Title:      The Woman Who Rode Away and other stories (1928)
Author:     D. H. Lawrence
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Woman Who Rode Away and other stories (1928)
Author:     D. H. Lawrence




Contents


The Woman Who Rode Away

Two Blue Birds

Sun

Smile

The Border-Line

Jimmy and the Desperate Woman

The Last Laugh

In Love

The Man Who Loved Islands

Glad Ghosts

None of That!

The Rocking-Horse Winner

The Lovely Lady





THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY


I


She had thought that this marriage, of all marriages, would be an
adventure.  Not that the man himself was exactly magical to her.  A
little, wiry, twisted fellow, twenty years older than herself, with
brown eyes and greying hair, who had come to America a scrap of a
wastrel, from Holland, years ago, as a tiny boy, and from the gold-
mines of the west had been kicked south into Mexico, and now was
more or less rich, owning silver-mines in the wilds of the Sierra
Madre: it was obvious that the adventure lay in his circumstances,
rather than his person.  But he was still a little dynamo of
energy, in spite of accidents survived, and what he had
accomplished he had accomplished alone.  One of those human
oddments there is no accounting for.

When she actually SAW what he had accomplished, her heart quailed.
Great green-covered, unbroken mountain-hills, and in the midst of
the lifeless isolation, the sharp pinkish mounds of the dried mud
from the silver-works.  Under the nakedness of the works, the
walled-in, one-storey adobe house, with its garden inside, and its
deep inner verandah with tropical climbers on the sides.  And when
you looked up from this shut-in flowered patio, you saw the huge
pink cone of the silver-mud refuse, and the machinery of the
extracting plant against heaven above.  No more.

To be sure, the great wooden doors were often open.  And then she
could stand outside, in the vast open world.  And see great, void,
tree-clad hills piling behind one another, from nowhere into
nowhere.  They were green in autumn time.  For the rest, pinkish,
stark dry, and abstract.

And in his battered Ford car her husband would take her into the
dead, thrice-dead little Spanish town forgotten among the
mountains.  The great, sundried dead church, the dead portales, the
hopeless covered market-place, where, the first time she went, she
saw a dead dog lying between the meat stalls and the vegetable
array, stretched out as if for ever, nobody troubling to throw it
away.  Deadness within deadness.

Everybody feebly talking silver, and showing bits of ore.  But
silver was at a standstill.  The great war came and went.  Silver
was a dead market.  Her husband's mines were closed down.  But she
and he lived on in the adobe house under the works, among the
flowers that were never very flowery to her.

She had two children, a boy and a girl.  And her eldest, the boy,
was nearly ten years old before she aroused from her stupor of
subjected amazement.  She was now thirty-three, a large, blue-eyed,
dazed woman, beginning to grow stout.  Her little, wiry, tough,
twisted, brown-eyed husband was fifty-three, a man as tough as
wire, tenacious as wire, still full of energy, but dimmed by the
lapse of silver from the market, and by some curious inaccessibility
on his wife's part.

He was a man of principles, and a good husband.  In a way, he doted
on her.  He never quite got over his dazzled admiration of her.
But essentially, he was still a bachelor.  He had been thrown out
on the world, a little bachelor, at the age of ten.  When he
married he was over forty, and had enough money to marry on.  But
his capital was all a bachelor's.  He was boss of his own works,
and marriage was the last and most intimate bit of his own works.

He admired his wife to extinction, he admired her body, all her
points.  And she was to him always the rather dazzling Californian
girl from Berkeley, whom he had first known.  Like any sheik, he
kept her guarded among those mountains of Chihuahua.  He was
jealous of her as he was of his silver-mine: and that is saying a
lot.

At thirty-three she really was still the girl from Berkeley, in all
but physique.  Her conscious development had stopped mysteriously
with her marriage, completely arrested.  Her husband had never
become real to her, neither mentally nor physically.  In spite of
his late sort of passion for her, he never meant anything to her,
physically.  Only morally he swayed her, downed her, kept her in an
invincible slavery.

So the years went by, in the adobe house strung round the sunny
patio, with the silver-works overhead.  Her husband was never
still.  When the silver went dead, he ran a ranch lower down, some
twenty miles away, and raised pure-bred hogs, splendid creatures.
At the same time, he hated pigs.  He was a squeamish waif of an
idealist, and really hated the physical side of life.  He loved
work, work, work, and making things.  His marriage, his children,
were something he was making, part of his business, but with a
sentimental income this time.

Gradually her nerves began to go wrong: she must get out.  She must
get out.  So he took her to El Paso for three months.  And at least
it was the United States.

But he kept his spell over her.  The three months ended: back she
was, just the same, in her adobe house among those eternal green or
pinky-brown hills, void as only the undiscovered is void.  She
taught her children, she supervised the Mexican boys who were her
servants.  And sometimes her husband brought visitors, Spaniards or
Mexicans or occasionally white men.

He really loved to have white men staying on the place.  Yet he had
not a moment's peace when they were there.  It was as if his wife
were some peculiar secret vein of ore in his mines, which no one
must be aware of except himself.  And she was fascinated by the
young gentlemen, mining engineers, who were his guests at times.
He, too, was fascinated by a real gentleman.  But he was an old-
timer miner with a wife, and if a gentleman looked at his wife, he
felt as if his mine were being looted, the secrets of it pryed out.

It was one of these young gentlemen who put the idea into her mind.
They were all standing outside the great wooden doors of the patio,
looking at the outer world.  The eternal, motionless hills were all
green, it was September, after the rains.  There was no sign of
anything, save the deserted mine, the deserted works, and a bunch
of half-deserted miner's dwellings.

"I wonder," said the young man, "what there is behind those great
blank hills."

"More hills," said Lederman.  "If you go that way, Sonora and the
coast.  This way is the desert--you came from there--And the other
way, hills and mountains."

"Yes, but what LIVES in the hills and mountains?  SURELY there is
something wonderful?  It looks SO like nowhere on earth: like being
on the moon."

"There's plenty of game, if you want to shoot.  And Indians, if you
call THEM wonderful."

"Wild ones?"

"Wild enough."

"But friendly?"

"It depends.  Some of them are quite wild, and they don't let
anybody near.  They kill a missionary at sight.  And where a
missionary can't get, nobody can."

"But what does the government say?"

"They're so far from everywhere, the government leaves 'em alone.
And they're wily; if they think there'll be trouble, they send a
delegation to Chihuahua and make a formal submission.  The
government is glad to leave it at that."

"And do they live quite wild, with their own savage customs and
religion?"

"Oh, yes.  They use nothing but bows and arrows.  I've seen them in
town, in the Plaza, with funny sort of hats with flowers round
them, and a bow in one hand, quite naked except for a sort of
shirt, even in cold weather--striding round with their savage's
bare legs."

"But don't you suppose it's wonderful, up there in their secret
villages?"

"No.  What would there be wonderful about it?  Savages are savages,
and all savages behave more or less alike: rather low-down and
dirty, unsanitary, with a few cunning tricks, and struggling to get
enough to eat."

"But surely they have old, old religions and mysteries--it MUST be
wonderful, surely it must."

"I don't know about mysteries--howling and heathen practices, more
or less indecent.  No, I see nothing wonderful in that kind of
stuff.  And I wonder that you should, when you have lived in London
or Paris or New York--"

"Ah, EVERYBODY lives in London or Paris or New York"--said the
young man, as if this were an argument.

And his peculiar vague enthusiasm for unknown Indians found a full
echo in the woman's heart.  She was overcome by a foolish
romanticism more unreal than a girl's.  She felt it was her destiny
to wander into the secret haunts of these timeless, mysterious,
marvellous Indians of the mountains.

She kept her secret.  The young man was departing, her husband was
going with him down to Torreon, on business:--would be away for
some days.  But before the departure, she made her husband talk
about the Indians: about the wandering tribes, resembling the
Navajo, who were still wandering free; and the Yaquis of Sonora:
and the different groups in the different valleys of Chihuahua
State.

There was supposed to be one tribe, the Chilchuis, living in a high
valley to the south, who were the sacred tribe of all the Indians.
The descendants of Montezuma and of the old Aztec or Totonac kings
still lived among them, and the old priests still kept up the
ancient religion, and offered human sacrifices--so it was said.
Some scientists had been to the Chilchui country, and had come back
gaunt and exhausted with hunger and bitter privation, bringing
various curious, barbaric objects of worship, but having seen
nothing extraordinary in the hungry, stark village of savages.

Though Lederman talked in this off-hand way, it was obvious he felt
some of the vulgar excitement at the idea of ancient and mysterious
savages.

"How far away are they?" she asked.

"Oh--three days on horseback--past Cuchitee and a little lake there
is up there."

Her husband and the young man departed.  The woman made her crazy
plans.  Of late, to break the monotony of her life, she had
harassed her husband into letting her go riding with him,
occasionally, on horseback.  She was never allowed to go out alone.
The country truly was not safe, lawless and crude.

But she had her own horse, and she dreamed of being free as she had
been as a girl, among the hills of California.

Her daughter, nine years old, was now in a tiny convent in the
little half-deserted Spanish mining-town five miles away.

"Manuel," said the woman to her house-servant, "I'm going to ride
to the convent to see Margarita, and take her a few things.
Perhaps I shall stay the night in the convent.  You look after
Freddy and see everything is all right till I come back."

"Shall I ride with you on the master's horse, or shall Juan?" asked
the servant.

"Neither of you.  I shall go alone."

The young man looked her in the eyes, in protest.  Absolutely
impossible that the woman should ride alone!

"I shall go alone," repeated the large, placid-seeming, fair-
complexioned woman, with peculiar overbearing emphasis.  And the
man silently, unhappily yielded.

"Why are you going alone, mother?" asked her son, as she made up
parcels of food.

"Am I NEVER to be let alone?  Not one moment of my life?" she
cried, with sudden explosion of energy.  And the child, like the
servant, shrank into silence.

She set off without a qualm, riding astride on her strong roan
horse, and wearing a riding suit of coarse linen, a riding skirt
over her linen breeches, a scarlet neck-tie over her white blouse,
and a black felt hat on her head.  She had food in her saddle-bags,
an army canteen with water, and a large, native blanket tied on
behind the saddle.  Peering into the distance, she set off from her
home.  Manuel and the little boy stood in the gateway to watch her
go.  She did not even turn to wave them farewell.

But when she had ridden about a mile, she left the wild road and
took a small trail to the right, that led into another valley, over
steep places and past great trees, and through another deserted
mining-settlement.  It was September, the water was running freely
in the little stream that had fed the now-abandoned mine.  She got
down to drink, and let the horse drink too.

She saw natives coming through the trees, away up the slope.  They
had seen her, and were watching her closely.  She watched in turn.
The three people, two women and a youth, were making a wide detour,
so as not to come too close to her.  She did not care.  Mounting,
she trotted ahead up the silent valley, beyond the silver-works,
beyond any trace of mining.  There was still a rough trail, that
led over rocks and loose stones into the valley beyond.  This trail
she had already ridden, with her husband.  Beyond that she knew she
must go south.

Curiously she was not afraid, although it was a frightening
country, the silent, fatal-seeming mountain-slopes, the occasional
distant, suspicious, elusive natives among the trees, the great
carrion birds occasionally hovering, like great flies, in the
distance, over some carrion or some ranch house or some group of
huts.

As she climbed, the trees shrank and the trail ran through a thorny
scrub, that was trailed over with blue convolvulus and an
occasional pink creeper.  Then these flowers lapsed.  She was
nearing the pine-trees.

She was over the crest, and before her another silent, void, green-
clad valley.  It was past midday.  Her horse turned to a little
runlet of water, so she got down to eat her midday meal.  She sat
in silence looking at the motionless unliving valley, and at the
sharp-peaked hills, rising higher to rock and pine-trees,
southwards.  She rested two hours in the heat of the day, while the
horse cropped around her.

Curious that she was neither afraid nor lonely.  Indeed, the
loneliness was like a drink of cold water to one who is very
thirsty.  And a strange elation sustained her from within.

She travelled on, and camped at night in a valley beside a stream,
deep among the bushes.  She had seen cattle and had crossed several
trails.  There must be a ranch not far off.  She heard the strange
wailing shriek of a mountain-lion, and the answer of dogs.  But she
sat by her small camp fire in a secret hollow place and was not
really afraid.  She was buoyed up always by the curious, bubbling
elation within her.

It was very cold before dawn.  She lay wrapped in her blanket
looking at the stars, listening to her horse shivering, and feeling
like a woman who has died and passed beyond.  She was not sure that
she had not heard, during the night, a great crash at the centre of
herself, which was the crash of her own death.  Or else it was a
crash at the centre of the earth, and meant something big and
mysterious.

With the first peep of light she got up, numb with cold, and made a
fire.  She ate hastily, gave her horse some pieces of oil-seed
cake, and set off again.  She avoided any meeting--and since she
met nobody, it was evident that she in turn was avoided.  She came
at last in sight of the village of Cuchitee, with its black houses
with their reddish roofs, a sombre, dreary little cluster below
another silent, long-abandoned mine.  And beyond, a long, great
mountain-side, rising up green and light to the darker, shaggier
green of pine trees.  And beyond the pine trees stretches of naked
rock against the sky, rock slashed already and brindled with white
stripes of snow.  High up, the new snow had already begun to fall.

