Part 7

Once when the children of her father’s house were grown out of babyhood and she was nearly ready to be wed herself there was a certain thing that happened to her, and it roused her as no man had ever done yet. There was one little boy who was too young to walk, a neighbor’s child, a round fat boy whose elder sister carried him about that whole summer long, naked and caught in a strip of cloth upon her back. And sometimes the mother, young then and waiting to be wed, would untie this strip and take the child from the little girl’s back, and the little girl would dart off to her play, glad to be released from her burden for a while.

It came to be so then that every day the young girl, the mother, grew to look for this little moon-faced boy and out of all the other children of the village he was the greatest joy to her, her favorite, and she held him and smelled of his fat palms and took pleasure in his round cheeks and in his little rosy mouth, and she carried him about with her, setting him astride her sturdy hip, and when her own mother cried, “What--had you not enough of children in this house so that when I am through my bearing you must go and seek another’s child?” she answered laughing, “I am never weary of babes, I think!”

Soon without her knowing it this child came to rouse in her a longing she had never known before. Sons she wanted as all women did, and she had always taken it as her right that she would have sons one day. But this robust and calm-eyed child roused more than wish of sons in her, and what had first been play with the child became something more, some deep and secret passion for what she did not know.

She made excuse then when the child was in her arms to get away with him alone and all the others were busy here or there in field or kitchen, and the child’s sister was glad to be away, and the young girl sat and held the fair sound child strained against herself. She murmured to him and nursed him in her arms and felt this little, fat, round body helpless against her. Sometimes, since he was still nearly toothless, she chewed up rice or a cake for him and thrust the food into his little lips from hers, and when he sucked it solemnly, surprised at what he felt in his mouth suddenly, she laughed, but she did not know why she laughed, for she was not merry, seeing there was such a fierce, deep, painful longing in her which she did not know how to ease.

One day soon before her marriage day she had the child thus alone and it grew late toward noon and the little girl did not come as early as usual to take the child to his mother to be fed, and the child fretted and tossed himself and would not be still. Then the young girl, seeing his hunger, and driven by some dim fierce passion she did not understand but only felt in her blood urging her on, went into her room and shut the door fast and with trembling hands she undid her coat and put the child to her own young slender breast and he laid hold on it lustily and sucked hard at it. Then she, standing there staring into his baby face, felt such a tumult in her blood as she had never dreamed of and the tears came into her eyes and sounds rose to her lips, broken sounds that were not words, and she held him strained against her and did not know what it was she felt within herself, full and yearning and passionate, greater than the child she held, greater than herself.

Then the moment broke. Her little breast was empty and the child wailed in disappointment and she fastened her coat again and was ashamed somehow of what she had done and she went quickly out and the little girl his sister came running in and seized him and ran with him to his own mother.

But to the young girl the moment was an awakening and more almost than marriage. Ever after even the man she wed was most to her because he was a part of motherhood, and not for his own sake only did she love him.

* * * * *

So had it been with her in her raw youth. Now with her body ripe and knowing all and herself in all her prime of womanhood she was left, woman alone, and every day the children grew up taller and every day they grew further from their babyhood they seemed less her own.

The elder boy shot up tall and thin and silent, and he said little but strained himself at heavy tasks. When the mother would have taken up the rude wooden plough to carry it back to the house at the end of the day, he seized it and held it like a yoke across his own thin shoulders and staggered with it over the clodded earth, and she was so weary oftentimes she let him do it. He it was now who pulled the pails of water from the well and fed the buffalo, and he struggled his whole share and more in the field, as though he were his own father.

Yet in all this he strained away from the woman, his mother, in some secret way, sharing with her in the labor most dutifully, and yet often wilful too, and it seemed to her he was parted from her flesh in some way she could not understand, not liking to be near her and standing off as though there were some smell about her that he could not bear. Oftentimes they quarreled over a slight cause, such as if she bade him hold his hoe better and he would not but would hold it in his own way, even though it was harder to wield when he held it so. Over such a small thing they quarreled and over many other like small things. Yet each knew dimly that this was not the true cause of quarrel either, but some deeper thing which neither could perceive.

The girl, too, was never any cause of joy to her, with her poor eyes half blind. Still the child did her patient best and she complained no more now as she once did, and now that the younger boy could walk and run and loved best to be in the street brawling and playing with others like him, the girl would come sometimes to the field where the mother and the lad worked. But even there she was more care than help, especially if it were in some field of small weak seedlings, for she was so blind that when she would have pulled the weeds she did not see them well and many a time she pulled a seedling, thinking it a weed, so that the boy called out in anger, “Go home, you girl, for I do swear you are no use to us here. Go and sit beside the old grandmother!”

