“THERE was a man here. For weeks he lay sick to the point of death, in
our house, and all the time I did not dare sleep. Night and day I was on
the watch. How often at night I have crept down across this very field,
in the middle of the night, in the darkness looking for the black,
trying to discover if he was still on the trail.”
It was early summer and May sat talking with Maud Welliver by a tree in
the field back of the Edgley’s kitchen door—building steadily her tower
of romance. Two or three times each week, since that first talk by the
blacksmith shop, Maud had managed to get to the Edgley house unobserved
by her aunt. In her passionate devotion to the little dark-skinned
woman, who had lived through so many and such romantic adventures in
life, she was ready to risk anything, even to the wrath of her father’s
iron-jawed housekeeper.
To the Edgley house she came always at night, and the necessity of that
was understood by May and perhaps better understood by Lillian Edgley.
On the next day, after the meeting by the blacksmith shop, Maud’s father
had spoken his mind concerning the Edgleys. The Welliver family sat at
supper in the evening. “Maud,” John Welliver began, looking sternly at
his daughter, “I don’t want you should have anything to do with that
Edgley family that lives on this street.” The railroad man cursed the
ill luck that had led him to take a house on the same street where such
cattle lived. One of his brother employees on the road, he said, had
told him the story of the Edgleys. “They are such an outfit,” he
declared wrathfully. “God only knows why they are allowed to stay here.
They should be tarred and feathered and run out of town. Why, to live on
the same street with them is like living in the midst of cattle.”
The railroad man looked hard at his daughter. To him she was a young
woman and a virgin, and by these tokens walked a dangerous trail through
life. On dark streets, adventurous men lay in wait for all such women
and they employed other women, of the Edgley stripe, to decoy innocent
virgins into their hands. There was much he would have liked to say to
his daughter but not much he could say. Among themselves men could speak
openly of such women as the Edgley sisters. They were a thing—well. To
tell the truth—during young manhood almost every man went to see such
women, went with other men into a house inhabited by such women. To go
to such a place one needed to have been drinking a little. It happened.
Several young men were together and went from place to place drinking.
“Let’s go down the line,” one of them said. The men went straggling off
along a street, two by two. Little was said and they were all a little
ashamed of their mission. Then they came to a house, always on a dark
foul street, and one of the young men, a bold fellow, knocked at the
door. A fat woman, with a hard face, came to let them in and they went
into a room and stood about, looking foolish. “O, girls,—company,” the
fat woman shouted and several women came and stood about. The women
looked bored and tired.
John Welliver had himself been to such places. Well, that was when he
was a young workman. Later a man met a good woman and married her, tried
to forget the other women, did forget them. In spite of all the things
said, most men after marriage went straight. They had a living to make
and children growing up and there was no time for any such nonsense.
Among his fellow workmen, the railroad man often spoke of the kind of
women he believed the three Edgley women to be. “It’s my notion,” he
said, “that it’s better to have such places in order that good women may
be let alone, but they ought to be off by themselves somewhere. A good
woman never ought to see or know about such cattle.”
In the presence of his daughter and of his sister, the housekeeper, now
that the subject of the Edgleys had been broached the railroad man was
embarrassed. He kept his eye on the plate before him and stole a shy
look at his daughter’s face. How white and pure it looked. “I wish I had
kept my mouth shut,” he thought—but a sense of the necessity of the
occasion led him on. “My Maud might be led to take up with the Edgley
women, knowing nothing,” he thought. “Well,” he said, “there are three
women in that family and they are all alike. There is one, who works at
the hotel—where she meets traveling men—and the oldest one doesn’t work
at all. And there is another, too, the youngest that everyone thought
was going to turn out all right because she stood high in school and is
said to be smart. Everyone thought she would be different but she isn’t,
you see. Why, right before everyone, in a berry field, where she was at
work, she went into a wood with a man.”
“I know about it and I’ve told Maud,” the railroad man’s sister said
sharply. “We don’t need to talk about it no more.”
* * * * *
Maud Welliver had listened with flushed cheeks to her father’s words,
and even as he talked had made up her mind she would see May again and
soon. Since coming to Bidwell she had not left the house at night, but
now she felt suddenly quite strong and well. When the supper was
finished and darkness came on she got up from her chair on the porch and
spoke to her aunt, at work inside the house. “I feel better than I have
for months, aunty,” she said, “and I’m going for a little walk. You know
the doctor said I was to walk all I could and I can’t walk during the
day on account of the heat. I’ll just go uptown a little while.”