And now, as she neared, more or less, her destination, she began to
go vague and disheartened.  She had passed the little lake among
yellowing aspen trees whose white trunks were round and suave like
the white round arms of some woman.  What a lovely place!  In
California she would have raved about it.  But here she looked and
saw that it was lovely, but she didn't care.  She was weary and
spent with her two nights in the open, and afraid of the coming
night.  She didn't know where she was going, or what she was going
for.  Her horse plodded dejectedly on, towards that immense and
forbidding mountain-slope, following a stony little trail.  And if
she had had any will of her own left, she would have turned back,
to the village, to be protected and sent home to her husband.

But she had no will of her own.  Her horse splashed through a
brook, and turned up a valley, under immense yellowing cotton-wood
trees.  She must have been near nine thousand feet above sea-level,
and her head was light with the altitude and with weariness.
Beyond the cotton-wood trees she could see, on each side, the steep
sides of mountain-slopes hemming her in, sharp-plumaged with
overlapping aspen, and, higher up, with sprouting, pointed spruce
and pine tree.  Her horse went on automatically.  In this tight
valley, on this slight trail, there was nowhere to go but ahead,
climbing.

Suddenly her horse jumped, and three men in dark blankets were on
the trail before her.

"Adios!" came the greeting, in the full, restrained Indian voice.

"Adios!" she replied, in her assured, American woman's voice.

"Where are you going?" came the quiet question, in Spanish.

The men in the dark sarapes had come closer, and were looking up at
her.

"On ahead," she replied coolly, in her hard, Saxon Spanish.

These were just natives to her: dark-faced, strongly-built men in
dark sarapes and straw hats.  They would have been the same as the
men who worked for her husband, except, strangely, for the long
black hair that fell over their shoulders.  She noted this long
black hair with a certain distaste.  These must be the wild Indians
she had come to see.

"Where do you come from?" the same man asked.  It was always the
one man who spoke.  He was young, with quick, large, bright black
eyes that glanced sideways at her.  He had a soft black moustache
on his dark face, and a sparse tuft of beard, loose hairs on his
chin.  His long black hair, full of life, hung unrestrained on his
shoulders.  Dark as he was, he did not look as if he had washed
lately.

His two companions were the same, but older men, powerful and
silent.  One had a thin black line of moustache, but was beardless.
The other had the smooth cheeks and the sparse dark hairs marking
the lines of his chin with the beard characteristic of the Indians.

"I come from far away," she replied, with half-jocular evasion.

This was received in silence.

"But where do you live?" asked the young man, with that same quiet
insistence.

"In the north," she replied airily.

Again there was a moment's silence.  The young man conversed
quietly, in Indian, with his two companions.

"Where do you want to go, up this way?" he asked suddenly, with
challenge and authority, pointing briefly up the trail.

"To the Chilchui Indians," answered the woman laconically.

The young man looked at her.  His eyes were quick and black, and
inhuman.  He saw, in the full evening light, the faint sub-smile of
assurance on her rather large, calm, fresh-complexioned face; the
weary, bluish lines under her large blue eyes; and in her eyes, as
she looked down at him, a half-childish, half-arrogant confidence
in her own female power.  But in her eyes also, a curious look of
trance.

"Usted es Señora?  You are a lady?" the Indian asked her.

"Yes, I am a lady," she replied complacently.

"With a family?"

"With a husband and two children, boy and girl," she said.

The Indian turned to his companions and translated, in the low,
gurgling speech, like hidden water running.  They were evidently at
a loss.

"Where is your husband?" asked the young man.

"Who knows?" she replied airily.  "He has gone away on business for
a week."

The black eyes watched her shrewdly.  She, for all her weariness,
smiled faintly in the pride of her own adventure and the assurance
of her own womanhood, and the spell of the madness that was on her.

"And what do YOU want to do?" the Indian asked her.

"I want to visit the Chilchui Indians--to see their houses and to
know their gods," she replied.

The young man turned and translated quickly, and there was a
silence almost of consternation.  The grave elder men were glancing
at her sideways, with strange looks, from under their decorated
hats.  And they said something to the young man, in deep chest
voices.

The latter still hesitated.  Then he turned to the woman.

"Good!" he said.  "Let us go.  But we cannot arrive until to-
morrow.  We shall have to make a camp to-night."

"Good!" she said.  "I can make a camp."

Without more ado, they set off at a good speed up the stony trail.
The young Indian ran alongside her horse's head, the other two ran
behind.  One of them had taken a thick stick, and occasionally he
struck her horse a resounding blow on the haunch, to urge him
forward.  This made the horse jump, and threw her back in the
saddle, which, tired as she was, made her angry.

"Don't do that!" she cried, looking round angrily at the fellow.
She met his black, large, bright eyes, and for the first time her
spirit really quailed.  The man's eyes were not human to her, and
they did not see her as a beautiful white woman.  He looked at her
with a black, bright inhuman look, and saw no woman in her at all.
As if she were some strange, unaccountable THING, incomprehensible
to him, but inimical.  She sat in her saddle in wonder, feeling
once more as if she had died.  And again he struck her horse, and
jerked her badly in the saddle.

All the passionate anger of the spoilt white woman rose in her.
She pulled her horse to a standstill, and turned with blazing eyes
to the man at her bridle.

"Tell that fellow not to touch my horse again," she cried.  She met
the eyes of the young man, and in their bright black inscrutability
she saw a fine spark, as in a snake's eye, of derision.  He spoke
to his companion in the rear, in the low tones of the Indian.  The
man with the stick listened without looking.  Then, giving a
strange low cry to the horse, he struck it again on the rear, so
that it leaped forward spasmodically up the stony trail, scattering
the stones, pitching the weary woman in her seat.

The anger flew like a madness into her eyes, she went white at the
gills.  Fiercely she reined in her horse.  But before she could
turn, the young Indian had caught the reins under the horse's
throat, jerked them forward, and was trotting ahead rapidly,
leading the horse.

The woman was powerless.  And along with her supreme anger there
came a slight thrill of exultation.  She knew she was dead.

The sun was setting, a great yellow light flooded the last of the
aspens, flared on the trunks of the pine-trees, the pine-needles
bristled and stood out with dark lustre, the rocks glowed with
unearthly glamour.  And through this effulgence the Indian at her
horse's head trotted unweariedly on, his dark blanket swinging, his
bare legs glowing with a strange transfigured ruddiness in the
powerful light, and his straw hat with its half-absurd decorations
of flowers and feathers shining showily above his river of long
black hair.  At times he would utter a low call to the horse, and
then the other Indian, behind, would fetch the beast a whack with
the stick.

The wonder-light faded off the mountains, the world began to grow
dark, a cold air breathed down.  In the sky, half a moon was
struggling against the glow in the west.  Huge shadows came down
from steep rocky slopes.  Water was rushing.  The woman was
conscious only of her fatigue, her unspeakable fatigue, and the
cold wind from the heights.  She was not aware how moonlight
replaced daylight.  It happened while she travelled unconscious
with weariness.

For some hours they travelled by moonlight.  Then suddenly they
came to a standstill.  The men conversed in low tones for a moment.

"We camp here," said the young man.

She waited for him to help her down.  He merely stood holding the
horse's bridle.  She almost fell from the saddle, so fatigued.

They had chosen a place at the foot of rocks that still gave off a
little warmth of the sun.  One man cut pine-boughs, another erected
little screens of pine-boughs against the rock for shelter, and put
boughs of balsam pine for beds.  The third made a small fire, to
heat tortillas.  They worked in silence.

The woman drank water.  She did not want to eat--only to lie down.

"Where do I sleep?" she asked.

The young man pointed to one of the shelters.  She crept in and lay
inert.  She did not care what happened to her, she was so weary,
and so beyond everything.  Through the twigs of spruce she could
see the three men squatting round the fire on their hams, chewing
the tortillas they picked from the ashes with their dark fingers,
and drinking water from a gourd.  They talked in low, muttering
tones, with long intervals of silence.  Her saddle and saddle-bags
lay not far from the fire, unopened, untouched.  The men were not
interested in her nor her belongings.  There they squatted with
their hats on their heads, eating, eating mechanically, like
animals, the dark sarape with its fringe falling to the ground
before and behind, the powerful dark legs naked and squatting like
an animal's, showing the dirty white shirt and the sort of loin-
cloth which was the only other garment, underneath.  And they
showed no more sign of interest in her than if she had been a piece
of venison they were bringing home from the hunt, and had hung
inside a shelter.

After a while they carefully extinguished the fire, and went inside
their own shelter.  Watching through the screen of boughs, she had
a moment's thrill of fear and anxiety, seeing the dark forms cross
and pass silently in the moonlight.  Would they attack her now?

But no!  They were as if oblivious of her.  Her horse was hobbled;
she could hear it hopping wearily.  All was silent, mountain-
silent, cold, deathly.  She slept and woke and slept in a semi-
conscious numbness of cold and fatigue.  A long, long night, icy
and eternal, and she aware that she had died.


II


Yet when there was a stirring, and a clink of flint and steel, and
the form of a man crouching like a dog over a bone, at a red
splutter of fire, and she knew it was morning coming, it seemed to
her the night had passed too soon.

When the fire was going, she came out of her shelter with one real
desire left: for coffee.  The men were warming more tortillas.

"Can we make coffee?" she asked.

The young man looked at her, and she imagined the same faint spark
of derision in his eyes.  He shook his head.

"We don't take it," he said.  "There is no time."

And the elder men, squatting on their haunches, looked up at her in
the terrible paling dawn, and there was not even derision in their
eyes.  Only that intense, yet remote, inhuman glitter which was
terrible to her.  They were inaccessible.  They could not see her
as a woman at all.  As if she WERE not a woman.  As if, perhaps,
her whiteness took away all her womanhood, and left her as some
giant, female white ant.  That was all they could see in her.

Before the sun was up, she was in the saddle again, and they were
climbing steeply, in the icy air.  The sun came, and soon she was
very hot, exposed to the glare in the bare places.  It seemed to
her they were climbing to the roof of the world.  Beyond against
heaven were slashes of snow.

During the course of the morning, they came to a place where the
horse could not go farther.  They rested for a time with a great
slant of living rock in front of them, like the glossy breast of
some earth-beast.  Across this rock, along a wavering crack, they
had to go.  It seemed to her that for hours she went in torment, on
her hands and knees, from crack to crevice, along the slanting face
of this pure rock-mountain.  An Indian in front and an Indian
behind walked slowly erect, shod with sandals of braided leather.
But she in her riding-boots dared not stand erect.

Yet what she wondered, all the time, was why she persisted in
clinging and crawling along these mile-long sheets of rock.  Why
she did not hurl herself down, and have done!  The world was below
her.

When they emerged at last on a stony slope, she looked back, and
saw the third Indian coming carrying her saddle and saddle-bags on
his back, the whole hung from a band across his forehead.  And he
had his hat in his hand, as he stepped slowly, with the slow, soft,
heavy tread of the Indian, unwavering in the chinks of rock, as if
along a scratch in the mountain's iron shield.

The stony slope led downwards.  The Indians seemed to grow excited.
One ran ahead at a slow trot, disappearing round the curve of
stones.  And the track curved round and down, till at last in the
full blaze of the mid-morning sun, they could see a valley below
them, between walls of rock, as in a great wide chasm let in the
mountains.  A green valley, with a river, and trees, and clusters
of low flat sparkling houses.  It was all tiny and perfect, three
thousand feet below.  Even the flat bridge over the stream, and the
square with the houses around it, the bigger buildings piled up at
opposite ends of the square, the tall cotton-wood trees, the
pastures and stretches of yellow-sere maize, the patches of brown
sheep or goats in the distance, on the slopes, the railed
enclosures by the stream-side.  There it was, all small and
perfect, looking magical, as any place will look magical, seen from
the mountains above.  The unusual thing was that the low houses
glittered white, whitewashed, looking like crystals of salt, or
silver.  This frightened her.

They began the long, winding descent at the head of the barranca,
following the stream that rushed and fell.  At first it was all
rocks: then the pine-trees began, and soon, the silver-limbed
aspens.  The flowers of autumn, big pink daisy-like flowers, and
white ones, and many yellow flowers, were in profusion.  But she
had to sit down and rest, she was so weary.  And she saw the bright
flowers shadowily, as pale shadows hovering, as one who is dead
must see them.

At length came grass and pasture-slopes between mingled aspen and
pine-trees.  A shepherd, naked in the sun save for his hat and his
cotton loin-cloth, was driving his brown sheep away.  In a grove of
trees they sat and waited, she and the young Indian.  The one with
the saddle had also gone forward.

They heard a sound of someone coming.  It was three men, in fine
sarapes of red and orange and yellow and black, and with brilliant
feather headdresses.  The oldest had his grey hair braided with
fur, and his red and orange-yellow sarape was covered with curious
black markings, like a leopard-skin.  The other two were not grey-
haired, but they were elders too.  Their blankets were in stripes,
and their headdresses not so elaborate.

The young Indian addressed the elders in a few quiet words.  They
listened without answering or looking at him or at the woman,
keeping their faces averted and their eyes turned to the ground,
only listening.  And at length they turned and looked at the woman.

The old chief, or medicine-man, whatever he was, had a deeply
wrinkled and lined face of dark bronze, with a few sparse grey
hairs round the mouth.  Two long braids of grey hair, braided with
fur and coloured feathers, hung on his shoulders.  And yet, it was
only his eyes that mattered.  They were black and of extraordinary
piercing strength, without a qualm of misgiving in their demonish,
dauntless power.  He looked into the eyes of the white woman with a
long, piercing look, seeking she knew not what.  She summoned all
her strength to meet his eyes and keep up her guard.  But it was no
good.  He was not looking at her as one human being looks at
another.  He never even perceived her resistance or her challenge,
but looked past them both, into she knew not what.

