There was a very tender delicate thing within her, many people had wanted to kill—that was certain. To kill the delicate thing within was a passion that obsessed mankind. All men and women tried to do it. First the man or woman killed the thing within himself, and then tried to kill it in others. Men and women were afraid to let the thing live.
May sat in the darkness in her room in the Edgley house having such thoughts as had never come to her before and the night seemed alive as no other night of her life had been. For her gods walked abroad in the land. The Edgley house was but a poor little affair of boards—of thin walls—and she looked out, in the dim wavering light of the night, into a field, that at times during the year became a bog where cattle sank in black mud to their knees. Her town was but a dot on the huge map of her country—she knew that. It was not necessary to travel to find out. Had she not been at the top of her class in geography? In her country alone lived some sixty, eighty, a hundred million people—she could not remember the number—it changed yearly. When the country was new millions of buffalo walked up and down on the plains. She was a she-calf among the buffalo but she had found lodgment in a town, in a house made of boards and painted yellow, but the field below the house was dry now and long grass grew there. However, tiny pools remained and frogs lived in them and croaked loudly while crickets sang in the dry grass. Her life was sacred—the house in which she lived, the room in which she sat, became a church, a temple, a tower. The lie she had told had started a new force within her and the new temple, on which she was to live, was now being built.
Thoughts like giant clouds, seen in a dim night sky, floated through her mind. Tears came to her eyes and her throat seemed to be swelling. She put her head down on the window sill and convulsive sobs shook her.
That was, she knew, because she had been brave enough and quick-witted enough to tell the lie, to reestablish the romance of existence within herself. The foundation stone for the temple had been laid.
May did not think anything out clearly, did not try to do that. She felt—she knew her own truth. Words heard, read in books in school, in other books loaned her by the schoolteachers, words said casually, without feeling—by thin-lipped, flat-breasted young women who were teachers at the Sunday school, words that had seemed as nothing to her when said, now made a great sound in her mind. They were repeated to her in stately measure by some force, seemingly outside herself and were like the steady rhythmical tread of an army marching on earth roads. No, they were like rain on the roof over her head, on the roof of the house that was herself. All her life she had lived in a house and the rains had come unheeded—and the words she had heard and now remembered were like rain drops falling on roofs. There was a subtle perfume remaining. “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.”
As the thoughts marched through May’s mind her small shoulders shook with sobs, but she was happy—strangely happy and something within herself was singing. The singing was a song that was always alive somewhere in the world, it was the song of life, the song that crickets sang, the song the frogs croaked hoarsely. It ran away out of her room, out of the darkness into the night, into days, into far lands—it was the old song, the sweet song.
May kept thinking about buildings and builders. “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.” Someone had said that and others had felt what she now felt—they had had the feeling she could not put into words and they had tried putting it into words. She was not alone in the world. It was not a strange path she walked in life, but many had walked it, many were walking it now. Even as she sat in the window, thinking so strangely, many men and women in many places and many lands sat at other windows having the same thoughts. In a world, where many men and women had killed the thing within themselves, the path of the rejected was the true path and how many had walked the path! The trees along the way were marked. Signs had been hung up by those who wanted to show others the way. “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.”
Lillian had said, “men are no good,” and it was clear Lillian had also killed the thing within herself, had let it be killed. She had let some Jerome Hadley kill it, and then she had grown slowly and steadily more and more angry at life, had come to hate life, had thrown it away. And the thing had happened to her mother, too. That was the reason for her life of silence—death walking about. “The dead rise up to strike the dead.”
The story May had told to Maud Welliver was not a lie—it was the living truth. He had tried to kill and had come near succeeding. May had walked in the valley of the shadow of death. She knew that now. Her own sister, Lillian, had come to her when she walked with Death and wanted Life. “If you are going to go on the turf I’ll get you in with men who have money,” Lillian had said. She had got no closer to understanding than that.
