of her and used
the word I am now using as the title for her story. The doctor said a
great many things that evening that I cannot now remember and I only
remember how the night came softly on and how the grey road faded out of
sight, and then how the moon came out and the road that had been grey
became silvery white, with patches of inky blackness where the shadows
of trees fell across it. The doctor was one sane enough not to talk down
to a boy. How often he spoke intimately to me of his impressions of men
and events! There were many things in the fat old doctor’s mind of which
his patients knew nothing, but of which his stable boy knew.
The doctor’s old bay horse went steadily along, doing his work as
cheerfully as the doctor did his and the doctor smoked a cigar. He spoke
of the dead woman, May Edgley, and of what a bright girl she had been.
As for her story—he did not tell it completely. I was myself much alive
that evening—that is to say the imaginative side of myself was much
alive—and the doctor was as a sower, sowing seed in a fertile soil. He
was as one who goes through a wide long field, newly plowed by the hand
of Death, the plowman, and as he went along he flung wide the seeds of
May Edgley’s story, wide, far over the land, over the rich fertile land
of a boy’s awakening imagination.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
THERE were three boys and as many girls in the Edgley family of Bidwell,
Ohio, and of the girls Lillian and Kate were known in a dozen towns
along the railroad that ran between Cleveland and Toledo. The fame of
Lillian, the eldest, went far. On the streets of the neighboring towns
of Clyde, Norwalk, Fremont, Tiffin, and even in Toledo and Cleveland,
she was well known. On summer evenings she went up and down our main
street wearing a huge hat with a white ostrich feather that fell down
almost to her shoulder. She, like her sister Kate, who never succeeded
in attaining to a position of prominence in the town’s life, was a
blonde with cold staring blue eyes. On almost any Friday evening she
might have been seen setting forth on some adventure, from which she did
not return until the following Monday or Tuesday. It was evident the
adventures were profitable, as the Edgley family were working folk and
it is certain her brothers did not purchase for her the endless number
of new dresses in which she arrayed herself.
It was a Friday evening in the summer and Lillian appeared on the upper
main street of Bidwell. Two dozen men and boys loafed by the station
platform, awaiting the arrival of the New York Central train, eastward
bound. They stared at Lillian who stared back at them. In the west, from
which direction the train was presently to come, the sun went down over
young corn fields. A dusky golden splendor lit the skies and the loafers
were awed into silence, hushed, both by the beauty of the evening and by
the challenge in Lillian’s eyes.
Then the train arrived and the spell of silence was broken. The
conductor and brakeman jumped to the station platform and waved their
hands at Lillian and the engineer put his head out of the cab.
Aboard the train Lillian found a seat by herself and as soon as the
train had started and the fares were collected the conductor came to sit
with her. When the train arrived at the next town and the conductor was
compelled to attend to his affairs, the brakeman came to lean over her
seat. The men talked in undertones and occasionally the silence in the
car was broken by outbursts of laughter. Other women from Bidwell, going
to visit relatives in distant towns, were embarrassed. They turned their
heads to look out at car windows and their cheeks grew red.
On the station platform at Bidwell, where darkness was settling down
over the scene, the men and boys still lingered about speaking of
Lillian and her adventures. “She can ride anywhere she pleases and never
has to pay a cent of fare,” declared a tall bearded man who leaned
against the station door. He was a buyer of pigs and cattle and was
compelled to go to the Cleveland market once every week. The thought of
Lillian, the light o’ love traveling free over the railroads filled his
heart with envy and anger.
The entire Edgley family bore a shaky reputation in Bidwell but with the
exception of May, the youngest of the girls, they were people who knew
how to take care of themselves. For years Jake, the eldest of the boys,
tended bar for Charley Shuter in a saloon in lower Main Street and then,
to everyone’s surprise, he bought out the place. “Either Lillian gave
him the money or he stole it from Charley,” the men said, but
nevertheless, and throwing moral standards aside, they went into the bar
to buy drinks. In Bidwell vice, while openly condemned, was in secret
looked upon as a mark of virility in young manhood.
