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 d
efeated 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
* * *
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?
Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories Page 49