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.