SHE did not see the man again through the whole spring, although she remembered him. She did not see him until a day in the early summer, when the wheat was turning faintly gold, and she had sown her rice in beds for seedlings, and it was sprouted new and green and set in small blocks of jade near the house where it could be well watched by the old grandmother against the greedy birds that loved its tenderness. And all this time her heart lay in her hot and fallow.
But there came a day in that early summer, a day windless and full of soft new heat. The cicadas called their sharp loves and when they had called past the crisis their voices trailed slow and languorous into silence again. Into the valley the sun poured down its heat like clear warm wine and the smooth warm stones of the solitary street of the little hamlet threw back the heat again so that the air shimmered and danced above them, and through those waves the little naked children ran and played, their smooth bodies shining with their sweat.
There was no little passing wind of any sort at all. Standing upon her threshold the mother thought she had never felt such close and sudden heat as this so soon in summer. The younger boy ran to the edge of the pool and sat in the water there, laughing and shouting to his playmates to come and join him, and the elder lad took off his coat and rolled his trousers high and put on his head a wide old bamboo hat that had been his father’s once and went out to the field of newly sprouted corn. The girl sat in the house for darkness and her mother heard her sighing there. Only the old woman loved this heat and she sat in the sun and slipped the coat from her old withered frame and let the sun soak down into her old bones and on her breasts that hung like bits of dried skin on her bosom, and she piped when she saw her son’s wife there, “I never fear to die in summer, daughter! The sun is good as new blood and bones to an old dried thing like me!”
But the mother could not bear the outer heat. Heat there was enough inside her and her blood seemed this day to thunder through her veins with too much heat. She left the house then saying, “I must go and water the rice a while. A very drying sun today, old mother,” and she took her hoe and on her shoulder slung her empty water buckets and so walked down the narrow path to where a further pond lay somewhat higher than the seed beds of the rice, and she walked gratefully, because the air though hot was not so shut and lifeless as it had been on the street.
She walked on and met no one at all, because it was the hour after noon when men take their rest. Here and there if a man had gone early to his field he sought the shade, for, after all, the heat was too great for labor, and he lay sleeping under some tree, his hat covering his face against the flies, and beside him stood his beast, its head drooping and all its body slack with heat and drowsiness. But the mother could bear the heat because it came down out of the sky and was not shut between walls or all in her own veins.
She worked on a while then in her seed beds and with her hoe she cut a little gate in the higher edge of the bed and she dug a small water way to the pond, and then she went to the pond’s edge and with her buckets slung upon the pole she dipped first one and then the other into the water and then emptied them into the ditch she had dug. Over and over she dipped the water and watched the earth grow dark and moist and it seemed to her she fed some thirsting living thing and gave it life.
Now while she was at this task she straightened her back once and set her buckets down and went and sat upon the green edge of the pond to rest, and as she sat she looked to the north where the hamlet was and there she saw a man stop and ask the old woman something and then he turned and came toward her where she sat by this pond. She looked as he came and knew him. It was the landlord’s agent, and while he came she remembered she had his trinkets still and she hung her head not knowing how to speak of them without giving them back again, and not daring now to go and find them and give them back to him in this full light of day when any passing soul might see her do it and the old woman wide awake, too, in the sun, and she was quick to see a thing she ought not.
So the man came on, and when he was come the mother rose slowly, being lesser in place than he and woman, too, before a man. But he called out freely and he said, “Goodwife, I came but to look and see what the wheat is this year and guess the harvest from the fields!”
But while he spoke his eyes ran up and down her body, clad for the heat in but a single coat and trousers of patched blue stuff worn thin and close to her shape and his eyes fixed themselves upon her bare brown feet and in fear of her own heart she muttered rudely, “The fields lie yonder—look then, and see!”
So he glanced over them from where he stood and he said in his pleasant, townsman’s way, “Very fair fields, goodwife, and there have been worse harvests than there will be this year.” And he took out a little folded book and wrote something down on it with a sort of stick she had never seen before, seeing he needed not to dip it in ink at all, as the letter writer did, for it came out black itself. She watched him write and half it made her curious and half it touched her and made her proud to think so learned and goodly a man had looked at one like her, even when he should not, and she thought she would not speak of the trinkets this one time.
