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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 In Bidwell, Tom Means, who later became a soldier and who has
recently won high rank in the army because of his proficiency in
training recruits for the World War, was the prize pupil in the schools.
Tom was working for his appointment to West Point, and did not
spend his evenings loafing on the streets, as did other young men.
He stayed in his own house, intent on his studies. Tom’s father was a
lawyer and his mother was third cousin to a Kentucky woman who
had married an English baronet. The son aspired to be a soldier and
a gentleman and to live on the intellectual plane, and had a good
deal of contempt for the mental capacities of his fellow students,
and when one of the Edgley family set up as his rival he was angry
and embarrassed and the schoolroom was delighted. Day after day
and year after year the contest between him and May Edgley went
on and in a sense the whole town of Bidwell got back of the girl. In
all such things as history and English literature Tom swept all before
him but in spelling, arithmetic, and geography May defeated him
without effort. At her desk she sat like a little terrier in the presence
of a trap filled with rats. A question was asked or a problem in
arithmetic put on the blackboard and like a terrier she jumped. Her
hand went up and her sensitive mouth quivered. Fingers were
snapped vigorously. “I know,” she said, and the entire class knew
she did. When she had answered the question or had gone to the
blackboard to solve the problem the half-grown children along the
rows of benches laughed and Tom Means stared out through a
window. May returned to her seat, half triumphant, half ashamed of
her victory.
The country lying west of Bidwell, like all the Ohio country down
that way, is given to small fruit and berry raising, and in June and
after school has been dismissed for the year all the younger men,
boys, and girls, with most of the women of the town go to work in
the fruit harvest. To the fields immediately after breakfast the
citizens go trooping away. Lunches are carried in baskets and until
the sun goes down everyone stays in the fields.
And in the berry fields as in the schoolroom May was a notable
figure. She did not walk or ride to the work with the other young
girls, or join the parties at lunch at the noon hour, but everyone
understood that that was because of her family. “I know how she
feels, if I came from a family like that I wouldn’t ask or want other
people’s attention,” said one of the women, the wife of a carpenter,
who trudged along with the others in the dust of the road.
In a berry field, belonging to a farmer named Peter Short, some
thirty women, young men and tall awkward boys crawled over the
ground, picking the red fragrant berries. Ahead of them, in a row by
herself, went May, the exclusive, the woman who walked by herself.
Her hands flitted in and out of the berry vines as the tail of a squirrel
disappears among the leaves of a tree when one walks in a wood.
The other pickers went slowly, stopping occasionally to eat berries
and talk and when one had crawled a little ahead of the others he
stopped and waited, sitting on his haunches. The pickers were paid
in proportion to the number of quarts picked during the day but, as
they often said, “pay was not everything.” The berry picking was in a
way a social function, and who were the pickers, wives, sons and
daughters of prosperous artisans, to kill themselves for a few paltry
dollars?
With May Edgley they understood it was different. Everyone knew
that she and her mother got practically no money from John Edgley,
the father—from the boys, Jake, Frank and Will—or from the girls,
Lillian and Kate, who spent their takings on clothes for themselves.
If she were to be decently dressed, she had to earn the money for
the purpose during the vacation time when she could stay out of
school. Later it was understood she planned to be a school teacher
herself, and to attain to that position it was necessary that she keep
herself well dressed and show herself industrious and alert in affairs.
Tirelessly, therefore, May worked and the boxes of berries, filled
by her ever alert fingers, grew into mountains. Peter Short with his
son came walking down the rows to gather the filled crates and put
them aboard a wagon to be hauled to town. He looked at May with
pride in his eyes and the other pickers lumbering slowly along
became the target for his scorn. “Ah, you talking women and you big
lazy boys, you’re not much good,” he cried. “Ain’t you ashamed of
yourselves? Look at you there, Sylvester and Al—letting yourself be
beat, twice over, by a girl so little you could almost carry her home
in your pocket.”