She could see it was hopeless to expect any human communication
with this old being.

He turned and said a few words to the young Indian.

"He asks what do you seek here?" said the young man in Spanish.

"I?  Nothing!  I only came to see what it was like."

This was again translated, and the old man turned his eyes on her
once more.  Then he spoke again, in his low muttering tone, to the
young Indian.

"He says, why does she leave her house with the white men?  Does
she want to bring the white man's God to the Chilchui?"

"No," she replied, foolhardy.  "I came away from the white man's
God myself.  I came to look for the God of Chilchui."

Profound silence followed, when this was translated.  Then the old
man spoke again, in a small voice almost of weariness.

"Does the white woman seek the gods of the Chilchui because she is
weary of her own God?" came the question.

"Yes, she does.  She is tired of the white man's God," she replied,
thinking that was what they wanted her to say.  She would like to
serve the gods of the Chilchui.

She was aware of an extraordinary thrill of triumph and exultance
passing through the Indians, in the tense silence that followed
when this was translated.  Then they all looked at her with
piercing black eyes, in which a steely covetous intent glittered
incomprehensible.  She was the more puzzled, as there was nothing
sensual or sexual in the look.  It had a terrible glittering purity
that was beyond her.  She was afraid, she would have been paralysed
with fear, had not something died within her, leaving her with a
cold, watchful wonder only.

The elders talked a little while, then the two went away, leaving
her with the young man and the oldest chief.  The old man now
looked at her with a certain solicitude.

"He says are you tired?" asked the young man.

"Very tired," she said.

"The men will bring you a carriage," said the young Indian.

The carriage, when it came, proved to be a litter consisting of a
sort of hammock of dark woollen frieze, slung on to a pole which
was borne on the shoulders of two long-haired Indians.  The woollen
hammock was spread on the ground, she sat down on it, and the two
men raised the pole to their shoulders.  Swinging rather as if she
were in a sack, she was carried out of the grove of trees,
following the old chief, whose leopard-spotted blanket moved
curiously in the sunlight.

They had emerged in the valley-head.  Just in front were the maize
fields, with ripe ears of maize.  The corn was not very tall, in
this high altitude.  The well-worn path went between it, and all
she could see was the erect form of the old chief, in the flame and
black sarape, stepping soft and heavy and swift, his head forward,
looking to neither to right nor left.  Her bearers followed,
stepping rhythmically, the long blue-black hair glistening like a
river down the naked shoulders of the man in front.

They passed the maize, and came to a big wall or earthwork made of
earth and adobe bricks.  The wooden doors were open.  Passing on,
they were in a network of small gardens, full of flowers and herbs
and fruit trees, each garden watered by a tiny ditch of running
water.  Among each cluster of trees and flowers was a small,
glittering white house, windowless, and with closed door.  The
place was a network of little paths, small streams, and little
bridges among square, flowering gardens.

Following the broadest path--a soft narrow track between leaves and
grass, a path worn smooth by centuries of human feet, no hoof of
horse nor any wheel to disfigure it--they came to the little river
of swift bright water, and crossed on a log bridge.  Everything was
silent--there was no human being anywhere.  The road went on under
magnificent cotton-wood trees.  It emerged suddenly outside the
central plaza or square of the village.

This was a long oblong of low white houses with flat roofs, and two
bigger buildings, having as it were little square huts piled on top
of bigger long huts, stood at either end of the oblong, facing each
other rather askew.  Every little house was a dazzling white, save
for the great round beam-ends which projected under the flat eaves,
and for the flat roofs.  Round each of the bigger buildings, on the
outside of the square, was a stockyard fence, inside which was
garden with trees and flowers, and various small houses.

Not a soul was in sight.  They passed silently between the houses
into the central square.  This was quite bare and arid, the earth
trodden smooth by endless generations of passing feet, passing
across from door to door.  All the doors of the windowless houses
gave on to this blank square, but all the doors were closed.  The
firewood lay near the threshold, a clay oven was still smoking, but
there was no sign of moving life.

The old man walked straight across the square to the big house at
the end, where the two upper storeys, as in a house of toy bricks,
stood each one smaller than the lower one.  A stone staircase,
outside, led up to the roof of the first storey.

At the foot of this staircase the litter-bearers stood still, and
lowered the woman to the ground.

"You will come up," said the young Indian who spoke Spanish.

She mounted the stone stairs to the earthen roof of the first
house, which formed a platform round the wall of the second storey.
She followed around this platform to the back of the big house.
There they descended again, into the garden at the rear.

So far they had seen no one.  But now two men appeared, bare-
headed, with long braided hair, and wearing a sort of white shirt
gathered into a loin-cloth.  These went along with the three
newcomers, across the garden where red flowers and yellow flowers
were blooming, to a long, low white house.  There they entered
without knocking.

It was dark inside.  There was a low murmur of men's voices.
Several men were present, their white shirts showing in the gloom,
their dark faces invisible.  They were sitting on a great log of
smooth old wood, that lay along the far wall.  And save for this
log, the room seemed empty.  But no, in the dark at one end was a
couch, a sort of bed, and someone lying there, covered with furs.

The old Indian in the spotted sarape, who had accompanied the
woman, now took off his hat and his blanket and his sandals.
Laying them aside, he approached the couch, and spoke in a low
voice.  For some moments there was no answer.  Then an old man with
the snow-white hair hanging round his darkly-visible face, roused
himself like a vision, and leaned on one elbow, looking vaguely at
the company, in tense silence.

The grey-haired Indian spoke again, and then the young Indian,
taking the woman's hand, led her forward.  In her linen riding
habit, and black boots and hat, and her pathetic bit of a red tie,
she stood there beside the fur-covered bed of the old, old man, who
sat reared up, leaning on one elbow, remote as a ghost, his white
hair streaming in disorder, his face almost black, yet with a far-
off intentness, not of this world, leaning forward to look at her.

His face was so old, it was like dark glass, and the few curling
hairs that sprang white from his lips and chin were quite
incredible.  The long white locks fell unbraided and disorderly on
either side of the glassy dark face.  And under a faint powder of
white eyebrows, the black eyes of the old chief looked at her as if
from the far, far dead, seeing something that was never to be seen.

At last he spoke a few deep, hollow words, as if to the dark air.

"He says, do you bring your heart to the god of the Chilchui?"
translated the young Indian.

"Tell him yes," she said, automatically.

There was a pause.  The old Indian spoke again, as if to the air.
One of the men present went out.  There was a silence as if of
eternity, in the dim room that was lighted only through the open
door.

The woman looked round.  Four old men with grey hair sat on the log
by the wall facing the door.  Two other men, powerful and
impassive, stood near the door.  They all had long hair, and wore
white shirts gathered into a loin-cloth.  Their powerful legs were
naked and dark.  There was a silence like eternity.

At length the man returned, with white and dark clothing on his
arm.  The young Indian took them, and holding them in front of the
woman, said:

"You must take off your clothes, and put these on."

"If all you men will go out," she said.

"No one will hurt you," he said quietly.

"Not while you men are here," she said.

He looked at the two men by the door.  They came quickly forward,
and suddenly gripped her arms as she stood, without hurting her,
but with great power.  Then two of the old men came, and with
curious skill slit her boots down with keen knives, and drew them
off, and slit her clothing so that it came away from her.  In a few
moments she stood there white and uncovered.  The old man on the
bed spoke, and they turned her round for him to see.  He spoke
again, and the young Indian deftly took the pins and comb from her
fair hair, so that it fell over her shoulders in a bunchy tangle.

Then the old man spoke again.  The Indian led her to the bedside.
The white-haired, glassy-dark old man moistened his finger-tips at
his mouth, and most delicately touched her on the breasts and on
the body, then on the back.  And she winced strangely each time, as
the fingertips drew along her skin, as if Death itself were
touching her.

And she wondered, almost sadly, why she did not feel shamed in her
nakedness.  She only felt sad and lost.  Because nobody felt
ashamed.  The elder men were all dark and tense with some other
deep, gloomy, incomprehensible emotion, which suspended all her
agitation, while the young Indian had a strange look of ecstasy on
his face.  And she, she was only utterly strange and beyond
herself, as if her body were not her own.

They gave her the new clothing: a long white cotton shift, that
came to her knees: then a tunic of thick blue woollen stuff,
embroidered with scarlet and green flowers.  It was fastened over
one shoulder only, and belted with a braid sash of scarlet and
black wool.

When she was thus dressed, they took her away, barefoot, to a
little house in the stockaded garden.  The young Indian told her
she might have what she wanted.  She asked for water to wash
herself.  He brought it in a jar, together with a long wooden bowl.
Then he fastened the gate-door of her house, and left her a
prisoner.  She could see through the bars of the gate-door of her
house, the red flowers of the garden, and a humming bird.  Then
from the roof of the big house she heard the long, heavy sound of a
drum, unearthly to her in its summons, and an uplifted voice
calling from the house-top in a strange language, with a far-away
emotionless intonation, delivering some speech or message.  And she
listened as if from the dead.

But she was very tired.  She lay down on a couch of skins, pulling
over her the blanket of dark wool, and she slept, giving up
everything.

When she woke it was late afternoon, and the young Indian was
entering with a basket-tray containing food, tortillas and corn-
mush with bits of meat, probably mutton, and a drink made of honey,
and some fresh plums.  He brought her also a long garland of red
and yellow flowers with knots of blue buds at the end.  He
sprinkled the garland with water from a jar, then offered it to
her, with a smile.  He seemed very gentle and thoughtful, and on
his face and in his dark eyes was a curious look of triumph and
ecstasy, that frightened her a little.  The glitter had gone from
the black eyes, with their curving dark lashes, and he would look
at her with this strange soft glow of ecstasy that was not quite
human, and terribly impersonal, and which made her uneasy.

"Is there anything you want?" he said, in his low, slow, melodious
voice, that always seemed withheld, as if he were speaking aside to
somebody else, or as if he did not want to let the sound come out
to her.

"Am I going to be kept a prisoner here?" she asked.

"No, you can walk in the garden to-morrow," he said softly.  Always
this curious solicitude.

"Do you like that drink?" he said, offering her a little
earthenware cup.  "It is very refreshing."

She sipped the liquor curiously.  It was made with herbs and
sweetened with honey, and had a strange, lingering flavour.  The
young man watched her with gratification.

"It has a peculiar taste," she said.

"It is very refreshing," he replied, his black eyes resting on her
always with that look of gratified ecstasy.  Then he went away.
And presently she began to be sick, and to vomit violently, as if
she had no control over herself.

Afterwards she felt a great soothing languor steal over her, her
limbs felt strong and loose and full of languor, and she lay on her
couch listening to the sounds of the village, watching the
yellowing sky, smelling the scent of burning cedar-wood, or pine-
wood.  So distinctly she heard the yapping of tiny dogs, the
shuffle of far-off feet, the murmur of voices, so keenly she
detected the smell of smoke, and flowers, and evening falling, so
vividly she saw the one bright star infinitely remote, stirring
above the sunset, that she felt as if all her senses were diffused
on the air, that she could distinguish the sound of evening flowers
unfolding, and the actual crystal sound of the heavens, as the vast
belts of the world-atmosphere slid past one another, and as if the
moisture ascending and the moisture descending in the air resounded
like some harp in the cosmos.

She was a prisoner in her house and in the stockaded garden, but
she scarcely minded.  And it was days before she realised that she
never saw another woman.  Only the men, the elderly men of the big
house, that she imagined must be some sort of temple, and the men
priests of some sort.  For they always had the same colours, red,
orange, yellow, and black, and the same grave, abstracted
demeanour.

Sometimes an old man would come and sit in her room with her, in
absolute silence.  None spoke any language but Indian, save the one
younger man.  The older men would smile at her, and sit with her
for an hour at a time, sometimes smiling at her when she spoke in
Spanish, but never answering save with this slow, benevolent-
seeming smile.  And they gave off a feeling of almost fatherly
solicitude.  Yet their dark eyes, brooding over her, had something
away in their depths that was awesomely ferocious and relentless.
They would cover it with a smile, at once, if they felt her
looking.  But she had seen it.

Always they treated her with this curious impersonal solicitude,
this utterly impersonal gentleness, as an old man treats a child.
But underneath it she felt there was something else, something
terrible.  When her old visitor had gone away, in his silent,
insidious, fatherly fashion, a shock of fear would come over her;
though of what she knew not.

The young Indian would sit and talk with her freely, as if with
great candour.  But with him, too, she felt that everything real
was unsaid.  Perhaps it was unspeakable.  His big dark eyes would
rest on her almost cherishingly, touched with ecstasy, and his
beautiful, slow, languorous voice would trail out its simple,
ungrammatical Spanish.  He told her he was the grandson of the old,
old man, son of the man in the spotted sarape: and they were
caciques, kings from the old, old days, before even the Spaniards
came.  But he himself had been in Mexico City, and also in the
United States.  He had worked as a labourer, building the roads in
Los Angeles.  He had travelled as far as Chicago.

"Don't you speak English, then?" she asked.

His eyes rested on her with a curious look of duplicity and
conflict, and he mutely shook his head.

"What did you do with your long hair, when you were in the United
States?" she asked.  "Did you cut it off?"

