THE Dewdrop, where the dance Maud and May were to attend was to be held
was, in May Edgley’s day and no doubt is now, a dreary enough place. An
east and west trunk line here came down almost to the water’s edge,
touching and then swinging off inland again, and on a narrow strip of
land between the tracks and the bay several huge ice houses had been
built. To the west of the ice houses were four other buildings,
buildings less huge but equally stark and unsightly. The shore of the
bay, turned beyond the ice houses, leaving the four latter buildings
standing at some distance from the railroad, and during ten months of
the year they were uninhabited and stared with curtainless windows—that
looked like great dead eyes—out over the water.
The buildings had been erected by an ice company, with headquarters at
Cleveland, for the housing of its workmen during the ice-cutting season,
and the upper floors, reached by outside stairways, had rickety
balconies running about the four sides. The balconies served as entry
ways to small sleeping rooms each provided with a bunk built against the
inner wall and filled with straw.
Still further west was the village of Dewdrop itself, a place of some
eight or ten small unpainted frame houses, inhabited by men who combined
fishing with small farming, and on the shore before each house a small
sailing craft was drawn, during the winter months, far up on the sand
out of the reach of storms.
All summer long the Dewdrop remained a quiet sleepy place and, far away,
over the water, smoke from factory chimneys in the growing industrial
city of Sandusky, at the foot of the bay, could be seen—a cloud of smoke
that drifted slowly across the horizon and was torn and tossed by a
wind. On summer days, on the long beaches a few fishermen launched their
boats and went to visit the nets while their children played in the sand
at the water’s edge. Inland the farming country—black land, partially
covered at certain seasons of the year with stagnant water—was not very
prosperous and the road leading down to the Dewdrop from the towns of
Fremont, Bellevue, Clyde, Tiffin, and Bidwell was often impassable.
On June days, however, in May Edgley’s time, parties came down along the
road to the beach and there was the screaming of town children, the
laughter of women and the gruff voices of men. They stayed for a day and
an evening and went, leaving upon the beach many empty tin cans, rusty
cooking utensils and bits of paper that lay rotting at the base of trees
and among the bushes back from the shore.
The hot months of July and August came and brought a little life. The
summer crew came to take the ice out of the ice houses and load it into
cars. They came in the morning and departed in the evening, and, as they
were quiet workmen with families of their own, did nothing to disturb
the quiet of the place. At the noon hour they sat in the shade of one of
the ice houses and ate their luncheons while they discussed such
problems as whether it was better for a workman to pay rent or to own
his own house, going into debt and paying on the installment plan.
Night came and an adventurous girl, daughter of one of the fishermen,
went to walk on the beach. Thanks to wind and rain the beach kept itself
always quite clean. Great tree stumps and logs had been carried up on to
the sand by winter storms but the wind and water had mellowed these and
touched them with delightful color. On moonlight nights the old roots,
clinging to the tree trunks, were like gaunt arms reached up to the sky,
and on stormy nights these moved back and forth in the wind and sent a
thrill of terror through the breast of the girl. She pressed her body
against the wall of one of the ice houses and listened. Far away, over
the water, were the massed lights of the great town of Sandusky and over
her shoulder the few feeble lights of her own fishing town. A group of
tramps had dropped off a freight train that afternoon and were making a
night of it about the empty workingmen’s lodging houses. They had jerked
doors off their hinges and were throwing them down from the balconies
above and soon a great fire would be lit and all night the fishing
families would be disturbed by oaths and shouts. The adventurous girl
ran swiftly along the beach but was seen by one of the road adventurers.
The fire had been lighted and he took a burning stick in his hand and
hurled it over her head. “Run little rabbit,” he called as the burning
stick, after making a long arch through the air, fell with a hiss into
the water.
That was a prelude to the coming of winter and the time of terror. In
the hard month of January, when the whole bay was covered with thick
ice, a fat man in a heavy fur overcoat, got off a train, that stopped
beside the ice houses, and from a car at the front of the train a great
multitude of boxes, kegs and crates were pitched into the deep snow at
the track side. The world of the cities was coming to break the winter
silence of the Dewdrop and the fur coated man and his helpers had come
to set the stage for the drama. Hundreds of thousands of tons of ice
were to be cut and stored in sawdust in the great ice houses and for
weeks, the quiet secluded spot would be astir with life. The silence
would be torn by cries, oaths, bits of drunken song—fights would be
started and blood would flow.
The fat man waded through the snow to the four empty houses and began to
look about. From the little cluster of native houses thin columns of
smoke went up into the winter sky. He spoke to one of his helpers. “Who
lives in those shacks?” he asked. He himself had much money invested at
the Dewdrop but visited the place but once each year and then stayed but
a few days. He walked through the big dining room and along the upper
galleries where the ice cutters slept, swearing softly. During the year
much of his property had been destroyed. Windows had been broken and
doors torn from their hinges and he took pencil and paper from his
pocket and began to figure. “We’ll have to spend all of three hundred
dollars this year,” he meditated. The thoughts of the money, thus thrown
away, brought a flush to his cheeks and he looked again along the shore
towards the tiny houses. Almost every year he decided he would go to the
houses and do what he called “raising the devil.” If doors were torn
from hinges and windows smashed these people must have done it. No one
else lived at the Dewdrop. “Well I suppose they are a rough gang and I’d
better let them alone,” he concluded, “I’ll send a couple of carpenters
down tomorrow and have them do just what has to be done. It’s better to
keep the ice cutters filled up with beer than to waste money giving them
luxurious quarters.”
The fat man went away and other men came. Fires were lighted in the
kitchens of the great boarding houses, carpenters nailed doors back on
hinges and replaced broken windows and the Dewdrop was ready again for
its season of feverish activity.
The fisher folk hid themselves completely away. On the day when the
first of the ice cutters arrived one of them spoke to his assembled
family. He looked at his daughter, a somewhat comely girl of fifteen,
who could sail a boat through the roughest storm that ever swept down
the bay. “I want you to keep out of sight,” he said. One winter night a
fire had broken out in the dining room of the smallest of the houses
where the ice cutters boarded and the fishermen with their wives had
gone to help put it out. That was an event they could never forget. As
the men worked, carrying buckets of water from a hole cut in the ice of
the bay, a group of young roughs, from Cleveland, tried to drag their
wives into another of the houses. Screams and cries arose on the winter
air and the men ran to the defense of their women. A battle began, some
of the ice cutters fighting on the side of the fishermen, some on the
side of the young roughs, but the fishermen never knew they had helpers
in the struggle. Out of a mass of swearing, laughing men they had
managed to drag their women and escape to their own houses and the
thoughts of what might have happened, had they been unsuccessful, had
brought the fear of man upon them. “I want you to keep out of sight,”
the fisherman said to his assembled family, but as he said it he looked
at his daughter. He imagined her dragged into the upper galleries of the
boarding houses and handed about among the city men—something like that
had come near happening to her mother. He stared hard at his daughter
and she was frightened by the look in his eyes. “You,” he began again,
“now you—well you keep yourself out of sight. Those men are looking for
just such girls as you.” The fisherman went out of the room and his
daughter stood by a window. Sometimes, on Sundays, during the
ice-cutting time, the men who had not gone to spend the day in the city
walked in the afternoon along the beach past the houses of the fishermen
and, more than once, she had peeked out at them from behind a curtain.
Sometimes they stopped before one of the houses and shouted and a wit
among them exercised his powers. “Hey, the house,” he shouted, “is there
any woman in there wants a louse for a lover.” The wit leaped upon the
shoulders of one of his companions and with his teeth snatched the cap
off his head. Turning towards the house he made an elaborate bow. “I’m
only a little louse but I’m cold. Let me crawl into your nest,” he
shouted.
* * * * *
There were six young men from Bidwell who went to the dance given at the
Dewdrop on the June evening when May went there with Maud and the two
widowed grocers, homeward bound from the K. of P. convention at
Cleveland. The dance was held in one of the large rooms, on the first
floor of one of the boarding houses, one of the rooms used as a dining
and drinking place by the ice cutters in the months of January and
February. A group of farmers’ sons gave the dance and Rat Gould, a
one-eyed fiddler from Clyde, came with two other fiddlers, to furnish
the music. The dance was open to all who paid fifty cents at the door,
and women paid nothing. Rat Gould had announced it at other dances given
at Clyde, Bellevue, Castalia and on the floors of newly build barns.
There was an idea. At all dances, where Rat had officiated, for several
weeks previously, the announcement had been made. “There will be a dance
at the Dewdrop two weeks from next Friday night,” he had cried out in a
shrill voice. “A prize will be given. The best dressed lady gets a new
calico dress.”
Three of the young men from Bidwell who came to the dance, were railroad
employees, brakemen on freight trains. They, like John Welliver, worked
for the Nickel Plate and their names were Sid Gould, Herman Sanford and
Will Smith. With them, to the dance, went Harry Kingsley, Michael
Tompkins and Cal Mosher, all known in Bidwell as young sports. Cal
Mosher tended bar at the Crescent Saloon near the Nickel Plate station
in Bidwell and Michael Tompkins and Harry Kingsley were house painters.
The going of the six young men to the dance was unpremeditated. They had
met at the Crescent Saloon early on that June evening and there was a
good deal of drinking. There had been a ball game between the baseball
teams of Clyde and Bidwell during the week before, and that was talked
over, and, thinking and speaking of the defeat of the Bidwell team, all
six of the young men grew angry. “Let’s go over to Clyde,” Cal Mosher
said. The young men went to a livery stable and hired a team and surrey
and set out, taking with them a plentiful supply of whiskey in bottles.
It was decided they would make a night of it. As they drove along
Turner’s Pike, between Bidwell and Clyde they stopped before farmhouses.
“Hey, go to bed you rubes. Get the cows milked and go on to bed,” they
shouted. Michael Tompkins, called Mike, was the wit of the party and he
decided upon a stroke to win applause. At one of the farmhouses he went
to the door and told the woman who came to answer his knock that a
friend of hers wanted to speak to her in the road and the woman, a plump
red-cheeked farmer’s wife, came boldly out and stood in the road beside
the surrey. Mike crept up behind her and throwing his arms about her
neck pulled her quickly backward. The woman screamed with fright as Mike
kissed her on the cheek and, jumping into the surrey, Mike joined in the
laughter of his companions. “Tell your husband your lover has been
here,” he shouted at the woman, now fleeing toward the house. Cal Mosher
slapped him on the back. “You got a nerve, Mike,” he said filled with
admiration. He slapped his knees with his hands. “She’ll have something
to talk about for ten years, eh? She won’t get over talking about that
kiss Mike gave her for ten years.”
At Clyde, the Bidwell young men went into Charley Shuter’s saloon and
there got into trouble. Sid Gould was pitcher for the Bidwell team and
during the game at Clyde, during the week before, had been hurt by a
swiftly pitched ball that struck him on the side of the head as he stood
at bat. He had been unable to continue pitching, and the man who took
his place was unskillful and the game was lost, and now, standing at the
bar in Charley Shuter’s saloon, Sid remembered his injury and began to
talk in a loud voice, challenging another group of young men at another
end of the bar. Charley Shuter’s bartender became alarmed. “Here, now,
don’t you go starting nothing. Don’t you go trying to start nothing in
this place,” he growled.
Sid turned to his friends. “Well, the cowardly pup, he beaned me,” he
said. “Well, I had the team, this town thinks so much of, eating out of
my hand. For five innings they never got a smell of a hit. Then what did
they do, eh? They fixed it up with their cowardly pitcher to bean
me—that’s what they did.”
One of the young men of Clyde, loafing the evening away in the saloon,
was an outfielder on the Clyde ball team and as Sid talked he went out
at the front door. From store to store and from saloon to saloon he ran
hurriedly, whispering, sending messengers out in all directions. He was
a tall blue-eyed soft-voiced man but he had now become intensely
excited. A dozen other young men gathered about him and the crowd
started for Shuter’s saloon but when they had got there the young men
from Bidwell had come out to the sidewalk, had unhitched their horses
from the railing before the saloon door and were preparing to depart.