It was in the summer of her seventeenth year that May fell down
from her high place in the life of the town of Bidwell. Two vital and
dramatic events had happened to her that year. Her mother died in
April and she graduated from the high school in June, second only in
honors to Tom Means. As Tom’s father had been on the school board
for years the town shook its head over the decision that placed him
ahead of May and in everyone’s eyes May had really walked off with
the prize. When she went into the fields, and when they
remembered the fact of her mother’s recent death, even the women
were ready to forget and forgive the fact of her being a member of
the Edgley family. As for May, it seemed to her at that moment that
nothing that could happen to her could very much matter.
And then the unexpected. As more than one Bidwell wife said
afterwards to her husband. “It was then that blood showed itself.”
A man named Jerome Hadley first found out about May. He went
that year to Peter Short’s field, as he himself said, “just for fun,” and
he found it. Jerome was pitcher for the Bidwell baseball nine and
worked as mail clerk on the railroad. After he had returned from a
run he had several days’ rest and went to the berry field because the
town was deserted. When he saw May working off by herself he
winked at the other young men and going to her got down on his
knees and began picking at a speed almost as great as her own.
“Come on here, little woman,” he said, “I’m a mail clerk and have
got my hand in, sorting letters. My fingers can go pretty fast. Come
on now, let’s see if you can keep up with me.”
For an hour Jerome and May went up and down in the rows and
then the thing happened that set the town by the ears. The girl, who
had never talked to others, began talking to Jerome and the other
pickers turned to look and wonder. She no longer picked at lightning
speed but loitered along, stopping to rest and put choice berries into
her mouth. “Eat that,” she said boldly passing a great red berry
across the row to the man. She put a handful of berries into his box.
“You won’t make as much as seventy-five cents all day if you don’t
get a move on you,” she said, smiling shyly.
At the noon hour the other pickers found out the truth. The tired
workers had gone to the pump by Peter Short’s house and then to a
nearby orchard to sit under the trees and rest after the eating of
lunches.
There was no doubt something had happened to May. Everyone
felt it. It was later understood that she had, during that noon hour in
June and quite calmly and deliberately, decided to become like her
two sisters and go on the town.
The berry pickers as usual ate their lunches in groups, the women
and girls sitting under one tree and the young men and boys under
another. Peter Short’s wife brought hot coffee and tin cups were
filled. Jokes went back and forth and the girls giggled.
In spite of the unexpectedness of May’s attitude toward Jerome, a
bachelor and quite legitimate game for the unmarried women, no
one suspected anything serious would happen. Flirtations were
always going on in the berry fields. They came, played themselves
out, and passed like the clouds in the June sky. In the evening,
when the young men had washed the dirt of the fields away and had
put on their Sunday clothes, things were different. Then a girl must
look out for herself. When she went to walk in the evening with a
young man under the trees or out into country lanes—then anything
might happen.
But in the fields, with all the older women about—to have thought
anything at all of a young man and a girl working together and
blushing and laughing, would have been to misunderstand the whole
spirit of the berry picking season.
And it was evident May had misunderstood. Later no one blamed
Jerome, at least none of the young fellows did. As the pickers ate
lunch May sat a little apart from the others. That was her custom
and Jerry lay in the long grass at the edge of the orchard also a little
apart. A sudden tenseness crept into the groups under the trees.
May had not gone to the pump with the others when she came in
from the field but sat with her back braced against a tree and the
hand that held the sandwich was black with the soil of her morning
labors. It trembled and once the sandwich fell out of her hand.
Suddenly she got to her feet and put her lunch basket into the
fork of a tree, and then, with a look of defiance in her eyes, she
climbed over a fence and started along a lane past Peter Short’s
barn. The lane ran down to a meadow, crossed a bridge and went
on beside a waving wheatfield to a wood.
May went a little way along the lane and then stopped to look
back and the other pickers stared at her, wondering what was the
matter. Then Jerome Hadley got to his feet. He was ashamed and
climbed awkwardly over the fence and walked away without looking
back.