Maud went cautiously along the sidewalk toward the business section of
town and then crossed over and returning on the opposite side, stole
along, walking on the grass at the edge of lawns. What an adventure! She
felt like one being admitted into some strange world filled with
romance. For her May Edgley’s tales had become golden apples of
existence, to taste which she would risk anything. “What a person!” she
thought as she crept forward in the darkness, lifting and putting down
her feet on the grass like a kitten compelled to walk in water. She
thought of May Edgley’s adventure in the wood with Jerome Hadley. How
stupid her father had been, how stupid everyone in the town of Bidwell!
“It must be so with men and women everywhere,” she thought vaguely.
“They go on thinking they know what’s happening, and they know nothing.”
She thought of May Edgley, small and a woman, alone in the forest with a
man—a dark determined man, intent upon murder. The man held in his hand
a little package containing a white powder. A few grains of it in a cup
of coffee and a human life would go out. A man who walked and talked and
went about the streets of Bidwell with other men would become a white
lifeless bit of clay. Maud had been at several times in her life close
to the door of death. She imagined a scene. There was a rich man’s home
with soft carpets, woven of priceless stuffs, brought from the Orient.
One walking on the carpets made no sound. The feet sank softly into the
velvety stuff and soft-voiced servants moved about. A man entered and
sat at breakfast. The movies had not at that time come to Bidwell but
Maud had read many popular novels and several times, at Fort Wayne, had
been to the theatre.
There was a woman in the rich man’s house—his guilty wife. She was
slender and willowy. Ah, there was something serpentine about her. In
Maud’s imagination she lay on a silken couch beside the table, at which
the man now sat down to eat his breakfast. A wood fire burned in the
fireplace. The woman’s hand stole forward and a tiny pinch of the white
powder went into the coffee cup; then she raised a white hand and
stroked the man’s cheek. She closed her eyes and lay back on the silken
couch. The dastardly deed was done and the woman did not care. She was
not even curious as to how death would come. She yawned and waited.
The man drank his coffee and arising moved about the room and then a
sudden pallor came upon his cheeks. It was quite noticeable as he was a
ruddy-cheeked man with soft grey hair—a strong commanding figure of a
man, a leader among men. Maud pictured him as the president of a great
railroad system. She had never seen a railroad president but her father
had often spoken of the president of the Nickle Plate and had described
him as a big fine looking fellow.
What a thing is passion, so terrible, so strange. It takes such
unimaginable turns. The woman on the silken couch, the willowy
serpentine woman, had turned from her husband, from the commander of
men, from the strong man, the powerful one who swept all before him, and
had given her illicit but powerfully fascinating love to a railroad mail
clerk.
Maud had seen Jerome Hadley. When the Wellivers had first come to
Bidwell she, with her aunt and father, had been driven about town with a
real-estate man and his wife. They were looking for a house in which to
live and as they drove about the real-estate man’s wife, who sat on the
back seat of a surrey with Maud and her aunt, had pointed to Jerome
Hadley, walking past in the street, and had told in a whisper the story
of his going into the wood with May Edgley. Maud was half sick on that
day and had not listened. The railroad journey from Fort Wayne to
Bidwell had given her a headache.
However, she had looked at Jerome. He had sloping shoulders, pale grey
eyes and sandy hair, and when he walked he toed out badly and his
trousers were baggy. And for that man the woman on the silken couch, the
railroad president’s wife, was ready to commit murder. What an
unexplainable, what a strange thing is love! The windings and twistings
of its pathway through life cannot be followed by the human mind.
The scene being enacted in Maud Welliver’s mind played itself out. The
strong man in the richly furnished room put his hand to his throat and
staggered. He reeled from side to side and clutched at the backs of
chairs. The noiseless servants had all gone out of the room. The woman
half arose from the couch as the man fell to the floor and in falling
struck his head on the corner of a table so that his blood ran out upon
the silken carpets. The woman smiled sardonically. It was terrible. She
cared not the least in the world and a slow cruel smile came and
remained fixed on her face. Then there was the sound of running feet.
The servants were coming, they were running, running desperately. The
woman lay back on the couch and yawned again. “I had better scream and
then faint,” she thought and she did the two things, did them with the
air of a tired actor rehearsing a well known part for a play. It was all
for love, for a strange and mysterious thing called passion. She did it
for Jerome Hadley’s sake, that she might be free to walk with him the
illicit paths of love.