“Yah, you,” bawled the blue-eyed outfielder. “Don’t tell lies and then
sneak out of town. Stand up and take your medicine.”
The fight at Clyde was short and sharp and when it had lasted three
minutes, and when Sid Gould had lost two teeth and two of his companions
had acquired bleeding heads, they managed to struggle into the surrey
and start the horses. The blue-eyed outfielder, white with wrath and
disappointment, sprang on the steps. “Come back, you cheap skates,” he
cried. The surrey rattled off over the cobblestones and several Clyde
young men ran in the road behind. Sid Gould drew back his arm and caught
the outfielder a swinging blow on the nose and the blow knocked him out
of the surrey to the road so that a wheel ran over his legs. Leaning
out, and mad now with joy, Sid issued a challenge. “Come over to
Bidwell, one at a time, and I’ll clean up your whole town alone. All I
want is to get at you fellows one or two at a time,” he challenged.
In the road north of Clyde, Cal Mosher, who was driving, stopped the
horses and there was a discussion as to whether the journey should be
continued on to the town of Fremont, in search of new and perhaps more
enticing adventures, or whether it would be better to go back to Bidwell
and mend broken teeth, cut lips and blackened eyes. Sid Gould, the most
badly injured member of the party, settled the matter. “There’s a dance
down at the Dewdrop tonight. Let’s go down there and stir up the
farmers. This night is just started for me,” he said, and the heads of
the horses were turned northward. On the back seat Will Smith and Harry
Kingsley fell into a troubled sleep, Herman Sanford and Michael Tompkins
attempted a song and Cal Mosher talked to Sid. “We’ll get up another
game with that bunch from Clyde,” he said. “Now you listen and I’ll tell
you how to work it. You pitch the game, see. Well, you fan every man
that faces you for eight innings. That will show them up, show what
mutts they are. Then, when it comes to the ninth inning, you start to
bean ’em. You can lay out three or four of that gang before the game
ends in a scrap, and when that time comes we’ll have our own gang on
hand.”
* * * * *
At the Dewdrop, when the six young men from Bidwell arrived at about
eleven o’clock, the dance was in full swing. The doors and windows to
the dining room of one of the big frame boarding houses had been thrown
open and the floor carefully swept, and over the windows and doorways
green branches of trees had been hung. The night was fine—with a
moon—and, on a white beach, twenty feet away, the waters of the bay made
a faint murmuring sound. At one end of the dance hall and on a little
raised platform sat Rat Gould with his brother Will, a small grey-haired
man who played a base viol larger than himself. Two other men, fiddlers
like Rat himself filled out the orchestra. Nearly every dance announced
was a square dance and Rat did the “calling off,” his shrill voice
rising above the shuffle of feet and the low continuous hum of
conversations. “Swing your pardners round and round. Bow your heads down
to the ground. Kick your heels and let her fly. The night is fine and
the moon’s on high,” he sang.
In a corner of the big room with her escort, the grocer, from the town
of Muncie in Indiana, sat May Edgley. He was a rather heavy and fleshy
man of forty-five, whose wife had died during the year before, and for
the first time since that event he was with a woman and the thought had
excited him. There was a round bald spot on the top of his head and
blushes kept running up his cheeks, into his hair and out upon the bald
spot, like waves upon a beach. May had put on a white dress, bought for
the ceremony of graduation from the Bidwell high school and, the owner
being out of town, had borrowed from Lillian,—unknown to her—a huge
white hat, decorated with a long ostrich feather, of the variety known
as a willow plume.
She had never before been to a dance and her escort had not danced since
boyhood but at Maud Welliver’s suggestion they had tried to take part in
a square dance. “It’s easy,” Maud had said. “All you got to do is to
watch and do what everyone else is doing.”
The attempt turned out a failure, and all the other dancers giggled and
laughed at the fat man from Muncie as he rolled and capered about. He
ran in the wrong direction, grabbed other men’s partners, whirled them
about and even got into the wrong set. A madness of embarrassment seized
him and he rushed for May, as one hurries into the house at the coming
of a sudden storm, and taking her by the arm started to get off the
floor, out of sight of the laughing people—but Rat Gould shouted at him.
“Come back, fat man,” he shrieked and the grocer, not knowing what else
to do, started to whirl May about. She also laughed and protested but
before she could make him understand that she did not want to dance any
more his feet flew out from under him and he sat down, pulling May down
to sit upon his round paunch.
For May that evening was terrible and the time spent at the dance hung
fire like a long unused and rusty old gun. It seemed to her that every
passing minute was heavily freighted with possibilities of evil for
herself. In the surrey, coming out from Bidwell, she had remained
silent, filled with vague fears and Maud Welliver was also silent. In a
way she wished May had not come. Alone with Grover Hunt on such a night,
she felt she might have had something to say, but all the time, in her
mind floated vague visions of May—alone in the wood with Jerome Hadley,
May struggling for life there, in the darkness of the field on that
other night—and grasping the hand of a prince. Grover Hunt’s hand took
hold of hers and he also became silent with embarrassment. When they had
got to the Dewdrop, and when they had danced in two square dances, Maud
went to May. “Mr. Hunt and I are going to take a little walk together,”
she said. “We won’t be gone long.” Through a window May saw the two
figures go off along the beach in the moonlight.
The man who had brought May to the dance was named Wilder, and he also
wanted May to go walk with him, into the moonlight outside, but could
not bring himself to the point of asking so bold a favor. He lit a cigar
and held it outside the window, taking occasional puffs and blowing the
smoke into the outer air and told May of the K. of P. convention at
Cleveland, of a ride the delegates had taken in automobiles and of a
dinner given in their honor by the business men of Cleveland. “It was
one of the largest affairs ever held in the city,” he said. The Mayor
had come and there was present a United States Senator. Well, there was
one man there. He was a fat fellow who could say such funny things that
everyone in the room rocked with laughter. He was the master of
ceremonies and all evening kept telling the funniest stories. As for the
Muncie grocer, he had been unable to eat. Well, he laughed until his
sides ached. Grocer Wilder tried to reproduce one of the tales told by
the Cleveland funny man. “There were two farmers,” he began, “they went
to the city of Philadelphia, to a church convention, and at the same
time and in the same city a convention of brewers was being held. The
two farmers got into the wrong place.”
May’s escort stopped talking and growing suddenly red, leaned out at the
window and puffed hard at his cigar. “Well, I can’t remember,” he
declared. It had come into his mind that the story he had started to
tell was one a man could not tell to a woman. “Gee, I nearly put me foot
into it! I came near making a break,” he thought.
May looked from her escort to the men and women dancing on the floor. In
her eyes fear lurked. “I wonder if anyone here knows me, I wonder if
anyone knows about me and Jerome Hadley,” she thought. Fear, like a
little hungry mouse, gnawed at May’s soul. Two red-cheeked country girls
sitting on a nearby bench put their heads together and whispered “Oh, I
don’t believe it,” one of them shouted and they both gave way to a spasm
of giggles. May turned to look at them and something gripped at her
heart. A young farm hand, with a shiny red face and with a white
handkerchief tied about his neck, beckoned to another young man and the
two went outside into the moonlight. They also whispered and laughed.
One of them turned to look back at May’s white face and then they lit
cigars and walked away. May could no longer hear the voice of grocer
Wilder telling of his adventures at the convention at Cleveland. “They
know me, I’m sure they know me. They have heard that story. Something
dreadful will happen to me before the night is over,” she thought.
May had always wanted to be in some such place as the one to which she
had now come, some place where many strange people had congregated and
where she could move freely about among strange people. Before the
Jerome Hadley incident, and the giving up of the idea of becoming a
schoolteacher she had thought a great deal of what she would do when she
became a teacher. Everything had been carefully planned. She would get a
place as teacher in some town or in the country, far from Bidwell and
from the Edgleys and there she would live her own life and make her own
way. There would be no handicap of birth and she could stand upon her
own feet. Well, that would be a chance. Her natural smartness would at
last count for something real and in the new place she would go about to
dances and to other social gatherings. Being the schoolteacher, and in a
way responsible for the future of their children, people would be glad
to invite her into their houses, and all she wanted was a chance, the
opportunity to step unknown into the presence of people who had never
been to Bidwell and had never heard of the Edgleys.
Then she would show what she could do! She would go—well, to a dance or
to a house where many people had congregated to have a good time. She
would move about, saying things, laughing, keeping everyone on tiptoes.
What things her quick mind would make up to say! Words would become
little sharp swords with which she played. How many pictures her mind
had made of herself in the midst of such an assemblage. It was not her
fault if she found herself the centre toward which all eyes looked and,
in spite of the fact that she was the outstanding figure in any
assemblage of people among whom she went, she would always remain
modest. After all, she would not say things that would hurt people.
Indeed she would not do that! Such a thing would not be necessary. It
would all be very lovely. Several people would be talking and up she
would come and for a moment she would listen, to catch the drift of what
was being said, and then her own word would be said. Well it would
startle people. She would have a new, a novel, a startling but
attractive point of view on any subject that was brought up. Her mind
was extraordinarily quick. It would attend to things.
With her fancy thus filled with the thoughts of the possibilities of
herself as a glowing social figure May turned toward her escort who,
puzzled by her apparent indifference, was striving manfully to remember
the funny things the Cleveland man had said at the dinner given for the
K. of Ps. Many of the man’s stories could not be repeated to a lady—it
had been what is called a stag dinner—but others could be. Of the ones
that could be told anywhere—they were called parlor stories—he
remembered one and launched into it. May pitied him. He forgot the
point, could not remember where the story began and ended. “Well,” he
began, “there was a man and woman on a train. It was on a train on the
B. and O. No, I think the man said it was on the Lake Shore and Michigan
Southern. Perhaps they were riding on a train on the Pennsylvania
Railroad. I have forgotten what the woman said to the man. It was about
a dog another woman was trying to conceal in a basket. They do not allow
dogs in passenger cars on railroads, you know. Something very funny
happened. I thought I would die laughing when the man told about it.”
“If I had that story to tell I could make something out of it,” May
thought. She imagined herself telling the story of the man and the woman
and the dog. How she would decorate it, add little touches. That fat man
in Cleveland might have been funny but had she been entrusted with the
telling of the story, she was sure he would have been outdone. Her mind
began to recast the story and then the fear, that had all evening been
lurking within, came back and she forgot the man, the woman and the dog
on the train. Again her eyes searched the faces in the room and when a
new man or woman came in she trembled. “Suppose Jerome Hadley were to
come here tonight,” she thought and the thought made her ill. It was a
thing that might happen. Jerome was a young man and a bachelor and he no
doubt went about to places, to dances and to shows at the Bidwell Opera
House, and he might now, at any moment, come into the very room in which
she was sitting and walk directly to her. In the berry field he had been
bold and had not cared what he said and, if he came to the dance, he
would walk directly to her and might even take her by the arm. “I want
you,” he would say. “Come outside with me.”
May tried to think what she would do if such a thing happened. Would she
struggle and refuse to go, thus attracting the attention of everyone in
the room, or would she go quietly and make her struggle with the man
outside alone in the darkness? Her mind ran into a tangle of thoughts.
It was true that Jerome Hadley had done something quite terrible to her,
had tried to kill something within her, but after all she had
surrendered to him. She had lain with the man—filled with fear,
trembling to be sure—but the thing had been done. In a strange sort of
way she belonged to Jerome Hadley and suppose he were to come and demand
again that she submit. Could she refuse? Had she become, and in spite of
herself, the property of the man?