And when she rose at this, half smiling but deeply hurt too, he cried at her again shrilly, “Now see where you tread, you clumsy thing, for you are walking on the seedlings now!”

So she made haste to get out of the field then, too proud to stay, and the mother was torn between these two, her son and the poor half blind girl, and she felt the hearts of both, the lad’s heart weary with labor too bitter for his age, and the girl’s too patient with her pain, and she said sighing, as the girl went away, “It is true, poor thing, you are very little use, nor even can you sew with those eyes as they are. But go you home and sweep the floor and set the food ready and light the fire. Such things you do well enough. Watch the little one and see he does not fall in the pond, for he is the boldest, wilfulest of you all, and pour a little tea sometimes for the old one. There your duty is and you are help to me there. And when I have a little time I will go and seek a balm of some kind for your eyes.”

So she comforted the girl, but the girl was little comfort to her, sitting silent hour after hour and wiping her wet aching lids, and smiling in her fixed and patient way. And looking at her sometimes and hearing her lad’s angers and seeing the younger one’s eagerness to be away at play, the mother wondered bitterly how it could be that when they were babes they were so fair and pleasant to her, and now no comfort.

Yes, oftentimes in the evening this mother looked across the way to her cousin’s house and envied it most sorely. There was the good and honest husband, a plain and earth-soiled man, not clean and pretty as her man had been, but still well enough and going to his daily work and coming home to be fed and to sleep as men should, and there were his children he begot regularly and well, and there the mother sat, easy and merry and well content with her last babe upon her knees, a shallow merry soul and her mouth always open and her tongue clacking, but kindly and a good neighbor. Often she ran to share some bit of meat with the mother, or gave the children a handful of fruit, or a little paper flower she made for the girl to thrust into her hair. It was a good, full, contented house, and the mother envied it, and in her the longing grew, deep and sullen and unsatisfied.

IX

If she could have forgotten the man and so finished with him, if he were dead and she had seen him buried in the earth and still and gone forever, if she could have been a widow and known her life with the man ended, it would have been easier for her. If the hamlet had known her widowed and if she could have kept before her pure and strong that true widowhood, and if she could have heard people say, when she passed or where she knew it said, “A very good true widow is that wife of Li, now dead. There he lies dead and buried and she goes steadfast and true to him, such a one as in the old days would have had a marble arch put up or at least an arch of stone for her honor.” If she could have heard talk like this it would have been a strength to her and a thing to stay herself by, and to this shape that people made of her she might have set her heart and so lived better than she was because men thought her so.

But widow she was not, and often must she answer those who called to ask her how her man did and ever must she lie and cheerfully and keep him in constant mind through her very lies. They would call, “There you are, goodwife, and have you had a letter of late or message by some mouth to say how your man is?”

And she, passing by with a load for market across her shoulder or coming slowly home with empty baskets must answer often out of deathly weariness, “Yes, by word of mouth I hear he does right well, but he only writes me once a year.”

But when she was come to her own house she was torn in two with all her lies. Sometimes she was filled with sadness and loneliness and she cried to her own heart, “How sorrowful and lone a woman am I whose only man is one I must make for myself out of words and lies!”

At such times she would sit and stare down the road and she would think heavily, “That blue robe of his would show a long way off, if he had a mind to turn to home again, so clear and fine a blue it was!”

And indeed if ever she saw a bit of blue anywhere in the distance her heart would leap, and if a man passed in the distance wearing a blue robe she could not but stop what she did and hold her breath to see how he came, shading her eyes against the sun if she were in the field, her hoe dropped from her hand, while she watched if he came this way or that or if he passed or if he went a long way off. And always it was not he who passed, for blue is a very common color and any man might wear a blue robe, if he be a poor and common man.

But there were times when her lies made her angry at him and she told herself the man was not worth it and if he had come home at one such time as this she would have burst her anger full upon him and cursed him soundly while she loved him because he made her suffer so. Times there were when this deep anger lasted over days, so that she was sullen and short with the children and with the grandmother and pushed the dog away roughly with her hoe, although she grieved her own heart the more when she was so.

At one such time as this it came about that it was time for the rice to be measured after harvest. Once more she had struggled through the harvest and alone except for such help as the lad could give, and a day or two from the good cousin, and the day came for the division of the threshed grain. It seemed to the woman that day as though her longing and her anger had made her heart like raw flesh, so that everything she saw fell on it sorely as a blow, and things she did not see of common times she saw and felt this day.