Maud Welliver tiptoed cautiously forward on the lawns on the further
side of Duane Street in Bidwell, looking across at the dark house where
she had come to live. In Fort Wayne she had known nothing like this.
What a terrible thing might have happened in Bidwell but for May Edgley!
The scene in the rich man’s home faded and was replaced by another. She
saw May standing in the forest with Jerome Hadley. How he had changed!
He stood alert, intent, determined, holding the poison package in his
hand and he was threatening, threatening and pleading. In the other hand
he held money, a great package of bills. He thrust the bills forward and
pleaded with May Edgley and then grew angry and threatened again.
Before him stood the small, white-faced woman, frightened now, but
terribly determined also. The word “never” was upon her lips. And now
the man threw the money away into the bushes and sprang forward. His
hand was at the woman’s throat, the murderous hand of the infuriated
mail clerk. It pressed hard. May fell to the ground.
Jerome Hadley did not quite dare let the woman die. Too many people had
seen the two go into the wood together. He stood over her until she had
a little recovered and then the threatening and pleading began again,
but all the time the little woman stood firm, shaking her head and
saying the brave word “never.” “Kill me if you will,” she said, “but
I’ll take no part in this murder. My reputation is gone and I am an
outlaw among men and women but I’ll take no part in this murder, and if
you go on with it I will betray you.”
* * * * *
The September evening when May uttered the startling sentences,
regarding a strange man and a mysterious black, set down at the head of
this section of the story of her adventures, was warm and clear.
Brightly the stars shone in the sky and in the field back of the
Edgley’s kitchen door all the little ponds had become dry. Since that
first evening when she had met May a great change had taken place in
Maud. May had led her up to the ramparts of the tower of romance and as
often as possible now the two sat together under a tree in the field or
on the floor by the open window in May’s room. To the field they went
through the kitchen door, along the creek where the elders and willows
grew and over stones in the bed of the creek itself, to a wire fence.
How alone and how far away from the life of the town they were in the
field at night! Buggies and the few automobiles then owned in Bidwell
passed on distant roads, and over the town, soft lights played on the
sky and soft lights seemed to play over the spirits of the two women. On
a distant street, that led down to the town waterworks, a group of young
men went tramping along on a board sidewalk. They were singing a song.
“Listen, May,” Maud said. The voices died away and another sound came.
Jerry Haden, a cripple who walked with a crutch and who delivered
evening papers, went along quickly, his crutch making a sharp clicking
sound on the sidewalks. What a hurry he was in. “Click! click!” went the
crutch.
It was a time and place for the growth of romance. A desire to reach out
to life, to command life grew within Maud. One evening she, alone and
unaided, mounted the tower of romance and told May of how a young man in
Fort Wayne had wanted to marry her. “He was the son of the president of
a railroad company,” she said. The matter was of no importance and she
only spoke of it to show what men were like. For a long time he came to
the house almost every evening and when he did not come he sent flowers
and candy. Maud had cared nothing for him. There was a certain air he
had that wearied her. He seemed to think himself in some way of better
blood than the Wellivers. The idea was absurd. Maud’s father knew his
father and knew that he had once been no more than a section hand on the
railroad. His pretensions wearied Maud and she finally sent him away.
Maud told May, on several evenings of the imaginary young man whom,
because of his pride of blood, she had cast adrift, and on the September
evening wanted to speak of something else. For two or three evenings she
had been on the point of saying what was in her mind but could not bring
the matter to her lips. It trembled within her like a wild bird caught
and held in her hand, as, in the dim light, she looked at May. “She
won’t do it. I’ll never get her to do it,” she thought.
In Fort Wayne, before she came to Bidwell, and when she had just
graduated from the high school Maud had for a time walked upon the
border line of love, had stood for a moment in the very pathway of
Cupid’s darts. Near the house where the Wellivers then lived there was a
grocery run by an alert erect little man of forty-five, whose wife had
died. Maud often went to the store to buy supplies for the Welliver home
and one evening she arrived just as the grocer, a man named Hunt, was
locking the store for the night. He unlocked the door and let her in.
“You won’t mind if I don’t light the lights again,” he said. He
explained that the grocerymen of Fort Wayne had made an agreement among
themselves that they would sell no goods after seven in the evening. “If
I light the lights and people see us in here they will be coming in and
wanting to be waited on,” he explained.