Frank and Will Edgley were teamsters and draymen like their father John
and were hard working men. They owned their own teams and asked favors
of no man and when they were not at work did not seek the society of
others. Late on Saturday afternoons, when the week’s work was done and
the horses cleaned, fed and bedded down for the night they dressed
themselves in black suits, put on white collars and black derby hats and
went into our main street to drink themselves drunk. By ten o’clock they
had succeeded and went reeling homeward. When in the darkness under the
maple trees on Vine or Walnut Streets they met a Bidwell citizen, also
homeward bound, a row started. “Damn you, get out of our way. Get off
the sidewalk,” Frank Edgley shouted and the two men rushed forward
intent on a fight.
One evening in the month of June, when there was a moon and when insects
sang loudly in the long grass between the sidewalks and the road, the
Edgley brothers met Ed Pesch, a young German farmer, out for an
evening’s walk with Caroline Dupee, daughter of a Bidwell drygoods
merchant, and the fight the Edgley boys had long been looking for took
place. Frank Edgley shouted and he and his brother plunged forward but
Ed Pesch did not run into the road and leave them to go triumphantly
homeward. He fought and the brothers were badly beaten, and on Monday
morning appeared driving their team and with faces disfigured and eyes
blackened. For a week they went up and down alleyways and along
residence streets, delivering ice and coal to houses and merchandise to
the stores without lifting their eyes or speaking. The town was
delighted and clerks ran from store to store making comments, they
longed to repeat within hearing of one of the brothers. “Have you seen
the Edgley boys?” they asked one another. “They got what was coming to
them. Ed Pesch gave them what for.” The more excitable and imaginative
of the clerks spoke of the fight in the darkness as though they had been
on hand and had seen every blow struck. “They are bullies and can be
beaten by any man who stands up for his rights,” declared Walter Wills,
a slender, nervous young man who worked for Albert Twist, the grocer.
The clerk hungered to be such another fighter as Ed Pesch had proven
himself. At night he went home from the store in the soft darkness and
imagined himself as meeting the Edgleys. “I’ll show you—you big
bullies,” he muttered and his fists shot out, striking at nothingness.
An eager strained feeling ran along the muscles of his back and arms but
his night time courage did not abide with him through the day. On
Wednesday when Will Edgley came to the back door of the store, his wagon
loaded with salt in barrels, Walter went into the alleyway to enjoy the
sight of the cut lips and blackened eyes. Will stood with hands in
pockets looking at the ground. An uncomfortable silence ensued and in
the end it was broken by the voice of the clerk. “There’s no one here
and those barrels are heavy,” he said heartily. “I might as well make
myself useful and help you unload.” Taking off his coat Walter Wills
voluntarily helped at the task that belonged to Will Edgley, the
drayman.
If May Edgley, during her girlhood, rose higher than any of the others
of the Edgley family she also fell lower. “She had her chance and threw
it away,” was the word that went round and surely no one else in that
family ever had so completely the town’s sympathy. Lillian Edgley was
outside the pale of the town’s life, and Kate was but a lesser edition
of her sister. She waited on table at the Fownsby House, and on almost
any evening might have been seen walking out with some traveling man.
She also took the evening train to neighboring towns but returned to
Bidwell later on the same night or at daylight the next morning. She did
not prosper as Lillian did and grew tired of the dullness of small town
life. At twenty-two she went to live in Cleveland where she got a job as
cloak model in a large store. Later she went on the road as an actress,
in a burlesque show, and Bidwell heard no more of her.
As for May Edgley, all through her childhood and until her seventeenth
year she was a model of good behavior. Everyone spoke of it. She was,
unlike the other Edgleys, small and dark, and unlike her sisters dressed
herself in plain neat-fitting clothes. As a young girl in the public
school she began to attract attention because of her proficiency in the
classes. Both Lillian and Kate Edgley had been slovenly students, who
spent their time ogling boys and the men teachers but May looked at no
one and as soon as school was dismissed in the afternoon went home to
her mother, a tall tired-looking woman who seldom went out of her own
house.