And while she longed, there upon her threshing-floor beside the heaped grain the agent stood, the landlord’s agent, and he was a tall man dressed in a silk robe of gray, and his face square and large and handsome in its bold way. He had his old manner she remembered, a manner of seeming courtesy, but his eyes were full and the lids heavy and half closed over them, and the woman knew from the way he stared at her from under those heavy drooping lids that he had heard her tale and how her husband was gone out to other parts and never had come back. Yes, there was something today in her full heart that caught this knowledge in him, and the truth was he was such a man as could not look at any woman left alone and not wonder secretly what she was and how her heart was made and how her body was shaped. There was a dog’s heart in him, for all his big, good frame and his square full face and his voice he made so hearty and frank. But in spite of his forced courtesy and his free words the tenants hated him, and they feared him because he had a high hard temper and this big body and two large, swift fists that he clenched and held hard against his thighs if any argued against what he said. Yes, and then he lifted the lids he drooped over his eyes, and his eyes were terrible, shining and black and cruel. Yet often they laughed at him, too, for if they gave him his fee without quarrel, he made a joke or two to salve the taking, and they could not but laugh at what he said, although with rue, for he had a way about him somehow.

So did he make a little merry on this day when he came to the mother’s house where she lived alone without her man and he knew she did, and he called out heartily to the lad, “I see your mother does not need your father with such a man as you to tend the fields!”

Then the boy swaggered his little lean body and boasted, shy and bold at once, he was so pleased, “Oh, aye, I do my share,” and he spat as he had seen men do, and set his arms upon his little bony thighs and felt himself grown and fully man.

Then the agent laughed and looked at the mother as though to laugh kindly with her over this lad of hers, and the woman could not but smile, and she handed him a bowl of tea she had poured out in common courtesy as to any passing guest. And being so near his laughing eyes she could not but look into them, and there was that great, greedy, starving heart of hers showing in her own eyes without her knowledge that it did. The man stared at her and scented her heat and he turned hot and grave and when he took the bowl he touched his hand to hers as though not knowing her hand was there. But the woman felt the touch and caught its meaning in her blood like flame.

Then she turned herself away shamed and would not hear what her own heart said. No, she busied herself with the grain and while she did it she grew suddenly afraid of her own self and she said to the lad in a low voice, “Run to our cousin and ask him to come hither and help me,” and to her heart she said, to still its wildness, “If he is here--if our good cousin is here--”

But the lad was proud and wilful and he argued, “I am here, mother, and I will help you. What other do you need? See, I am here!”

Then the agent laughed loudly and slapped his thick thigh and he took secret advantage of the innocent lad and he cried, “So you are, my lad, and true enough your mother needs no other man!”

Then the lad grew the more bold being so encouraged and when his mother said again, half faintly, “It would be better if our cousin were here,” the boy caught the faintness and he cried, “No, I will not call him, mother! I am man enough!” and he took up the scales and strutted to fill the measure with the grain and the woman laughed uneasily and let him be, and the truth was there was something in her, too, that pulled at her to let him be.

When the grain was measured out and she had made a measure full again to give the agent for himself, that agent put it from him in a lordly way and he smoothed his long straight upper lip and looking ardently into the woman’s face--for who was there save these children and that old woman nodding in her sleep under the eaves by the door?--he said, “No, I will not have it! You are a lone woman now and your man gone from home and all this is your own labor. I will take no more of it than my landlord must have, or blame me if he does not. I will take no fee from you, goodwife.”

Then was the woman suddenly afraid in the midst of the sweet sick heat that was upon her and she grew confused and pressed the fee upon him. But he would not have it. He pushed the measure away, his hand on hers while he did, and at last when he took the measure from her he poured the grain back into the basket where she kept it stored, and he would not have it.

Nor had she strength to beg him any more. Under this man’s smooth face and smiling ways, under that gray costly robe of his, there was some strange and secret force that poured out of him into the shining autumn sun and clung to her and licked about her like a tongue of fire. She fell silent then and hung her head like any maid and when he poured the grain back and bowed and went his way, laughing and bowing and smoothing his long lip where there was no hair, she could not say a word. She stood there in silence, her bare brown feet thrust into broken shoes, one hand twisting the corner of her patched cotton coat.

When he was gone she lifted her head and looked after him and at that same instant he turned and caught her look and bowed and laughed again. Yet, in such a way he went, and afterwards she wished a thousand times she had not looked after him like that and yet she could not help it when she did it. Then the boy cried out gladly, “A good man, mother, not to take his fee! I never heard of such a good agent not to take his fee!” And when she went into the kitchen silently, half in a dream with what had passed, he following crying at her, “Is he not a good man, mother, who wanted nothing for himself?” And when still she answered nothing he cried peevishly, “Mother--mother!”