Maud stood in the uncertain light by a counter while the grocer wrapped
her packages. At the back of the store there was a lamp fastened to a
bracket on the wall and burning dimly and the soft yellow light fell on
her hair and on her white smiling face as the grocer fumbled in the
darkness back of the counter and from time to time looked up at her. How
beautiful her long pale face in that light! He was stirred and delayed
the matter of getting the packages wrapped. “My wife and I were not very
happy together but I was happy when I lived alone with my mother,” he
thought. He let Maud out at the door, locked it and went along beside
her carrying the packages. “I’m going your way,” he said vaguely. He
began to speak of his boyhood in a town in Ohio and told of how he had
married at the age of twenty-three and had come to Fort Wayne where his
wife’s father owned the store that was now his own. He spoke to Maud as
to one who knew most of the details of his life. “Well, my wife and her
father are both dead and I own the place—I’ve come out all right,” he
said. “I wonder why I left my mother. I thought more of her than anyone
else in the world but I got married and went away and left her, went
away and left her, to live alone until she died,” he said. They came to
a corner and he put the packages into Maud’s arms. “You got me started
thinking of mother. You’re like her,” he said suddenly and then hurried
away.
Maud had got into the habit of going to the store, just at closing time
in the evening and when she did not come the grocer was upset. He closed
the store and, walking to a nearby corner, stood under an awning before
a hardware store, also closed for the night, and looked down along the
street where Maud lived. Then he took a heavy silver watch from his
pocket and looked at it. “Huh!” he exclaimed and went off along another
street to his boarding house, stopping several times in the first block
to look back.
* * * * *
It was early June and the Wellivers had lived in Bidwell, for four
months and, during the last year of her life at Fort Wayne Maud had been
so continually ill that she had seldom seen the grocer, but now a letter
had come from him. The letter came from the city of Cleveland. “I am
here at a convention of the K of Ps,” he wrote, “and I have met a man
here who is a widower like myself. We are in the same room at the hotel.
I want to stop to see you on the way home and would like to bring my
friend along. Can’t you get another girl and we’ll all spend an evening
together. If you can do it, you get a surrey and meet us at the
seven-fifty train next Friday evening. I’ll pay for the surrey of course
and we’ll go off somewhere to the country. I’ve got something very
important I want to say to you. You write me here and let me know if
it’s all right.”
Maud sat in the field beside May and thought of the letter. An answer
must be sent at once. In fancy she saw the little bright-eyed grocer
standing before May, the hero of the passage in the wood with Jerome
Hadley, the woman who lived the romance of which she herself dreamed. At
the post office during the afternoon she had heard two young men talking
of a dance to be given at a place called the Dewdrop. It was to be held
on Friday evening, and a bold impulse had led her to go to a livery
stable and make inquiry about the place. It was twenty miles away and on
the shores of Sandusky Bay. “We will go there,” she had thought, and had
engaged the surrey and horses and now she was face to face with May and
the thought of the little grocer and his companion frightened her.
Freeman Hunt the widower had a bald head and a grey mustache. What would
his friend be like? Fear made Maud’s body tremble and when she tried to
speak, to tell May of her plan, the words would not come. “She’ll never
do it. I’ll never get her to do it,” she thought again.
* * * * *
“There was a man here. For weeks he lay sick to the point of death in
our house and all the time I did not dare sleep.”
May Edgley was building high her tower of romance. Having several times
listened, as Maud told of the imaginary son of the railroad president
who had been determined to marry her, she had set about making a
romantic lover of her own. Books she had read, the remembrance of
childhood tales of love and romantic adventure poured in upon her mind.
“There was a man here. He was just twenty-four but what a life he had
led,” she said absentmindedly. She appeared to be lost in thought and
for a long time was silent. Then she got suddenly to her feet and ran to
where two large maple trees stood on a little hill in the midst of the
field. Maud also got to her feet and her body shook with a new fear. The
grocer was forgotten. May returned and again sat on the grass. “I
thought I saw someone snooping there behind that tree,” she said. “You
see I have to be careful. A man’s life depends on my being careful.”
