A NEW life began to unfold itself to May Edgley. After the affair in the
berry field, and until the time of the conversation with Maud Welliver,
she had felt as one dead. As she went about in the Edgley household,
doing the daily work, she sometimes stopped and stood still, on the
stairs or in the kitchen by the stove. A whirlwind seemed to be going on
around her while she stood thus, becalmed—fear made her body tremble. It
had happened even in the moments when she was hidden under the elders by
the creek. At such times the trunks of the willow trees and the
fragrance of the elders comforted but did not comfort enough. There was
something wanting. They were too impersonal, too sure of themselves.
To herself, at such moments, May was like one sealed up in a vessel of
glass. The light of days came to her and from all sides came the sound
of life going on but she herself did not live. She but breathed, ate
food, slept and awakened but what she wanted out of life seemed far
away, lost to her. In a way, and ever since she had been conscious of
herself, it had been so.
She remembered faces she had seen, expressions that had come suddenly to
peoples’ faces as she passed them on the streets. In particular old men
had always been kind to her. They stopped to speak to her. “Hello,
little girl,” they said. For her benefit eyes had been lifted, lips had
smiled, kindly words had been spoken, and at such moments it had seemed
to her that some tiny sluiceway out of the great stream of human life
had been opened to her. The stream flowed on somewhere, in the distance,
on the further side of a wall, behind a mountain of iron—just out of
sight, out of hearing—but a few drops of the living waters of life had
reached her, had bathed her. Understanding of the secret thing that went
on within herself was not impossible. It could exist.
In the days after the talk with Lillian the puzzled woman in the yellow
house thought much about life. Her mind, naturally a busy active one,
could not remain passive and for the time she dared not think much of
herself and of her own future. She thought abstractly.
She had done a thing and how natural and yet how strange the doing of it
had been. There she was at work in a berry field—it was morning, the sun
shone, boys, young girls, and mature women laughed and talked in the
rows behind her. Her fingers were very busy but she listened while a
woman’s voice talked of canning fruit. “Cherries take so much sugar,”
the voice said. A young girl’s voice talked endlessly of some boy and
girl affair. There was a tale of a ride into the country on a hay wagon,
and an involved recital of “he saids” and “I saids.”
And then the man had come along the rows and had got down on his knees
to work beside herself—May Edgley. He was a man out of the town’s life,
and had come thus, suddenly, unexpectedly. No one had ever come to her
in that way. Oh, people had been kind. They had smiled and nodded, and
had gone their own ways.
May had not seen the sly winks Jerome Hadley had bestowed on the other
berry pickers and had taken his impulse to come to her as a simple and
lovely fact in life. Perhaps he was lonely like herself. For a time the
two had worked together in silence and then a bantering conversation
began. May had found herself able to carry her end of a conversation, to
give and take with the man. She laughed at him because, although his
fingers were skilled, he could not fill the berry boxes as fast as
herself.
And then, quite suddenly, the tone of the conversation had changed. The
man became bold and his boldness had excited May. What words he had
said. “I’d like to hold you in my arms. I’d like to have you alone where
I could kiss you. I’d like to be alone with you in the woods or
somewhere.” The others working, now far away along the rows, young girls
and women, too, must also have heard just such words from the lips of
men. It was the fact that they had heard such words and responded to
them in kind that differentiated them from herself. It was by responding
to such words that a woman got herself a lover, got married, connected
herself with the stream of life. She heard such words and something
within herself stirred, as it was stirring now in herself. Like a flower
she opened to receive life. Strange beautiful things happened and her
experience became the experience of all life, of trees, of flowers, of
grasses and most of all of other women. Something arose within her and
then broke. The wall of life was broken down. She became a living thing,
receiving life, giving it forth, one with all life.
In the berry field that morning May had gone on working after the words
were said. Her fingers automatically picked berries and put them in the
boxes slowly, hesitatingly. She turned to the man and laughed. How
wonderful that she could control herself so.
Her mind had raced. What a thing her mind was. It was always doing
that—racing, running madly, a little out of control. Her fingers moved
more slowly. She picked berries and put them in the man’s box, and now
and then gave him large fine round berries to eat and was conscious that
the others in the field were looking in her direction. They were
listening, wondering, and she grew resentful. “What did they want? What
did all this have to do with them?”