Again, with the look of torment in his eyes, he shook his head.

"No," he said, in a low, subdued voice, "I wore a hat, and a
handkerchief tied round my head."

And he relapsed into silence, as if of tormented memories.

"Are you the only man of your people who has been to the United
States?" she asked him.

"Yes.  I am the only one who has been away from here for a long
time.  The others come back soon, in one week.  They don't stay
away.  The old men don't let them."

"And why did you go?"

"The old men want me to go--because I shall be the Cacique--"

He talked always with the same naïveté, an almost childish candour.
But she felt that this was perhaps just the effect of his Spanish.
Or perhaps speech altogether was unreal to him.  Anyhow, she felt
that all the real things were kept back.

He came and sat with her a good deal--sometimes more than she
wished--as if he wanted to be near her.  She asked him if he was
married.  He said he was--with two children.

"I should like to see your children," she said.

But he answered only with that smile, a sweet, almost ecstatic
smile above which the dark eyes hardly changed from their enigmatic
abstraction.

It was curious, he would sit with her by the hour, without even
making her self-conscious, or sex-conscious.  He seemed to have no
sex, as he sat there so still and gentle and apparently submissive,
with his head bent a little forward, and the river of glistening
black hair streaming maidenly over his shoulders.

Yet when she looked again, she saw his shoulders broad and
powerful, his eyebrows black and level, the short, curved,
obstinate black lashes over his lowered eyes, the small, fur-like
line of moustache above his blackish, heavy lips, and the strong
chin, and she knew that in some other mysterious way he was darkly
and powerfully male.  And he, feeling her watching him, would
glance up at her swiftly with a dark, lurking look in his eyes,
which immediately he veiled with that half-sad smile.

The days and the weeks went by, in a vague kind of contentment.
She was uneasy sometimes, feeling she had lost the power over
herself.  She was not in her own power, she was under the spell of
some other control.  And at times she had moments of terror and
horror.  But then these Indians would come and sit with her,
casting their insidious spell over her by their very silent
presence, their silent, sexless, powerful physical presence.  As
they sat they seemed to take her will away, leaving her will-less
and victim to her own indifference.  And the young man would bring
her sweetened drink, often the same emetic drink, but sometimes
other kinds.  And after drinking, the languor filled her heavy
limbs, her senses seemed to float in the air, listening, hearing.
They had brought her a little female dog, which she called Flora.
And once, in the trance of her senses, she felt she HEARD the
little dog conceive, in her tiny womb, and begin to be complex,
with young.  And another day she could hear the vast sound of the
earth going round, like some immense arrow-string booming.

But as the days grew shorter and colder, when she was cold, she
would get a sudden revival of her will, and a desire to go out, to
go away.  And she insisted to the young man, she wanted to go out.

So one day, they let her climb to the topmost roof of the big house
where she was, and look down the square.  It was the day of the big
dance, but not everybody was dancing.  Women with babies in their
arms stood in their doorways, watching.  Opposite, at the other end
of the square, there was a throng before the other big house, and a
small, brilliant group on the terrace-roof of the first storey, in
front of wide open doors of the upper storey.  Through these wide
open doors she could see fire glinting in darkness and priests in
headdresses of black and yellow and scarlet feathers, wearing robe-
like blankets of black and red and yellow, with long green fringes,
were moving about.  A big drum was beating slowly and regularly, in
the dense, Indian silence.  The crowd below waited--

Then a drum started on a high beat, and there came the deep,
powerful burst of men singing a heavy, savage music, like a wind
roaring in some timeless forest, many mature men singing in one
breath, like the wind; and long lines of dancers walked out from
under the big house.  Men with naked, golden-bronze bodies and
streaming black hair, tufts of red and yellow feathers on their
arms, and kilts of white frieze with a bar of heavy red and black
and green embroidery round their waists, bending slightly forward
and stamping the earth in their absorbed, monotonous stamp of the
dance, a fox-fur, hung by the nose from their belt behind, swaying
with the sumptuous swaying of a beautiful fox-fur, the tip of the
tail writhing above the dancer's heels.  And after each man, a
woman with a strange elaborate headdress of feathers and seashells,
and wearing a short black tunic, moving erect, holding up tufts of
feathers in each hand, swaying her wrists rhythmically and subtly
beating the earth with her bare feet.

So, the long line of the dance unfurling from the big house
opposite.  And from the big house beneath her, strange scent of
incense, strange tense silence, then the answering burst of inhuman
male singing, and the long line of the dance unfurling.

It went on all day, the insistence of the drum, the cavernous,
roaring, storm-like sound of male singing, the incessant swinging
of the fox-skins behind the powerful, gold-bronze, stamping legs of
the men, the autumn sun from a perfect blue heaven pouring on the
rivers of black hair, men's and women's, the valley all still, the
walls of rock beyond, the awful huge bulking of the mountain
against the pure sky, its snow seething with sheer whiteness.

For hours and hours she watched, spell-bound, and as if drugged.
And in all the terrible persistence of the drumming and the
primeval, rushing deep singing, and the endless stamping of the
dance of fox-tailed men, the tread of heavy, bird-erect women in
their black tunics, she seemed at last to feel her own death; her
own obliteration.  As if she were to be obliterated from the field
of life again.  In the strange towering symbols on the heads of the
changeless, absorbed women she seemed to read once more the Mene
Mene Tekel Upharsin.  Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and
individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval
symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual
independence of woman.  The sharpness and the quivering nervous
consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be destroyed
again, womanhood was to be cast once more into the great stream of
impersonal sex and impersonal passion.  Strangely, as if
clairvoyant, she saw the immense sacrifice prepared.  And she went
back to her little house in a trance of agony.

After this, there was always a certain agony when she heard the
drums at evening, and the strange uplifted savage sound of men
singing round the drum, like wild creatures howling to the
invisible gods of the moon and the vanished sun.  Something of the
chuckling, sobbing-cry of the coyote, something of the exultant
bark of the fox, the far-off wild melancholy exultance of the
howling wolf, the torment of the puma's scream, and the insistence
of the ancient fierce human male, with his lapses of tenderness and
his abiding ferocity.

Sometimes she would climb the high roof after nightfall, and listen
to the dim cluster of young men round the drum on the bridge just
beyond the square, singing by the hour.  Sometimes there would be a
fire, and in the fire-glow, men in their white shirts or naked save
for a loin-cloth, would be dancing and stamping like spectres, hour
after hour in the dark cold air, within the fire-glow, forever
dancing and stamping like turkeys, or dropping squatting by the
fire to rest, throwing their blankets round them.

"Why do you all have the same colours?" she asked the young Indian.
"Why do you all have red and yellow and black, over your white
shirts?  And the women have black tunics?"

He looked into her eyes, curiously, and the faint, evasive smile
came on to his face.  Behind the smile lay a soft, strange
malignancy.

"Because our men are the fire and the daytime, and our women are
the spaces between the stars at night," he said.

"Aren't the women even stars?" she said.

"No.  We say they are the spaces between the stars, that keep the
stars apart."

He looked at her oddly, and again the touch of derision came into
his eyes.

"White people," he said, "they know nothing.  They are like
children, always with toys.  We know the sun, and we know the moon.
And we say, when a white woman sacrifice herself to our gods, then
our gods will begin to make the world again, and the white man's
gods will fall to pieces."

"How sacrifice herself?" she asked quickly.

And he, as quickly covered, covered himself with a subtle smile.

"She sacrifice her own gods and come to our gods, I mean that," he
said, soothingly.

But she was not reassured.  An icy pang of fear and certainty was
at her heart.

"The sun he is alive at one end of the sky," he continued, "and the
moon lives at the other end.  And the man all the time have to keep
the sun happy in his side of the sky, and the woman have to keep
the moon quiet at her side of the sky.  All the time she have to
work at this.  And the sun can't ever go into the house of the
moon, and the moon can't ever go into the house of the sun, in the
sky.  So the woman, she asks the moon to come into her cave, inside
her.  And the man, he draws the sun down till he has the power of
the sun.  All the time he do this.  Then when the man gets a woman,
the sun goes into the cave of the moon, and that is how everything
in the world starts."

She listened, watching him closely, as one enemy watches another
who is speaking with double meaning.

"Then," she said, "why aren't you Indians masters of the white
men?"

"Because," he said, "the Indian got weak, and lost his power with
the sun, so the white men stole the sun.  But they can't keep him--
they don't know how.  They got him, but they don't know what to do
with him, like a boy who catch a big grizzly bear, and can't kill
him, and can't run away from him.  The grizzly bear eats the boy
that catch him, when he want to run away from him.  White men don't
know what they are doing with the sun, and white women don't know
what they do with the moon.  The moon she got angry with white
women, like a puma when someone kills her little ones.  The moon,
she bites white women--here inside," and he pressed his side.  "The
moon, she is angry in a white woman's cave.  The Indian, can see it--
And soon," he added, "the Indian women get the moon back and keep
her quiet in their house.  And the Indian men get the sun, and the
power over all the world.  White men don't know what the sun is.
They never know."

He subsided into a curious exultant silence.

"But," she faltered, "why do you hate us so?  Why do you hate me?"

He looked up suddenly with a light on his face, and a startling
flame of a smile.

"No, we don't hate," he said softly, looking with a curious glitter
into her face.

"You do," she said, forlorn and hopeless.

And after a moment's silence, he rose and went away.


III


Winter had now come, in the high valley, with snow that melted in
the day's sun, and nights that were bitter cold.  She lived on, in
a kind of daze, feeling her power ebbing more and more away from
her, as if her will were leaving her.  She felt always in the same
relaxed, confused, victimised state, unless the sweetened herb
drink would numb her mind altogether, and release her senses into a
sort of heightened, mystic acuteness and a feeling as if she were
diffusing out deliciously into the harmony of things.  This at
length became the only state of consciousness she really
recognised: this exquisite sense of bleeding out into the higher
beauty and harmony of things.  Then she could actually hear the
great stars in heaven, which she saw through her door, speaking
from their motion and brightness, saying things perfectly to the
cosmos, as they trod in perfect ripples, like bells on the floor of
heaven, passing one another and grouping in the timeless dance,
with the spaces of dark between.  And she could hear the snow on a
cold, cloudy day twittering and faintly whistling in the sky, like
birds that flock and fly away in autumn, suddenly calling farewell
to the invisible moon, and slipping out of the plains of the air,
releasing peaceful warmth.  She herself would call to the arrested
snow to fall from the upper air.  She would call to the unseen moon
to cease to be angry, to make peace again with the unseen sun like
a woman who ceases to be angry in her house.  And she would smell
the sweetness of the moon relaxing to the sun in the wintry heaven,
when the snow fell in a faint, cold-perfumed relaxation, as the
peace of the sun mingled again in a sort of unison with the peace
of the moon.

She was aware too of the sort of shadow that was on the Indians of
the valley, a deep, stoical disconsolation, almost religious in its
depth.

"We have lost our power over the sun, and we are trying to get him
back.  But he is wild with us, and shy like a horse that has got
away.  We have to go through a lot."  So the young Indian said to
her, looking into her eyes with a strained meaning.  And she, as if
bewitched, replied:

"I hope you will get him back."

The smile of triumph flew over his face.

"Do you hope it?" he said.

"I do," she answered fatally.

"Then all right," he said.  "We shall get him."

And he went away in exultance.

She felt she was drifting on some consummation, which she had no
will to avoid, yet which seemed heavy and finally terrible to her.

It must have been almost December, for the days were short, when
she was taken again before the aged man, and stripped of her
clothing, and touched with the old finger-tips.

The aged cacique looked her in the eyes, with his eyes of lonely,
far-off, black intentness, and murmured something to her.

"He wants you to make the sign of peace," the young man translated,
showing her the gesture.  "Peace and farewell to him."

She was fascinated by the black, glass-like, intent eyes of the old
cacique, that watched her without blinking, like a basilisk's,
overpowering her.  In their depths also she saw a certain fatherly
compassion, and pleading.  She put her hand before her face, in the
required manner, making the sign of peace and farewell.  He made
the sign of peace back again to her, then sank among his furs.  She
thought he was going to die, and that he knew it.

There followed a day of ceremonial, when she was brought out before
all the people, in a blue blanket with white fringe, and holding
blue feathers in her hands.  Before an altar of one house, she was
perfumed with incense and sprinkled with ash.  Before the altar of
the opposite house she was fumigated again with incense by the
gorgeous, terrifying priests in yellow and scarlet and black, their
faces painted with scarlet paint.  And then they threw water on
her.  Meanwhile she was faintly aware of the fire on the altar, the
heavy, heavy sound of a drum, the heavy sound of men beginning
powerfully, deeply, savagely to sing, the swaying of the crowd of
faces in the plaza below, and the formation for a sacred dance.

But at this time her commonplace consciousness was numb, she was
aware of her immediate surroundings as shadows, almost immaterial.
With refined and heightened senses she could hear the sound of the
earth winging on its journey, like a shot arrow, the ripple-
rustling of the air, and the boom of the great arrow-string.  And
it seemed to her there were two great influences in the upper air,
one golden towards the sun, and one invisible silver; the first
travelling like rain ascending to the gold presence sunwards, the
second like rain silverily descending the ladders of space towards
the hovering, lurking clouds over the snowy mountain-top.  Then
between them, another presence, waiting to shake himself free of
moisture, of heavy white snow that had mysteriously collected about
him.  And in summer, like a scorched eagle, he would wait to shake
himself clear of the weight of heavy sunbeams.  And he was coloured
like fire.  And he was always shaking himself clear, of snow or of
heavy heat, like an eagle rustling.