Everyone was quite sure it had all been arranged. As the girls and
women got to their feet and stood watching, May and Jerome went
out of the lane and into the wood. The older women shook their
heads. “Well, well,” they exclaimed while the boys and young men
began slapping each other on the back and prancing grotesquely
about.
It was unbelievable. Before they had got out of sight of the others
under the tree Jerome had put his arm about May’s waist and she
had put her head down on his shoulder. It was as though May
Edgley who, as all the older women agreed, had been treated almost
as an equal by all of the others had wanted to throw something ugly
right in their faces.
Jerome and May stayed for two hours in the wood and then came
back together to the field where the others were at work. May’s
cheeks were pale and she looked as though she had been crying.
She picked alone as before and after a few moments of awkward
silence Jerome put on his coat and went off along a road toward
town. May made a little mountain of filled berry boxes during that
afternoon but two or three times filled boxes dropped out of her
hands. The spilled fruit lay red and shining against the brown and
black of the soil.
No one saw May in the berry fields after that, and Jerome Hadley
had something of which to boast. In the evening when he came
among the young fellows he spoke of his adventure at length.
“You couldn’t blame me for taking the chance when I had it,” he
said laughing. He explained in detail what had occurred in the wood,
while other young men stood about filled with envy. As he talked he
grew both proud and a little ashamed of the public attention his
adventure was attaining. “It was easy,” he said. “That May Edgley’s
the easiest thing that ever lived in this town. A fellow don’t have to
ask to get what he wants. That’s how easy it is.”
 Chapter II

IN Bidwell, and after she had fairly flung herself against the wall of
village convention by going into the wood with Jerome, May lived
at home, doing the work her mother had formerly done in the
Edgley household. She washed the clothes, cooked the food and
made the beds. There was, for the time, something sweet to her in
the thoughts of doing lowly tasks and she washed and ironed the
dresses in which Lillian and Kate were to array themselves and the
heavy overalls worn by her father and brothers with a kind of
satisfaction in the task. “It makes me tired and I can sleep and won’t
be thinking,” she told herself. As she worked over the washtubs,
among the beds soiled by the heavy slumbers of her brothers who
on the evening before had perhaps come home drunk, or stood over
the hot stove in the kitchen, she kept thinking of her dead mother. “I
wonder what she would think,” she asked herself and then added.
“If she hadn’t died it wouldn’t have happened. If I had someone, I
could go to and talk with, things would be different.”
During the day when the men of the household were gone with
their teams and when Lillian was away from town May had the
house to herself. It was a two-storied frame building, standing at the
edge of a field near the town’s edge, and had once been painted
yellow. Now, water washing from the roofs had discolored the paint,
and the side walls of the old building were all mottled and streaked.
The house stood on a little hill and the land fell sharply away from
the kitchen door. There was a creek under the hill and beyond the
creek a field that at certain times during the year became a swamp.
At the creek’s edge willows and elders grew and often in the
afternoon, when there was no one about, May went softly out at the
kitchen door, looking to be sure there was no one in the road that
ran past the front of the house, and if the coast was clear went
down the hill and crept in among the fragrant elders and willows. “I
am lost here and no one can see me or find me,” she thought, and
the thought gave her intense satisfaction. Her cheeks grew flushed
and hot and she pressed the cool green leaves of the willows against
them. When a wagon passed in the road or someone walked along
the board sidewalk at the road-side she drew herself into a little
lump and closed her eyes. The passing sounds seemed far away and
to herself it seemed that she had in some way escaped from life.
How warm and close it was there, buried amid the dark green
shadows of the willows. The gnarled twisted limbs of the trees were
like arms but unlike the arms of the man with whom she had lain in
the wood they did not grasp her with terrifying convulsive strength.
For hours she lay still in the shadows and nothing came to frighten
her and her lacerated spirit began to heal a little. “I have made
myself an outlaw among people but I am not an outlaw here,” she
told herself.