Her mind took a new turn. “What would it be like to be held in the arms
of a man, to have a man’s lips pressed down upon her lips. It was an
experience all women, who had lived, had known. It had come to her own
mother, to the married women, working with her in the field, to young
girls, too, to many much younger than herself.” She imagined arms soft
and yet firm, strong arms, holding her closely, and sank into a dim,
splendid world of emotion. The stream of life in which she had always
wanted to float had picked her up—it carried her along. All life became
colorful. The red berries in the boxes—how red they were, the green of
the vines, what a living green! The colors merged—they ran together, the
stream of life was flowing over them, over her.
What a terrible day that had been for May. Later she could not focus her
mind upon it, dared not do so. The actual experience with the man in the
forest had been quite brutal—an assault had been made upon her. She had
consented—yes—but not to what happened. Why had she gone into the woods
with him? Well, she had gone, and by her manner she had invited, urged
him to follow, but she had not expected anything really to happen.
It had been her own fault, everything had been her own fault. She had
got up from among the berry pickers, angry at them—resentful. They knew
too much and not enough and she had hated their knowledge, their
smartness. She had got up and walked away from them, looking back,
expecting him.
What had she expected? What she had expected could not get itself put
into words. She knew nothing of poets and their efforts, of the things
they live to try to do, of things men try to paint into canvasses,
translate into song. She was an Ohio woman, an Edgley, the daughter of a
teamster, the sister of Lillian Edgley who had gone on the turf. May
expected to walk into a new world, into life—she expected to bathe
herself in the living waters of life. There was to be something warm,
close, comforting, secure. Hands were to arise out of darkness and grasp
her hands, her hands covered with the stain of red berries and the
yellow dust of fields. She was to be held closely in the warm place and
then like a flower she was to break open, throw herself, her fragrance
into the air.
What had been the matter with her, with her notion of life? May had
asked herself that question a thousand times, had asked it until she was
weary of asking, could not ask any more. She had known her
mother—thought she had known her—if she had not, no Edgley had. Had none
of the others cared? Her mother had met a man and had been held in his
arms, she had become the mother of sons and daughters, and the sons and
daughters had gone their own way, lived brutally. They had gone after
what they thought they wanted from life, directly, brutally—like
animals. And her mother had stood aside. How long ago she must have
died, really. It was then only flesh and blood that went on living,
working, making beds, cooking, lying with a husband.
It was plain that was true of her mother—it must have been true. If it
were not true why had she not spoken, why had no words come to her lips.
Day after day May had worked with her mother. Well, then she was a
virgin, young, tender and her mother had not kissed her, had not held
her closely. No word had been said. It was not true, as Lillian had
said, that her mother had counted on her. It was because of death that
she was silent, when Lillian and then Kate went on the turf. The dead
did not care! The dead are dead!
May wondered if she herself had passed out of life, if she had died. “It
may be,” she thought, “I may never have lived and my thinking I was
alive may only have been a trick of mind.”
“I’m smart,” May thought. Lillian had said that, her brothers had said
it, the whole town had said it. How she hated her own smartness.
The others had been proud of it, glad of it. The whole town had been
proud of her, had hailed her. It was because she was smart, because she
thought quicker and faster than others, it was because of that the women
schoolteachers had smiled at her, because of that old men spoke to her
on the streets.
Once an old man had met her on the sidewalk in front of one of the
stores and taking her by the hand had led her inside and had bought her
a bag of candy. The man was a merchant in Bidwell and had a daughter who
was a teacher in the schools, but May had never seen him before, had
heard nothing of him, knew nothing about him. He came up to her out of
nothingness, out of the stream of life. He had heard about May, of her
quick active mind, that always defeated the other children in the school
room, that in every test came out ahead. Her imagination played about
his figure.
At that time May went every Sunday morning to the Presbyterian Sunday
School, as there was a tradition in the Edgley family that Ma Edgley had
once been a Presbyterian. None of the other children had ever gone, but
for a time she did and they all seemed to want her to go. She remembered
the men, the Sunday School teachers were always talking about. There was
a gigantic strong old man named Abraham who walked in God’s footsteps.
He must have been huge, strong, and good, too. His children were like
the sands of the seas for numbers, and was that not a sign of strength.
How many children! All the children in the world could not be more than
that! The man who had taken hold of her hand and had led her into the
store to buy the candy for her was, she imagined just such another. He
also must own lands and be the father of innumerable children and no
doubt he could ride all day on a fast horse and never get off his own
possessions. It was possible he thought her one of his innumerable
children.