Warning Maud that whatever happened she was not to tell the secret, now
for the first time to be told to another, May launched into her tale. On
a dark night, when it was raining and when the trees shook in the wind,
she had got out of bed in the Edgley house and had opened her window to
behold the storm. She could not imagine what had led her to do it. It
was something she had never done before. To tell the truth a voice
outside herself seemed to be calling her, commanding her. Well, she had
thrown up the window and had stood looking out. How the wind screamed
and shrieked! Furies seemed abroad in the night. The house itself
trembled on its foundations and great trees bent almost to the ground.
Now and then there was a flash of lightning and she could see the whole
outdoors as plain as day—“I could even see the leaves on the tree.” May
had thought the world must be coming to an end but for some strange
reason she was not in the least afraid. It was impossible to explain the
feeling she had on that night. Well, she couldn’t sleep. Something,
outside there, in the darkness, seemed to be calling, calling to her.
“All of this happened more than two years ago, when I was just a young
girl in school,” she explained.
On that night when the storm raged May had seen, during one of the
flashes of lightning, a man running desperately across the very field,
where now she and Maud sat so quietly. Even from where she stood by the
window in the upstairs room she could see that he was white and that his
face was drawn and tired from long running. Behind him, perhaps a dozen
strides behind, was another man, a giant black, with a club in his hand.
In a moment May knew, she knew everything, knowledge came into her mind
and illuminated it as the lightning had illuminated the scene in the
field. The giant black with the club was about to kill the other man,
the white man in the field. In a moment she knew she would see a murder
done. The fleeing man could not escape. At every stride the black
gained. There came a second flash of lightning and then the white man
stumbled and fell. May threw up her hands and screamed. She had always
been ashamed of the fact but why deny it—she fainted.
What a night that had turned out to be! Even to speak of it made May
shudder, even yet. Her father had heard her scream and came running to
her room. She recovered—she sat up—in a few quick words she told her
father what she had seen.
Well, you see, her father and she had got out of the house somehow. They
were both in their night dresses and in the woodshed back of the house
her father had fumbled about and had got hold of an axe. It was the only
weapon of any kind he could lay his hands on about the place.
And there they were, in the darkness. No more flashes of lightning came
and it began to rain. It poured. The rain came in torrents and the wind
blew so that the trees seemed to be shouting to each other, calling to
each other like friends lost in some dark pit.
There was plenty of shouting after that but neither May nor her father
was afraid. They were perhaps too excited for fear to take hold of them.
May didn’t know exactly how she felt. No words could describe how she
felt.
Followed by her father she ran, down the little hill back of the
kitchen, got across the creek, stumbled and fell several times, picked
herself up and ran on again. They came to the fence at the edge of the
field. Well, they got over somehow. It was strange how the field, across
which they had both walked so many times in the daytime (as a child May
had always played there) and she thought she knew every blade of grass,
every little pond, and hillock,—it was strange how it had changed. It
was exactly as though she and her father had run out upon a wide
treeless plain. They ran, it seemed for hours and hours, and still they
were in the field. Later when May thought of the experiences of that
night she understood how men came to write fairy tales. Why, the ground
in the field might have been made of rubber that stretched out as they
ran.
They could see no trees, no buildings—nothing. For a time she and her
father kept close together, running desperately, into nothingness, into
a wall of darkness.
Then her father got lost from her, was swallowed up in the darkness.
What a roaring of voices went on. Trees somewhere, away off in the
distance, were shouting to each other. The very blades of grass seemed
to be talking—in excited whispers, you understand.
It was terrible! Now and then May could hear her father’s voice. He just
swore. “Gol darn you,” he shouted over and over. The words were grunted
forth.
Then there was another and terrible voice—it must have been the voice of
the black, intent upon murder. May could not understand what he said.
He, of course, just shouted words in some strange foreign language—a
gibberish of words.
Then May stopped running. She was too exhausted to run any more and sat
down on the ground at the edge of one of the little ponds. Her hair had
all fallen about her face. Well, she wasn’t afraid. The thing that had
happened was too big to be afraid of. It was like being in the presence
of God and one couldn’t be afraid. How could one? A blade of grass isn’t
afraid in the presence of the sun, coming up. That’s the way May
felt—little you see—a tiny thing in the vast night—nothing.
How wet she was! Her clothes clung to her. All about the voices went on
and on and the storm raged. She sat with her feet in a puddle of water
and things seemed to fly past her, dark figures running, screaming,
swearing, saying strange words. She herself did not doubt—when she
thought of it all after it was over—that the giant black and her father
had both run past her a dozen times, had passed so close to her that she
might have put out her hand and touched them.