Having heard of the incident with Jerome Hadley, in the berry

field, Lillian and Kate Edgley were irritated and angry and one
evening when they were both at the house and May was at work in
the kitchen they spoke about it. Lillian was very angry and had
decided to give May what she spoke of as “a piece of her mind.”
“What’d she want to go in the cheap for?” she asked. “It makes me
sick when I think of it—a fellow like that Jerome Hadley! If she was
going to cut loose what made her want to go on the cheap?”
In the Edgley family it had always been understood that May was
of a different clay and old John Edgley and the boys had always paid
her a kind of crude respect. They did not swear at her as they
sometimes did at Lillian and Kate, and in secret they thought of her
as a link between themselves and the more respectable life of the
town. Ma Edgley was respectable enough but she was old and tired
and never went out of the house and it was in May the family held
up its head. The two brothers were proud of their sister because of
her record in the town school. They themselves were working men
and never expected to be anything else but, they thought, “that
sister of ours has shown the town that an Edgley can beat them at
their own game. She is smarter than any of them. See how she has
forced the town to pay attention to her.”
As for Lillian—before the incident with Jerome Hadley, she
continually talked of her sister. In Norwalk, Fremont, Clyde and the
other towns she visited she had many friends. Men liked her
because, as they often said, she was a woman to be trusted. One
could talk to her, say anything, and she would keep her mouth shut
and in her presence one felt comfortably free and easy. Among her
secret associates were members of churches, lawyers, owners of
prosperous businesses, heads of respectable families. To be sure
they saw Lillian in secret but she seemed to understand and respect
their desire for secrecy. “You don’t need to make no bones about it
with me. I know you got to be careful,” she said.
On a summer evening, in one of the towns she was in the habit of
visiting, an arrangement was made. The man with whom she was to
spend the evening waited until darkness had come and then, hiring
a horse at a livery stable, drove to an appointed place. Side curtains
were put on the buggy and the pair set forth into the darkness and
loneliness of country roads. As the evening advanced and the more
ardent mood of the occasion passed, a sudden sense of freedom
swept over the man. “It is better not to fool around with a young girl
or with some other man’s wife. With Lillian one does not get found
out and get into trouble,” he thought.
The horse went slowly, along out of the way roads—bars were let
down and the couple drove into a field. For hours they sat in the
buggy and talked. The men talked to Lillian as they could talk to no
other woman they had ever known. She was shrewd and in her own
way capable and often the men spoke of their affairs, asking her
advice. “Now what do you think, Lil’—if you were me would you buy
or sell?” one of them asked.
 Other and more intimate things crept into the conversations.
“Well, Lil’, my wife and I are all right. We get along well enough, but
we ain’t what you might speak of as lovers,” Lillian’s temporary
intimate said. “She jaws me a lot when I smoke too much or when I
don’t want to go to church. And then, you see, we’re worried about
the kids. My oldest girl is running around a lot with young Harry
Garvner and I keep asking myself, ‘Is he any good?’ I can’t make up
my mind. You’ve seen him around, Lil’, what do you think?”
Having taken part in many such conversations Lillian had come to
depend on her sister May to furnish her with a topic of conversation.
“I know how you feel. I feel that way about May,” she said. More
than a hundred times she had explained that May was different from
the rest of the Edgleys. “She’s smart,” she explained. “I tell you
what, she’s the smartest girl that ever went to the high school in
Bidwell.”
Having so often used May as an example of what an Edgley could
be Lillian was shocked when she heard of the affair in the berry
field. For several weeks she said nothing and then one evening in
July when the two were alone in the house together she spoke. She
had intended to be motherly, direct and kind—if firm, but when the
words came her voice trembled and she grew angry. “I hear, May,
you been fooling with a man,” she began as they sat together on the
front porch of the house. It was a hot evening and dark and a
thunder storm threatened and for a long time after Lillian had
spoken there was silence and then May put her head into her hands
and leaning forward began to cry softly. Her body rocked back and
forth and occasionally a dry broken sob broke the silence. “Well,”
Lillian added sharply, being determined to terminate her remarks
before she also broke into tears, “well, May, you’ve made a darn fool
of yourself. I didn’t think it of you. I didn’t think you’d turn out a
fool.”