With her head a whirlpool of thought May stared, half wildly, about. If
in her own room in the Edgley house, and when she had hidden herself
away by the willows by the creek, she had built herself a tower of
romance in which she could live and from the windows of which she could
look down upon life, striving to understand it, to understand people,
the tower was now being destroyed. Hands were tearing at it, strong,
determined hands. She had felt them as she sat in the surrey with Maud
and the two grocers, outbound from Bidwell. Then as now she wondered why
she had consented to come to the dance. Well, she had come because not
to come would bring a disappointment to Maud Welliver, the only woman
who had come in any way close to herself, and now she was at the dance
and Maud had gone away, outdoors into darkness. She had gone away with a
man and it had been understood that would not happen. There was the
matter of the prince, her lover. It had been understood that, because of
the prince, Maud would not leave her alone with another man, and she had
left, had gone outdoors with a grocer and had left another grocer
sitting beside May.
Hands were tearing at her tower of romance, the tower she had built so
slowly and painfully, the tower in which she had found the prince, the
tower in which she had found a way to live and to be happy in spite of
the ugliness of actuality. Dust arose from the walls. An army of men and
women, male and female Jerome Hadleys, were charging down upon it. There
would be rape and murder and how could she, left alone, withstand them.
The prince had gone away. He was now far, far away, and the invaders
would clamor over the walls. They would throw her down from the walls.
The beautiful hangings in the tower, the rich silken gowns, the stones
from strange lands, all the treasures of the tower would be destroyed.
* * * * *
May had worked herself into a state of mind that made her want to
scream. In the room the dance went on, the shrill voice of Rat Gould
called off and the fiddles made dance music to which heavy feet scraped
over rough boards. By her side sat Grocer Wilder, still talking of the
K. of P. convention at Cleveland and May felt that, in coming to the
dance, she had raised a knife that in a moment would be plunged into her
own breast. She arose to go out of the room, out into the night, out of
the sight of people—but for a moment stood uncertain, looking vaguely
about. Then she sat heavily down. Grocer Wilder also arose and his face
grew red. “I’ve made a break,” he thought. He wondered what he had said
that had offended May. “Maybe she didn’t want me to smoke,” he told
himself and threw the end of his cigar out through a window. The moment
reminded him of many moments of his married life. It was like having his
wife back, this feeling of having offended a woman, without knowing in
just what the offense lay.
* * * * *
And then, through a door at the front, the six Bidwell young men came
into the room. They had stopped outside for a final drink out of the
bottles carried in their hip pockets and, the appetite for drink being
satisfied, another appetite had come into the ascendency. They wanted
women.
Sid Gould, accompanied by Cal Mosher, led the way into the dance hall.
His face had become badly swollen during the drive north from Clyde and
he walked uncertainly.
He walked directly toward May, who turned her face to the wall and tried
to hide herself. She looked like a rabbit, cornered by dogs, and when
she turned on her seat and half knelt, trying to hide her face, the rim
of Lillian Edgley’s white dress hat struck against the wall and the hat
fell to the floor. Trembling with excitement she turned and picked it
up. Her face was chalky white.
Sid Gould was well known in the Edgley household. One summer evening, in
the year before May’s mother’s death, he had got into a row with the
Edgleys. Being a little under the influence of drink and wanting a woman
he shouted at Kate Edgley, walking through the streets of Bidwell with a
traveling man, and a fight had been started in which the traveling man
blackened Sid’s eyes. Later he was taken into the mayor’s office and
fined and the whole affair had given the Edgley men and women a good
deal of satisfaction and had been discussed endlessly at the table. Old
John Edgley and the sons had sworn they also would beat the ball player.
“Just let me catch him alone somewhere, so I don’t get stuck for no
fine, and I’ll pound the head off’n him,” they declared.
In the dance hall, and when his eyes alighted upon the figure of May
Edgley, Sid Gould remembered his beating at the hands of the traveling
man and the ten dollar fine he had been compelled to pay for fighting on
the street. “Well, look here,” he cried turning to his companions, now
straggling into the room, “here’s one of the Edgley chickens, a long
ways from the home coop.”
“There she is—that little chicken over there by the wall.” Sid laughed
and leaning over slapped his knees with his hands. The twisted swollen
face made the laugh a grotesque, something horrible. Sid’s companions
gathered about him. “There she is,” he said, again pointing a wavering
forefinger. “It’s the youngest of that Edgley gang, the one that’s just
gone on the turf, the one that was so blamed smart in school. Jerome
Hadley says she’s all right, and I say she’s mine. I saw her first.”
In the hall all became quiet and many eyes were turned toward the
laughing man and the shrinking trembling woman by the wall. May tried to
stand erect, to be defiant, but her knees shook so that she sat quickly
down on the bench. Grover Wilder, now utterly confused, touched her on
the arm, intending to ask for an explanation of her strange behavior,
but at the touch of his finger she again sprang to her feet. She was
like some little automatic toy that goes stiffly through certain
movements when you touch some hidden spring. “What’s the matter, what’s
the matter?” Grocer Wilder asked wildly.
Sid Gould walked to where May stood and took hold of her arm and she
went meekly when he led her toward the door, walking demurely beside
him. He was amazed, having expected a struggle. “Well,” he thought, “I
got into trouble over that Kate Edgley but this one is different. She
knows how to behave. I’ll have a good time with this kid.” He remembered
the trial and the ten dollars he had been compelled to pay for his first
attempt to get into the good graces of one of the Edgley women. “I’ll
get the worth of my money now and I won’t pay this one a cent,” he
thought. He turned to his companions still straggling at his heels. “Get
out,” he cried. “Get your own women. I saw this one first. You go get
one of your own.”
Sid and May had got outside and nearly to the beach before strength came
back into May’s body and mind. She walked beside Sid on the white sand
and toward the beach. “Don’t be afraid little kid. I won’t hurt you,” he
said. May laughed nervously and he loosened the grip of his hand on her
arm.
And then, with a cry of joy she sprang away from him and leaning quickly
down grasped one of the pieces of driftwood with which the sand was
strewn. The stick whistled through the air and descended upon Sid’s
head, knocking him to his knees. “You, you!” he stuttered and then cried
out. “Hey, rubes!” he called and two of his companions, who had been
standing at the door of the dance hall, ran toward him. Swinging the
stick about her head May ran past them and in her nervous fright struck
Sid again. In her mind the thing that was happening was in some odd way
connected with the affair in the wood with Jerome. It was the same
affair. Sid Gould and Jerome were one man, they stood for the same
thing, were the same thing. They were something strange and terrible she
had to meet, with which she had to struggle. The thing they represented
had defeated her once, had got the best of her. She had surrendered to
it, had opened the gates that led into the tower of romance, that was
herself, that walled in her own secret and precious life. Something
terribly crude, without understanding had happened then—it must not,
could not happen again! She had been a child and had understood nothing
but now she did understand. There was a thing within herself that must
not be touched by unclean hands. A terrible fear of people swept over
her. There was Maud Welliver, whom she had tried to take as a friend,
and Lillian who had tried to be a sister to her, had wanted to help her
achieve life. As for Maud—she knew nothing, she was a child—and Lillian
was crude, she understood nothing.
May’s mind put all men in a class with Jerome Hadley. There was
something men wanted from women, that Jerome had wanted and now this
other man, Sid Gould. They were all, like the Edgleys—Lillian and Kate
and the two boys—people who went after the thing they wanted brutally,
directly. That was not May’s way and she decided she wanted nothing more
to do with such people. “I’ll never go back to Bidwell,” she kept saying
over and over as she ran in the uncertain light along the beach.
Sid Gould’s companions, having run out of the dance hall, could not
understand that he had been knocked over by the slight girl he had led
into the darkness, and when they heard his curses and groans and saw him
reeling about, quite overcome by the second blow May had aimed at his
head—combined with the liquor within—they imagined some man had come to
May’s rescue. When they ran forward and saw May with the stick in her
hand and swinging it wildly about they paid little attention to her but
began at once looking for her companion. Two of them followed May as she
ran along the beach and the others returned to the dance hall. A group
of young farmers came crowding to the door and Cal Mosher hit one of
them a swinging blow with his fist. “Get out of the way,” he cried,
“we’re going to clean up this place.”
May ran like a frightened rabbit along the beach, stopping occasionally
to listen. From the dance hall came an uproar and oaths and cries broke
the silence of the night. At her heels two men ran, lumbering along
slowly. The drink within had taken effect and one of them fell. As she
ran May came presently into the place of huge stumps and logs, thrown up
by the storms of winter, and saw Maud Welliver standing at the edge of
the water with the grocer Hunt—who had his arm about Maud’s waist. The
frightened woman ran so close to them that she might have touched Maud’s
dress but they were unconscious of her presence and, as for May, she was
in an odd way afraid of them also. She was afraid of everything human.
“It all comes to something ugly and terrible,” she thought frantically.
May ran for nearly two miles, along the beach, among the tree stumps,
the roots of which stuck up into the air like arms raised in
supplication to the moon. Perhaps the dry withered old tree arms,
sticking up thus, kept her physical fear alive, as it is not likely Sid
Gould’s drunken companions followed her far. She ran clinging to Lillian
Edgley’s hat—she had borrowed without permission—and that, I presume,
seemed a thing of beauty to her. Something conscientious and fine in her
made her cling desperately to the hat and she had held it in her left
hand and safely out of harm’s way, even in the moment when she was
belaboring Sid Gould with the stick of driftwood.
And now she ran, still clinging to the hat, and was afraid with a fear
that was no longer physical. The new fear that swept in upon her
comprehended something more than the grotesque masses of tree roots,
that now appeared to dance madly in the moonlight, something more than
Sid Gould, Cal Mosher and Jerome Hadley—that had become a fear of life
itself, of all she had ever known of life, all she had ever been
permitted to see of life—that fear was now heavy upon her.
Little May Edgley did not want to live any more. “Death is a kind and
comforting thing to those who are through with life,” an old farm horse
had seemed to say to a boy, who, a few days later, ran in terror from
the sight of May Edgley’s dead body to lean trembling on the old horse’s
manger.
What actually happened on that terrible night when May ran so madly was
that she came in her flight to where a creek runs down into the bay.
There are good fishing places off the mouth of the creek. At the creek’s
mouth the water spreads itself out, so that the small stream looks, from
a distance, like a strong river, but one coming along the beach—running
along the beach, in the moonlight, let us say—from the west would run
almost to the eastern bank in the shallow water, that came only to the
shoe tops.
One would run thus, in the shallow water, and the clear white beach—east
of the creek’s mouth—would seem but a few steps away, and then one would
be plunged suddenly down into the narrow deep current, sweeping under
the eastern bank, the current that carried the main body of the water of
the stream.
And May Edgley plunged in there, still clinging to Lillian’s white
hat—the white willow plume bobbing up and down in the swift current—and
was swept into the bay. Her body, caught by an eddy was carried in and
lodged among the submerged tree roots, where it stayed, lodged, until
the farmer and his hired man accidentally found it and laid it tenderly
on the boards beside the farmer’s barn.
The little hard fist clung to the hat, the white grotesque hat that Lil
Edgley was in the habit of putting on when she wanted to look her
best—when she wanted, I presume, to be beautiful.
May may have thought the hat was beautiful. She may have thought of it
as the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in the actuality of her
life.
Of that one cannot speak too definitely, and I only know that, if the
hat ever had been beautiful, it had lost its beauty when, a few days
later, it fell under the eyes of a boy who saw the bedraggled remains of
it, clutched in the drowned woman’s hand.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A CHICAGO HAMLET
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A CHICAGO HAMLET
THERE was one time in Tom’s life when he came near dying, came so close
to it that for several days he held his own life in his hand, as a boy
would hold a ball. He had only to open his fingers to let it drop.
How vividly I remember the night when he told me the story. We had gone
to dine together at a little combined saloon and restaurant in what is
now Wells Street in Chicago. It was a wet cold night in early October.
In Chicago October and November are usually the most charming months of
the year but that year the first weeks of October were cold and rainy.
Everyone who lives in our industrial lake cities has a disease of the
nasal passages and a week of such weather starts everyone coughing and
sneezing. The warm little den into which Tom and I had got seemed cosy
and comfortable. We had drinks of whiskey to drive the chill out of our
bodies and then, after eating, Tom began to talk.