There was no doubt he was a mighty man. He looked like one and he had
admired her. “I’m giving you this candy because my daughter says you are
the smartest girl in school,” he said. She remembered that another man
stood in the store and that, as she ran away with the bag of candy
gripped in her small fingers, the old man, the mighty one, turned to
him. He said something to the man. “They are all cattle except her, just
cattle,” he had said. Later she had thought out what he meant. He meant
her family, the Edgleys.
How many things she had thought out as she went back and forth to
school, always alone. There was always plenty of time for thinking
things out—in the late afternoons as she helped her mother with the
housework and in the long winter evenings when she went to bed early and
for a long time did not go to sleep. The old man in the store had
admired her quick brain—for that he had forgiven her being an Edgley,
one of the cattle. Her thoughts went round and round in circles. Even as
a child she had always felt shut in, walled in from life. She struggled
to escape out of herself, out into life.
And now she was a woman who had experienced life, tested it, and she
stood, silent and attentive on the stairway of the Edgley house or by
the stove in the kitchen and with an effort forced herself to quit
thinking. On another street, in another house, a door banged. Her sense
of hearing was extraordinarily acute, and it seemed to her she could
hear every sound made by every man, woman, and child in town. The circle
of thoughts began again and again she fought to think, to feel her way
out of herself. On another street, in another house a woman was doing
housework, just as she had been doing—making beds, washing dishes,
cooking food. The woman had just passed from one room of her house to
another and a door had shut with a bang. “Well,” May thought, “she is a
human being, she feels things as I do, she thinks, eats food, sleeps,
dreams, walks about her house.”
It didn’t matter who the woman was. Being or not being an Edgley made no
difference. Any woman would do for the purposes of May’s thoughts. All
people who lived, lived! Men walked about too, and had thoughts, young
girls laughed. She had heard a girl in school, when no one was speaking
to her—paying any attention to her—burst suddenly into loud laughter.
What was she laughing about?
How cruelly the town had patronized May, setting her apart from the
others, calling her smart. They had cared about her because of her
smartness. She was smart. Her mind was quick, it reached out. And she
was one of the Edgleys—“cattle,” the bearded man in the store had said.
And what of that—what was an Edgley—why were they cattle? An Edgley also
slept, ate food, had dreams, walked about. Lillian had said that an
Edgley man was like all other men, only less stuck on himself.
May’s mind fought to realize herself in the world of people, she wanted
to be a part of all life, to function in life—did not want to be a
special thing—smart—patted on the head—smiled at because she was smart.
What was smartness? She could work out problems in school quickly,
swiftly, but as each problem was solved she forgot it. It meant nothing
to her. A merchant in Egypt wanted to transport goods across the desert
and had 370 pounds of tea and such another number of pounds of dried
fruits and spices. There was a problem concerning the matter. Camels
were to be loaded. How far away? The result of all her quick thinking
was some number like twelve or eighteen, arrived at before the others.
There was a little trick. It consisted in throwing everything else out
of the mind and concentrating on the one thing—and that was smartness.
But what did it matter to her about the loading of camels? It might have
meant something could she have seen into the mind, the soul of the man
who owned all that merchandise and who was to carry it so far, if she
could have understood him, if she could have understood anyone, if
anyone could have understood her.
May stood in the kitchen of the Edgley house, quiet, attentive—for ten
minutes, a half hour. Once a dish she held in her hand fell to the floor
and broke, awakening her suddenly and to awaken was like coming back to
the Edgley house after a long journey, during which she had traveled
far, over mountains, rivers, seas—it was like coming back to a place she
wanted to leave for good.
“And all the time,” she told herself, “life swept on, other people
lived, laughed, achieved life.”
And then, through the lie she had told Maud Welliver, May stepped into a
new world, a world of boundless release. Through the lie and the telling
of it she found out that, if she could not live in the life about her,
she could create a life. If she was walled in, shut off from
participation in the life of the Ohio town—hated, feared by the town—she
could come out of the town. The people would not really look at her, try
to understand her and they would not let her look down into themselves.
The lie she had told was the foundation stone, the first of the
foundation stones. A tower was to be built, a tall tower on which she
could stand, from the ramparts of which she could look down into a world
created by herself, by her own mind. If her mind was really what
Lillian, the teachers in the school, all the others, had said she would
use it, it would become the tool which in her hands, would force stone
after stone into its place in her tower.