In the attempt to control her own unhappiness and to conceal it,
Lillian became more and more angry. Her voice continued to tremble
and to regain control of it she got up and went inside the house.
When she came out again May still sat in the chair at the edge of
the porch with her head held in her hands. Lillian was moved to pity.
“Well, don’t break your heart about it, kid. I’m only an old fool after
all. Don’t pay too much attention to me. I guess Kate and I haven’t
set you such a good example,” she said softly.
Lillian sat on the edge of the porch and put her hand on May’s
knee and when she felt the trembling of the younger woman’s body
a sharp mother feeling awakened within her. “I say, kid,” she began
again, “a girl gets notions into her head. I’ve had them myself. A girl
thinks she’ll find a man that’s all right. She kinda dreams of a man
that doesn’t exist. She wants to be good and at the same time she
wants to be something else. I guess I know how you felt but, believe
me, kid, it’s bunk. Take it from me, kid, I know what I’m talking
about. I been with men enough. I ought to know something.”
Intent now on giving advice and having for the first time definitely
accepted her sister as a comrade Lillian did not realize that what she
now had to say would hurt May more than her anger. “I’ve often
wondered about mother,” she said reminiscently. “She was always so
glum and silent. When Kate and I went on the turf she never had
nothing to say and even when I was a kid and began running
around with men evenings, she kept still. I remember the first time I
went over to Fremont with a man and stayed out all night. I was
ashamed to come home. ‘I’ll catch hell,’ I thought but she never said
nothing at all and it was the same way with Kate. She never said
nothing to her. I guess Kate and I thought she was like the rest of
the family—she was banking on you.”
“To Ballyhack with Dad and the boys,” Lillian added sharply.
“They’re men and don’t care about anything but getting filled up
with booze and when they’re tired sleeping like dogs. They’re like all
the other men only not so much stuck on themselves.”
Lillian became angry again. “I was pretty proud of you, May, and
now I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I’ve bragged about you a
thousand times and I suppose Kate has. It makes me sore to think
of it, you an Edgley and being as smart as you are, to fall for a
cheap one like that Jerome Hadley. I bet he didn’t even give you any
money or promise to marry you either.”
May arose from her chair, her whole body trembling as with a chill,
and Lillian arose and stood beside her. The older woman got down
to the kernel of what she wanted to say. “You ain’t that way are you,
sis—you ain’t going to have a kid?” she asked. May stood by the
door, leaning against the door jamb and the rain that had been
threatening began to fall. “No, Lillian,” she said. Like a child begging
for mercy she held out her hand. Her face was white and in a flash
of lightning Lillian could see it plainly. It seemed to leap out of the
darkness toward her. “Don’t talk about it any more, Lillian, please
don’t. I won’t ever do it again,” she pleaded.
Lillian was determined. When May went indoors and up the
stairway to her room above she followed to the foot of the stairs and
finished what she felt she had to say. “I don’t want you to do it,
May,” she said, “I don’t want you to do it. I want to see there be one
Edgley that goes straight but if you intend to go crooked don’t be a
fool. Don’t take up with a cheap one, like Jerome Hadley, who just
give you soft talk. If you are going to do it anyway you just come to
me. I’ll get you in with men who have money and I’ll fix it so you
don’t have no trouble. If you’re going to go on the turf, like Kate and
I did, don’t be a fool. You just come to me.”

In all her life May had never achieved a friendship with another
woman, although often she had dreamed of such a possibility. When
she was still a school girl she saw other girls going homeward in the
evening. They loitered along, their arms linked, and how much they
had to say to each other. When they came to a corner, where their
ways parted, they could not bear to leave each other. “You go a
piece with me tonight and tomorrow night I’ll go a piece with you,”
one of them said.
