Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

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  The September evening when May uttered the startling sentences, regarding a strange man and a mysterious black, set down at the head of this section of the story of her adventures, was warm and clear. Brightly the stars shone in the sky and in the field back of the Edgley’s kitchen door all the little ponds had become dry. Since that first evening when she had met May a great change had taken place in Maud. May had led her up to the ramparts of the tower of romance and as often as possible now the two sat together under a tree in the field or on the floor by the open window in May’s room. To the field they went through the kitchen door, along the creek where the elders and willows grew and over stones in the bed of the creek itself, to a wire fence. How alone and how far away from the life of the town they were in the field at night! Buggies and the few automobiles then owned in Bidwell passed on distant roads, and over the town, soft lights played on the sky and soft lights seemed to play over the spirits of the two women. On a distant street, that led down to the town waterworks, a group of young men went tramping along on a board sidewalk. They were singing a song. “Listen, May,” Maud said. The voices died away and another sound came. Jerry Haden, a cripple who walked with a crutch and who delivered evening papers, went along quickly, his crutch making a sharp clicking sound on the sidewalks. What a hurry he was in. “Click! click!” went the crutch.

  It was a time and place for the growth of romance. A desire to reach out to life, to command life grew within Maud. One evening she, alone and unaided, mounted the tower of romance and told May of how a young man in Fort Wayne had wanted to marry her. “He was the son of the president of a railroad company,” she said. The matter was of no importance and she only spoke of it to show what men were like. For a long time he came to the house almost every evening and when he did not come he sent flowers and candy. Maud had cared nothing for him. There was a certain air he had that wearied her. He seemed to think himself in some way of better blood than the Wellivers. The idea was absurd. Maud’s father knew his father and knew that he had once been no more than a section hand on the railroad. His pretensions wearied Maud and she finally sent him away.

  Maud told May, on several evenings of the imaginary young man whom, because of his pride of blood, she had cast adrift, and on the September evening wanted to speak of something else. For two or three evenings she had been on the point of saying what was in her mind but could not bring the matter to her lips. It trembled within her like a wild bird caught and held in her hand, as, in the dim light, she looked at May. “She won’t do it. I’ll never get her to do it,” she thought.

  In Fort Wayne, before she came to Bidwell, and when she had just graduated from the high school Maud had for a time walked upon the border line of love, had stood for a moment in the very pathway of Cupid’s darts. Near the house where the Wellivers then lived there was a grocery run by an alert erect little man of forty-five, whose wife had died. Maud often went to the store to buy supplies for the Welliver home and one evening she arrived just as the grocer, a man named Hunt, was locking the store for the night. He unlocked the door and let her in. “You won’t mind if I don’t light the lights again,” he said. He explained that the grocerymen of Fort Wayne had made an agreement among themselves that they would sell no goods after seven in the evening. “If I light the lights and people see us in here they will be coming in and wanting to be waited on,” he explained.

  Maud stood in the uncertain light by a counter while the grocer wrapped her packages. At the back of the store there was a lamp fastened to a bracket on the wall and burning dimly and the soft yellow light fell on her hair and on her white smiling face as the grocer fumbled in the darkness back of the counter and from time to time looked up at her. How beautiful her long pale face in that light! He was stirred and delayed the matter of getting the packages wrapped. “My wife and I were not very happy together but I was happy when I lived alone with my mother,” he thought. He let Maud out at the door, locked it and went along beside her carrying the packages. “I’m going your way,” he said vaguely. He began to speak of his boyhood in a town in Ohio and told of how he had married at the age of twenty-three and had come to Fort Wayne where his wife’s father owned the store that was now his own. He spoke to Maud as to one who knew most of the details of his life. “Well, my wife and her father are both dead and I own the place—I’ve come out all right,” he said. “I wonder why I left my mother. I thought more of her than anyone else in the world but I got married and went away and left her, went away and left her, to live alone until she died,” he said. They came to a corner and he put the packages into Maud’s arms. “You got me started thinking of mother. You’re like her,” he said suddenly and then hurried away.