Something had come into the air of the place where we sat, a kind of
weariness. At times all Chicagoans grow weary of the almost universal
ugliness of Chicago and everyone sags. One feels it in the streets, in
the stores, in the homes. The bodies of the people sag and a cry seems
to go up out of a million throats,—“we are set down here in this
continual noise, dirt and ugliness. Why did you put us down here? There
is no rest. We are always being hurried about from place to place, to no
end. Millions of us live on the vast Chicago West Side, where all
streets are equally ugly and where the streets go on and on forever, out
of nowhere into nothing. We are tired, tired! What is it all about? Why
did you put us down here, mother of men?” All the moving bodies of the
people in the streets seem to be saying something like the words set
down above and some day, perhaps, that Chicago poet, Carl Sandburg, will
sing a song about it. Oh, he will make you feel then the tired voices
coming out of tired people. Then, it may be, we will all begin singing
it and realizing something long forgotten among us.
But I grow too eloquent. I will return to Tom and the restaurant in
Wells Street. Carl Sandburg works on a newspaper and sits at a desk
writing about the movies in Wells Street, Chicago.
In the restaurant two men stood at the bar talking to the bartender.
They were trying to hold a friendly conversation, but there was
something in the air that made friendly conversations impossible. The
bartender looked like pictures one sees of famous generals—he was the
type—a red-faced, well-fed looking man, with a grey moustache.
The two men facing him and with their feet resting on the bar rail had
got into a meaningless wrangle concerning the relationship of President
McKinley and his friend Mark Hanna. Did Mark Hanna control McKinley or
was McKinley only using Mark Hanna to his own ends. The discussion was
of no special interest to the men engaged in it—they did not care. At
that time the newspapers and political magazines of the country were
always wrangling over the same subject. It filled space that had to be
filled, I should say.
At any rate the two men had taken it up and were using it as a vehicle
for their weariness and disgust with life. They spoke of McKinley and
Hanna as Bill and Mark.
“Bill is a smooth one, I tell you what. He has Mark eating out of his
hand.”
“Eating out of his hand, hell! Mark whistles and Bill comes running,
like that, like a little dog.”
Meaningless vicious sentences, opinions thrown out by tired brains. One
of the men grew sullenly angry. “Don’t look at me like that, I tell you.
I’ll stand a good deal from a friend but not any such looks. I’m a
fellow who loses his temper. Sometimes I bust someone on the jaw.”
The bartender was taking the situation in hand. He tried to change the
subject. “Who’s going to lick that Fitzsimmons? How long they going to
let that Australian strut around in this country? Ain’t they no guy can
take him?” he asked, with pumped up enthusiasm.
I sat with my head in my hands. “Men jangling with men! Men and women in
houses and apartments jangling! Tired people going home to Chicago’s
West Side, going home from the factories! Children crying fretfully!”
Tom tapped me on the shoulder, and then tapped with his empty glass on
the table. He laughed.
“Ladybug, ladybug, why do you roam?
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,”
he recited. When the whiskey had come he leaned forward and made one of
the odd and truthful observations on life that were always coming out of
him at unexpected moments. “I want you to notice something,” he began;
“You have seen a lot of bartenders—well, if you’ll notice, there is a
striking similarity in appearance between bartenders, great generals,
diplomats, presidents and all such people. I just happened to think why
it is. It’s because they are all up to the same game. They have to spend
their lives handling weary dissatisfied people and they learn the trick
of giving things just a little twist, out of one dull meaningless
channel into another. That is their game and practising it makes them
all look alike.”
I smiled sympathetically. Now that I come to write of my friend I find
it somewhat difficult not to misrepresent him on the sentimental side. I
forget times when I was with him and he was unspeakably dull, when he
also talked often for hours of meaningless things. It was all
foolishness, this trying to be anything but a dull business man, he
sometimes said, and declared that both he and I were fools. Better for
us both that we become more alert, more foxy, as he put it. But for the
fact that we were both fools we would both join the Chicago Athletic
Club, play golf, ride about in automobiles, pick up flashy young girls
and take them out to road-houses to dinner, go home later and make up
cock and bull stories to quiet our wives, go to church on Sunday, talk
continuously of money making, woman and golf, and in general enjoy our
lives. At times he half convinced me he thought the fellows he described
led gay and cheerful lives.
And there were times, too, when he, as a physical being, seemed to
fairly disintegrate before my eyes. His great bulk grew a little loose
and flabby, he talked and talked, saying nothing.
And then, when I had quite made up my mind he had gone the same road I
and all the men about me were no doubt going, the road of surrender to
ugliness and to dreary meaningless living, something would happen. He
would have talked thus, as I have just described, aimlessly, through a
long evening, and then, when we parted for the night, he would scribble
a few words on a bit of paper and push it awkwardly into my pocket. I
watched his lumbering figure go away along a street and going to a
street lamp read what he had written.
“I am very weary. I am not the silly ass I seem but I am as tired as a
dog, trying to find out what I am,” were the words he had scrawled.
But to return to the evening in the place in Wells Street. When the
whiskey came we drank it and sat looking at each other. Then he put his
hand on the table and closing the fingers, so that they made a little
cup, opened the hand slowly and listlessly. “Once I had life, like that,
in my hand, my own life. I could have let go of it as easily as that.
Just why I didn’t I’ve never quite figured out. I can’t think why I kept
my fingers cupped, instead of opening my hand and letting go,” he said.
If, a few minutes before, there had been no integrity in the man there
was enough of it now.
He began telling the story of an evening and a night of his youth.
It was when he was still on his father’s farm, a little rented farm down
in Southeastern Ohio, and when he was but eighteen years old. That would
have been in the fall before he left home and started on his adventures
in the world. I knew something of his history.
It was late October and he and his father had been digging potatoes in a
field. I suppose they both wore torn shoes as, in telling the story, Tom
made a point of the fact that their feet were cold, and that the black
dirt had worked into their shoes and discolored their feet.
The day was cold and Tom wasn’t very well and was in a bitter mood. He
and his father worked rather desperately and in silence. The father was
tall, had a sallow complexion and wore a beard, and in the mental
picture I have of him, he is always stopping—as he walks about the
farmyard or works in the fields he stops and runs his fingers nervously
through his beard.
As for Tom, one gets the notion of him as having been at that time
rather nice, one having an inclination toward the nicer things of life
without just knowing he had the feeling, and certainly without an
opportunity to gratify it.
Tom had something the matter with him, a cold with a bit of fever
perhaps and sometimes as he worked his body shook as with a chill and
then, after a few minutes, he felt hot all over. The two men had been
digging the potatoes all afternoon and as night began to fall over the
field, they started to pick up. One picks up the potatoes in baskets and
carries them to the ends of the rows where they are put into two-bushel
grain bags.
Tom’s step-mother came to the kitchen door and called. “Supper,” she
cried in her peculiarly colorless voice. Her husband was a little angry
and fretful. Perhaps for a long time he had been feeling very deeply the
enmity of his son. “All right,” he called back, “we’ll come pretty soon.
We got to get done picking up.” There was something very like a whine in
his voice. “You can keep the things hot for a time,” he shouted.
Tom and his father both worked with feverish haste, as though trying to
outdo each other and every time Tom bent over to pick up a handful of
the potatoes his head whirled and he thought he might fall. A kind of
terrible pride had taken possession of him and with the whole strength
of his being he was determined not to let his father—who, if
ineffectual, was nevertheless sometimes very quick and accurate at
tasks—get the better of him. They were picking up potatoes—that was the
task before them at the moment—and the thing was to get all the potatoes
picked up and in the bags before darkness came. Tom did not believe in
his father and was he to let such an ineffectual man outdo him at any
task, no matter how ill he might be?
That was somewhat the nature of Tom’s thoughts and feelings at the
moment.
And then the darkness had come and the task was done. The filled sacks
were set along a fence at the end of the field. It was to be a cold
frosty night and now the moon was coming up and the filled sacks looked
like grotesque human beings, standing there along the fence—standing
with grey sagging bodies, such as Tom’s step-mother had—sagged bodies
and dull eyes—standing and looking at the two men, so amazingly not in
accord with each other.
As the two walked across the field Tom let his father go ahead. He was
afraid he might stagger and did not want his father to see there was
anything the matter with him. In a way boyish pride was involved too.
“He might think he could wear me out working,” Tom thought. The moon
coming up was a huge yellow ball in the distance. It was larger than the
house towards which they were walking and the figure of Tom’s father
seemed to walk directly across the yellow face of the moon.
When they got to the house the children Tom’s father had got—thrown in
with the woman, as it were, when he made his second marriage—were
standing about. After he left home Tom could never remember anything
about the children except that they always had dirty faces and were clad
in torn dirty dresses and that the youngest, a baby, wasn’t very well
and was always crying fretfully.
When the two men came into the house the children, from having been
fussing at their mother because the meal was delayed, grew silent. With
the quick intuition of children they sensed something wrong between
father and son. Tom walked directly across the small dining room and
opening a door entered a stairway that led up to his bedroom. “Ain’t you
going to eat any supper?” his father asked. It was the first word that
had passed between father and son for hours.
“No,” Tom answered and went up the stairs. At the moment his mind was
concentrated on the problem of not letting anyone in the house know he
was ill and the father let him go without protest. No doubt the whole
family were glad enough to have him out of the way.
He went upstairs and into his own room and got into bed without taking
off his clothes, just pulled off the torn shoes and crawling in pulled
the covers up over himself. There was an old quilt, not very clean.
His brain cleared a little and as the house was small he could hear
everything going on down stairs. Now the family were all seated at the
table and his father was doing a thing called “saying grace.” He always
did that and sometimes, while the others waited, he prayed
intermittently.
Tom was thinking, trying to think. What was it all about, his father’s
praying that way? When he got at it the man seemed to forget everyone
else in the world. There he was, alone with God, facing God alone and
the people about him seemed to have no existence. He prayed a little
about food, and then went on to speak with God, in a strange
confidential way, about other things, his own frustrated desires mostly.
All his life he had wanted to be a Methodist minister but could not be
ordained because he was uneducated, had never been to the schools or
colleges. There was no chance at all for his becoming just the thing he
wanted to be and still he went on and on praying about it, and in a way
seemed to think there might be a possibility that God, feeling strongly
the need of more Methodist ministers, would suddenly come down out of
the sky, off the judgment seat as it were, and would go to the
administrating board, or whatever one might call it, of the Methodist
Church and say, “Here you, what are you up to? Make this man a Methodist
minister and be quick about it. I don’t want any fooling around.”
Tom lay on the bed upstairs listening to his father praying down below.
When he was a lad and his own mother was alive he had always been
compelled to go with his father to the church on Sundays and to the
prayer meetings on Wednesday evenings. His father always prayed,
delivered sermons to the other sad-faced men and women sitting about,
under the guise of prayers, and the son sat listening and no doubt it
was then, in childhood, his hatred of his father was born. The man who
was then the minister of the little country church, a tall, raw-boned
young man, who was as yet unmarried, sometimes spoke of Tom’s father as
one powerful in prayer.
And all the time there was something in Tom’s mind. Well he had seen a
thing. One day when he was walking alone through a strip of wood, coming
back barefooted from town to the farm he had seen—he never told anyone
what he had seen. The minister was in the wood, sitting alone on a log.
There was something. Some rather nice sense of life in Tom was deeply
offended. He had crept away unseen.
And now he was lying on the bed in the half darkness upstairs in his
father’s house, shaken with a chill, and downstairs his father was
praying and there was one sentence always creeping into his prayers.
“Give me the gift, O God, give me the great gift.” Tom thought he knew
what that meant—“the gift of the gab and the opportunity to exercise it,
eh?”
There was a door at the foot of Tom’s bed and beyond the door another
room, at the front of the house upstairs. His father slept in there with
the new woman he had married and the three children slept in a small
room beside it. The baby slept with the man and woman. It was odd what
terrible thoughts sometimes came into one’s head. The baby wasn’t very
well and was always whining and crying. Chances were it would grow up to
be a yellow-skinned thing, with dull eyes, like the mother. Suppose ...
well suppose ... some night ... one did not voluntarily have such
thoughts—suppose either the man or woman might, quite accidentally, roll
over on the baby and crush it, smother it, rather.