May hurried homeward alone, her heart filled with envy, and after
she had finished her time in the school and, more than ever after
the incident in the berry field—always spoken of by Lillian as the
time of her troubles—the dream of a possible friendship with some
other woman grew more intense.
During the summer of that last year of her life in Bidwell a young
woman from another town moved into a house on her street. Her
father had a job on the Nickel Plate Railroad and Bidwell was at the
end of a section of that road. The railroad man was seldom at home,
his wife had died a few months before and his daughter, whose
name was Maud, was not well and did not go about town with the
other young women. Every afternoon and evening she sat on the
front porch of her father’s house, and May, who was sometimes
compelled to go to one of the stores, often saw her sitting there.
The newcomer in Bidwell was tall and slender and looked like an
invalid. Her cheeks were pale and she looked tired. During the year
before she had been operated upon and some part of her internal
machinery had been taken away and her paleness and the look of
weariness on her face, touched May’s heart. “She looks as though
she might be wanting company,” she thought hopefully.
After his wife’s death an unmarried sister had become the railroad
man’s housekeeper. She was a short strongly built woman with hard
grey eyes and a determined jaw and sometimes she sat with the
new girl. Then May hurried past without looking, but, when Maud
sat alone, she went slowly, looking slyly at the pale face and
drooped figure in the rocking chair. One day she smiled and the
smile was returned. May lingered a moment. “It’s hot,” she said
leaning over the fence, but before a conversation could be started
she grew alarmed and hurried away.
When the evening’s work was done on that evening and when the
Edgley men had gone up town, May went into the street. Lillian was
away from home and the sidewalk further up the street was
deserted. The Edgley house was the last one on the street, and in
the direction of town and on the same side of the street, there was
—first a vacant lot, then a shed that had once been used as a
blacksmith shop but that was now deserted, and after that the
house where the new girl had come to live.
 When the soft darkness of the summer evening came May went a
little way along the street and stopped by the deserted shed. The
girl in the rocking chair on the porch saw her there, and seemed to
understand May’s fear of her aunt. Arising she opened the door and
peered into the house to be sure she was unobserved and then
came down a brick walk to the gate and along the street to May,
occasionally looking back to be sure she had escaped unnoticed. A
large stone lay at the edge of the sidewalk before the shed and May
urged the new girl to sit down beside her and rest herself.
May was flushed with excitement. “I wonder if she knows? I
wonder if she knows about me?” she thought.
“I saw you wanted to be friendly and I thought I’d come and talk,”
the new girl said. She was filled with a vague curiosity. “I heard
something about you but I know it ain’t true,” she said.
May’s heart jumped and her hands trembled. “I’ve let myself in for
something,” she thought. The impulse to jump to her feet and run
away along the sidewalk, to escape at once from the situation her
hunger for companionship had created, almost overcame her and
she half arose from the stone and then sat down again. She became
suddenly angry and when she spoke her voice was firm, filled with
indignation. “I know what you mean,” she said sharply, “you mean
the fool story about me and Jerome Hadley in the woods?” The new
girl nodded. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “My aunt heard it from a
woman.”
Now that Maud had boldly mentioned the affair, that had, May
knew, made her an outlaw in the town’s life May felt suddenly free,
bold, capable of meeting any situation that might arise and was lost
in wonder at her own display of courage. Well, she had wanted to
love the new girl, take her as a friend, but now that impulse was lost
in another passion that swept through her. She wanted to conquer,
to come out of a bad situation with flying colors. With the boldness
of another Lillian she began to speak, to tell lies. “It just shows what
happens,” she said quickly. A re-creation of the incident in the wood
with Jerome had come to her swiftly, like a flash of sunlight on a
dark day. “I went into the woods with Jerome Hadley—why? You
won’t believe it when I tell you, maybe,” she added.
