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,