* * * * *
In the Edgley house May had a room of her own, a tiny room at the back
of the house and there was one window looking down into the field, that
every spring and fall became a swamp. In the winter sometimes it was
covered with ice and boys came there to skate. On the evening she had
told Maud Welliver the great lie—recreated the incident in the wood with
Jerome Hadley—she hurried home and went up to her room and, pulling a
chair to the window, sat down. What a thing she had done! The encounter
with Jerome Hadley in the wood had been terrible—she had been unable to
think about it, did not dare to think about it, and trying not to think
had almost upset her reason.
And now it was gone. The whole thing had really never happened. What had
happened was this other thing, or something like that, something no one
knew about. There had really been an attempt at murder. May sat by the
window and smiled sadly. “I stretched it a little,” she thought. “Of
course I stretched it, but what was the use trying to tell what
happened. I couldn’t make it understood. I can’t understand it myself.”
All through the weeks that had passed since that day in the wood May had
been obsessed by the notion that she was unclean, physically unclean.
Doing the housework she wore calico dresses—she had several of them and
two or three times a day she changed her dress and the soiled dress she
could not leave hanging in a closet until washday but washed the dress
at once and hung it on a line in the back yard. The wind blowing through
it gave her a comforting feeling.
The Edgleys had no bathroom or bathtub. Few people in towns in her day
owned any such luxurious appendages to life. And a washtub was kept in
the woodshed by the kitchen door and what baths were taken were taken in
the tub. It was a ceremony that did not often occur in the family, and
when it did occur the tub was filled from the cistern and set in the sun
to warm. Then it was carried into the shed. The candidate for
cleanliness went into the shed and closed the door. In the winter the
ceremony took place in the kitchen and Ma Edgley came at the last moment
and poured a kettle of boiling water into the cold water in the tub. In
the summer in the shed that was not necessary. The bather undressed and
put his clothes about, on the piles of wood, and there was a great
splashing.
During that summer May took a bath every afternoon, but did not bother
to put the water out in the sun. How good it felt to have it cold! Often
when there was no one about, she filled the tub and got into it again
before going to bed. Her small body, dark and strong, sank into the cold
water and she took strong soap and scrubbed her legs, her breasts, her
neck where Jerome Hadley’s kisses had alighted. Her neck and breasts she
wished she could scrub quite away.
Her body was strong and wiry. All the Edgleys, even Ma Edgley, had been
strong. They were all, except May, large people and in her the family
strength seemed to have concentrated. She was never physically weary and
after the time of her intensive thinking began, and when she often slept
little at night her body seemed to grow constantly stronger. Her breasts
grew larger and her figure changed slightly. It grew less boyish. She
was becoming a woman.
* * * * *
After the telling of the lie, May’s body became for a time no more than
a tree growing in a forest through which she walked. It was something
through which life made itself manifest; it was a house within which she
lived, a house, in which, and in spite of the enmity of the town, life
went on. “I’m not dead like those who die while their bodies are still
alive,” May thought, and there was intense comfort in the thought.
She sat by the window of her room in the darkness thinking. Jerome
Hadley had tried to commit a murder and how often such attempts must
have been made in the history of other men and women—and how often they
must have succeeded. The spirit within was killed. Boys and girls grew
up full of notions, brave notions too. In Bidwell, as in other towns,
they went to schools and Sunday schools. Words were said—they heard many
brave words—but within themselves, within their own tiny houses, all
life was uncertain, hesitating. They looked abroad and saw men and
women, bearded men, kind strong women. How many were dead! How many of
the houses were but empty haunted places! Their town was not the town
they had thought it and some day they would have to find that out. It
was not a place of warm friendly closeness. Feeling instinctively the
uncertainty of life, the difficulty of arriving at truth the people did
not draw together. They were not humble in the face of the great
mystery. The mystery was to be solved with lies, with truth put away. A
great noise must be made. Everything was to be covered up. There must be
a great noise and bustle, the firing of cannons, the roll of drums, the
shouting of many words. The spirit within must be killed. “What liars
people are,” May thought breathlessly. It seemed to her that all the
people of her town stood before her, were in a way being judged by her,
and her own lie, told to defeat a universal lie, now seemed a small, a
white innocent thing.
There was a very tender delicate thing within her, many people had
wanted to kill—that was certain. To kill the delicate thing within was a
passion that obsessed mankind. All men and women tried to do it. First
the man or woman killed the thing within himself, and then tried to kill
it in others. Men and women were afraid to let the thing live.