In Bidwell, Tom Means, who later became a soldier and who has recently
won high rank in the army because of his proficiency in training
recruits for the World War, was the prize pupil in the schools. Tom was
working for his appointment to West Point, and did not spend his
evenings loafing on the streets, as did other young men. He stayed in
his own house, intent on his studies. Tom’s father was a lawyer and his
mother was third cousin to a Kentucky woman who had married an English
baronet. The son aspired to be a soldier and a gentleman and to live on
the intellectual plane, and had a good deal of contempt for the mental
capacities of his fellow students, and when one of the Edgley family set
up as his rival he was angry and embarrassed and the schoolroom was
delighted. Day after day and year after year the contest between him and
May Edgley went on and in a sense the whole town of Bidwell got back of
the girl. In all such things as history and English literature Tom swept
all before him but in spelling, arithmetic, and geography May defeated
him without effort. At her desk she sat like a little terrier in the
presence of a trap filled with rats. A question was asked or a problem
in arithmetic put on the blackboard and like a terrier she jumped. Her
hand went up and her sensitive mouth quivered. Fingers were snapped
vigorously. “I know,” she said, and the entire class knew she did. When
she had answered the question or had gone to the blackboard to solve the
problem the half-grown children along the rows of benches laughed and
Tom Means stared out through a window. May returned to her seat, half
triumphant, half ashamed of her victory.
The country lying west of Bidwell, like all the Ohio country down that
way, is given to small fruit and berry raising, and in June and after
school has been dismissed for the year all the younger men, boys, and
girls, with most of the women of the town go to work in the fruit
harvest. To the fields immediately after breakfast the citizens go
trooping away. Lunches are carried in baskets and until the sun goes
down everyone stays in the fields.
And in the berry fields as in the schoolroom May was a notable figure.
She did not walk or ride to the work with the other young girls, or join
the parties at lunch at the noon hour, but everyone understood that that
was because of her family. “I know how she feels, if I came from a
family like that I wouldn’t ask or want other people’s attention,” said
one of the women, the wife of a carpenter, who trudged along with the
others in the dust of the road.
In a berry field, belonging to a farmer named Peter Short, some thirty
women, young men and tall awkward boys crawled over the ground, picking
the red fragrant berries. Ahead of them, in a row by herself, went May,
the exclusive, the woman who walked by herself. Her hands flitted in and
out of the berry vines as the tail of a squirrel disappears among the
leaves of a tree when one walks in a wood. The other pickers went
slowly, stopping occasionally to eat berries and talk and when one had
crawled a little ahead of the others he stopped and waited, sitting on
his haunches. The pickers were paid in proportion to the number of
quarts picked during the day but, as they often said, “pay was not
everything.” The berry picking was in a way a social function, and who
were the pickers, wives, sons and daughters of prosperous artisans, to
kill themselves for a few paltry dollars?
With May Edgley they understood it was different. Everyone knew that she
and her mother got practically no money from John Edgley, the
father—from the boys, Jake, Frank and Will—or from the girls, Lillian
and Kate, who spent their takings on clothes for themselves. If she were
to be decently dressed, she had to earn the money for the purpose during
the vacation time when she could stay out of school. Later it was
understood she planned to be a school teacher herself, and to attain to
that position it was necessary that she keep herself well dressed and
show herself industrious and alert in affairs.
Tirelessly, therefore, May worked and the boxes of berries, filled by
her ever alert fingers, grew into mountains. Peter Short with his son
came walking down the rows to gather the filled crates and put them
aboard a wagon to be hauled to town. He looked at May with pride in his
eyes and the other pickers lumbering slowly along became the target for
his scorn. “Ah, you talking women and you big lazy boys, you’re not much
good,” he cried. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourselves? Look at you there,
Sylvester and Al—letting yourself be beat, twice over, by a girl so
little you could almost carry her home in your pocket.”
It was in the summer of her seventeenth year that May fell down from her
high place in the life of the town of Bidwell. Two vital and dramatic
events had happened to her that year. Her mother died in April and she
graduated from the high school in June, second only in honors to Tom
Means. As Tom’s father had been on the school board for years the town
shook its head over the decision that placed him ahead of May and in
everyone’s eyes May had really walked off with the prize. When she went
into the fields, and when they remembered the fact of her mother’s
recent death, even the women were ready to forget and forgive the fact
of her being a member of the Edgley family. As for May, it seemed to her
at that moment that nothing that could happen to her could very much
matter.
And then the unexpected. As more than one Bidwell wife said afterwards
to her husband. “It was then that blood showed itself.”
A man named Jerome Hadley first found out about May. He went that year
to Peter Short’s field, as he himself said, “just for fun,” and he found
it. Jerome was pitcher for the Bidwell baseball nine and worked as mail
clerk on the railroad. After he had returned from a run he had several
days’ rest and went to the berry field because the town was deserted.