  Maud had got into the habit of going to the store, just at closing time in the evening and when she did not come the grocer was upset. He closed the store and, walking to a nearby corner, stood under an awning before a hardware store, also closed for the night, and looked down along the street where Maud lived. Then he took a heavy silver watch from his pocket and looked at it. “Huh!” he exclaimed and went off along another street to his boarding house, stopping several times in the first block to look back.

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  It was early June and the Wellivers had lived in Bidwell, for four months and, during the last year of her life at Fort Wayne Maud had been so continually ill that she had seldom seen the grocer, but now a letter had come from him. The letter came from the city of Cleveland. “I am here at a convention of the K of Ps,” he wrote, “and I have met a man here who is a widower like myself. We are in the same room at the hotel. I want to stop to see you on the way home and would like to bring my friend along. Can’t you get another girl and we’ll all spend an evening together. If you can do it, you get a surrey and meet us at the seven-fifty train next Friday evening. I’ll pay for the surrey of course and we’ll go off somewhere to the country. I’ve got something very important I want to say to you. You write me here and let me know if it’s all right.”

  Maud sat in the field beside May and thought of the letter. An answer must be sent at once. In fancy she saw the little bright-eyed grocer standing before May, the hero of the passage in the wood with Jerome Hadley, the woman who lived the romance of which she herself dreamed. At the postoffice during the afternoon she had heard two young men talking of a dance to be given at a place called the Dewdrop. It was to be held on Friday evening, and a bold impulse had led her to go to a livery stable and make inquiry about the place. It was twenty miles away and on the shores of Sandusky Bay. “We will go there,” she had thought, and had engaged the surrey and horses and now she was face to face with May and the thought of the little grocer and his companion frightened her. Freeman Hunt the widower had a bald head and a grey mustache. What would his friend be like? Fear made Maud’s body tremble and when she tried to speak, to tell May of her plan, the words would not come. “She’ll never do it. I’ll never get her to do it,” she thought again.

  * * *

  “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.”

  May Edgley was building high her tower of romance. Having several times listened, as Maud told of the imaginary son of the railroad president who had been determined to marry her, she had set about making a romantic lover of her own. Books she had read, the remembrance of childhood tales of love and romantic adventure poured in upon her mind. “There was a man here. He was just twenty-four but what a life he had led,” she said absentmindedly. She appeared to be lost in thought and for a long time was silent. Then she got suddenly to her feet and ran to where two large maple trees stood on a little hill in the midst of the field. Maud also got to her feet and her body shook with a new fear. The grocer was forgotten. May returned and again sat on the grass. “I thought I saw someone snooping there behind that tree,” she said. “You see I have to be careful. A man’s life depends on my being careful.”

  Warning Maud that w
hatever happened she was not to tell the secret, now for the first time to be told to another, May launched into her tale. On a dark night, when it was raining and when the trees shook in the wind, she had got out of bed in the Edgley house and had opened her window to behold the storm. She could not imagine what had led her to do it. It was something she had never done before. To tell the truth a voice outside herself seemed to be calling her, commanding her. Well, she had thrown up the window and had stood looking out. How the wind screamed and shrieked! Furies seemed abroad in the night. The house itself trembled on its foundations and great trees bent almost to the ground. Now and then there was a flash of lightning and she could see the whole outdoors as plain as day—“I could even see the leaves on the tree.” May had thought the world must be coming to an end but for some strange reason she was not in the least afraid. It was impossible to explain the feeling she had on that night. Well, she couldn’t sleep. Something, outside there, in the darkness, seemed to be calling, calling to her. “All of this happened more than two years ago, when I was just a young girl in school,” she explained.