May sat in the darkness in her room in the Edgley house having such
thoughts as had never come to her before and the night seemed alive as
no other night of her life had been. For her gods walked abroad in the
land. The Edgley house was but a poor little affair of boards—of thin
walls—and she looked out, in the dim wavering light of the night, into a
field, that at times during the year became a bog where cattle sank in
black mud to their knees. Her town was but a dot on the huge map of her
country—she knew that. It was not necessary to travel to find out. Had
she not been at the top of her class in geography? In her country alone
lived some sixty, eighty, a hundred million people—she could not
remember the number—it changed yearly. When the country was new millions
of buffalo walked up and down on the plains. She was a she-calf among
the buffalo but she had found lodgment in a town, in a house made of
boards and painted yellow, but the field below the house was dry now and
long grass grew there. However, tiny pools remained and frogs lived in
them and croaked loudly while crickets sang in the dry grass. Her life
was sacred—the house in which she lived, the room in which she sat,
became a church, a temple, a tower. The lie she had told had started a
new force within her and the new temple, in which she was to live, was
now being built.
Thoughts like giant clouds, seen in a dim night sky, floated through her
mind. Tears came to her eyes and her throat seemed to be swelling. She
put her head down on the window sill and convulsive sobs shook her.
That was, she knew, because she had been brave enough and quick-witted
enough to tell the lie, to re-establish the romance of existence within
herself. The foundation stone for the temple had been laid.
May did not think anything out clearly, did not try to do that. She
felt—she knew her own truth. Words heard, read in books in school, in
other books loaned her by the schoolteachers, words said casually,
without feeling—by thin-lipped, flat-breasted young women who were
teachers at the Sunday school, words that had seemed as nothing to her
when said, now made a great sound in her mind. They were repeated to her
in stately measure by some force, seemingly outside herself and were
like the steady rhythmical tread of an army marching on earth roads. No,
they were like rain on the roof over her head, on the roof of the house
that was herself. All her life she had lived in a house and the rains
had come unheeded—and the words she had heard and now remembered were
like rain drops falling on roofs. There was a subtle perfume remaining.
“The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the
corner.”
As the thoughts marched through May’s mind her small shoulders shook
with sobs, but she was happy—strangely happy and something within
herself was singing. The singing was a song that was always alive
somewhere in the world, it was the song of life, the song that crickets
sang, the song the frogs croaked hoarsely. It ran away out of her room,
out of the darkness into the night, into days, into far lands—it was the
old song, the sweet song.
May kept thinking about buildings and builders. “The stone which the
builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.” Someone had
said that and others had felt what she now felt—they had had the feeling
she could not put into words and they had tried putting it into words.
She was not alone in the world. It was not a strange path she walked in
life, but many had walked it, many were walking it now. Even as she sat
in the window, thinking so strangely, many men and women in many places
and many lands sat at other windows having the same thoughts. In a
world, where many men and women had killed the thing within themselves,
the path of the rejected was the true path and how many had walked the
path! The trees along the way were marked. Signs had been hung up by
those who wanted to show others the way. “The stone which the builders
refused is become the headstone of the corner.”
Lillian had said, “men are no good,” and it was clear Lillian had also
killed the thing within herself, had let it be killed. She had let some
Jerome Hadley kill it, and then she had grown slowly and steadily more
and more angry at life, had come to hate life, had thrown it away. And
the thing had happened to her mother, too. That was the reason for her
life of silence—death walking about. “The dead rise up to strike the
dead.”
The story May had told to Maud Welliver was not a lie—it was the living
truth. He had tried to kill and had come near succeeding. May had walked
in the valley of the shadow of death. She knew that now. Her own sister,
Lillian, had come to her when she walked with Death and wanted Life. “If
you are going to go on the turf I’ll get you in with men who have
money,” Lillian had said. She had got no closer to understanding than
that.
* * * * *
May decided that after all she would not try to be Maud Welliver’s
friend. She would see her and talk to her but, for the present, she
would keep herself to herself. The living thing within her had been
wounded and needed time to recover. Of all the feelings, the strong
emotion, that swept through her on that evening, cleansing her
internally, as she had been trying by splashing in the tub in the
woodshed to cleanse herself externally, one impulse got itself
definitely expressed. “I’ll go it alone, that’s what I’ll do,” she
murmured between sobs as she sat by the window with her head in her
hands, and heard the sweet song of the insects, singing of life in the
darkness of the fields.
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