Tom’s mind slipped a little out of his grasp. He was trying to hold on
to something—what was it? Was it his own life? That was an odd thought.
Now his father had stopped praying and downstairs the family were eating
the evening meal. There was silence in the house. People, even dirty
half-ill children, grew silent when they ate. That was a good thing. It
was good to be silent sometimes.
And now Tom was in the wood, going barefooted through the wood and there
was that man, the minister, sitting alone there on the log. Tom’s father
wanted to be a minister, wanted God to arbitrarily make him a minister,
wanted God to break the rules, bust up the regular order of things just
to make him a minister. And he a man who could barely make a living on
the farm, who did everything in a half slipshod way, who, when he felt
he had to have a second wife, had gone off and got one with four sickly
kids, one who couldn’t cook, who did the work of his house in a slovenly
way.
Tom slipped off into unconsciousness and lay still for a long time.
Perhaps he slept.
When he awoke—or came back into consciousness—there was his father’s
voice still praying and Tom had thought the grace-saying was over. He
lay still, listening. The voice was loud and insistent and now seemed
near at hand. All of the rest of the house was silent. None of the
children were crying.
Now there was a sound, the rattling of dishes downstairs in the kitchen
and Tom sat up in bed and leaning far over looked through the open door
into the room occupied by his father and his father’s new wife. His mind
cleared.
After all, the evening meal was over and the children had been put to
bed and now the woman downstairs had put the three older children into
their bed and was washing the dishes at the kitchen stove. Tom’s father
had come upstairs and had prepared for bed by taking off his clothes and
putting on a long soiled white nightgown. Then he had gone to the open
window at the front of the house and kneeling down had begun praying
again.
A kind of cold fury took possession of Tom and without a moment’s
hesitation he got silently out of bed. He did not feel ill now but very
strong. At the foot of his bed, leaning against the wall, was a
whippletree, a round piece of hard wood, shaped something like a
baseball bat, but tapering at both ends. At each end there was an iron
ring. The whippletree had been left there by his father who was always
leaving things about, in odd unexpected places. He leaned a whippletree
against the wall in his son’s bedroom and then, on the next day, when he
was hitching a horse to a plow and wanted it, he spent hours going
nervously about rubbing his fingers through his beard and looking.
Tom took the whippletree in his hand and crept barefooted through the
open door into his father’s room. “He wants to be like that fellow in
the woods—that’s what he’s always praying about.” There was in Tom’s
mind some notion—from the beginning there must have been a great deal of
the autocrat in him—well, you see, he wanted to crush out impotence and
sloth.
He had quite made up his mind to kill his father with the whippletree
and crept silently across the floor, gripping the hardwood stick firmly
in his right hand. The sickly looking baby had already been put into the
one bed in the room and was asleep. Its little face looked out from
above another dirty quilt and the clear cold moonlight streamed into the
room and fell upon the bed and upon the kneeling figure on the floor by
the window.
Tom had got almost across the room when he noticed something—his
father’s bare feet sticking out from beneath the white nightgown. The
heels and the little balls of flesh below the toes were black with the
dirt of the fields but in the centre of each foot there was a place. It
was not black but yellowish white in the moonlight.
Tom crept silently back into his own room and closed softly the door
between himself and his father. After all he did not want to kill
anyone. His father had not thought it necessary to wash his feet before
kneeling to pray to his God, and he had himself come upstairs and had
got into bed without washing his own feet.
His hands were trembling now and his body shaking with the chill but he
sat on the edge of the bed trying to think. When he was a child and went
to church with his father and mother there was a story he had heard
told. A man came into a feast, after walking a long time on dusty roads,
and sat down at the feast. A woman came and washed his feet. Then she
put precious ointments on them and later dried the feet with her hair.
The story had, when he heard it, no special meaning to the boy but
now.... He sat on the bed smiling half foolishly. Could one make of
one’s own hands a symbol of what the woman’s hands must have meant on
that occasion, long ago, could not one make one’s own hands the humble
servants to one’s soiled feet, to one’s soiled body?
It was a strange notion, this business of making oneself the keeper of
the clean integrity of oneself. When one was ill one got things a little
distorted. In Tom’s room there was a tin wash-basin, and a pail of
water, he himself brought each morning from the cistern at the back of
the house. He had always been one who fancied waiting on himself and
perhaps, at that time, he had in him something he afterward lost, or
only got hold of again at long intervals, the sense of the worth of his
own young body, the feeling that his own body was a temple, as one might
put it.
At any rate he must have had some such feeling on that night of his
childhood and I shall never forget a kind of illusion I had concerning
him that time in the Wells Street place when he told me the tale. At the
moment something seemed to spring out of his great hulking body,
something young hard clean and white.
But I must walk carefully. Perhaps I had better stick to my tale, try
only to tell it simply, as he did.
Anyway he got off the bed, there in the upper room of that strangely
disorganized and impotent household, and standing in the centre of the
room took off his clothes. There was a towel hanging on a hook on the
wall but it wasn’t very clean.
By chance he did have, however, a white nightgown that had not been worn
and he now got it out of the drawer of a small rickety dresser that
stood by the wall and recklessly tore off a part of it to serve as a
washcloth. Then he stood up and with the tin washbasin on the floor at
his feet washed himself carefully in the icy cold water.
No matter what illusions I may have had regarding him when he told me
the tale, that night in Wells Street, surely on that night of his youth
he must have been, as I have already described him, something young hard
clean and white. Surely and at that moment his body was a temple.
* * * * *
As for the matter of his holding his own life in his hands—that came
later, when he had got back into the bed, and that part of his tale I do
not exactly understand. Perhaps he fumbled it in the telling and perhaps
my own understanding fumbled.
I remember that he kept his hand lying on the table in the Wells Street
place and that he kept opening and closing the fingers as though that
would explain everything. It didn’t for me, not then at any rate.
Perhaps it will for you who read.
“I got back into bed,” he said, “and taking my own life into my hand
tried to decide whether I wanted to hold on to it or not. All that night
I held it like that, my own life I mean,” he said.
There was some notion, he was evidently trying to explain, concerning
other lives being things outside his own, things not to be touched, not
to be fooled with. How much of that could have been in his mind that
night of his youth, long ago, and how much came later I do not know and
one takes it for granted he did not know either.
He seemed however to have had the notion that for some hours that night,
after his father’s wife came upstairs and the two elder people got into
bed and the house was silent, that there came certain hours when his own
life belonged to him to hold or to drop as easily as one spreads out the
fingers of a hand lying on a table in a saloon in Wells Street, Chicago.
“I had a fancy not to do it,” he said, “not to spread out my fingers,
not to open my hand. You see, I couldn’t feel any very definite purpose
in life, but there was something. There was a feeling I had as I stood
naked in the cold washing my body. Perhaps I just wanted to have that
feeling of washing myself again sometime. You know what I mean—I was
really cleansing myself, there in the moonlight, that night.
“And so I got back into bed and kept my fingers closed, like this, like
a cup. I held my own life in my hand and when I felt like opening my
fingers and letting my life slip away I remembered myself washing myself
in the moonlight.
“And so I didn’t open out my fingers. I kept my fingers closed like
this, like a cup,” he said, again slowly drawing his fingers together.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PART TWO
FOR a good many years Tom wrote advertisements in an office in Chicago
where I was also employed. He had grown middle-aged and was unmarried
and in the evenings and on Sundays sat in his apartment reading or
playing rather badly on a piano. Outside business hours he had few
associates and although his youth and young manhood had been a time of
hardship, he continually, in fancy, lived in the past.
He and I had been intimate, in a loose detached sort of way, for a good
many years. Although I was a much younger man we often got half-drunk
together.
Little fluttering tag-like ends of his personal history were always
leaking out of him and, of all the men and women I have known, he gave
me the most material for stories. His own talks, things remembered or
imagined, were never quite completely told. They were fragments caught
up, tossed in the air as by a wind and then abruptly dropped.
All during the late afternoon we had been standing together at a bar and
drinking. We had talked of our work and as Tom grew more drunken he
played with the notion of the importance of advertising writing. At that
time his more mature point of view puzzled me a little. “I’ll tell you
what, that lot of advertisements on which you are now at work is very
important. Do put all your best self into your work. It is very
important that the American house-wife buy Star laundry soap, rather
than Arrow laundry soap. And there is something else—the daughter of the
man who owns the soap factory, that is at present indirectly employing
you, is a very pretty girl. I saw her once. She is nineteen now but soon
she will be out of college and, if her father makes a great deal of
money it will profoundly affect her life. The very man she is to marry
may be decided by the success or failure of the advertisements you are
now writing. In an obscure way you are fighting her battles. Like a
knight of old you have tipped your lance, or shall I say typewriter, in
her service. Today as I walked past your desk and saw you sitting there,
scratching your head, and trying to think whether to say, “buy Star
Laundry Soap—it’s best,” or whether to be a bit slangy and say, “Buy
Star—You win!”—well, I say, my heart went out to you and to this fair
young girl you have never seen, may never see. I tell you what, I was
touched.” He hiccoughed and leaning forward tapped me affectionately on
the shoulder. “I tell you what, young fellow,” he added smiling, “I
thought of the middle ages and of the men, women and children who once
set out toward the Holy Land in the service of the Virgin. They didn’t
get as well paid as you do. I tell you what, we advertising men are too
well paid. There would be more dignity in our profession if we went
barefooted and walked about dressed in old ragged cloaks and carrying
staffs. We might, with a good deal more dignity, carry beggar’s bowls,
in our hands, eh!”
He was laughing heartily now, but suddenly stopped laughing. There was
always an element of sadness in Tom’s mirth.
We walked out of the saloon, he going forward a little unsteadily for,
even when he was quite sober, he was not too steady on his legs. Life
did not express itself very definitely in his body and he rolled
awkwardly about, his heavy body at times threatening to knock some
passerby off the sidewalk.
For a time we stood at a corner, at La Salle and Lake Streets in
Chicago, and about us surged the home-going crowds while over our heads
rattled the elevated trains. Bits of newspaper and clouds of dust were
picked up by a wind and blown in our faces and the dust got into our
eyes. We laughed together, a little nervously.
At any rate for us the evening had just begun. We would walk and later
dine together. He plunged again into the saloon out of which we had just
come, and in a moment returned with a bottle of whiskey in his pocket.
“It is horrible stuff, this whiskey, eh, but after all this is a
horrible town. One couldn’t drink wine here. Wine belongs to a sunny,
laughing people and clime,” he said. He had a notion that drunkenness
was necessary to men in such a modern industrial city as the one in
which we lived. “You wait,” he said, “you’ll see what will happen. One
of these days the reformers will manage to take whiskey away from us,
and what then? We’ll sag down, you see. We’ll become like old women, who
have had too many children. We’ll all sag spiritually and then you’ll
see what’ll happen. Without whiskey no people can stand up against all
this ugliness. It can’t be done, I say. We’ll become empty and
bag-like—we will—all of us. We’ll be like old women who were never loved
but who have had too many children.”
We had walked through many streets and had come to a bridge over a
river. It was growing dark now and we stood for a time in the dusk and
in the uncertain light the structures, built to the very edge of the
stream, great warehouses and factories, began to take on strange shapes.
The river ran through a canyon formed by the buildings, a few boats
passed up and down, and over other bridges, in the distance, street-cars
passed. They were like moving clusters of stars against the dark purple
of the sky.
From time to time he sucked at the whiskey bottle and occasionally
offered me a drink but often he forgot me and drank alone. When he had
taken the bottle from his lips he held it before him and spoke to it
softly, “Little mother,” he said, “I am always at your breast, eh? You
cannot wean me, can you?”
He grew a little angry. “Well, then why did you drop me down here?
Mothers should drop their children in places where men have learned a
little to live. Here there is only a desert of buildings.”