Then the mother started suddenly and she answered in strange haste, “Oh--aye, son--” and the lad prattled on, “So good a man, mother--you see, he would take nothing from you at all, knowing how you are poor now that my father is gone.”

But the mother stood still of a sudden, the lid of the cauldron lifted and still in her hand. She stared at the boy fixedly and her heart echoed strangely, shamed and yet filled with that sick sweet fever, “Did he want nothing of me?” Though to the lad she answered nothing.

* * * * *

Nor could the man forget the woman’s heat. For this excuse and that he came back to the hamlet and now it was to make sure of some account which he thought he had written wrong, and now it was to complain that such a one had given a measure short and the landlord was angry with him. Most often of all he went to the cousin’s house, which stood near the woman’s, and he went to see of this and that, and now he brought some new seed of a kind of cotton that was held very fine in other parts or he brought a man with him carrying a load of lime or some such thing to make the fields more fertile, and the cousin was dazed with so much coming. At first he was afraid the agent had some evil purpose toward him and then he grew anxious when nothing came out for him to see, and he said to his wife, “It must be he has some very deep and evil purpose if it is so long leaking out of him,” and he watched the man anxiously and sat and stared at him, yet impatient, too, to be at his work again that waited for him, and yet afraid to be lacking in courtesy to one who could do him evil if he would.

But neither cousin nor cousin’s wife saw how the secret eyes of the agent went sliding under his lids toward the woman across the way, and how if she were not there upon her threshold, he stayed but a little while, and how if she were there he sat on and on, facing her, and often he cried in loud and false good nature, “No, good fellow, I have no errand other than this. I am but a common man, too, and I like nothing better than to sit in an honest man’s dooryard and feel the autumn sun upon me.” But all the while he stared across the way where the woman sat spinning or sewing.

Now this was the season when the land was sinking into quiescence for the winter. The wheat was planted in the dry earth and waiting for a rain to sprout it, and the mother took a little leisure and sat in her doorway and mended the winter garments and made new shoes, for the girl’s sight was not enough for this, and never would be. She sat there in the full sun for warmth, half listening to the old woman’s talk and what her children had to say to her, and half dreaming, and her lips were tranquil and her skin warm and golden brown with the sun and her hair shiny black with health and newly combed now she had the time to do it every day, and these days she looked younger than she was, although she was yet not thirty and five years old.

Well she knew that man sat there across the few feet of roadway but she would not look up and sometimes when she felt his look press her too hard she rose and went into the house and stayed there until she had seen him go. But she knew why he came and she knew he looked at her for a cause, and she could not forget him.

All through that winter she could not forget him somehow. At last it grew too cold for him to come even for his purpose. When the snow fell and when the winds came down bitter and dry out of the northwest, she might have forgotten him. But she did not.

Once more the new year came and she went into the town as she did every year and sold some grain and changed her silver into paper and she went and sought a different letter writer, and once more she had the letter written as though the man sent it, and once more the hamlet heard the news and knew she had the money from her man.

But this time their fresh envy and all their talk and praise put nothing in the woman’s empty heart. Not even pride could comfort her this time. She listened to the letter read, her face quiet and cold, and she took it home and that night she put it in the oven with the burning grass. Then she went to the table in the room where there was a small drawer and after a while she opened it and brought out the three letters there, for so long had the man been gone now, and she took them also to the fire and laid them on the flames. The lad saw it, and he cried out astounded,

“Do you burn my father’s letters then?”

“Aye,” the mother answered, cold as death, her eyes on the quick flames.

“But how will we know where he is, then?” the lad wailed.

“I know as well as ever. Do you think I can forget?” the woman said.

So she emptied her heart clean.

* * * * *

But how can any heart live empty? On a day soon after this she went into the city to change again her bit of paper, for these days she did not trouble her cousin often, having learned to be alone, and when she had the ten pieces in her hand she turned to go and there a man stood by the door upon the street, and he stood smiling and smoothing his upper lip, and it was the landlord’s agent.

Not since the late autumn had he seen her close as this, and there was none near who knew them and so he stared at her boldly and smiling and he said, “What do you here, goodwife?”

“I did but change a bit of money--” she broke off here, for she had been about to say on, “that my man sent me,” but the words stuck in her throat somehow and she did not utter them.

“And what then?” he asked her, his lids lifted and his eyes pressing her.