How long did she sit there in the darkness? That was something she never
knew and her father was like her about it too. Later he couldn’t have
said, for the life of him, how long he ran about in the darkness, trying
to strike something with the axe. Once he ran against a tree. Well, he
drew back and sank the axe into the tree. Sometime—in the daytime—May
would show Maud the tree with the great gash in it. Her father sank the
axe so deeply into the body of the tree that he had work getting it out
again and even in the midst of his excitement he had to laugh to think
of what a silly fool he had been.
And there was May sitting with her feet in the puddle, the hair clinging
to her bare shoulders, her head in her hands, trying to think, trying
perhaps to catch some meaningful word in the strange roar of voices.
Well, what was she thinking about? She didn’t know.
And then a hand touched her, a white strong firm hand. It just crept up
out of the darkness, seemed to come out of the very ground under her.
There was one thing sure—although she lived to be a thousand years old,
May would never know why she didn’t scream, faint away, get up and run
madly, butting her head against things.
“Love is a strange thing,” she told Maud Welliver, as the two sat in the
field that warm clear starlit evening. Her voice trembled. “I knew a man
had come to whom I would be faithful unto death,” she explained.
That was the beginning of the strangest and most exciting time in May’s
whole life. Never had she thought she would tell anyone in the world
about it, at least not until the time came for her marriage, and when
all the dangers that still faced the man she loved had passed like a
cloud.
On that terrible night, and while the storm still raged, the hand that
had crept so strangely and unexpectedly into hers had at once quieted
and reassured her. It was too dark to see the face and the body of the
man’s back of the hand, but for some reason she knew at once that he was
beautiful and good. She loved the man at once and completely, that was
the truth. Later he had told her that his own experience was the same.
For him also there came a great peace of the spirit, after his hand
found hers in the midst of that roaring darkness.
They got out of that field and into the Edgley house somehow, crawled
along together and when they got to the house they did not light a lamp
or anything but sat on the floor of May’s room hand in hand, talking in
low quiet tones. After a long time, perhaps an hour, May’s father came
home. He had got out of the field and had wandered on a country road and
as he went along he heard stealthy footsteps behind him. That was the
black following the wrong man and it’s a wonder he didn’t kill John
Edgley. What happened was that the drayman began to run and got into a
grove of trees and there lost his pursuer. Then he took off his shoes
and managed to find his way home barefooted. The black having followed
the wrong man turned out to be a good thing. The man up in May’s room
was free, for the first time in more than two years, he was free.
It had turned out that the man was quite badly injured, the black
having, in his excitement, aimed a blow at his head that would have done
for him had it struck fair. However, the blow glanced off and only
bruised his head and made it bleed and as he sat in the darkness on the
floor in May’s room with his hand in hers, telling her his story, the
blood kept dropping thump, thump, on the floor. May had thought, at the
time, it was water falling from her hair. It just went to show what a
man he was, afraid of nothing, enduring everything without a murmur.
Later he was sick with a fever for weeks and May never left his room,
but gradually nursed him back to health and strength, and no one in
Bidwell had ever known of his presence in the house. Later he left town
at night, on a dark night when, to save yourself, you couldn’t see your
hand before your face.
As to the man’s story—it had never been told to anyone and if May told
it to Maud Welliver it was because she had to have at least one friend
who knew all. Even her father, who had risked his life, did not know.
May put her hands over her face and leaned forward and for a long time
she was silent. In the grass the insects kept singing and on a distant
street Maud could hear the footsteps of people walking. What a world she
had come into when she left Fort Wayne and came to Bidwell! Indiana was
not like Ohio! The very air was different. She breathed deeply and
looked about into the soft darkness. Had she been alone she could not
have stood being in a place where such wonderful things as had just been
described to her could happen. How quiet it was in the field now. She
put out a hand softly and touched May’s dress and tried to think but her
own thoughts were vague, they swam away into a strange world. To go to a
theatre, to read books, to hear of the commonplace adventures of other
people—how dull and uneventful her life had been before she knew May.
Once her father had been in a wreck on the railroad and by a miracle had
escaped uninjured and, when company came to the Welliver house, he
always told of the wreck, how the cars were piled up and how he, walking
over the tops of cars in the darkness of a rainy night was pitched off
and went flying, head over heels, only by a pure miracle to land on his
feet in dense bushes, uninjured, only badly shaken up. May had thought
the tale exciting, she had been stupid enough to think it exciting. What
contempt she now had for such weak commonplace adventures. What a vast
change knowing May Edgley had made in her life!