* * *
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 str
eet, two by two. Little was said and they were all a little ashamed of their mission. Then they came to a house, always on a dark foul street, and one of the young men, a bold fellow, knocked at the door. A fat woman, with a hard face, came to let them in and they went into a room and stood about, looking foolish. “O, girls,—company,” the fat woman shouted and several women came and stood about. The women looked bored and tired.
John Welliver had himself been to such places. Well, that was when he was a young workman. Later a man met a good woman and married her, tried to forget the other women, did forget them. In spite of all the things said, most men after marriage went straight. They had a living to make and children growing up and there was no time for any such nonsense. Among his fellow workmen, the railroad man often spoke of the kind of women he believed the three Edgley women to be. “It’s my notion,” he said, “that it’s better to have such places in order that good women may be let alone, but they ought to be off by themselves somewhere. A good woman never ought to see or know about such cattle.”
In the presence of his daughter and of his sister, the housekeeper, now that the subject of the Edgleys had been broached the railroad man was embarrassed. He kept his eye on the plate before him and stole a shy look at his daughter’s face. How white and pure it looked. “I wish I had kept my mouth shut,” he thought—but a sense of the necessity of the occasion led him on. “My Maud might be led to take up with the Edgley women, knowing nothing,” he thought. “Well,” he said, “there are three women in that family and they are all alike. There is one, who works at the hotel—where she meets traveling men—and the oldest one doesn’t work at all. And there is another, too, the youngest that everyone thought was going to turn out all right because she stood high in school and is said to be smart. Everyone thought she would be different but she isn’t, you see. Why, right before everyone, in a berry field, where she was at work, she went into a wood with a man.”
“I know about it and I’ve told Maud,” the railroad man’s sister said sharply. “We don’t need to talk about it no more.”
* * *
Maud Welliver had listened with flushed cheeks to her father’s words, and even as he talked had made up her mind she would see May again and soon. Since coming to Bidwell she had not left the house at night, but now she felt suddenly quite strong and well. When the supper was finished and darkness came on she got up from her chair on the porch and spoke to her aunt, at work inside the house. “I feel better than I have for months, aunty,” she said, “and I’m going for a little walk. You know the doctor said I was to walk all I could and I can’t walk during the day on account of the heat. I’ll just go uptown a little while.”
Maud went cautiously along the sidewalk toward the business section of town and then crossed over and returning on the opposite side, stole along, walking on the grass at the edge of lawns. What an adventure! She felt like one being admitted into some strange world filled with romance. For her May Edgley’s tales had become golden apples of existence, to taste which she would risk anything. “What a person!” she thought as she crept forward in the darkness, lifting and putting down her feet on the grass like a kitten compelled to walk in water. She thought of May Edgley’s adventure in the wood with Jerome Hadley. How stupid her father had been, how stupid everyone in the town of Bidwell! “It must be so with men and women everywhere,” she thought vaguely. “They go on thinking they know what’s happening, and they know nothing.” She thought of May Edgley, small and a woman, alone in the forest with a man—a dark determined man, intent upon murder. The man held in his hand a little package containing a white powder. A few grains of it in a cup of coffee and a human life would go out. A man who walked and talked and went about the streets of Bidwell with other men would become a white lifeless bit of clay. Maud had been at several times in her life close to the door of death. She imagined a scene. There was a rich man’s home with soft carpets, woven of priceless stuffs, brought from the Orient. One walking on the carpets made no sound. The feet sank softly into the velvety stuff and soft-voiced servants moved about. A man entered and sat at breakfast. The movies had not at that time come to Bidwell but Maud had read many popular novels and several times, at Fort Wayne, had been to the theatre.