Then there was a still stranger presence, standing watching from
the blue distance, always watching.  Sometimes running in upon the
wind, or shimmering in the heat-waves.  The blue wind itself,
rushing as it were out of the holes in the earth into the sky,
rushing out of the sky down upon the earth.  The blue wind, the go-
between, the invisible ghost that belonged to two worlds, that
played upon the ascending and the descending chords of the rains.

More and more her ordinary personal consciousness had left her, she
had gone into that other state of passional cosmic consciousness,
like one who is drugged.  The Indians, with their heavily religious
natures, had made her succumb to their vision.

Only one personal question she asked the young Indian:

"Why am I the only one that wears blue?"

"It is the colour of the wind.  It is the colour of what goes away
and is never coming back, but which is always here, waiting like
death among us.  It is the colour of the dead.  And it is the
colour that stands away off, looking at us from the distance, that
cannot come near to us.  When we go near, it goes farther.  It
can't be near.  We are all brown and yellow and black hair, and
white teeth and red blood.  We are the ones that are here.  You
with blue eyes, you are the messengers from the far-away, you
cannot stay, and now it is time for you to go back."

"Where to?" she asked.

"To the way-off things like the sun and the blue mother of rain,
and tell them that we are the people on the world again, and we can
bring the sun to the moon again, like a red horse to a blue mare;
we are the people.  The white women have driven back the moon in
the sky, won't let her come to the sun.  So the sun is angry.  And
the Indian must give the moon to the sun."

"How?" she said.

"The white woman got to die and go like a wind to the sun, tell him
the Indians will open the gate to him.  And the Indian women will
open the gate to the moon.  The white women don't let the moon come
down out of the blue coral.  The moon used to come down among the
Indian women, like a white goat among the flowers.  And the sun
want to come down to the Indian men, like an eagle to the pine-
trees.  The sun, he is shut out behind the white man, and the moon
she is shut out behind the white woman, and they can't get away.
They are angry, everything in the world gets angrier.  The Indian
says, he will give the white woman to the sun, so the sun will leap
over the white man and come to the Indian again.  And the moon will
be surprised, she will see the gate open, and she not know which
way to go.  But the Indian woman will call to the moon, Come!
Come!  Come back into my grasslands.  The wicked white woman can't
harm you any more.  Then the sun will look over the heads of the
white men, and see the moon in the pastures of our women, with the
Red Men standing around like pine trees.  Then he will leap over
the heads of the white men, and come running past to the Indians
through the spruce trees.  And we, who are red and black and
yellow, we who stay, we shall have the sun on our right hand and
the moon on our left.  So we can bring the rain down out of the
blue meadows, and up out of the black; and we can call the wind
that tells the corn to grow, when we ask him, and we shall make the
clouds to break, and the sheep to have twin lambs.  And we shall be
full of power, like a spring day.  But the white people will be a
hard winter, without snow--"

"But," said the white woman, "I don't shut out the moon--how can
I?"

"Yes," he said, "you shut the gate, and then laugh, think you have
it all your own way."

She could never quite understand the way he looked at her.  He was
always so curiously gentle, and his smile was so soft.  Yet there
was such glitter in his eyes, and an unrelenting sort of hate came
out of his words, a strange, profound, impersonal hate.  Personally
he liked her, she was sure.  He was gentle with her, attracted by
her in some strange, soft, passionless way.  But impersonally he
hated her with a mystic hatred.  He would smile at her, winningly.
Yet if, the next moment, she glanced round at him unawares, she
would catch that gleam of pure after-hate in his eyes.

"Have I got to die and be given to the sun?" she asked.

"Sometime," he said, laughing evasively.  "Sometime we all die."

They were gentle with her, and very considerate with her.  Strange
men, the old priests and the young cacique alike, they watched over
her and cared for her like women.  In their soft, insidious
understanding, there was something womanly.  Yet their eyes, with
that strange glitter, and their dark, shut mouths that would open
to the broad jaw, the small, strong, white teeth, had something
very primitively male and cruel.

One wintry day, when snow was falling, they took her to a great
dark chamber in the big house.  The fire was burning in a corner on
a high raised dais under a sort of hood or canopy of adobe-work.
She saw in the fire-glow, the glowing bodies of the almost naked
priests, and strange symbols on the roof and walls of the chamber.
There was no door or window in the chamber, they had descended by a
ladder from the roof.  And the fire of pinewood danced continually,
showing walls painted with strange devices, which she could not
understand, and a ceiling of poles making a curious pattern of
black and red and yellow, and alcoves or niches in which were
curious objects she could not discern.

The older priests were going through some ceremony near the fire,
in silence, intense Indian silence.  She was seated on a low
projection of the wall, opposite the fire, two men seated beside
her.  Presently they gave her a drink from a cup, which she took
gladly, because of the semi-trance it would induce.

In the darkness and in the silence she was accurately aware of
everything that happened to her: how they took off her clothes,
and, standing her before a great, weird device on the wall,
coloured blue and white and black, washed her all over with water
and the amole infusion; washed even her hair, softly, carefully,
and dried it on white cloths, till it was soft and glistening.
Then they laid her on a couch under another great indecipherable
image of red and black and yellow, and now rubbed all her body with
sweet-scented oil, and massaged all her limbs, and her back, and
her sides, with a long, strange, hypnotic massage.  Their dark
hands were incredibly powerful, yet soft with a watery softness she
could not understand.  And the dark faces, leaning near her white
body, she saw were darkened with red pigment, with lines of yellow
round the cheeks.  And the dark eyes glittered absorbed, as the
hands worked upon the soft white body of the woman.

They were so impersonal, absorbed in something that was beyond her.
They never saw her as a personal woman: she could tell that.  She
was some mystic object to them, some vehicle of passions too remote
for her to grasp.  Herself in a state of trance, she watched their
faces bending over her, dark, strangely glistening with the
transparent red paint, and lined with bars of yellow.  And in this
weird, luminous-dark mask of living face, the eyes were fixed with
an unchanging steadfast gleam, and the purplish-pigmented lips were
closed in a full, sinister, sad grimness.  The immense fundamental
sadness, the grimness of ultimate decision, the fixity of revenge,
and the nascent exultance of those that are going to triumph--these
things she could read in their faces, as she lay and was rubbed
into a misty glow, by their uncanny dark hands.  Her limbs, her
flesh, her very bones at last seemed to be diffusing into a roseate
sort of mist, in which her consciousness hovered like some sun-
gleam in a flushed cloud.

She knew the gleam would fade, the cloud would go grey.  But at
present she did not believe it.  She knew she was a victim; that
all this elaborate work upon her was the work of victimising her.
But she did not mind.  She wanted it.

Later, they put a short blue tunic on her and took her to the upper
terrace, and presented her to the people.  She saw the plaza below
her full of dark faces and of glittering eyes.  There was no pity:
only the curious hard exultance.  The people gave a subdued cry
when they saw her, and she shuddered.  But she hardly cared.

Next day was the last.  She slept in a chamber of the big house.
At dawn they put on her a big blue blanket with a fringe, and led
her out into the plaza, among the throng of silent, dark-blanketed
people.  There was pure white snow on the ground, and the dark
people in their dark-brown blankets looked like inhabitants of
another world.

A large drum was slowly pounding, and an old priest was declaring
from a housetop.  But it was not till noon that a litter came
forth, and the people gave that low, animal cry which was so
moving.  In the sack-like litter sat the old, old cacique, his
white hair braided with black braid and large turquoise stones.
His face was like a piece of obsidian.  He lifted his hand in
token, and the litter stopped in front of her.  Fixing her with his
old eyes, he spoke to her for a few moments, in his hollow voice.
No one translated.

Another litter came, and she was placed in it.  Four priests moved
ahead, in their scarlet and yellow and black, with plumed
headdresses.  Then came the litter of the old cacique.  Then the
light drums began, and two groups of singers burst simultaneously
into song, male and wild.  And the golden-red, almost naked men,
adorned with ceremonial feathers and kilts, the rivers of black
hair down their backs, formed into two files and began to tread the
dance.  So they threaded out of the snowy plaza, in two long,
sumptuous lines of dark red-gold and black and fur, swaying with a
faint tinkle of bits of shell and flint, winding over the snow
between the two bee-clusters of men who sang around the drum.

Slowly they moved out, and her litter, with its attendance of
feathered, lurid, dancing priests, moved after.  Everybody danced
the tread of the dance-step, even, subtly, the litter-bearers.  And
out of the plaza they went, past smoking ovens, on the trail to the
great cotton-wood trees, that stood like grey-silver lace against
the blue sky, bare and exquisite above the snow.  The river,
diminished, rushed among fangs of ice.  The chequer-squares of
gardens within fences were all snowy, and the white houses now
looked yellowish.

The whole valley glittered intolerably with pure snow, away to the
walls of the standing rock.  And across the flat cradle of snow-bed
wound the long thread of the dance, shaking slowly and sumptuously
in its orange and black motion.  The high drums thudded quickly,
and on the crystalline frozen air the swell and roar of the chant
of savages was like an obsession.

She sat looking out of her litter with big, transfixed blue eyes,
under which were the wan markings of her drugged weariness.  She
knew she was going to die, among the glisten of this snow, at the
hands of this savage, sumptuous people.  And as she stared at the
blaze of blue sky above the slashed and ponderous mountain, she
thought:  "I am dead already.  What difference does it make, the
transition from the dead I am to the dead I shall be, very soon!"
Yet her soul sickened and felt wan.

The strange procession trailed on, in perpetual dance, slowly
across the plain of snow, and then entered the slopes between the
pine-trees.  She saw the copper-dark men dancing the dance-tread,
onwards, between the copper-pale tree trunks.  And at last she,
too, in her swaying litter, entered the pine-trees.

They were travelling on and on, upwards, across the snow under the
trees, past the superb shafts of pale, flaked copper, the rustle
and shake and tread of the threading dance, penetrating into the
forest, into the mountain.  They were following a stream-bed: but
the stream was dry, like summer, dried up by the frozenness of the
head-waters.  There were dark, red-bronze willow bushes with
wattles like wild hair, and pallid aspen trees looking like cold
flesh against the snow.  Then jutting dark rocks.

At last she could tell that the dancers were moving forward no
more.  Nearer and nearer she came upon the drums, as to a lair of
mysterious animals.  Then through the bushes she emerged into a
strange amphitheatre.  Facing was a great wall of hollow rock, down
the front of which hung a great, dripping, fang-like spoke of ice.
The ice came pouring over the rock from the precipice above, and
then stood arrested, dripping out of high heaven, almost down to
the hollow stones where the stream-pool should be below.  But the
pool was dry.

On either side the dry pool, the lines of dancers had formed, and
the dance was continuing without intermission, against a background
of bushes.

But what she felt was that fanged inverted pinnacle of ice, hanging
from the lip of the dark precipice above.  And behind the great
rope of ice, she saw the leopard-like figures of priests climbing
the hollow cliff face, to the cave that, like a dark socket, bored
a cavity, an orifice, half way up the crag.

Before she could realise, her litter-bearers were staggering in the
footholds, climbing the rock.  She, too, was behind the ice.  There
it hung, like a curtain that is not spread, but hangs like a great
fang.  And near above her was the orifice of the cave sinking dark
into the rock.  She watched it as she swayed upwards.

On the platform of the cave stood the priests, waiting in all their
gorgeousness of feathers and fringed robes, watching her ascent.
Two of them stooped to help her litter-bearer.  And at length she
was on the platform of the cave, far in behind the shaft of ice,
above the hollow amphitheatre among the bushes below, where men
were dancing, and the whole populace of the village was clustered
in silence.

The sun was sloping down the afternoon sky, on the left.  She knew
that this was the shortest day of the year, and the last day of her
life.  They stood her facing the iridescent column of ice, which
fell down marvellously arrested, away in front of her.

Some signal was given, and the dance below stopped.  There was now
absolute silence.  She was given a little to drink, then two
priests took off her mantle and her tunic, and in her strange
pallor she stood there, between the lurid robes of the priests,
beyond the pillar of ice, beyond and above the dark-faced people.
The throng below gave the low, wild cry.  Then the priests turned
her round, so she stood with her back to the open world, her long
blond hair to the people below.  And they cried again.

She was facing the cave, inwards.  A fire was burning and
flickering in the depths.  Four priests had taken off their robes,
and were almost as naked as she was.  They were powerful men in the
prime of life, and they kept their dark, painted faces lowered.

From the fire came the old, old priest, with an incense-pan.  He
was naked and in a state of barbaric ecstasy.  He fumigated his
victim, reciting at the same time in a hollow voice.  Behind him
came another robeless priest, with two flint knives.

When she was fumigated, they laid her on a large flat stone, the
four powerful men holding her by the outstretched arms and legs.
Behind stood the aged man, like a skeleton covered with dark glass,
holding a knife and transfixedly watching the sun; and behind him
again was another naked priest, with a knife.

She felt little sensation, though she knew all that was happening.
Turning to the sky, she looked at the yellow sun.  It was sinking.
The shaft of ice was like a shadow between her and it.  And she
realised that the yellow rays were filling half the cave, though
they had not reached the altar where the fire was, at the far end
of the funnel-shaped cavity.

Yes, the rays were creeping round slowly.  As they grew ruddier,
they penetrated farther.  When the red sun was about to sink, he
would shine full through the shaft of ice deep into the hollow of
the cave, to the innermost.