“You won’t tell. You promise on your life you won’t tell.” May’s hand
gripped Maud’s and the two women sat in silence, intent, shaken with
some vast emotion that seemed to run over the dry grass in the field,
through the branches of distant trees, and that seemed to effect even
the stars in the sky. To Maud the stars appeared about to speak. They
came down close out of the sky. “Be cautious,” they seemed to be saying.
Had she lived in old times, in Judea, and had she been permitted to go
into the room where Jesus sat at the last supper with his disciples, she
could not have felt more completely humble and thankful that she, of all
the people in the world had been permitted to be where she was at the
moment.
“He was a prince in his own country,” May said suddenly breaking the
silence that had become so intense that in another moment Maud thought
she would have screamed. “He lived, Oh, far away.” In his own country
the father, a king, had decided to marry the prince to the princess of a
neighboring kingdom, and on the same day his sister was to marry the
brother of his betrothed. Neither he nor his sister had ever seen the
man and woman they were to marry. Princes and princesses don’t, you
know. That is the way such things are arranged when princes and
princesses are concerned.
“He thought nothing about it, was all ready for the marriage, and then
one night something came into his head and he had an almost overpowering
desire to see the woman, who was to be his wife, and the man who was to
be his sister’s husband. Well, he went at night and crept up the side of
a great wall to the window of a tower, and through the window saw the
man and woman. How ugly they were—horrible! He shuddered. For a time he
thought he would let go his hold on the stone face of the wall and be
dashed to bits on the rocks beneath. He was ready to die with
horror—didn’t care much.
“And then he thought of his sister, the beautiful princess. Whatever
happened she had to be saved from such a marriage.
“And so home the prince went and confronted his father and there was a
terrible scene, the father swearing the marriage would have to be
consummated. The neighboring king was powerful and his kingdom was of
vast extent and the marriage would make the son, born of the marriage,
the most powerful king in the whole world. The prince and the king stood
in the castle and looked at each other. Neither of them would give in an
inch.
“There was one thing of which the prince was sure—if he did not marry
his sister would not have to. If he went away there would be a quarrel
between the two old kings. He was sure of that.
“First though he gave the king, his father, his chance. ‘I won’t do it,’
he declared and he stuck to his word. The king was furious. ‘I’ll
disinherit you,’ he cried, and then he ordered his son to go out of his
presence and not to come back until he had made up his mind to go ahead
with the marriage.
“What the king did not expect was that he would be taken at his word.
For what the young man, the prince, did, you see, was to just walk out
of the castle and right on out into the world.
“Poor man, his hands were then as soft as a woman’s,” May explained.
“You see in all his former life he had never even lifted his hand to do
a thing. When he dressed he didn’t even button his own clothes. A prince
never did.
“And so the prince ran away and managed, after unbelievable hardships,
to make his way to a seaport, where he got a place as sailor on a ship
just leaving for foreign parts. The captain of the ship did not know,
and the other sailors did not know that he was a king’s son, nor did
they know that a great outcry was going up and horsemen riding madly
over the whole country, trying to find the lost prince.
“So he got away and was a sailor and in the castle his father was so
furious he would not speak to anyone. He shut himself up in a room of
the castle and just swore and swore.
“And then one day he called to him a giant black, one who had been his
slave since he was born, and was the strongest, the fleetest of foot and
the smartest man too, of all the king’s servants. ‘Go over land and
sea,’ shouted the king. ‘Go into all strange far away lands and amongst
all peoples. Do not let me ever see your face again until you have found
my son and have brought him back to marry the woman I have decided shall
be his wife. If you find him and he will not come strike him down if you
must, but do not kill him. Stun him and bring him to me. Do not let me
see your face again until you have done my bidding.’ He threw a handful
of gold at the black’s feet. That was to pay the fares on railroads and
buy his meals at hotels,” May explained.
“And all the time the king’s son was sailing on and on, over unknown
seas. He passed icebergs, islands and continents, and saw great whales
and at night heard the growling of wild beasts on strange shores.
“He wasn’t afraid, not he. And all the time he kept getting stronger and
his hands got harder, and he could do more work and do it quicker than
almost any man on the ship. Almost every day the captain called him
aside. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are my bravest and best sailor. How shall I
reward you?’