He took another drink from the bottle and then held it for a moment
against his cheek before passing it to me. “There is something feminine
about a whiskey bottle,” he declared. “As long as it contains liquor one
hates to part with it and passing it to a friend is a little like
inviting a friend to go in to your wife. They do that, I’m told, in some
of the Oriental countries—a rather delicate custom. Perhaps they are
more civilized than ourselves, and then, you know, perhaps, it’s just
possible, they have found out that the women sometimes like it too, eh?”
I tried to laugh but did not succeed very well. Now that I am writing of
my friend, I find I am not making a very good likeness of him after all.
It may be that I overdo the note of sadness I get into my account of
him. There was always that element present but it was tempered in him,
as I seem to be unable to temper it in my account of him.
For one thing he was not very clever and I seem to be making him out a
rather clever fellow. On many evenings I have spent with him he was
silent and positively dull and for hours walked awkwardly along, talking
of some affair at the office. There was a long rambling story. He had
been at Detroit with the president of the company and the two men had
visited an advertiser. There was a long dull account of what had been
said—of “he saids,” and, “I saids.”
Or again he told a story of some experience of his own, as a newspaper
man, before he got into advertising. He had been on the copy desk in
some Chicago newspaper, the _Tribune_, perhaps. One grew accustomed to a
little peculiarity of his mind. It traveled sometimes in circles and
there were certain oft-told tales always bobbing up. A man had come into
the newspaper office, a cub reporter with an important piece of news, a
great scoop in fact. No one would believe the reporter’s story. He was
just a kid. There was a murderer, for whom the whole town was on the
watchout, and the cub reporter had picked him up and had brought him
into the office.
There he sat, the dangerous murderer. The cub reporter had found him in
a saloon and going up to him had said, “You might as well give yourself
up. They will get you anyway and it will go better with you if you come
in voluntarily.”
And so the dangerous murderer had decided to come and the cub reporter
had escorted him, not to the police station but to the newspaper office.
It was a great scoop. In a moment now the forms would close, the
newspaper would go to press. The dead line was growing close and the cub
reporter ran about the room from one man to another. He kept pointing at
the murderer, a mild-looking little man with blue eyes, sitting on a
bench, waiting. The cub reporter was almost insane. He danced up and
down and shouting “I tell you that’s Murdock, sitting there. Don’t be a
lot of damn fools. I tell you that’s Murdock, sitting there.”
Now one of the editors has walked listlessly across the room and is
speaking to the little man with blue eyes, and suddenly the whole tone
of the newspaper office has changed. “My God! It’s the truth! Stop
everything! Clear the front page! My God! It is Murdock! What a near
thing! We almost let it go! My God! It’s Murdock!”
The incident in the newspaper office had stayed in my friend’s mind. It
swam about in his mind as in a pool. At recurring times, perhaps once
every six months, he told the story, using always the same words and the
tenseness of that moment in the newspaper office was reproduced in him
over and over. He grew excited. Now the men in the office were all
gathering about the little blue-eyed Murdock. He had killed his wife,
her lover and three children. Then he had run into the street and quite
wantonly shot two men, innocently passing the house. He sat talking
quietly and all the police of the city, and all the reporters for the
other newspapers, were looking for him. There he sat talking, nervously
telling his story. There wasn’t much to the story. “I did it. I just did
it. I guess I was off my nut,” he kept saying.
“Well, the story will have to be stretched out.” The cub reporter who
has brought him in walks about the office proudly. “I’ve done it! I’ve
done it! I’ve proven myself the greatest newspaper man in the city.” The
older men are laughing. “The fool! It’s fool’s luck. If he hadn’t been a
fool he would never have done it. Why he walked right up. ‘Are you
Murdock?’ He had gone about all over town, into saloons, asking men,
‘Are you Murdock?’ God is good to fools and drunkards!”
My friend told the story to me ten, twelve, fifteen times, and did not
know it had grown to be an old story. When he had reproduced the scene
in the newspaper office he made always the same comment. “It’s a good
yarn, eh. Well it’s the truth. I was there. Someone ought to write it up
for one of the magazines.”
I looked at him, watched him closely as he told the story and as I grew
older and kept hearing the murderer’s story and certain others, he also
told regularly without knowing he had told them before, an idea came to
me. “He is a tale-teller who has had no audience,” I thought. “He is a
stream dammed up. He is full of stories that whirl and circle about
within him. Well, he is not a stream dammed up, he is a stream
overfull.” As I walked beside him and heard again the story of the cub
reporter and the murderer I remembered a creek back of my father’s house
in an Ohio town. In the spring the water overflowed a field near our
house and the brown muddy water ran round and round in crazy circles.
One threw a stick into the water and it was carried far away but, after
a time, it came whirling back to where one stood on a piece of high
ground, watching.
What interested me was that the untold stories, or rather the
uncompleted stories of my friend’s mind, did not seem to run in circles.
When a story had attained form it had to be told about every so often,
but the unformed fragments were satisfied to peep out at one and then
retire, never to reappear.
* * * * *
It was a spring evening and he and I had gone for a walk in Jackson
Park. We went on a street-car and when we were alighting the car started
suddenly and my awkward friend was thrown to the ground and rolled over
and over in the dusty street. The motorman, the conductor and several of
the men passengers alighted and gathered about. No, he was not hurt and
would not give his name and address to the anxious conductor. “I’m not
hurt. I’m not going to sue the company. Damn it, man, I defy you to make
me give my name and address if I do not care to do so.”
He assumed a look of outraged dignity. “Just suppose now that I happen
to be some great man, traveling about the country—in foreign parts,
incognito, as it were. Let us suppose I am a great prince or a dignitary
of some sort. Look how big I am.” He pointed to his huge round paunch.
“If I told who I was cheers might break forth. I do not care for that.
With me, you see, it is different than with yourselves. I have had too
much of that sort of thing already. I’m sick of it. If it happens that,
in the process of my study of the customs of your charming country, I
chose to fall off a street-car that is my own affair. I did not fall on
anyone.”
We walked away leaving the conductor, the motorman and passengers
somewhat mystified. “Ah, he’s a nut,” I heard one of the passengers say
to another.
As for the fall, it had shaken something out of my friend. When later we
were seated on a bench in the park one of the fragments, the little
illuminating bits of his personal history, that sometimes came from him
and that were his chief charm for me, seemed to have been shaken loose
and fell from him as a ripe apple falls from a tree in a wind.
He began talking, a little hesitatingly, as though feeling his way in
the darkness along the hallway of a strange house at night. It had
happened I had never seen him with a woman and he seldom spoke of women,
except with a witty and half scornful gesture, but now he began speaking
of an experience with a woman.
The tale concerned an adventure of his young manhood and occurred after
his mother had died and after his father married again, in fact after he
had left home, not to return.
The enmity, that seemed always to have existed between himself and his
father became while he continued living at home, more and more
pronounced, but on the part of the son, my friend, it was never
expressed in words and his dislike of his father took the form of
contempt that he had made so bad a second marriage. The new woman in the
house seemed such a poor stick. The house was always dirty and the
children, some other man’s children, were always about under foot. When
the two men who had been working in the fields came into the house to
eat, the food was badly cooked.
The father’s desire to have God make him, in some mysterious way a
Methodist minister continued and, as he grew older, the son had
difficulty keeping back certain sharp comments upon life in the house,
that wanted to be expressed. “What was a Methodist minister after all?”
The son was filled with the intolerance of youth. His father was a
laborer, a man who had never been to school. Did he think that God could
suddenly make him something else and that without effort on his own
part, by this interminable praying? If he had really wanted to be a
minister why had he not prepared himself? He had chased off and got
married and when his first wife died he could hardly wait until she was
buried before making another marriage. And what a poor stick of a woman
he had got.
The son looked across the table at his step-mother who was afraid of
him. Their eyes met and the woman’s hands began to tremble. “Do you want
anything?” she asked anxiously. “No,” he replied and began eating in
silence.
One day in the spring, when he was working in the field with his father,
he decided to start out into the world. He and his father were planting
corn. They had no corn-planter and the father had marked out the rows
with a home-made marker and now he was going along in his bare feet,
dropping the grains of corn and the son, with a hoe in his hand, was
following. The son drew earth over the corn and then patted the spot
with the back of the hoe. That was to make the ground solid above so
that the crows would not come down and find the corn before it had time
to take root.
All morning the two worked in silence, and then at noon and when they
came to the end of a row, they stopped to rest. The father went into a
fence corner.
The son was nervous. He sat down and then got up and walked about. He
did not want to look into the fence corner, where his father was no
doubt kneeling and praying—he was always doing that at odd moments—but
presently he did. Dread crept over him. His father was kneeling and
praying in silence and the son could see again the bottoms of his two
bare feet, sticking out from among low-growing bushes. Tom shuddered.
Again he saw the heels and the cushions of the feet, the two ball-like
cushions below the toes. They were black but the instep of each foot was
white with an odd whiteness—not unlike the whiteness of the belly of a
fish.
The reader will understand what was in Tom’s mind—a memory.
Without a word to his father or to his father’s wife, he walked across
the fields to the house, packed a few belongings and left, saying
good-bye to no one. The woman of the house saw him go but said nothing
and after he had disappeared, about a bend in the road, she ran across
the fields to her husband, who was still at his prayers, oblivious to
what had happened. His wife also saw the bare feet sticking out of the
bushes and ran toward them screaming. When her husband arose she began
to cry hysterically. “I thought something dreadful had happened, Oh, I
thought something dreadful had happened,” she sobbed.
“Why, what’s the matter,—what’s the matter?” asked her husband but she
did not answer but ran and threw herself into his arms, and as the two
stood thus, like two grotesque bags of grain, embracing in a black
newly-plowed field under a grey sky, the son, who had stopped in a small
clump of trees, saw them. He walked to the edge of a wood and stood for
a moment and then went off along the road. Afterward he never saw or
heard from them again.
* * * * *
About Tom’s woman adventure—he told it as I have told you the story of
his departure from home, that is to say in a fragmentary way. The story,
like the one I have just tried to tell, or rather perhaps give you a
sense of, was told in broken sentences, dropped between long silences.
As my friend talked I sat looking at him and I will admit I sometimes
found myself thinking he must be the greatest man I would ever know. “He
has felt more things, has by his capacity for silently feeling things,
penetrated further into human life than any other man I am likely ever
to know, perhaps than any other man who lives in my day,” I
thought—deeply stirred.
And so he was on the road now and working his way slowly along afoot
through Southern Ohio. He intended to make his way to some city and
begin educating himself. In the winter, during boyhood, he had attended
a country school, but there were certain things he wanted he could not
find in the country, books, for one thing. “I knew then, as I know now,
something of the importance of books, that is to say real books. There
are only a few such books in the world and it takes a long time to find
them out. Hardly anyone knows what they are and one of the reasons I
have never married is because I did not want some woman coming between
me and the search for the books that really have something to say,” he
explained. He was forever breaking the thread of his stories with little
comments of this kind.
All during that summer he worked on the farms, staying sometimes for two
or three weeks and then moving on and in June he had got to a place,
some twenty miles west of Cincinnati, where he went to work on the farm
of a German, and where the adventure happened that he told me about that
night on the park bench.
The farm on which he was at work belonged to a tall, solidly-built
German of fifty, who had come to America twenty years before, and who,
by hard work, had prospered and had acquired much land. Three years
before he had made up his mind he had better marry and had written to a
friend in Germany about getting him a wife. “I do not want one of these
American girls, and I would like a young woman, not an old one,” he
wrote. He explained that the American girls all had the idea in their
heads that they could run their husbands and that most of them
succeeded. “It’s getting so all they want is to ride around all dressed
up or trot off to town,” he said. Even the older American women he
employed as housekeepers were the same way; none of them would take
hold, help about the farm, feed the stock and do things the wife of a
European farmer expected to do. When he employed a housekeeper she did
the housework and that was all.