She understood now that this was what the men were waiting for.
Even those that held her down were bent and twisted round, their
black eyes watching the sun with a glittering eagerness, and awe,
and craving.  The black eyes of the aged cacique were fixed like
black mirrors on the sun, as if sightless, yet containing some
terrible answer to the reddening winter planet.  And all the eyes
of the priests were fixed and glittering on the sinking orb, in the
reddening, icy silence of the winter afternoon.

They were anxious, terribly anxious, and fierce.  Their ferocity
wanted something, and they were waiting the moment.  And their
ferocity was ready to leap out into a mystic exultance, of triumph.
But still they were anxious.

Only the eyes of that oldest man were not anxious.  Black, and
fixed, and as if sightless, they watched the sun, seeing beyond the
sun.  And in their black, empty concentration there was power,
power intensely abstract and remote, but deep, deep to the heart of
the earth, and the heart of the sun.  In absolute motionlessness he
watched till the red sun should send his ray through the column of
ice.  Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish
the sacrifice and achieve the power.

The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race.



TWO BLUE BIRDS


There was a woman who loved her husband, but she could not live
with him.  The husband, on his side, was sincerely attached to his
wife, yet he could not live with her.  They were both under forty,
both handsome and both attractive.  They had the most sincere
regard for one another, and felt, in some odd way, eternally
married to one another.  They knew one another more intimately than
they knew anybody else, they felt more known to one another than to
any other person.

Yet they could not live together.  Usually, they kept a thousand
miles apart, geographically.  But when he sat in the greyness of
England, at the back of his mind, with a certain grim fidelity, he
was aware of his wife, her strange yearning to be loyal and
faithful, having her gallant affairs away in the sun, in the south.
And she, as she drank her cocktail on the terrace over the sea, and
turned her grey, sardonic eyes on the heavy dark face of her
admirer, whom she really liked quite a lot, she was actually
preoccupied with the clear-cut features of her handsome young
husband, thinking of how he would be asking his secretary to do
something for him, asking in that good-natured, confident voice of
a man who knows that his request will be only too gladly fulfilled.

The secretary, of course, adored him.  She was VERY competent,
quite young, and quite good-looking.  She adored him.  But then all
his servants always did, particularly his women-servants.  His men-
servants were likely to swindle him.

When a man has an adoring secretary, and you are the man's wife,
what are you to do?  Not that there was anything 'wrong'--if you
know what I mean!--between them.  Nothing you could call adultery,
to come down to brass tacks.  No, no!  They were just the young
master and his secretary.  He dictated to her, she slaved for him
and adored him, and the whole thing went on wheels.

He didn't 'adore' her.  A man doesn't need to adore his secretary.
But he depended on her.  "I simply rely on Miss Wrexall."  Whereas
he could never rely on his wife.  The one thing he knew finally
about HER was that she didn't intend to be relied on.

So they remained friends, in the awful unspoken intimacy of the
once-married.  Usually each year they went away together for a
holiday, and, if they had not been man and wife, they would have
found a great deal of fun and stimulation in one another.  The fact
that they were married, had been married for the last dozen years,
and couldn't live together for the last three or four, spoilt them
for one another.  Each had a private feeling of bitterness about
the other.

However, they were awfully kind.  He was the soul of generosity,
and held her in real tender esteem, no matter how many gallant
affairs she had.  Her gallant affairs were part of her modern
necessity.  "After all, I've got to LIVE.  I can't turn into a
pillar of salt in five minutes just because you and I can't live
together!  It takes years for a woman like me to turn into a pillar
of salt.  At least I hope so!"

"Quite!" he replied.  "Quite!  By all means put them in pickle,
make pickled cucumbers of them, before you crystallise out.  That's
my advice."

He was like that: so awfully clever and enigmatic.  She could more
or less fathom the idea of the pickled cucumbers, but the
'crystallising out'--what did that signify?

And did he mean to suggest that he himself had been well pickled
and that further immersion was for him unnecessary, would spoil his
flavour?  Was that what he meant?  And herself, was she the brine
and the vale of tears?

You never knew how catty a man was being, when he was really clever
and enigmatic, withal a bit whimsical.  He was adorably whimsical,
with a twist of his flexible, vain mouth, that had a long upper
lip, so fraught with vanity!  But then a handsome, clear-cut,
histrionic young man like that, how could he help being vain?  The
women made him so.

Ah, the women!  How nice men would be if there were no other women!

And how nice the women would be if there were no other men!  That's
the best of a secretary.  She may have a husband, but a husband is
the mere shred of a man, compared to a boss, a chief, a man who
dictates to you and whose words you faithfully write down and then
transcribe.  Imagine a wife writing down anything her husband said
to her!  But a secretary!  Every and and but of his she preserves
for ever.  What are candied violets in comparison!

Now it is all very well having gallant affairs under the southern
sun, when you know there is a husband whom you adore dictating to a
secretary whom you are too scornful to hate yet whom you rather
despise, though you allow she has her good points, away north in
the place you ought to regard as home.  A gallant affair isn't much
good when you've got a bit of grit in your eye.  Or something at
the back of your mind.

What's to be done?  The husband, of course, did not send his wife
away.

"You've got your secretary and your work," she said.  "There's no
room for me."

"There's a bedroom and a sitting-room exclusively for you," he
replied.  "And a garden and half a motor-car.  But please yourself
entirely.  Do what gives you most pleasure."

"In that case," she said, "I'll just go south for the winter."

"Yes, do!" he said.  "You always enjoy it."

"I always do," she replied.

They parted with a certain relentlessness that had a touch of
wistful sentiment behind it.  Off she went to her gallant affairs,
that were like the curate's egg, palatable in parts.  And he
settled down to work.  He said he hated working, but he never did
anything else.  Ten or eleven hours a day.  That's what it is to be
your own master!

So the winter wore away, and it was spring, when the swallows
homeward fly, or northward, in this case.  This winter, one of a
series similar, had been rather hard to get through.  The bit of
grit in the gallant lady's eye had worked deeper in the more she
blinked.  Dark faces might be dark, and icy cocktails might lend a
glow; she blinked her hardest to blink that bit of grit away,
without success.  Under the spicy balls of the mimosa she thought
of that husband of hers in his library, and of that neat, competent
but COMMON little secretary of his, for ever taking down what he
said!

"How a man can STAND it!  How SHE can stand it, common little thing
as she is, I don't know!" the wife cried to herself.

She meant this dictating business, this ten hours a day
intercourse, à deux, with nothing but a pencil between them, and a
flow of words.

What was to be done?  Matters, instead of improving, had grown
worse.  The little secretary had brought her mother and sister into
the establishment.  The mother was a sort of cook-housekeeper, the
sister was a sort of upper maid--she did the fine laundry, and
looked after 'his' clothes, and valeted him beautifully.  It was
really an excellent arrangement.  The old mother was a splendid
plain cook, the sister was all that could be desired as a valet de
chambre, a fine laundress, an upper parlour-maid, and a table-
waiter.  And all economical to a degree.  They knew his affairs by
heart.  His secretary flew to town when a creditor became
dangerous, and she ALWAYS smoothed over the financial crisis.

'He', of course, had debts, and he was working to pay them off.
And if he had been a fairy prince who could call the ants to help
him, he would not have been more wonderful than in securing this
secretary and her family.  They took hardly any wages.  And they
seemed to perform the miracle of loaves and fishes daily.

'She', of course, was the wife who loved her husband, but helped
him into debt, and she still was an expensive item.  Yet when she
appeared at her 'home', the secretarial family received her with
most elaborate attentions and deference.  The knight returning from
the Crusades didn't create a greater stir.  She felt like Queen
Elizabeth at Kenilworth, a sovereign paying a visit to her faithful
subjects.  But perhaps there lurked always this hair in her soup!
Won't they be glad to be rid of me again!

But they protested No!  No!  They had been waiting and hoping and
praying she would come.  They had been pining for her to be there,
in charge: the mistress, 'his' wife.  Ah, 'his' wife!

'His' wife!  His halo was like a bucket over her head.

The cook-mother was 'of the people', so it was the upper-maid
daughter who came for orders.

"What will you order for to-morrow's lunch and dinner, Mrs. Gee?"

"Well, what do you usually have?"

"Oh, we want YOU to say."

"No, what do you USUALLY have?"

"We don't have anything fixed.  Mother goes out and chooses the
best she can find, that is nice and fresh.  But she thought you
would tell her now what to get."

"Oh, I don't know!  I'm not very good at that sort of thing.  Ask
her to go on just the same; I'm quite sure she knows best."

"Perhaps you'd like to suggest a sweet?"

"No, I don't care for sweets--and you know Mr. Gee doesn't.  So
don't make one for me."

Could anything be more impossible!  They had the house spotless and
running like a dream; how could an incompetent and extravagant wife
dare to interfere, when she saw their amazing and almost inspired
economy!  But they ran the place on simply nothing!

Simply marvellous people!  And the way they strewed palm branches
under her feet!

But that only made her feel ridiculous.

"Don't you think the family manage very well?" he asked her
tentatively.

"Awfully well!  Almost romantically well!" she replied.  "But I
suppose you're perfectly happy?"

"I'm perfectly comfortable," he replied.

"I can see you are," she replied.  "Amazingly so!  I never knew
such comfort!  Are you sure it isn't bad for you?"

She eyed him stealthily.  He looked very well, and extremely
handsome, in his histrionic way.  He was shockingly well-dressed
and valeted.  And he had that air of easy aplomb and good humour
which is so becoming to a man, and which he only acquires when he
is cock of his own little walk, made much of by his own hens.

"No!" he said, taking his pipe from his mouth and smiling
whimsically round at her.  "Do I look as if it were bad for me?"

"No, you don't," she replied promptly: thinking, naturally, as a
woman is supposed to think nowadays, of his health and comfort, the
foundation, apparently, of all happiness.

Then, of course, away she went on the back-wash.

"Perhaps for your work, though, it's not so good as it is for YOU,"
she said in a rather small voice.  She knew he couldn't bear it if
she mocked at his work for one moment.  And he knew that rather
small voice of hers.

"In what way?" he said, bristles rising.

"Oh, I don't know," she answered indifferently.  "Perhaps it's not
good for a man's work if he is too comfortable."

"I don't know about THAT!" he said, taking a dramatic turn round
the library and drawing at his pipe.  "Considering I work,
actually, by the clock, for twelve hours a day, and for ten hours
when it's a short day, I don't think you can say I am deteriorating
from easy comfort."

"No, I suppose not," she admitted.

Yet she did think it, nevertheless.  His comfortableness didn't
consist so much in good food and a soft bed, as in having nobody,
absolutely nobody and nothing to contradict him.  "I do like to
think he's got nothing to aggravate him," the secretary had said to
the wife.

"Nothing to aggravate him!"  What a position for a man!  Fostered
by women who would let nothing 'aggravate' him.  If anything would
aggravate his wounded vanity, this would!

So thought the wife.  But what was to be done about it?  In the
silence of midnight she heard his voice in the distance, dictating
away, like the voice of God to Samuel, alone and monotonous, and
she imagined the little figure of the secretary busily scribbling
shorthand.  Then in the sunny hours of morning, while he was still
in bed--he never rose till noon--from another distance came that
sharp insect noise of the typewriter, like some immense grasshopper
chirping and rattling.  It was the secretary, poor thing, typing
out his notes.

That girl--she was only twenty-eight--really slaved herself to skin
and bone.  She was small and neat, but she was actually worn out.
She did far more work than he did, for she had not only to take
down all those words he uttered, she had to type them out, make
three copies, while he was still resting.

"What on earth she gets out of it," thought the wife, "I don't
know.  She's simply worn to the bone, for a very poor salary, and
he's never kissed her, and never will, if I know anything about
him."



Whether his never kissing her--the secretary, that is--made it
worse or better, the wife did not decide.  He never kissed anybody.
Whether she herself--the wife, that is--wanted to be kissed by him,
even that she was not clear about.  She rather thought she didn't.

What on earth did she want then?  She was his wife.  What on earth
did she want of him?

She certainly didn't want to take him down in shorthand, and type
out again all those words.  And she didn't really want him to kiss
her; she knew him too well.  Yes, she knew him too well.  If you
know a man too well, you don't want him to kiss you.

What then?  What did she want?  Why had she such an extraordinary
hang-over about him?  Just because she was his wife?  Why did she
rather 'enjoy' other men--and she was relentless about enjoyment--
without ever taking them seriously?  And why must she take him so
damn seriously, when she never really 'enjoyed' him?

Of course she HAD had good times with him, in the past, before--ah!
before a thousand things, all amounting really to nothing.  But she
enjoyed him no more.  She never even enjoyed being with him.  There
was a silent, ceaseless tension between them, that never broke,
even when they were a thousand miles apart.

Awful!  That's what you call being married!  What's to be done
about it?  Ridiculous, to know it all and not do anything about it!

She came back once more, and there she was, in her own house, a
sort of super-guest, even to him.  And the secretarial family
devoting their lives to him.

Devoting their lives to him!  But actually!  Three women pouring
out their lives for him day and night!  And what did they get in
return?  Not one kiss!  Very little money, because they knew all
about his debts, and had made it their life business to get them
paid off!  No expectations!  Twelve hours' work a day!  Comparative
isolation, for he saw nobody!

And beyond that?  Nothing!  Perhaps a sense of uplift and
importance because they saw his name and photograph in the
newspaper sometimes.  But would anybody believe that it was good
enough?

