Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

  “You won’t tell. You promise on your life you won’t tell.” May’s hand gripped Maud’s and the two women sat in silence, intent, shaken with some vast emotion that seemed to run over the dry grass in the field, through the branches of distant trees, and that seemed to effect even the stars in the sky. To Maud the stars appeared about to speak. They came down close out of the sky. “Be cautious,” they seemed to be saying. Had she lived in old times, in Judea, and had she been permitted to go into the room where Jesus sat at the last supper with his disciples, she could not have felt more completely humble and thankful that she, of all the people in the world had been permitted to be where she was at the moment.

  “He was a prince in his own country,” May said suddenly breaking the silence that had become so intense that in another moment Maud thought she would have screamed. “He lived, Oh, far away. In his own country the father, a king, had decided to marry the prince to the princess of a neighboring kingdom, and on the same day his sister was to marry the brother of his betrothed. Neither he nor his sister had ever seen the man and woman they were to marry. Princes and princesses don’t, you know. That is the way such things are arranged when princes and princesses are concerned.

  “He thought nothing about it, was all ready for the marriage, and then one night something came into his head and he had an almost overpowering desire to see the woman, who was to be his wife, and the man who was to be his sister’s husband. Well, he went at night and crept up the side of a great wall to the window of a tower, and through the window saw the man and woman. How ugly they were—horrible! He shuddered. For a time he thought he would let go his hold on the stone face of the wall and be dashed to bits on the rocks beneath. He was ready to die with horror—didn’t care much.

  “And then he thought of his sister, the beautiful princess. Whatever happened she had to be saved from such a marriage.

  “And so home the prince went and confronted his father and there was a terrible scene, the father swearing the marriage would have to be consummated. The neighboring king was powerful and his kingdom was of vast extent and the marriage would make the son, born of the marriage, the most powerful king in the whole world. The prince and the king stood in the castle and looked at each other. Neither of them would give in an inch.

  “There was one thing of which the prince was sure—if he did not marry his sister would not have to. If he went away there would be a quarrel between the two old kings. He was sure of that.

  “First though he gave the king, his father, his chance. ‘I won’t do it,’ he declared and he stuck to his word. The king was furious. ‘I’ll disinherit you,’ he cried, and then he ordered his son to go out of his presence and not to come back until he had made up his mind to go ahead with the marriage.

  “What the king did not expect was that he would be taken at his word. For what the young man, the prince, did, you see, was to just walk out of the castle and right on out into the world.

  “Poor man, his hands were then as soft as a woman’s,” May explained. “You see in all his former life he had never even lifted his hand to do a thing. When he dressed he didn’t even button his own clothes. A prince never did.

  “And so the prince ran away and managed, after unbelievable hardships, to make his way to a seaport, where he got a place as sailor on a ship just leaving for foreign parts. The captain of the ship did not know, and the other sailors did not know that he was a king’s son, nor did they know that a great outcry was going up and horsemen riding madly over the whole country, trying to find the lost prince.

  “So he got away and was a sailor and in the castle his father was so furious he would not speak to anyone. He shut himself up in a room of the castle and just swore and swore.

  “And then one day he called to him a giant black, one who had been his slave since he was born, and was the strongest, the fleetest of foot and the smartest man too, of all the king’s servants. ‘Go over land and sea,’ shouted the king. ‘Go into all strange far away lands and amongst all peoples. Do not let me ever see your face again until you have found my son and have brought him back to marry the woman I have decided shall be his wife. If you find him and he will not come strike him down if you must, but do not kill him. Stun him and bring him to me. Do not let me see your face again until you have done my bidding.’ He threw a handful of gold at the black’s feet. That was to pay the fares on railroads and buy his meals at hotels,” May explained.

  “And all the time the king’s son was sailing on and on, over unknown seas. He passed icebergs, islands and continents, and saw great whales and at night heard the growling of wild beasts on strange shores.

  “He wasn’t afraid, not he. And all the time he kept getting stronger and his hands got harder, and he could do more work and do it quicker than almost any man on the ship. Almost every day the captain called him aside. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you are my bravest and best sailor. How shall I reward you?’