  On that night when the storm raged May had seen, during one of the flashes of lightning, a man running desperately across the very field, where now she and Maud sat so quietly. Even from where she stood by the window in the upstairs room she could see that he was white and that his face was drawn and tired from long running. Behind him, perhaps a dozen strides behind, was another man, a giant black, with a club in his hand. In a moment May knew, she knew everything, knowledge came into her mind and illuminated it as the lightning had illuminated the scene in the field. The giant black with the club was about to kill the other man, the white man in the field. In a moment she knew she would see a murder done. The fleeing man could not escape. At every stride the black gained. There came a second flash of lightning and then the white man stumbled and fell. May threw up her hands and screamed. She had always been ashamed of the fact but why deny it—she fainted.

  What a night that had turned out to be! Even to speak of it made May shudder, even yet. Her father had heard her scream and came running to her room. She recovered—she sat up—in a few quick words she told her father what she had seen.

  Well, you see, her father and she had got out of the house somehow. They were both in their night dresses and in the woodshed back of the house her father had fumbled about and had got hold of an axe. It was the only weapon of any kind he could lay his hands on about the place.

  And there they were, in the darkness. No more flashes of lightning came and it began to rain. It poured. The rain came in torrents and the wind blew so that the trees seemed to be shouting to each other, calling to each other like friends lost in some dark pit.

  There was plenty of shouting after that but neither May nor her father was afraid. They were perhaps too excited for fear to take hold of them. May didn’t know exactly how she felt. No words could describe how she felt.

  Followed by her father she ran, down the little hill back of the kitchen, got across the creek, stumbled and fell several times, picked herself up and ran on again. They came to the fence at the edge of the field. Well, they got over somehow. It was strange how the field, across which they had both walked so many times in the daytime (as a child May had always played there and she thought she knew every blade of grass, every little pond, and hillock)—it was strange how it had changed. It was exactly as though she and her father had run out upon a wide treeless plain. They ran, it seemed for hours and hours, and still they were in the field. Later when May thought of the experiences of that night she understood how men came to write fairy tales. Why, the ground in the field might have been made of rubber that stretched out as they ran.

  They could see no trees, no buildings—nothing. For a time she and her father kept close together, running desperately, into nothingness, into a wall of darkness.

  Then her father got lost from her, was swallowed up in the darkness.

  What a roaring of voices went on. Trees somewhere, away off in the distance, were shouting to each other. The very blades of grass seemed to be talking—in excited whispers, you understand.

  It was terrible! Now and then May could hear her father’s voice. He just swore. “Gol darn you,” he shouted over and over. The words were grunted forth.

  Then there was another and terrible voice—it must have been the voice of the black, intent upon murder. May could not understand what he said. He, of course, just shouted words in some strange foreign language—a gibberish of words.

  Then May stopped running. She was too exhausted to run any more and sat down on the ground at the edge of one of the little ponds. Her hair had all fallen about her face. Well, she wasn’t afraid. The thing that had happened was too big to be afraid of. It was like being in the presence of God and one couldn’t be afraid. How could one? A blade of grass isn’t afraid in the presence of the sun, coming up. That’s the way May felt—little you see—a tiny thing in the vast night—nothing.

  How wet she was! Her clothes clung to her. All about the voices went on and on and the storm raged. She sat with her feet in a puddle of water and things seemed to fly past her, dark figures running, screaming, swearing, saying strange words. She herself did not doubt—when she thought of it all after it was over—that the giant black and her father had both run past her a dozen times, had passed so close to her that she might have put out her hand and touched them.

  How long did she sit there in the darkness? That was something she never knew and her father was like her about it too. Later he couldn’t have said, for the life of him, how long he ran about in the darkness, trying to strike something with the axe. Once he ran against a tree. Well, he drew back and sank the axe into the tree. Sometime—in the daytime—May would show Maud the tree with the great gash in it. Her father sank the axe so deeply into the body of the tree that he had work getting it out again and even in the midst of his excitement he had to laugh to think of what a silly fool he had been.