Yet they adored it!  They seemed to get a deep satisfaction out of
it, like people with a mission.  Extraordinary!

Well, if they did, let them.  They were, of course, rather common,
'of the people'; there might be a sort of glamour in it for them.

But it was bad for him.  No doubt about it.  His work was getting
diffuse and poor in quality--and what wonder!  His whole tone was
going down--becoming commoner.  Of course it was bad for him.

Being his wife, she felt she ought to do something to save him.
But how could she?  That perfectly devoted, marvellous secretarial
family, how could she make an attack on them?  Yet she'd love to
sweep them into oblivion.  Of course they were bad for him: ruining
his work, ruining his reputation as a writer, ruining his life.
Ruining him with their slavish service.

Of course she ought to make an onslaught on them!  But how COULD
she?  Such devotion!  And what had she herself to offer in their
place?  Certainly not slavish devotion to him, nor to his flow of
words!  Certainly not!

She imagined him stripped once more naked of secretary and
secretarial family, and she shuddered.  It was like throwing the
naked baby in the dust-bin.  Couldn't do that!

Yet something must be done.  She felt it.  She was almost tempted
to get into debt for another thousand pounds, and send in the bill,
or have it sent in to him, as usual.

But no!  Something more drastic!

Something more drastic, or perhaps more gentle.  She wavered
between the two.  And wavering, she first did nothing, came to no
decision, dragged vacantly on from day to day, waiting for
sufficient energy to take her departure once more.

It was spring!  What a fool she had been to come up in spring!  And
she was forty!  What an idiot of a woman to go and be forty!

She went down the garden in the warm afternoon, when birds were
whistling loudly from the cover, the sky being low and warm, and
she had nothing to do.  The garden was full of flowers: he loved
them for their theatrical display.  Lilac and snowball bushes, and
laburnum and red may, tulips and anemones and coloured daisies.
Lots of flowers!  Borders of forget-me-nots!  Bachelor's buttons!
What absurd names flowers had!  She would have called them blue
dots and yellow blobs and white frills.  Not so much sentiment
after all!

There is a certain nonsense, something showy and stagey about
spring, with its pushing leaves and chorus-girl flowers, unless you
have something corresponding inside you.  Which she hadn't.

Oh, heaven!  Beyond the hedge she heard a voice, a steady rather
theatrical voice.  Oh, heaven!  He was dictating to his secretary
in the garden.  Good God, was there nowhere to get away from it!

She looked around: there was indeed plenty of escape.  But what was
the good of escaping?  He would go on and on.  She went quietly
towards the hedge, and listened.

He was dictating a magazine article about the modern novel.  "What
the modern novel lacks is architecture."  Good God!  Architecture!
He might just as well say:  What the modern novel lacks is
whalebone, or a teaspoon, or a tooth stopped.

Yet the secretary took it down, took it down, took it down!  No,
this could not go on!  It was more than flesh and blood could bear.

She went quietly along the hedge, somewhat wolf-like in her prowl,
a broad, strong woman in an expensive mustard-coloured silk jersey
and cream-coloured pleated skirt.  Her legs were long and shapely,
and her shoes were expensive.

With a curious wolf-like stealth she turned the hedge and looked
across at the small, shaded lawn where the daisies grew
impertinently.  'He' was reclining in a coloured hammock under the
pink-flowering horse-chestnut tree, dressed in white serge with a
fine yellow-coloured linen shirt.  His elegant hand dropped over
the side of the hammock and beat a sort of vague rhythm to his
words.  At a little wicker table the little secretary, in a green
knitted frock, bent her dark head over her note-book, and
diligently made those awful shorthand marks.  He was not difficult
to take down, as he dictated slowly, and kept a sort of rhythm,
beating time with his dangling hand.

"In every novel there must be one outstanding character with
which we always sympathise--with WHOM we always sympathise--even
though we recognise it--even when we are most aware of the human
frailties--"

Every man his own hero, thought the wife grimly, forgetting that
every woman is intensely her own heroine.

But what did startle her was a blue bird dashing about near the
feet of the absorbed, shorthand-scribbling little secretary.  At
least it was a blue-tit, blue with grey and some yellow.  But to
the wife it seemed blue, that juicy spring day, in the translucent
afternoon.  The blue bird, fluttering round the pretty but rather
COMMON little feet of the little secretary.

The blue bird!  The blue bird of happiness!  Well, I'm blest,--
thought the wife.  Well, I'm blest!

And as she was being blest, appeared another blue bird--that is,
another blue-tit--and began to wrestle with the first blue-tit.  A
couple of blue birds of happiness, having a fight over it!  Well,
I'm blest!

She was more or less out of sight of the human preoccupied pair.
But 'he' was disturbed by the fighting blue birds, whose little
feathers began to float loose.

"Get out!" he said to them mildly, waving a dark-yellow
handkerchief at them.  "Fight your little fight, and settle your
private affairs elsewhere, my dear little gentlemen."

The little secretary looked up quickly, for she had already begun
to write it down.  He smiled at her his twisted whimsical smile.

"No, don't take that down," he said affectionately.  "Did you see
those two tits laying into one another?"

"No!" said the little secretary, gazing brightly round, her eyes
half-blinded with work.

But she saw the queer, powerful, elegant, wolf-like figure of the
wife, behind her, and terror came into her eyes.

"I did!" said the wife, stepping forward with those curious,
shapely, she-wolf legs of hers, under the very short skirt.

"Aren't they extraordinarily vicious little beasts?" said he.

"Extraordinarily!" she re-echoed, stooping and picking up a little
breast-feather.  "Extraordinarily!  See how the feathers fly!"

And she got the feather on the tip of her finger, and looked at it.
Then she looked at the secretary, then she looked at him.  She had
a queer, were-wolf expression between her brows.

"I think," he began, "these are the loveliest afternoons, when
there's no direct sun, but all the sounds and the colours and the
scents are sort of dissolved, don't you know, in the air, and the
whole thing is steeped, steeped in spring.  It's like being on the
inside; you know how I mean, like being inside the egg and just
ready to chip the shell."

"Quite like that!" she assented, without conviction.

There was a little pause.  The secretary said nothing.  They were
waiting for the wife to depart again.

"I suppose," said the latter, "you're awfully busy, as usual?"

"Just about the same," he said, pursing his mouth deprecatingly.

Again the blank pause, in which he waited for her to go away again.

"I know I'm interrupting you," she said.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "I was just watching those two blue-
tits."

"Pair of little demons!" said the wife, blowing away the yellow
feather from her finger-tip.

"Absolutely!" he said.

"Well, I'd better go, and let you get on with your work," she said.

"No hurry!" he said, with benevolent nonchalance.  "As a matter of
fact, I don't think it's a great success, working out of doors."

"What made you try it?" said the wife.  "You know you never could
do it."

"Miss Wrexall suggested it might make a change.  But I don't think
it altogether helps, do you, Miss Wrexall?"

"I'm sorry," said the little secretary.

"Why should YOU be sorry?" said the wife, looking down at her as a
wolf might look down half-benignly at a little black-and-tan
mongrel.  "You only suggested it for his good, I'm sure!"

"I thought the air might be good for him," the secretary admitted.

"Why do people like you never think about yourselves?" the wife
asked.

The secretary looked her in the eye.

"I suppose we do, in a different way," she said.

"A VERY different way!" said the wife ironically.  "Why don't you
make HIM think about YOU?" she added, slowly, with a sort of drawl.
"On a soft spring afternoon like this, you ought to have him
dictating poems to you, about the blue birds of happiness
fluttering round your dainty little feet.  I know _I_ would, if I
were his secretary."

There was a dead pause.  The wife stood immobile and statuesque, in
an attitude characteristic of her, half turning back to the little
secretary, half averted.  She half turned her back on everything.

The secretary looked at him.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "I was doing an article on the
Future of the Novel."

"I know that," said the wife.  "That's what's so awful!  Why not
something lively in the life of the novelist?"

There was a prolonged silence, in which he looked pained, and
somewhat remote, statuesque.  The little secretary hung her head.
The wife sauntered slowly away.

"Just where were we, Miss Wrexall?" came the sound of his voice.

The little secretary started.  She was feeling profoundly
indignant.  Their beautiful relationship, his and hers, to be so
insulted!

But soon she was veering down-stream on the flow of his words, too
busy to have any feelings, except one of elation at being so busy.

Tea-time came; the sister brought out the tea-tray into the garden.
And immediately, the wife appeared.  She had changed, and was
wearing a chicory-blue dress of fine cloth.  The little secretary
had gathered up her papers and was departing, on rather high heels.

"Don't go, Miss Wrexall," said the wife.

The little secretary stopped short, then hesitated.

"Mother will be expecting me," she said.

"Tell her you're not coming.  And ask your sister to bring another
cup.  I want you to have tea with us."

Miss Wrexall looked at the man, who was reared on one elbow in the
hammock, and was looking enigmatical, Hamletish.

He glanced at her quickly, then pursed his mouth in a boyish
negligence.

"Yes, stay and have tea with us for once," he said.  "I see
strawberries, and I know you're the bird for them."

She glanced at him, smiled wanly, and hurried away to tell her
mother.  She even stayed long enough to slip on a silk dress.

"Why, how smart you are!" said the wife, when the little secretary
reappeared on the lawn, in chicory-blue silk.

"Oh, don't look at my dress, compared to yours!" said Miss Wrexall.
They were of the same colour, indeed!

"At least you earned yours, which is more than I did mine," said
the wife, as she poured tea.  "You like it strong?"

She looked with her heavy eyes at the smallish, birdy, blue-clad,
overworked young woman, and her eyes seemed to speak many
inexplicable dark volumes.

"Oh, as it comes, thank you," said Miss Wrexall, leaning nervously
forward.

"It's coming pretty black, if you want to ruin your digestion,"
said the wife.

"Oh, I'll have some water in it, then."

"Better, I should say."

"How'd the work go--all right?" asked the wife, as they drank tea,
and the two women looked at each other's blue dresses.

"Oh!" he said.  "As well as you can expect.  It was a piece of pure
flummery.  But it's what they want.  Awful rot, wasn't it, Miss
Wrexall?"

Miss Wrexall moved uneasily on her chair.

"It interested me," she said, "though not so much as the novel."

"The novel?  Which novel?" said the wife.  "Is there another new
one?"

Miss Wrexall looked at him.  Not for words would she give away any
of his literary activities.

"Oh, I was just sketching out an idea to Miss Wrexall," he said.

"Tell us about it!" said the wife.  "Miss Wrexall, YOU tell us what
it's about."

She turned on her chair, and fixed the little secretary.

"I'm afraid"--Miss Wrexall squirmed--"I haven't got it very clearly
myself, yet."

"Oh, go along!  Tell us what you HAVE got then!"

Miss Wrexall sat dumb and very vexed.  She felt she was being
baited.  She looked at the blue pleatings of her skirt.

"I'm afraid I can't," she said.

"Why are you afraid you can't?  You're so VERY competent.  I'm sure
you've got it all at your finger-ends.  I expect you write a good
deal of Mr. Gee's books for him, really.  He gives you the hint,
and you fill it all in.  Isn't that how you do it?"  She spoke
ironically, and as if she were teasing a child.  And then she
glanced down at the fine pleatings of her own blue skirt, very fine
and expensive.

"Of course you're not speaking seriously?" said Miss Wrexall,
rising on her mettle.

"Of course I am!  I've suspected for a long time--at least, for
some time--that you write a good deal of Mr. Gee's books for him,
from his hints."

It was said in a tone of raillery, but it was cruel.

"I should be terribly flattered," said Miss Wrexall, straightening
herself, "if I didn't know you were only trying to make me feel a
fool."

"Make you feel a fool?  My dear child!--why, nothing could be
farther from me!  You're twice as clever, and a million times as
competent as I am.  Why, my dear child, I've the greatest
admiration for you!  I wouldn't do what you do, not for all the
pearls in India.  I COULDN'T anyhow--"

Miss Wrexall closed up and was silent.

"Do you mean to say my books read as if--" he began, rearing up and
speaking in a harrowed voice.

"I do!" said the wife.  "JUST as if Miss Wrexall had written them
from your hints.  I HONESTLY thought she did--when you were too
busy--"

"How very clever of you!" he said.

"Very!" she said.  "Especially if I was wrong!"

"Which you were," he said.

"How very extraordinary!" she cried.  "Well, I am once more
mistaken!"

There was a complete pause.

It was broken by Miss Wrexall, who was nervously twisting her
fingers.

"You want to spoil what there is between me and him, I can see
that," she said bitterly.

"My dear, but what IS there between you and him?" asked the wife.

"I was HAPPY working with him, working for him!  I was HAPPY
working for him!" cried Miss Wrexall, tears of indignant anger and
chagrin in her eyes.

"My dear child!" cried the wife, with simulated excitement, "go ON
being happy working with him, go on being happy while you can!  If
it makes you happy, why then, enjoy it!  Of course!  Do you think
I'd be so cruel as to want to take it away from you?--working with
him?  _I_ can't do shorthand and typewriting and double-entrance
book-keeping, or whatever it's called.  I tell you, I'm utterly
incompetent.  I never earn anything.  I'm the parasite of the
British oak, like the mistletoe.  The blue bird doesn't flutter
round my feet.  Perhaps they're too big and trampling."

She looked down at her expensive shoes.

