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

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.