Then she went to sit on the front porch, to sew or read a book. “What
nonsense! You get me a good German girl, strong and pretty good-looking.
I’ll send the money and she can come over here and be my wife,” he
wrote.
The letter had been sent to a friend of his young manhood, now a small
merchant in a German town and after talking the matter over with his
wife the merchant decided to send his daughter, a woman of twenty-four.
She had been engaged to marry a man who was taken sick and had died
while he was serving his term in the army and her father decided she had
been mooning about long enough. The merchant called the daughter into a
room where he and his wife sat and told her of his decision and, for a
long time she sat looking at the floor. Was she about to make a fuss? A
prosperous American husband who owned a big farm was not to be sneezed
at. The daughter put up her hand and fumbled with her black hair—there
was a great mass of it. After all she was a big strong woman. Her
husband wouldn’t be cheated. “Yes, I’ll go,” she said quietly, and
getting up walked out of the room.
In America the woman had turned out all right but her husband thought
her a little too silent. Even though the main purpose in life be to do
the work of a house and farm, feed the stock and keep a man’s clothes in
order, so that he is not always having to buy new ones, still there are
times when something else is in order. As he worked in his fields the
farmer sometimes muttered to himself. “Everything in its place. For
everything there is a time and a place,” he told himself. One worked and
then the time came when one played a little too. Now and then it was
nice to have a few friends about, drink beer, eat a good deal of heavy
food and then have some fun, in a kind of way. One did not go too far
but if there were women in the party someone tickled one of them and she
giggled. One made a remark about legs—nothing out of the way. “Legs is
legs. On horses or women legs count a good deal.” Everyone laughed. One
had a jolly evening, one had some fun.
Often, after his woman came, the farmer, working in his fields, tried to
think what was the matter with her. She worked all the time and the
house was in order. Well, she fed the stock so that he did not have to
bother about that. What a good cook she was. She even made beer, in the
old-fashioned German way, at home—and that was fine too.
The whole trouble lay in the fact that she was silent, too silent. When
one spoke to her she answered nicely but she herself made no
conversation and at night she lay in the bed silently. The German
wondered if she would be showing signs of having a child pretty soon.
“That might make a difference,” he thought. He stopped working and
looked across the fields to where there was a meadow. His cattle were
there feeding quietly. “Even cows, and surely cows were quiet and silent
enough things, even cows had times. Sometimes the very devil got into a
cow. You were leading her along a road or a lane and suddenly she went
half insane. If one weren’t careful she would jam her head through
fences, knock a man over, do almost anything. She wanted something
insanely, with a riotous hunger. Even a cow wasn’t always just passive
and quiet.” The German felt cheated. He thought of the friend in Germany
who had sent his daughter. “Ugh, the deuce, he might have sent a
livelier one,” he thought.
It was June when Tom came to the farm and the harvest was on. The German
had planted several large fields to wheat and the yield was good.
Another man had been employed to work on the farm all summer but Tom
could be used too. He would have to sleep on the hay in the barn but
that he did not mind. He went to work at once.
And anyone knowing Tom, and seeing his huge and rather ungainly body,
must realize that, in his youth, he might have been unusually strong.
For one thing he had not done so much thinking as he must have done
later, nor had he been for years seated at a desk. He worked in the
fields with the other two men and at the meal time came into the house
with them to eat. He and the German’s wife must have been a good deal
alike. Tom had in his mind certain things—thoughts concerning his
boyhood—and he was thinking a good deal of the future. Well, there he
was working his way westward and making a little money all the time as
he went, and every cent he made he kept. He had not yet been into an
American city, had purposely avoided such places as Springfield, Dayton
and Cincinnati and had kept to the smaller places and the farms.
After a time he would have an accumulation of money and would go into
cities, study, read books, live. He had then a kind of illusion about
American cities. “A city was a great gathering of people who had grown
tired of loneliness and isolation. They had come to realize that only by
working together could they have the better things of life. Many hands
working together might build wonderfully, many minds working together
might think clearly, many impulses working together might channel all
lives into an expression of something rather fine.”
I am making a mistake if I give you the impression that Tom, the boy
from the Ohio farm, had any such definite notions. He had a feeling—of a
sort. There was a dumb kind of hope in him. He had even then, I am quite
sure, something else, that he later always retained, a kind of almost
holy inner modesty. It was his chief attraction as a man but perhaps it
stood in the way of his ever achieving the kind of outstanding and
assertive manhood we Americans all seem to think we value so highly.
At any rate there he was, and there was that woman, the silent one, now
twenty-seven years old. The three men sat at table eating and she waited
on them. They ate in the farm kitchen, a large old-fashioned one, and
she stood by the stove or went silently about putting more food on the
table as it was consumed.
At night the men did not eat until late and sometimes darkness came as
they sat at table and then she brought lighted lamps for them. Great
winged insects flew violently against the screen door and a few moths,
that had managed to get into the house, flew about the lamps. When the
men had finished eating they sat at the table drinking beer and the
woman washed the dishes.
The farm hand, employed for the summer, was a man of thirty-five, a
large bony man with a drooping mustache. He and the German talked. Well,
it was good, the German thought, to have the silence of his house
broken. The two men spoke of the coming threshing time and of the hay
harvest just completed. One of the cows would be calving next week. Her
time was almost here. The man with the mustache took a drink of beer and
wiped his mustache with the back of his hand, that was covered with long
black hair.
Tom had drawn his chair back against the wall and sat in silence and,
when the German was deeply engaged in conversation, he looked at the
woman, who sometimes turned from her dish-washing to look at him.
There was something, a certain feeling he had sometimes—she, it might
be, also had—but of the two men in the room that could not be said. It
was too bad she spoke no English. Perhaps, however even though she spoke
his language, he could not speak to her of the things he meant. But,
pshaw, there wasn’t anything in his mind, nothing that could be said in
words. Now and then her husband spoke to her in German and she replied
quietly, and then the conversation between the two men was resumed in
English. More beer was brought. The German felt expansive. How good to
have talk in the house. He urged beer upon Tom who took it and drank.
“You’re another close-mouthed one, eh?” he said laughing.
Tom’s adventure happened during the second week of his stay. All the
people about the place had gone to sleep for the night but, as he could
not sleep, he arose silently and came down out of the hay loft carrying
his blanket. It was a silent hot soft night without a moon and he went
to where there was a small grass plot that came down to the barn and
spreading his blanket sat with his back to the wall of the barn.
That he could not sleep did not matter. He was young and strong. “If I
do not sleep tonight I will sleep tomorrow night,” he thought. There was
something in the air that he thought concerned only himself, and that
made him want to be thus awake, sitting out of doors and looking at the
dim distant trees in the apple orchard near the barn, at the stars in
the sky, at the farm house, faintly seen some few hundred feet away. Now
that he was out of doors he no longer felt restless. Perhaps it was only
that he was nearer something that was like himself at the moment, just
the night perhaps.
He became aware of something, of something moving, restlessly in the
darkness. There was a fence between the farm yard and the orchard, with
berry bushes growing beside it, and something was moving in the darkness
along the berry bushes. Was it a cow that had got out of the stable or
were the bushes moved by a wind? He did a trick known to country boys.
Thrusting a finger into his mouth he stood up and put the wet finger out
before him. A wind would dry one side of the warm wet finger quickly and
that side would turn cold. Thus one told oneself something, not only of
the strength of a wind but its direction. Well, there was no wind strong
enough to move berry bushes—there was no wind at all. He had come down
out of the barn loft in his bare feet and in moving about had made no
sound and now he went and stood silently on the blanket with his back
against the wall of the barn.
The movement among the bushes was growing more distinct but it wasn’t in
the bushes. Something was moving along the fence, between him and the
orchard. There was a place along the fence, an old rail one, where no
bushes grew and now the silent moving thing was passing the open space.
It was the woman of the house, the German’s wife. What was up? Was she
also trying dumbly to draw nearer something that was like herself, that
she could understand, a little? Thoughts flitted through Tom’s head and
a dumb kind of desire arose within him. He began hoping vaguely that the
woman was in search of himself.
Later, when he told me of the happenings of that night, he was quite
sure that the feeling that then possessed him was not physical desire
for a woman. His own mother had died several years before and the woman
his father had later married had seemed to him just a thing about the
house, a not very competent thing, bones, a hank of hair, a body that
did not do very well what one’s body was supposed to do. “I was
intolerant as the devil, about all women. Maybe I always have been but
then—I’m sure I was a queer kind of country bumpkin aristocrat. I
thought myself something, a special thing in the world, and that woman,
any women I had ever seen or known, the wives of a few neighbors as poor
as my father, a few country girls—I had thought them all beneath my
contempt, dirt under my feet.
“About that German’s wife I had not felt that way. I don’t know why.
Perhaps because she had a habit of keeping her mouth shut as I did just
at that time, a habit I have since lost.”
And so Tom stood there—waiting. The woman came slowly along the fence,
keeping in the shadow of the bushes and then crossed an open space
toward the barn.
Now she was walking slowly along the barn wall, directly toward the
young man who stood in the heavy shadows holding his breath and waiting
for her coming.
Afterwards, when he thought of what had happened, he could never quite
make up his mind whether she was walking in sleep or was awake as she
came slowly toward him. They did not speak the same language and they
never saw each other after that night. Perhaps she had only been
restless and had got out of the bed beside her husband and made her way
out of the house, without any conscious knowledge of what she was doing.
She became conscious when she came to where he was standing however,
conscious and frightened. He stepped out toward her and she stopped.
Their faces were very close together and her eyes were large with alarm.
“The pupils dilated,” he said in speaking of that moment. He insisted
upon the eyes. “There was a fluttering something in them. I am sure I do
not exaggerate when I say that at the moment I saw everything as clearly
as though we had been standing together in the broad daylight. Perhaps
something had happened to my own eyes, eh? That might be possible. I
could not speak to her, reassure her—I could not say, ‘Do not be
frightened, woman.’ I couldn’t say anything. My eyes I suppose had to do
all the saying.”
Evidently there was something to be said. At any rate there my friend
stood, on that remarkable night of his youth, and his face and the
woman’s face drew nearer each other. Then their lips met and he took her
into his arms and held her for a moment.
That was all. They stood together, the woman of twenty-seven and the
young man of nineteen and he was a country boy and was afraid. That may
be the explanation of the fact that nothing else happened.
I do not know as to that but in telling this tale I have an advantage
you who read cannot have. I heard the tale told, brokenly, by the
man—who had the experience I am trying to describe. Story-tellers of old
times, who went from place to place telling their wonder tales, had an
advantage we, who have come in the age of the printed word, do not have.
They were both story tellers and actors. As they talked they modulated
their voices, made gestures with their hands. Often they carried
conviction simply by the power of their own conviction. All of our
modern fussing with style in writing is an attempt to do the same thing.
And what I am trying to express now is a sense I had that night, as my
friend talked to me in the park, of a union of two people that took
place in the heavy shadows by a barn in Ohio, a union of two people that
was not personal, that concerned their two bodies and at the same time
did not concern their bodies. The thing has to be felt, not understood
with the thinking mind.
Anyway they stood for a few minutes, five minutes perhaps, with their
bodies pressed against the wall of the barn and their hands together,
clasped together tightly. Now and then one of them stepped away from the
barn and stood for a moment directly facing the other. One might say it
was Europe facing America in the darkness by a barn. One might grow
fancy and learned and say almost anything but all I am saying is that
they stood as I am describing them, and oddly enough with their faces to
the barn wall—instinctively turning from the house I presume—and that
now and then one of them stepped out and stood for a moment facing the
other. Their lips did not meet after the first moment.
The next step was taken. The German awoke in the house and began
calling, and then he appeared at the kitchen door with a lantern in his
hand. It was the lantern, his carrying of the lantern, that saved the
situation for the wife and my friend. It made a little circle of light
outside of which he could see nothing, but he kept calling his wife,
whose name was Katherine, in a distracted frightened way. “Oh,
Katherine. Where are you? Oh, Katherine,” he called.