When he had finished his writing he said to her smiling and smoothing his lip, “If you have time, show me that other field of yours that stands in barley, for I ever do forget which is yours and which your cousin’s.”
“Mine is there around the hill,” she said half unwillingly, and now her eyes were dropped and she made as if to take the hoe again.
“Around the hill?” the man said and then his voice grew soft and he smoothed that lip of his with his big soft hand and smiled and said, “But show me, goodwife!”
He fixed his eyes on her steadily now and openly and his gaze had power to move her somehow and she put down her hoe and went with him, following after him as women do when they walk with men.
The sun beat down on them as they went and the earth was warm beneath their feet and green and soft with grass. Suddenly as she walked the woman felt her blood grow all sweet and languorous in her with the hot sun. And without knowing why, it gave her some deep pleasure to look at the man who walked ahead of her, at his strong pale neck, shining with sweat, at his body moving in the long smooth robe of summer stuff, at his feet in white clean hose and black shoes of cloth. And she went silently on her bare feet and she came near to him and caught some fragrance from him, too strong for perfume, some compound of man’s blood and flesh and sweat. When she caught it in her nostrils she was stirred with longing and it was such a longing she grew frightened of herself and of what she might do, and she cried out faltering, and standing still upon the grassy path, “I have forgot something for my old mother!” and when he turned and looked at her, she faltered out again thickly, her whole body suddenly hot and weak, “I have forgot a thing I had to do—” and she turned from him and walked as quickly as she could and left him there staring after her.
Straight she went to her house and she crept across the threshold and none noticed her, for everyone lay sleeping. The heat of the day had grown heavier as the afternoon wore on. Across the way the cousin’s wife sat sleeping, her mouth ajar, and the last babe sleeping at her breast. Here the old grandmother slept too, her head drooped and her nose upon her chin, and her clothes slipped to her waist still as she had sat in the sun. The girl had come out of the close room and lay curled against a cool stone for a pillow and she slept, and the younger lad lay naked and stretched to his full length beneath the willow tree, asleep.
The very day had changed. It was grown darker and more still and full of deeper and more burning heat. Great clouds loomed swollen, black and monstrous, up from the hills. But they shone silver-edged, luminous from some strange inner light. Even the sound of any insect, the call of any bird, was stilled in the vast hot silence of that day.
But the mother was far from sleep. She went softly into the darkened, silent room, and she sat herself upon the bed and the blood thundered in her ears, the blood of her strong hungry body. Now she knew what was amiss with her. She pretended nothing to herself now, as a townswoman might pretend, that there was some illness she had. No, she was too simple to pretend when well she knew how it was with her, and she was more frightened than she had ever been in her whole life, for she knew that such hunger as was in her now grew raving if it were not fed.... She did not even dream she could repulse him, now she knew her own hunger was the same as his, and she groaned aloud and cried to her heart, “It would be better if he would not have me—Oh, I wish he would not have me, and that I might be saved!”
But even while she groaned she rose driven from off that bed and went from the sleeping hamlet and to the fields along the way that she had come. She walked along under the great, black, bright-edged clouds and about her were the hills, livid green and clean against the blackness. She went under such a sky, along the little winding turn the path took where it turned past a small and ruined shrine, and there in the door of the shrine the man stood, waiting.
And she could not pass him. No, when he went inside and waited she followed to the door and looked and there he stood inside the twilight of the windowless shrine, waiting, and his eyes gleamed out of that twilight, shining as a beast’s eyes, waiting, and she went in.
They looked at each other in the dim light, two people in a dream, desperate, beyond any power now to stay, and they made ready for what they must do.
Yet did the woman stop once, too. She looked up from her dream and she saw the three gods in the shrine, the chief a staid old man staring straight ahead of him, and by his side two small attendants, little, decent gods of the wayside for those who paused in their journey for worship or for shelter. She took the garment she had laid aside and went and threw it on their heads and covered up their staring eyes.