Mary Elizabeth heard. I have seen that look of dumb, unresentful suffering in many a human face—in the faces of those who, by the Laws of sport or society or of jurisprudence, find no escape. She had no anger, and what she felt must have been long familiar. “I’d better go home,” she said to me briefly.
I still had her by the hand. And it was, I am bound to confess, as no errant but chiefly as antagonist to the others that I pulled her along. “You got to come,” I reminded her. “You said you would.”
It was cruel treatment, by way of kindness. The others, quickly adapting themselves, fell into the talk of expeditions, which is never quite the same as any other talk; and the only further notice that they took of Mary Elizabeth was painstakingly to leave her out. They never said anything to her, and when she ventured some faint word, they never answered or noticed or seemed to hear. In later years I have had occasion to observe, among the undeveloped, these same traces of tribal antagonisms.
As we went, I had time to digest the hints which I had overheard concerning Mary Elizabeth’s estate. I knew that a family having many children had lately come to live “across the tracks,” and that, because of our anxiety to classify, the father was said to be a drunkard. I looked stealthily at Mary Elizabeth, with a certain respect born of her having experience so transcending my own. Telling how many drunken men and how many dead persons, if any, we had seen was one of our modes of recreation when we foregathered. Technically Mary Elizabeth was, I perceived, one of the vague “poor children” for whom we had long packed baskets and whom we used to take for granted as barbarously as they used to take for granted the plague. Yet now that I knew one such, face to face, she seemed so much less a poor child than a little girl. And though she said so little, she had a priceless manner of knowing what I was driving at, which not even Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman had, and they were the daughters of an assemblyman, and had a furnace in their house, and had had gold watches for Christmas. It was very perplexing.
“First one finds a May-flower’s going to be a princess!” Delia shouted. Delia was singularly unimaginative; the idea of royalty was her single entrance to fields of fancy. The stories that I made up always began “Once there was a fairy”; Margaret and Betty started at gnomes and dwarfs; Calista usually selected a poor little match girl or a boot-black asleep in a piano box; but Delia invariably chose a royal family, with many sons.
We ran, shouting, across the stretch of scrub-oak which stretched where the town blocks of houses and streets gave it up and reverted to the open country. To reach this unprepossessing green place, usually occupied by a decrepit wagon and a pile of cord-wood, was like passing through a doorway into the open. We expressed our freedom by shouting and scrambling to be princesses—all, that is, save Mary Elizabeth. She went soberly about, a little apart, and I wished with all my heart that she might find the first May-flower; but she did not do so.
We hunted for wind-flowers. It was on Prospect Hill that these first flowers—wind-flowers, pasque flowers, May-flowers, however one has learned to say them—were found in Spring—the anemone patens which, next to pussy-willows themselves, meant to us Spring. A week before Nellie Pitmouth had brought to school the first that we had seen. Nellie had our pity because she drove the cows to pasture before she came to school, but she had her reward, for it was always she who found the first spoils. I remember those mornings when I would reach school to find a little group about Nellie in whose hands would be pussy-willows, or the first violets, or our rarely found white violets. For a little while, in the light of real events like these, Nellie enjoyed distinction. Then she relapsed into her usual social obscurity and the stigma of her gingham apron which she wore even on half holidays. This day we pressed hard for her laurels, scrambling in the deep mould and dead leaves in search of the star faces on silvery, silken, furry stems. We hoped untiringly that we might some day find arbutus, which grew in abundance only eighteen miles away, on the hills. In Summer we patiently looked for wintergreen, which they were always finding farther up the river. And from the undoubted dearth of both we escaped with a pretence to the effect that we were under a spell, and that some day, the witch having died, we should walk on our hill and find the wintergreen come and the arbutus under the leaves.
By five o’clock we had been hungry for two hours, and we spread our lunch on the crest. Prospect Hill was the place to which we took our guests when we had them. It was the wide west gateway of the town, where through few ventured, for it opened out on the bend of the little river, navigable only to rowboats and launches, and flowing toward us from the west. You stood at the top of a sharp declivity, and it was like seeing a river face to face to find it flowing straight toward you, out of the sky, bearing little green islands and wet yellow sandbars. It almost seemed as if these must come floating toward us and bringing us everything.... For these were the little days, when we still believed that everything was necessary.
We quickly despatched the process of “trading off,” a sandwich for an apple, a cooky for a cake, and so on, occasionally trading back before the bargain had been tasted. Mary Elizabeth sat at one side; even after I had divided my lunch and given her my basket for a plate, she sat a very little away from us—or it may be my remembrance of her aloofness that makes this seem so. Each of the others gave her something from her basket—but it was the kind of giving which makes one know what a sad word is the word “bestow.” They “bestowed” these things. Since that time, when I have seen folk administering charity, I have always thought of the manner, ill-bred as is all condescension, in which we must have shared our picnic food with Mary Elizabeth.
I believe that this is the first conversation that ever I can remember. Up to this time, I had talked as naturally as the night secretes dreams, with no sense of responsibility for either to mean anything. But that day I became uncomfortably conscious of the trend of the talk.