"If I DID have a word of criticism to offer," she said turning to
her husband, "it would be to you, Cameron, for taking so much from
her and giving her nothing."

"But he gives me everything, everything!" cried Miss Wrexall.  "He
gives me everything!"

"What do you mean by everything?" said the wife, turning on her
sternly.

Miss Wrexall pulled up short.  There was a snap in the air, and a
change of currents.

"I mean nothing that YOU need begrudge me," said the little
secretary rather haughtily.  "I've never made myself cheap."

There was a blank pause.

"My God!" said the wife.  "You don't call that being cheap?  Why, I
should say you got nothing out of him at all, you only give!  And
if you don't call that making yourself cheap--my God!"

"You see, we see things different," said the secretary.

"I should say we do!--THANK GOD!" rejoined the wife.

"On whose behalf are you thanking God?" he asked sarcastically.

"Everybody's, I suppose!  Yours, because you get everything for
nothing, and Miss Wrexall's, because she seems to like it, and mine
because I'm well out of it all."

"You NEEDN'T be out of it all," cried Miss Wrexall magnanimously,
"if you didn't PUT yourself out of it all."

"Thank you, my dear, for your offer," said the wife, rising, "but
I'm afraid no man can expect TWO blue birds of happiness to flutter
round his feet, tearing out their little feathers!"

With which she walked away.

After a tense and desperate interim, Miss Wrexall cried:

"And REALLY, need any woman be jealous of me?"

"Quite!" he said.

And that was all he did say.



SUN


"Take her away, into the sun," the doctor said.  She herself was
sceptical of the sun, but she permitted herself to be carried away,
with her child, and a nurse, and her mother, over the sea.

The ship sailed at midnight.  And for two hours her husband stayed
with her, while the child was put to bed, and the passengers came
on board.  It was a black night, the Hudson swayed with heaving
blackness, shaken over with spilled dribbles of light.  She leaned
over the rail, and looking down thought: this is the sea; it is
deeper than one imagines, and fuller of memories.  At that moment
the sea seemed to heave like the serpent of chaos that has lived
for ever.

"These partings are no good, you know," her husband was saying, at
her side.  "They're no good.  I don't like them."

His tone was full of apprehension, misgiving, and there was a
certain clinging to the last straw of hope.

"No, neither do I," she responded in a flat voice.  She remembered
how bitterly they wanted to get away from one another, he and she.
The emotion of parting gave a slight tug at her emotions, but only
caused the iron that had gone into her soul to gore deeper.

So, they looked at their sleeping son, and the father's eyes were
wet.  But it is not the wetting of the eyes that counts, it is the
deep iron rhythm of habit, the year-long, life-habits; the deep-set
stroke of power.

And in their two lives, the stroke of power was hostile, his and
hers.  Like two engines running at variance, they shattered one
another.

"All ashore!  All ashore!"

"Maurice, you must go."

And she thought to herself:  For him it is All Ashore!  For me it
is Out to Sea!

Well, he waved his hanky on the midnight dreariness of the pier, as
the boat inched away; one among a crowd.  One among a crowd!  C'est
ça!

The ferry-boats, like great dishes piled with rows of lights, were
still slanting across the Hudson.  That black mouth must be the
Lackawanna Station.

The ship ebbed on between the lights, the Hudson seemed
interminable.  But at last they were round the bend, and there was
the poor harvest of lights at the Battery.  Liberty flung up her
torch in a tantrum.  There was the wash of the sea.

And though the Atlantic was grey as lava, they did come at last
into the sun.  Even she had a house above the bluest of seas, with
a vast garden, or vineyard, all vines and olives, dropping steeply
in terrace after terrace, to the strip of coast plain; and the
garden full of secret places, deep groves of lemon far down in the
cleft of earth, and hidden, pure green reservoirs of water; then a
spring issuing out of a little cavern, where the old Sicules had
drunk before the Greeks came; and a grey goat bleating, stabled in
an ancient tomb with the niches empty.  There was the scent of
mimosa, and beyond, the snow of the volcano.

She saw it all, and in a measure it was soothing.  But it was all
external.  She didn't really care about it.  She was herself just
the same, with all her anger and frustration inside her, and her
incapacity to feel anything real.  The child imitated her, and
preyed on her peace of mind.  She felt so horribly, ghastly
responsible for him: as if she must be responsible for every breath
he drew.  And that was torture to her, to the child, and to
everybody else concerned.

"You know, Juliet, the doctor told you to lie in the sun, without
your clothes.  Why don't you?" said her mother.

"When I am fit to do so, I will.  Do you want to kill me?" Juliet
flew at her.

"To kill you, no!  Only to do you good."

"For God's sake, leave off wanting to do me good."

The mother at last was so hurt and incensed, she departed.

The sea went white, and then invisible.  Pouring rain fell.  It was
cold, in the house built for the sun.

Again a morning when the sun lifted himself molten and sparkling,
naked over the sea's rim.  The house faced south-east, Juliet lay
in her bed and watched him rise.  It was as if she had never seen
the sun rise before.  She had never seen the naked sun stand up
pure upon the sea-line, shaking the night off himself, like
wetness.  And he was full and naked.  And she wanted to come to
him.

So the desire sprang secretly in her, to be naked to the sun.  She
cherished her desire like a secret.  She wanted to come together
with the sun.

But she would have to go away from the house--away from people.
And it is not easy, in a country where every olive tree has eyes,
and every slope is seen from afar, to go hidden, and have
intercourse with the sun.

But she found a place: a rocky bluff shoved out to the sea and sun,
and overgrown with the large cactus called prickly pear.  Out of
this thicket of cactus rose one cypress tree, with a pallid, thick
trunk, and a tip that leaned over, flexible, in the blue.  It stood
like a guardian looking to sea; or a candle whose huge flame was
darkness against light: the long tongue of darkness licking up at
the sky.

Juliet sat down by the cypress tree, and took off her clothes.  The
contorted cactus made a forest, hideous yet fascinating, about her.
She sat and offered her bosom to the sun, sighing, even now, with a
certain hard pain, against the cruelty of having to give herself:
but exulting that at last it was no human lover.

But the sun marched in blue heaven and sent down his rays as he
went.  She felt the soft air of the sea on her breasts, that seemed
as if they would never ripen.  But she hardly felt the sun.  Fruits
that would wither and not mature, her breasts.

Soon, however, she felt the sun inside them, warmer than ever love
had been, warmer than milk or the hands of her baby.  At last, her
breasts were like long white grapes in the hot sun.

She slid off all her clothes, and lay naked in the sun, and as she
lay she looked up through her fingers at the central sun, his blue
pulsing roundness, whose outer edges streamed brilliance.  Pulsing
with marvellous blue, and alive, and streaming white fire from his
edges, the Sun!  He faced down to her with blue body of fire, and
enveloped her breasts and her face, her throat, her tired belly,
her knees, her thighs and her feet.

She lay with shut eyes, the colour of rosy flame through her lids.
It was too much.  She reached and put leaves over her eyes.  Then
she lay again, like a long gourd in the sun, green that must ripen
to gold.

She could feel the sun penetrating into her bones; nay, further,
even into her emotions and thoughts.  The dark tensions of her
emotion began to give way, the cold dark clots of her thoughts
began to dissolve.  She was beginning to be warm right through.
Turning over, she let her shoulders lie in the sun, her loins, the
backs of her thighs, even her heels.  And she lay half stunned with
the strangeness of the thing that was happening to her.  Her weary,
chilled heart was melting, and in melting, evaporating.  Only her
womb remained tense and resistant, the eternal resistance.  It
would resist even the sun.

When she was dressed again she lay once more and looked up at the
cypress tree, whose crest, a filament, fell this way and that in
the breeze.  Meanwhile, she was conscious of the great sun roaming
in heaven, and of her own resistance.

So, dazed, she went home, only half-seeing, sun-blinded and sun-
dazed.  And her blindness was like a richness to her, and her dim,
warm, heavy half-consciousness was like wealth.

"Mummy!  Mummy!" her child came running towards her, calling in
that peculiar bird-like little anguish of want, always wanting her.
She was surprised that her drowsed heart for once felt none of the
anxious love-tension in return.  She caught the child up in her
arms, but she thought:  He should not be such a lump!  If he had
any sun in him, he would spring up.--And she felt again the
unyielding resistance of her womb, against him and everything.

She resented, rather, his little hands clutching at her, especially
her neck.  She pulled her throat away.  She did not want him
getting hold of it.  She put the child down.

"Run!" she said.  "Run in the sun!"

And there and then she took off his clothes and set him naked on
the warm terrace.

"Play in the sun!" she said.

He was frightened and wanted to cry.  But she, in the warm
indolence of her body, and the complete indifference of her heart,
and the resistance of her womb, rolled him an orange across the red
tiles, and with his soft, unformed little body he toddled after it.
Then, immediately he had it, he dropped it because it felt strange
against his flesh.  And he looked back at her, wrinkling his face
to cry, frightened because he was stark.

"Bring me the orange," she said, amazed at her own deep
indifference to his trepidation.  "Bring Mummy the orange."

"He shall not grow up like his father," she said to herself.  "Like
a worm that the sun has never seen."


II


She had had the child so much on her mind, in a torment of
responsibility, as if, having borne him, she had to answer for his
whole existence.  Even if his nose were running, it had been
repulsive and a goad in her vitals, as if she must say to herself:
Look at the thing you brought forth!

Now a change took place.  She was no longer vitally consumed about
the child, she took the strain of her anxiety and her will from off
him.  And he thrived all the more for it.

She was thinking inside herself, of the sun in his splendour, and
his entering into her.  Her life was now a secret ritual.  She
always lay awake, before dawn, watching for the grey to colour to
pale gold, to know if clouds lay on the sea's edge.  Her joy was
when he rose all molten in his nakedness, and threw off blue-white
fire, into the tender heaven.

But sometimes he came ruddy, like a big, shy creature.  And
sometimes slow and crimson red, with a look of anger, slowly
pushing and shouldering.  Sometimes again she could not see him,
only the level cloud threw down gold and scarlet from above, as he
moved behind the wall.

She was fortunate.  Weeks went by, and though the dawn was
sometimes clouded, and afternoon was sometimes grey, never a day
passed sunless, and most days, winter though it was, streamed
radiant.  The thin little wild crocuses came up mauve and striped,
the wild narcissus hung their winter stars.

Every day, she went down to the cypress tree, among the cactus
grove on the knoll with yellowish cliffs at the foot.  She was
wiser and subtler now, wearing only a dove-grey wrapper, and
sandals.  So that in an instant, in any hidden niche, she was naked
to the sun.  And the moment she was covered again she was grey and
invisible.

Every day, in the morning towards noon, she lay at the foot of the
powerful, silver-pawed cypress tree, while the sun strode jovial in
heaven.  By now she knew the sun in every thread of her body.  Her
heart of anxiety, that anxious, straining heart, had disappeared
altogether, like a flower that falls in the sun, and leaves only a
little ripening fruit.  And her tense womb, though still closed,
was slowly unfolding, slowly, slowly, like a lily bud under water,
as the sun mysteriously touched it.  Like a lily bud under water it
was slowly rising to the sun, to expand at last, to the sun, only
to the sun.

She knew the sun in all her body, the blue-molten with his white
fire edges, throwing off fire.  And, though he shone on all the
world, when she lay unclothed he focussed on her.  It was one of
the wonders of the sun, he could shine on a million people, and
still be the radiant, splendid, unique sun, focussed on her alone.

With her knowledge of the sun, and her conviction that the sun was
gradually penetrating her to know her, in the cosmic carnal sense
of the word, came over her a feeling of a detachment from people,
and a certain contemptuous tolerance for human beings altogether.
They were so un-elemental, so un-sunned.  They were so like
graveyard worms.

Even the peasants passing up the rocky, ancient little road with
their donkeys, sun-blackened as they were, were not sunned right
through.  There was a little soft white core of fear, like a snail
in a shell, where the soul of the man cowered in fear of the
natural blaze of life.  He dared not quite see the sun: always
innerly cowed.  All men were like that.

Why admit men!

With her indifference to people, to men, she was not now so
cautious about being seen.  She had told Marinina, who went
shopping for her in the village, that the doctor had ordered sun-
baths.  Let that suffice.

Marinina was a woman of sixty or more, tall, thin, erect, with
curling dark-grey hair, and dark-grey eyes that had the shrewdness
of thousands of years in them, with the laugh, half mockery, that
underlies all long experience.  Tragedy is lack of experience.

"It must be beautiful to go naked in the sun," said Marinina, with
a shrewd laugh in her eyes as she looked keenly at the other woman.
Juliet's fair, bobbed hair curled in a little cloud at her temples.
Marinina was a woman of Magna Graecia, and had far memories.  She
looked again at Juliet.

"But when a woman is beautiful, she can show herself to the sun?
eh? isn't it true?" she added, with that queer, breathless little
laugh of the women of the past.

"Who knows if I am beautiful!" said Juliet.

But beautiful or not, she felt that by the sun she was appreciated.
Which is the same.

When, out of the sun at noon, sometimes she stole down over the
rocks and past the cliff-edge, down to the deep gully where the
lemons hung in cool eternal shadow; and in the silence slipped off
her wrapper to wash herself quickly at one of the deep, clear green
basins, she would notice, in the bare green twilight under the
lemon leaves, that all her body was rosy, rosy, and turning to
gold.  She was like another person.  She was another person.

So she remembered that the Greeks had said a white unsunned body
was unhealthy, and fishy.

And she would