  And there was May sitting with her feet in the puddle, the hair clinging to her bare shoulders, her head in her hands, trying to think, trying perhaps to catch some meaningful word in the strange roar of voices. Well, what was she thinking about? She didn’t know.

  And then a hand touched her, a white strong firm hand. It just crept up out of the darkness, seemed to come out of the very ground under her. There was one thing sure—although she lived to be a thousand years old, May would never know why she didn’t scream, faint away, get up and run madly, butting her head against things.

  “Love is a strange thing,” she told Maud Welliver, as the two sat in the field that warm clear starlit evening. Her voice trembled. “I knew a man had come to whom I would be faithful unto death,” she explained.

  That was the beginning of the strangest and most exciting time in May’s whole life. Never had she thought she would tell anyone in the world about it, at least not until the time came for her marriage, and when all the dangers that still faced the man she loved had passed like a cloud.

  On that terrible night, and while the storm still raged, the hand that had crept so strangely and unexpectedly into hers had at once quieted and reassured her. It was too dark to see the face and the body of the man back of the hand, but for some reason she knew at once that he was beautiful and good. She loved the man at once and completely, that was the truth. Later he had told her that his own experience was the same. For him also there came a great peace of the spirit, after his hand found hers in the midst of that roaring darkness.

  They got out of that field and into the Edgley house somehow, crawled along together and when they got to the house they did not light a lamp or anything but sat on the floor of May’s room hand in hand, talking in low quiet tones. After a long time, perhaps an hour, May’s father came home. He had got out of the field and had wandered on a country road and as he went along he heard stealthy footsteps behind him. That was the black following the wrong man and it’s a wonder he didn’t kill John Edgley. What happen
ed was that the drayman began to run and got into a grove of trees and there lost his pursuer. Then he took off his shoes and managed to find his way home barefooted. The black’s having followed the wrong man turned out to be a good thing. The man up in May’s room was free, for the first time in more than two years, he was free.

  It had turned out that the man was quite badly injured, the black having, in his excitement, aimed a blow at his head that would have done for him had it struck fair. However, the blow glanced off and only bruised his head and made it bleed and as he sat in the darkness on the floor in May’s room with his hand in hers, telling her his story, the blood kept dropping thump, thump, on the floor. May had thought, at the time, it was water falling from her hair. It just went to show what a man he was, afraid of nothing, enduring everything without a murmur. Later he was sick with a fever for weeks and May never left his room, but gradually nursed him back to health and strength, and no one in Bidwell had ever known of his presence in the house. Later he left town at night, on a dark night when, to save yourself, you couldn’t see your hand before your face.

  As to the man’s story—it had never been told to anyone and if May told it to Maud Welliver it was because she had to have at least one friend who knew all. Even her father, who had risked his life, did not know.

  May put her hands over her face and leaned forward and for a long time she was silent. In the grass the insects kept singing and on a distant street Maud could hear the footsteps of people walking. What a world she had come into when she left Fort Wayne and came to Bidwell! Indiana was not like Ohio! The very air was different. She breathed deeply and looked about into the soft darkness. Had she been alone she could not have stood being in a place where such wonderful things as had just been described to her could happen. How quiet it was in the field now. She put out a hand softly and touched May’s dress and tried to think but her own thoughts were vague, they swam away into a strange world. To go to a theatre, to read books, to hear of the commonplace adventures of other people—how dull and uneventful her life had been before she knew May. Once her father had been in a wreck on the railroad and by a miracle had escaped uninjured and, when company came to the Welliver house, he always told of the wreck, how the cars were piled up and how he, walking over the tops of cars in the darkness of a rainy night was pitched off and went flying, head over heels, only by a pure miracle to land on his feet in dense bushes, uninjured, only badly shaken up. Maud had thought the tale exciting, she had been stupid enough to think it exciting. What contempt she now had for such weak commonplace adventures. What a vast change knowing May Edgley had made in her life!