May began laying the foundation of her lie. “He said he was in
trouble and wanted to speak with me, off somewhere where no one
could hear, in some secret place,” she explained. “I said, ‘If you’re in
trouble let’s go over into the woods at noon.’ It was my idea, our
going off together that way. When he told me he was in trouble his
eyes looked so hurt I never thought of reputation or nothing. I just
said I’d go and I been paid for it. A girl always has to pay if she’s
good to a man I suppose.”
May tried to look and talk like a wise woman, as she imagined
Lillian would have talked under the circumstances. “I’ve got a notion
to tell what that Jerome Hadley talked to me about all the time when
we were in there—in the woods—but I won’t,” she declared. “He lied
about me afterwards because I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to,
but I’ll keep my word. I won’t tell you any names but I’ll tell you this
much—I know enough to have Jerome Hadley sent to jail if I wanted
to do it.”
May watched her companion. To Maud, whose life had always
been a dull affair, the evening was like going to a theatre. It was
better than that. It was like going to the theatre where the star is
your friend, where you sit among strangers and have the sense of
superiority that comes with knowing, as a person much like yourself,
the hero in the velvet gown with the sword clanking at his side. “Oh,
do tell me all you dare. I want to know,” she said.
“It was about a woman he was in trouble,” May answered. “One of
these days maybe the whole town will find out what I alone know.”
She leaned forward and touched Maud’s arm. The lie she was telling
made her feel glad and free. As on a dark day, when the sun
suddenly breaks through clouds, everything in life now seemed
bright and glowing and her imagination took a great leap forward.
She had been inventing a tale to save herself but went on for the joy
of seeing what she could do with the story that had come suddenly,
unexpectedly, to her lips. As when she was a girl in school her mind
worked swiftly, eagerly. “Listen,” she said impressively, “and don’t
you never tell no one. Jerome Hadley wanted to kill a man here in
this town, because he was in love with the man’s woman. He had
got poison and intended to give it to the woman. She is married and
rich too. Her husband is a big man here in Bidwell. Jerome was to
give the poison to the woman and she was to put it in her husband’s
coffee and, when the man died, the woman was to marry Jerome. I
put a stop to it. I prevented the murder. Now do you understand
why I went into the woods with that man?”
The fever of excitement that had taken possession of May was
transmitted to her companion. It drew them closer together and now
Maud put her arm about May’s waist. “The nerve of him,” May said
boldly, “he wanted me to take the stuff to the woman’s house and
he offered me money too. He said the rich woman would give me a
thousand dollars, but I laughed at him. ‘If anything happens to that
man I’ll tell and you’ll get hung for murder,’ that’s what I said to
him.”
May described the scene that had taken place there in the deep
dark forest with the man, intent upon murder. They fought, she said,
for more than two hours and the man tried to kill her. She would
have had him arrested at once, she explained, but to do so involved
telling the story of the poison plot and she had given her word to
save him, and if he reformed, she would not tell. After a long time,
when the man saw she was not to be moved and would neither take
part in the plot or allow it to be carried out, he grew quieter. Then,
as they were coming out of the woods, he sprang upon her again
and tried to choke her. Some berry pickers in a field, among whom
she had been working during the morning, saw the struggle.
“They went and told lies about me,” May said emphatically. “They
saw us struggling and they went and said he was making love to
me. A girl there, who was in love with Jerome herself and was
jealous when she saw us together, started the story. It spread all
over town and now I’m so ashamed I hardly dare to show my face.”
 With an air of helpless annoyance May arose. “Well,” she said, “I
promised him I wouldn’t tell the name of the man he was going to
murder or nothing about it and I won’t. I’ve told you too much as it
is but you gave me your word you wouldn’t tell. It’s got to be a
secret between us.” She started off along the sidewalk toward the
Edgley house and then turned and ran back to the new girl, who had
got almost to her own gate. “You keep still,” May whispered
dramatically. “If you go talking now remember you may get a man
hung.”
 Chapter III

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
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