May decided that after all she would not try to be Maud Welliver’s friend. She would see her and talk to her but, for the present, she would keep herself to herself. The living thing within her had been wounded and needed time to recover. Of all the feelings, the strong emotion, that swept through her on that evening, cleansing her internally, as she had been trying by splashing in the tub in the woodshed to cleanse herself externally, one impulse got itself definitely expressed. “I’ll go it alone, that’s what I’ll do,” she murmured between sobs as she sat by the window with her head in her hands, and heard the sweet song of the insects, singing of life in the darkness of the fields.
Chapter IV
“THERE was a man here. For weeks he lay sick to the point of death, in our house, and all the time I did not dare sleep. Night and day I was on the watch. How often at night I have crept down across this very field, in the middle of the night, in the darkness looking for the black, trying to discover if he was still on the trail.”
It was early summer and May sat talking with Maud Welliver by a tree in the field back of the Edgley’s kitchen door—building steadily her tower of romance. Two or three times each week, since that first talk by the blacksmith shop, Maud had managed to get to the Edgley house unobserved by her aunt. In her passionate devotion to the little dark-skinned woman, who had lived through so many and such romantic adventures in life, she was ready to risk anything, even to the wrath of her father’s iron-jawed housekeeper.
To the Edgley house she came always at night, and the necessity of that was understood by May and perhaps better understood by Lillian Edgley. On the next day, after the meeting by the blacksmith shop, Maud’s father had spoken his mind concerning the Edgleys. The Welliver family sat at supper in the evening. “Maud,” John Welliver began, looking sternly at his daughter, “I don’t want you should have anything to do with that Edgley family that lives on this street.” The railroad man cursed the ill luck that had led him to take a house on the same street where such cattle lived. One of his brother employees on the road, he said, had told him the story of the Edgleys. “They are such an outfit,” he declared wrathfully. “God only knows why they are allowed to stay here. They should be tarred and feathered and run out of town. Why, to live on the same street with them is like living in the midst of cattle.”
The railroad man looked hard at his daughter. To him she was a young woman and a virgin, and by these tokens walked a dangerous trail through life. On dark streets, adventurous men lay in wait for all such women and they employed other women, of the Edgley stripe, to decoy innocent virgins into their hands. There was much he would have liked to say to his daughter but not much he could say. Among themselves men could speak openly of such women as the Edgley sisters. They were a thing—well. To tell the truth—during young manhood almost every man went to see such women, went with other men into a house inhabited by such women. To go to such a place one needed to have been drinking a little. It happened. Several young men were together and went from place to place drinking. “Let’s go down the line,” one of them said. The men went straggling off along a street, two by two. Little was said and they were all a little ashamed of their mission. Then they came to a house, always on a dark foul street, and one of the young men, a bold fellow, knocked at the door. A fat woman, with a hard face, came to let them in and they went into a room and stood about, looking foolish. “O, girls,—company,” the fat woman shouted and several women came and stood about. The women looked bored and tired.
John Welliver had himself been to such places. Well, that was when he was a young workman. Later a man met a good woman and married her, tried to forget the other women, did forget them. In spite of all the things said, most men after marriage went straight. They had a living to make and children growing up and there was no time for any such nonsense. Among his fellow workmen, the railroad man often spoke of the kind of women he believed the three Edgley women to be. “It’s my notion,” he said, “that it’s better to have such places in order that good women may be let alone, but they ought to be off by themselves somewhere. A good woman never ought to see or know about such cattle.”
In the presence of his daughter and of his sister, the housekeeper, now that the subject of the Edgleys had been broached the railroad man was embarrassed. He kept his eye on the plate before him and stole a shy look at his daughter’s face. How white and pure it looked. “I wish I had kept my mouth shut,” he thought—but a sense of the necessity of the occasion led him on. “My Maud might be led to take up with the Edgley women, knowing nothing,” he thought. “Well,” he said, “there are three women in that family and they are all alike. There is one, who works at the hotel—where she meets traveling men—and the oldest one doesn’t work at all. And there is another, too, the youngest that everyone thought was going to turn out all right because she stood high in school and is said to be smart. Everyone thought she would be different but she isn’t, you see. Why, right before everyone, in a berry field, where she was at work, she went into a wood with a man.”