  “But the young prince wanted no reward. He was so glad to escape from that horrible king’s daughter. How homely she was. Why her teeth stuck out of her mouth like tusks and she was all covered with wrinkles and haggard.

  “And the ship sailed and sailed, and it hit a hidden rock, sticking up in the bottom of the ocean, and was split right in two. All but the prince were drowned.

  “He swam and swam and came at last to an island that had a mountain on it, and no one lived there, and the mountain was filled with gold. After a long time a passing ship took him off but he told no one of the golden mountain. He sailed and sailed and came to America, and started out to get money to buy a ship and go get the gold and go back to his own country, rich enough so he could marry almost anyone he chose. He had worked and worked and saved money, and then the giant black got on his trail. He tried to escape, time after time he tried to escape. He had been trying that time May found him half-dead in the field.

  “The way that came about was that he was on a train passing through Bidwell at night and it was the nine-fifty, that didn’t stop but only threw off a mail sack. He was on that train and the black was on it, too, and, as the train went flying through Bidwell in the terrible storm, the prince opened a door and jumped and the black jumped after him. They ran and ran.

  “By a miracle neither of them was hurt by the leap from the train, and then they had got into the field where May had seen them.

  “I can’t think what kept me awake on that night,” May said again. She arose and walked toward the Edgley house. “We are betrothed. He has gone to earn money to buy a ship and get the gold. Then he will come for me,” she said in a matter of fact tone.

  The two women went to the wire fence, crawled over and got into the Edgley back yard. It was nearly midnight and Maud Welliver had never before been out so late. In the Welliver house her aunt and father sat waiting for her, frightened and nervous. “If she doesn’t come soon I’ll get the police to look for her. I’m afraid something dreadful has happened.”

  Maud did not, however, think of her father or of the reception that awaited her in the Welliver house. Other and more sombre thoughts occupied her mind. She had come on that evening to the Edgley house, intending to ask May to go with her on the excursion to the Dewdrop with the two grocers, and that was now an impossibility. One who was loved by a prince, who was secretly betrothed to a prince, would never let herself be seen in the company of a grocer, and, beside May, Maud knew no other woman in Bidwell she felt she could ask to go on the trip, on which she did not feel she could go alone. The whole thing would have to be given up. With a catch in her throat she realized what the trip had meant to her. In Fort Wayne, in the presence of the grocer Hunt, she had felt as she had never felt in the presence of another man. He was old, yes, but there was something in his eyes when he looked at her that made her feel strange inside. He had written that he had something to say to her. Now it could never be said.

  In the darkness the two women passed around the Edgley house and came to the front gate, and then Maud gav
e way to the grief struggling for expression within. May was astonished and tried to comfort her. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously. Stepping through the gate she put an arm about Maud Welliver’s shoulders and for a long time the two figures rocked back and forth in the darkness, and then May managed to get her to come to the Edgley front porch and sit beside her. Maud told the story of the proposed trip and of what it had meant to her—spoke of it as a thing of the past, as a hopeless dream that had faded. “I wouldn’t dare ask you to go,” she said.

  It was ten minutes later when Maud got up to go home and May was silent, absorbed in her own thoughts. The tale of the prince was forgotten and she thought only of the town, of what it had done to her, what it would do again when the chance offered. The two grocers were both, however, from another place and knew nothing of her. She thought of the long ride to the shore of Sandusky Bay. Maud had conveyed to her some notion of what the trip meant to her. May’s mind raced. “I could not be alone with a man. I wouldn’t dare,” she thought. Maud had said they would go in a surrey and there was something, that could be used now, in the story she had told about the prince. She could insist that, because of the prince, Maud was not to leave her alone with another man, with the strange grocer, not for a moment.

  May arose and stood irresolutely by the front door of the Edgley house and watched Maud go through the gate. How her shoulders drooped. “Oh, well, I’ll go. You fix it up. Don’t you tell anyone in the world, but I’ll go,” she said and then, before Maud Welliver could recover from her surprise, and from the glad thrill that ran through her body, May had opened the door and had disappeared into the Edgley house.

  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 uninhabitated 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 naile
d 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, there 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.