When he saw May working off by herself he winked at the other young men
and going to her got down on his knees and began picking at a speed
almost as great as her own. “Come on here, little woman,” he said, “I’m
a mail clerk and have got my hand in, sorting letters. My fingers can go
pretty fast. Come on now, let’s see if you can keep up with me.”
For an hour Jerome and May went up and down in the rows and then the
thing happened that set the town by the ears. The girl, who had never
talked to others, began talking to Jerome and the other pickers turned
to look and wonder. She no longer picked at lightning speed but loitered
along, stopping to rest and put choice berries into her mouth. “Eat
that,” she said boldly passing a great red berry across the row to the
man. She put a handful of berries into his box. “You won’t make as much
as seventy-five cents all day if you don’t get a move on you,” she said,
smiling shyly.
At the noon hour the other pickers found out the truth. The tired
workers had gone to the pump by Peter Short’s house and then to a nearby
orchard to sit under the trees and rest after the eating of lunches.
There was no doubt something had happened to May. Everyone felt it. It
was later understood that she had, during that noon hour in June and
quite calmly and deliberately, decided to become like her two sisters
and go on the town.
The berry pickers as usual ate their lunches in groups, the women and
girls sitting under one tree and the young men and boys under another.
Peter Short’s wife brought hot coffee and tin cups were filled. Jokes
went back and forth and the girls giggled.
In spite of the unexpectedness of May’s attitude toward Jerome, a
bachelor and quite legitimate game for the unmarried women, no one
suspected anything serious would happen. Flirtations were always going
on in the berry fields. They came, played themselves out, and passed
like the clouds in the June sky. In the evening, when the young men had
washed the dirt of the fields away and had put on their Sunday clothes,
things were different. Then a girl must look out for herself. When she
went to walk in the evening with a young man under the trees or out into
country lanes—then anything might happen.
But in the fields, with all the older women about—to have thought
anything at all of a young man and a girl working together and blushing
and laughing, would have been to misunderstand the whole spirit of the
berry picking season.
And it was evident May had misunderstood. Later no one blamed Jerome, at
least none of the young fellows did. As the pickers ate lunch May sat a
little apart from the others. That was her custom and Jerry lay in the
long grass at the edge of the orchard also a little apart. A sudden
tenseness crept into the groups under the trees. May had not gone to the
pump with the others when she came in from the field but sat with her
back braced against a tree and the hand that held the sandwich was black
with the soil of her morning labors. It trembled and once the sandwich
fell out of her hand.
Suddenly she got to her feet and put her lunch basket into the fork of a
tree, and then, with a look of defiance in her eyes, she climbed over a
fence and started along a lane past Peter Short’s barn. The lane ran
down to a meadow, crossed a bridge and went on beside a waving
wheatfield to a wood.
May went a little way along the lane and then stopped to look back and
the other pickers stared at her, wondering what was the matter. Then
Jerome Hadley got to his feet. He was ashamed and climbed awkwardly over
the fence and walked away without looking back.
Everyone was quite sure it had all been arranged. As the girls and women
got to their feet and stood watching, May and Jerome went out of the
lane and into the wood. The older women shook their heads. “Well, well,”
they exclaimed while the boys and young men began slapping each other on
the back and prancing grotesquely about.
It was unbelievable. Before they had got out of sight of the others
under the tree Jerome had put his arm about May’s waist and she had put
her head down on his shoulder. It was as though May Edgley who, as all
the older women agreed, had been treated almost as an equal by all of
the others had wanted to throw something ugly right in their faces.
Jerome and May stayed for two hours in the wood and then came back
together to the field where the others were at work. May’s cheeks were
pale and she looked as though she had been crying. She picked alone as
before and after a few moments of awkward silence Jerome put on his coat
and went off along a road toward town. May made a little mountain of
filled berry boxes during that afternoon but two or three times filled
boxes dropped out of her hands. The spilled fruit lay red and shining
against the brown and black of the soil.
No one saw May in the berry fields after that, and Jerome Hadley had
something of which to boast. In the evening when he came among the young
fellows he spoke of his adventure at length.
“You couldn’t blame me for taking the chance when I had it,” he said
laughing. He explained in detail what had occurred in the wood, while
other young men stood about filled with envy. As he talked he grew both
proud and a little ashamed of the public attention his adventure was
attaining. “It was easy,” he said. “That May Edgley’s the easiest thing
that ever lived in this town. A fellow don’t have to ask to get what he
wants. That’s how easy it is.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------