“But the young prince wanted no reward. He was so glad to escape from
that horrible king’s daughter. How homely she was. Why her teeth stuck
out of her mouth like tusks and she was all covered with wrinkles and
haggard.
“And the ship sailed and sailed, and it hit a hidden rock, sticking up
in the bottom of the ocean, and was split right in two. All but the
prince were drowned.
“He swam and swam and came at last to an island that had a mountain on
it, and no one lived there, and the mountain was filled with gold. After
a long time a passing ship took him off but he told no one of the golden
mountain. He sailed and sailed and came to America, and started out to
get money to buy a ship and go get the gold and go back to his own
country, rich enough so he could marry almost anyone he chose. He had
worked and worked and saved money, and then the giant black got on his
trail. He tried to escape, time after time he tried to escape. He had
been trying that time May found him half-dead in the field.
“The way that came about was that he was on a train passing through
Bidwell at night and it was the nine-fifty, that didn’t stop but only
threw off a mail sack. He was on that train and the black was on it,
too, and, as the train went flying through Bidwell in the terrible
storm, the prince opened a door and jumped and the black jumped after
him. They ran and ran.
“By a miracle neither of them was hurt by the leap from the train, and
then they had got into the field where May had seen them.
“I can’t think what kept me awake on that night,” May said again. She
arose and walked toward the Edgley house. “We are betrothed. He has gone
to earn money to buy a ship and get the gold. Then he will come for me,”
she said in a matter of fact tone.
The two women went to the wire fence, crawled over and got into the
Edgley back yard. It was nearly midnight and Maud Welliver had never
before been out so late. In the Welliver house her aunt and father sat
waiting for her, frightened and nervous. “If she doesn’t come soon I’ll
get the police to look for her. I’m afraid something dreadful has
happened.”
Maud did not, however, think of her father or of the reception that
awaited her in the Welliver house. Other and more sombre thoughts
occupied her mind. She had come on that evening to the Edgley house,
intending to ask May to go with her on the excursion to the Dewdrop with
the two grocers, and that was now an impossibility. One who was loved by
a prince, who was secretly betrothed to a prince, would never let
herself be seen in the company of a grocer, and, beside May, Maud knew
no other woman in Bidwell she felt she could ask to go on the trip, on
which she did not feel she could go alone. The whole thing would have to
be given up. With a catch in her throat she realized what the trip had
meant to her. In Fort Wayne, in the presence of the grocer Hunt, she had
felt as she had never felt in the presence of another man. He was old,
yes, but there was something in his eyes when he looked at her that made
her feel strange inside. He had written that he had something to say to
her. Now it could never be said.
In the darkness the two women passed around the Edgley house and came to
the front gate, and then Maud gave way to the grief struggling for
expression within. May was astonished and tried to comfort her. “What’s
the matter? What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously. Stepping through
the gate she put an arm about Maud Welliver’s shoulders and for a long
time the two figures rocked back and forth in the darkness, and then May
managed to get her to come to the Edgley front porch and sit beside her.
Maud told the story of the proposed trip and of what it had meant to
her—spoke of it as a thing of the past, as a hopeless dream that had
faded. “I wouldn’t dare ask you to go,” she said.
It was ten minutes later when Maud got up to go home and May was silent,
absorbed in her own thoughts. The tale of the prince was forgotten and
she thought only of the town, of what it had done to her, what it would
do again when the chance offered. The two grocers were both, however,
from another place and knew nothing of her. She thought of the long ride
to the shore of Sandusky Bay. Maud had conveyed to her some notion of
what the trip meant to her. May’s mind raced. “I could not be alone with
a man. I wouldn’t dare,” she thought. Maud had said they would go in a
surrey and there was something, that could be used now, in the story she
had told about the prince. She could insist that, because of the prince,
Maud was not to leave her alone with another man, with the strange
grocer, not for a moment.
May arose and stood irresolutely by the front door of the Edgley house
and watched Maud go through the gate. How her shoulders drooped. “Oh,
well, I’ll go. You fix it up. Don’t you tell anyone in the world, but
I’ll go,” she said and then, before Maud Welliver could recover from her
surprise, and from the glad thrill that ran through her body, May had
opened the door and had disappeared into the Edgley house.
------------------------------------------------------------------------