Chapter V
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