There was a woman in the rich man’s house—his guilty wife. She was slender and willowy. Ah, there was something serpentine about her. In Maud’s imagination she lay on a silken couch beside the table, at which the man now sat down to eat his breakfast. A wood fire burned in the fireplace. The woman’s hand stole forward and a tiny pinch of the white powder went into the coffee cup; then she raised a white hand and stroked the man’s cheek. She closed her eyes and lay back on the silken couch. The dastardly deed was done and the woman did not care. She was not even curious as to how death would come. She yawned and waited.
The man drank his coffee and arising moved about the room and then a sudden pallor came upon his cheeks. It was quite noticeable as he was a ruddy-cheeked man with soft grey hair—a strong commanding figure of a man, a leader among men. Maud pictured him as the president of a great railroad system. She had never seen a railroad president but her father had often spoken of the president of the Nickel Plate and had described him as a big fine looking fellow.
What a thing is passion, so terrible, so strange. It takes such unimaginable turns. The woman on the silken couch, the willowy serpentine woman, had turned from her husband, from the commander of men, from the strong man, the powerful one who swept all before him, and had given her illicit but powerfully fascinating love to a railroad mail clerk.
Maud had seen Jerome Hadley. When the Wellivers had first come to Bidwell she, with her aunt and father, had been driven about town with a real-estate man and his wife. They were looking for a house in which to live and as they drove about the real-estate man’s wife, who sat on the back seat of a surrey with Maud and her aunt, had pointed to Jerome Hadley, walking past in the street, and had told in a whisper the story of his going into the wood with May Edgley. Maud was half sick on that day and had not listened. The railroad journey from Fort Wayne to Bidwell had given her a headache.
However, she had looked at Jerome. He had sloping shoulders, pale grey eyes and sandy hair, and when he walked he toed out badly and his trousers were baggy. And for that man the woman on the silken couch, the railroad president’s wife, was ready to commit murder. What an unexplainable, what a strange thing is love! The windings and twistings of its pathway through life cannot be followed by the human mind.
The scene being enacted in Maud Welliver’s mind played itself out. The strong man in the richly furnished room put his hand to his throat and staggered. He reeled from side to side and clutched at the backs of chairs. The noiseless servants had all gone out of the room. The woman half arose from the couch as the man fell to the floor and in falling struck his head on the corner of a table so that his blood ran out upon the silken carpets. The woman smiled sardonically. It was terrible. She cared not the least in the world and a slow cruel smile came and remained fixed on her face. Then there was the sound of running feet. The servants were coming, they were running, running desperately. The woman lay back on the couch and yawned again. “I had better scream and then faint,” she thought and she did the two things, did them with the air of a tired actor rehearsing a well known part for a play. It was all for love, for a strange and mysterious thing called passion. She did it for Jerome Hadley’s sake, that she might be free to walk with him the illicit paths of love.
Maud Welliver tiptoed cautiously forward on the lawns on the further side of Duane Street in Bidwell, looking across at the dark house where she had come to live. In Fort Wayne she had known nothing like this. What a terrible thing might have happened in Bidwell but for May Edgley! The scene in the rich man’s home faded and was replaced by another. She saw May standing in the forest with Jerome Hadley. How he had changed! He stood alert, intent, determined, holding the poison package in his hand and he was threatening, threatening and pleading
. In the other hand he held money, a great package of bills. He thrust the bills forward and pleaded with May Edgley and then grew angry and threatened again.
Before him stood the small, white-faced woman, frightened now, but terribly determined also. The word “never” was upon her lips. And now the man threw the money away into the bushes and sprang forward. His hand was at the woman’s throat, the murderous hand of the infuriated mail clerk. It pressed hard. May fell to the ground.
Jerome Hadley did not quite dare let the woman die. Too many people had seen the two go into the wood together. He stood over her until she had a little recovered and then the threatening and pleading began again, but all the time the little woman stood firm, shaking her head and saying the brave word “never.” “Kill me if you will,” she said, “but I’ll take no part in this murder. My reputation is gone and I am an outlaw among men and women but I’ll take no part in this murder, and if you go on with it I will betray you.”
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 45