My friend acted at once. Taking hold of the woman’s hand he ran—making
no sound—along the shadows of the barn and across the open space between
the barn and the fence. The two people were two dim shadows flitting
along the dark wall of the barn, nothing more and at the place in the
fence where there were no bushes he lifted her over and climbed over
after her. Then he ran through the orchard and into the road before the
house and putting his two hands on her shoulders shook her. As though
understanding his wish, she answered her husband’s call and as the
lantern came swinging down toward them my friend dodged back into the
orchard.
The man and wife went toward the house, the German talking vigorously
and the woman answering quietly, as she had always answered him. Tom was
puzzled. Everything that happened to him that night puzzled him then and
long afterward when he told me of it. Later he worked out a kind of
explanation of it—as all men will do in such cases—but that is another
story and the time to tell it is not now.
The point is that my friend had, at the moment, the feeling of having
completely possessed the woman, and with that knowledge came also the
knowledge that her husband would never possess her, could never by any
chance possess her. A great tenderness swept over him and he had but one
desire, to protect the woman, not to by any chance make the life she had
yet to live any harder.
And so he ran quickly to the barn, secured the blanket and climbed
silently up into the loft.
The farm hand with the drooping mustache was sleeping quietly on the hay
and Tom lay down beside him and closed his eyes. As he expected the
German came, almost at once, to the loft and flashed the lantern, not
into the face of the older man but into Tom’s face. Then he went away
and Tom lay awake smiling happily. He was young then and there was
something proud and revengeful in him—in his attitude toward the German,
at the moment. “Her husband knew, but at the same time did not know,
that I had taken his woman from him,” he said to me when he told of the
incident long afterward. “I don’t know why that made me so happy then,
but it did. At the moment I thought I was happy only because we had both
managed to escape, but now I know that wasn’t it.”
And it is quite sure my friend did have a sense of something. On the
next morning when he went into the house the breakfast was on the table
but the woman was not on hand to serve it. The food was on the table and
the coffee on the stove and the three men ate in silence. And then Tom
and the German stepped out of the house together, stepped, as by a
prearranged plan into the barnyard. The German knew nothing—his wife had
grown restless in the night and had got out of bed and walked out into
the road and both the other men were asleep in the barn. He had never
had any reason for suspecting her of anything at all and she was just
the kind of woman he had wanted, never went trapsing off to town, didn’t
spend a lot of money on clothes, was willing to do any kind of work,
made no trouble. He wondered why he had taken such a sudden and violent
dislike for his young employee.
Tom spoke first. “I think I’ll quit. I think I’d better be on my way,”
he said. It was obvious his going, at just that time, would upset the
plans the German had made for getting the work done at the rush time but
he made no objection to Tom’s going and at once. Tom had arranged to
work by the week and the German counted back to the Saturday before and
tried to cheat a little. “I owe you for only one week, eh?” he said. One
might as well get two days extra work out of the man without pay—if it
were possible.
But Tom did not intend being defeated. “A week and four days,” he
replied, purposely adding an extra day. “If you do not want to pay for
the four days I’ll stay out the week.”
The German went into the house and got the money and Tom set off along
the road.
When he had walked for two or three miles he stopped and went into a
wood where he stayed all that day thinking of what had happened.
Perhaps he did not do much thinking. What he said, when he told the
story that night in the Chicago park, was that all day there were
certain figures marching through his mind and that he just sat down on a
log and let them march. Did he have some notion that an impulse toward
life in himself had come, and that it would not come again?
As he sat on the log there were the figures of his father and his dead
mother and of several other people who had lived about the Ohio
countryside where he had spent his boyhood. They kept doing things,
saying things. It will be quite clear to my readers that I think my
friend a story teller who for some reason has never been able to get his
stories outside himself, as one might say, and that might of course
explain the day in the wood. He himself thought he was in a sort of
comatose state. He had not slept during the night before and, although
he did not say as much, there was something a bit mysterious in the
thing that had happened to him.
There was one thing he told me concerning that day of dreams that is
curious. There appeared in his fancy, over and over again, the figure of
a woman he had never seen in the flesh and has never seen since. At any
rate it wasn’t the German’s wife, he declared.
“The figure was that of a woman but I could not tell her age,” he said.
“She was walking away from me and was clad in a blue dress covered with
black dots. Her figure was slender and looked strong but broken. That’s
it. She was walking in a path in a country such as I had then never
seen, have never seen, a country of very low hills and without trees.
There was no grass either but only low bushes that came up to her knees.
One might have thought it an Arctic country, where there is summer but
for a few weeks each year. She had her sleeves rolled to her shoulders
so that her slender arms showed, and had buried her face in the crook of
her right arm. Her left arm hung like a broken thing, her legs were like
broken things, her body was a broken thing.
“And yet, you see, she kept walking and walking, in the path, among the
low bushes, over the barren little hills. She walked vigorously too. It
seems impossible and a foolish thing to tell about but all day I sat in
the woods on the stump and every time I closed my eyes I saw that woman
walking thus, fairly rushing along, and yet, you see, she was all broken
to pieces.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MAN WHO BECAME A WOMAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MAN WHO BECAME A WOMAN
MY father was a retail druggist in our town, out in Nebraska, which was
so much like a thousand other towns I’ve been in since that there’s no
use fooling around and taking up your time and mine trying to describe
it.
Anyway I became a drug clerk and after father’s death the store was sold
and mother took the money and went west, to her sister in California,
giving me four hundred dollars with which to make my start in the world.
I was only nineteen years old then.
I came to Chicago, where I worked as a drug clerk for a time, and then,
as my health suddenly went back on me, perhaps because I was so sick of
my lonely life in the city and of the sight and smell of the drug store,
I decided to set out on what seemed to me then the great adventure and
became for a time a tramp, working now and then, when I had no money,
but spending all the time I could loafing around out of doors or riding
up and down the land on freight trains and trying to see the world. I
even did some stealing in lonely towns at night—once a pretty good suit
of clothes that someone had left hanging out on a clothesline, and once
some shoes out of a box in a freight car—but I was in constant terror of
being caught and put into jail so realized that success as a thief was
not for me.
The most delightful experience of that period of my life was when I once
worked as a groom, or swipe, with race horses and it was during that
time I met a young fellow of about my own age who has since become a
writer of some prominence.
The young man of whom I now speak had gone into race track work as a
groom, to bring a kind of flourish, a high spot, he used to say, into
his life.
He was then unmarried and had not been successful as a writer. What I
mean is he was free and I guess, with him as with me, there was
something he liked about the people who hang about a race track, the
touts, swipes, drivers, niggers and gamblers. You know what a gaudy
undependable lot they are—if you’ve ever been around the tracks
much—about the best liars I’ve ever seen, and not saving money or
thinking about morals, like most druggists, drygoods merchants and the
others who used to be my father’s friends in our Nebraska town—and not
bending the knee much either, or kowtowing to people, they thought must
be grander or richer or more powerful than themselves.
What I mean is, they were an independent, go-to-the-devil,
come-have-a-drink-of-whisky, kind of a crew and when one of them won a
bet, “knocked ’em off,” we called it, his money was just dirt to him
while it lasted. No king or president or soap manufacturer—gone on a
trip with his family to Europe—could throw on more dog than one of them,
with his big diamond rings and the diamond horse-shoe stuck in his
necktie and all.
I liked the whole blamed lot pretty well and he did too.
He was groom temporarily for a pacing gelding named Lumpy Joe owned by a
tall black-mustached man named Alfred Kreymborg and trying the best he
could to make the bluff to himself he was a real one. It happened that
we were on the same circuit, doing the West Pennsylvania county fairs
all that fall, and on fine evenings we spent a good deal of time walking
and talking together.
Let us suppose it to be a Monday or Tuesday evening and our horses had
been put away for the night. The racing didn’t start until later in the
week, maybe Wednesday, usually. There was always a little place called a
dining-hall, run mostly by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Associations
of the towns, and we would go there to eat where we could get a pretty
good meal for twenty-five cents. At least then we thought it pretty
good.
I would manage it so that I sat beside this fellow, whose name was Tom
Means and when we had got through eating we would go look at our two
horses again and when we got there Lumpy Joe would be eating his hay in
his box-stall and Alfred Kreymborg would be standing there, pulling his
mustache and looking as sad as a sick crane.
But he wasn’t really sad. “You two boys want to go down-town to see the
girls. I’m an old duffer and way past that myself. You go on along. I’ll
be setting here anyway, and I’ll keep an eye on both the horses for
you,” he would say.
So we would set off, going, not into the town to try to get in with some
of the town girls, who might have taken up with us because we were
strangers and race track fellows, but out into the country. Sometimes we
got into a hilly country and there was a moon. The leaves were falling
off the trees and lay in the road so that we kicked them up with the
dust as we went along.
To tell the truth I suppose I got to love Tom Means, who was five years
older than me, although I wouldn’t have dared say so, then. Americans
are shy and timid about saying things like that and a man here don’t
dare own up he loves another man, I’ve found out, and they are afraid to
admit such feelings to themselves even. I guess they’re afraid it may be
taken to mean something it don’t need to at all.
Anyway we walked along and some of the trees were already bare and
looked like people standing solemnly beside the road and listening to
what we had to say. Only I didn’t say much. Tom Means did most of the
talking.
Sometimes we came back to the race track and it was late and the moon
had gone down and it was dark. Then we often walked round and round the
track, sometimes a dozen times, before we crawled into the hay to go to
bed.
Tom talked always on two subjects, writing and race horses, but mostly
about race horses. The quiet sounds about the race tracks and the smells
of horses, and the things that go with horses, seemed to get him all
excited. “Oh, hell, Herman Dudley,” he would burst out suddenly, “don’t
go talking to me. I know what I think. I’ve been around more than you
have and I’ve seen a world of people. There isn’t any man or woman, not
even a fellow’s own mother, as fine as a horse, that is to say a
thoroughbred horse.”
Sometimes he would go on like that a long time, speaking of people he
had seen and their characteristics. He wanted to be a writer later and
what he said was that when he came to be one he wanted to write the way
a well bred horse runs or trots or paces. Whether he ever did it or not
I can’t say. He has written a lot, but I’m not too good a judge of such
things. Anyway I don’t think he has.
But when he got on the subject of horses he certainly was a darby. I
would never have felt the way I finally got to feel about horses or
enjoyed my stay among them half so much if it hadn’t been for him. Often
he would go on talking for an hour maybe, speaking of horses’ bodies and
of their minds and wills as though they were human beings. “Lord help
us, Herman,” he would say, grabbing hold of my arm, “don’t it get you up
in the throat? I say now, when a good one, like that Lumpy Joe I’m
swiping, flattens himself at the head of the stretch and he’s coming,
and you know he’s coming, and you know his heart’s sound, and he’s game,
and you know he isn’t going to let himself get licked—don’t it get you
Herman, don’t it get you like the old Harry?”
That’s the way he would talk, and then later, sometimes, he’d talk about
writing and get himself all het up about that too. He had some notions
about writing I’ve never got myself around to thinking much about but
just the same maybe his talk, working in me, has led me to want to begin
to write this story myself.
* * * * *
There was one experience of that time on the tracks that I am forced, by
some feeling inside myself, to tell.
Well, I don’t know why but I’ve just got to. It will be kind of like
confession is, I suppose, to a good Catholic, or maybe, better yet, like
cleaning up the room you live in, if you are a bachelor, like I was for
so long. The room gets pretty mussy and the bed not made some days and
clothes and things thrown on the closet floor and maybe under the bed.
And then you clean all up and put on new sheets, and then you take off
all your clothes and get down on your hands and knees, and scrub the
floor so clean you could eat bread off it, and then take a walk and come
home after a while and your room smells sweet and you feel sweetened-up
and better inside yourself too.
What I mean is, this story has been on my chest, and I’ve often dreamed
about the happenings in it, even after I married Jessie and was happy.
Sometimes I even screamed out at night and so I said to myself, “I’ll
write the dang story,” and here goes.