So did he make a little merry on this day when he came to the mother’s house where she lived alone without her man and he knew she did, and he called out heartily to the lad, “I see your mother does not need your father with such a man as you to tend the fields!”
Then the boy swaggered his little lean body and boasted, shy and bold at once, he was so pleased, “Oh, aye, I do my share,” and he spat as he had seen men do, and set his arms upon his little bony thighs and felt himself grown and fully man.
Then the agent laughed and looked at the mother as though to laugh kindly with her over this lad of hers, and the woman could not but smile, and she handed him a bowl of tea she had poured out in common courtesy as to any passing guest. And being so near his laughing eyes she could not but look into them, and there was that great, greedy, starving heart of hers showing in her own eyes without her knowledge that it did. The man stared at her and scented her heat and he turned hot and grave and when he took the bowl he touched his hand to hers as though not knowing her hand was there. But the woman felt the touch and caught its meaning in her blood like flame.
Then she turned herself away shamed and would not hear what her own heart said. No, she busied herself with the grain and while she did it she grew suddenly afraid of her own self and she said to the lad in a low voice, “Run to our cousin and ask him to come hither and help me,” and to her heart she said, to still its wildness, “If he is here—if our good cousin is here—”
But the lad was proud and wilful and he argued, “I am here, mother, and I will help you. What other do you need? See, I am here!”
Then the agent laughed loudly and slapped his thick thigh and he took secret advantage of the innocent lad and he cried, “So you are, my lad, and true enough your mother needs no other man!”
Then the lad grew the more bold being so encouraged and when his mother said again, half faintly, “It would be better if our cousin were here,” the boy caught the faintness and he cried, “No, I will not call him, mother! I am man enough!” and he took up the scales and strutted to fill the measure with the grain and the woman laughed uneasily and let him be, and the truth was there was something in her, too, that pulled at her to let him be.
When the grain was measured out and she had made a measure full again to give the agent for himself, that agent put it from him in a lordly way and he smoothed his long straight upper lip and looking ardently into the woman’s face—for who was there save these children and that old woman nodding in her sleep under the eaves by the door ?—he said, “No, I will not have it! You are a lone woman now and your man gone from home and all this is your own labor. I will take no more of it than my landlord must have, or blame me if he does not. I will take no fee from you, goodwife.”
Then was the woman suddenly afraid in the midst of the sweet sick heat that was upon her and she grew confused and pressed the fee upon him. But he would not have it. He pushed the measure away, his hand on hers while he did, and at last when he took the measure from her he poured the grain back into the basket where she kept it stored, and he would not have it.
Nor had she strength to beg him any more. Under this man’s smooth face and smiling ways, under that gray costly robe of his, there was some strange and secret force that poured out of him into the shining autumn sun and clung to her and licked about her like a tongue of fire. She fell silent then and hung her head like any maid and when he poured the grain back and bowed and went his way, laughing and bowing and smoothing his long lip where there was no hair, she could not say a word. She stood there in silence, her bare brown feet thrust into broken shoes, one hand twisting the corner of her patched cotton coat.
When he was gone she lifted her head and looked after him and at that same instant he turned and caught her look and bowed and laughed again. Yet, in such a way he went, and afterwards she wished a thousand times she had not looked after him like that and yet she could not help it when she did it. Then the boy cried out gladly, “A good man, mother, not to take his fee! I never heard of such a good agent not to take his fee!” And when she went into the kitchen silently, half in a dream with what had passed, he following crying at her, “Is he not a good man, mother, who wanted nothing for himself?” And when still she answered nothing he cried peevishly, “Mother—mother!”
Then the mother started suddenly and she answered in strange haste, “Oh—aye, son—” and the lad prattled on, “So good a man, mother—you see, he would take nothing from you at all, knowing how you are poor now that my father is gone.”
But the mother stood still of a sudden, the lid of the cauldron lifted and still in her hand. She stared at the boy fixedly and her heart echoed strangely, shamed and yet filled with that sick sweet fever, “Did he want nothing of me?” Though to the lad she answered nothing.
Nor could the man forget the woman’s heat. For this excuse and that he came back to the hamlet and now it was to make sure of some account which he thought he had written wrong, and now it was to complain that such a one had given a measure short and the landlord was angry with him. Most often of all he went to the cousin’s house, which stood near the woman’s, and he went to see of this and that, and now he brought some new seed of a kind of cotton that was held very fine in other parts or he brought a man with him carrying a load of lime or some such thing to make the fields more fertile, and the cousin was dazed with so much coming. At first he was afraid the agent had some evil purpose toward him and then he grew anxious when nothing came out for him to see, and he said to his wife, “It must be he has some very deep and evil purpose if it is so long leaking out of him,” and he watched the man anxiously and sat and stared at him, yet impatient, too, to be at his work again that waited for him, and yet afraid to be lacking in courtesy to one who could do him evil if he would.
But neither cousin nor cousin’s wife saw how the secret eyes of the agent went sliding under his lids toward the woman across the way, and how if she were not there upon her threshold, he stayed but a little while, and how if she were there he sat on and on, facing her, and often he cried in loud and false good nature, “No, good fellow, I have no errand other than this. I am but a common man, too, and I like nothing better than to sit in an honest man’s dooryard and feel the autumn sun upon me.” But all the while he stared across the way where the woman sat spinning or sewing.
Now this was the season when the land was sinking into quiescence for the winter. The wheat was planted in the dry earth and waiting for a rain to sprout it, and the mother took a little leisure and sat in her doorway and mended the winter garments and made new shoes, for the girl’s sight was not enough for this, and never would be. She sat there in the full sun for warmth, half listening to the old woman’s talk and what her children had to say to her, and half dreaming, and her lips were tranquil and her skin warm and golden brown with the sun and her hair shiny black with health and newly combed now she had the time to do it every day, and these days she looked younger than she was, although she was yet not thirty and five years old.
Well she knew that man sat there across the few feet of roadway but she would not look up and sometimes when she felt his look press her too hard she rose and went into the house and stayed there until she had seen him go. But she knew why he came and she knew he looked at her for a cause, and she could not forget him.
All through that winter she could not forget him somehow. At last it grew too cold for him to come even for his purpose. When the snow fell and when the winds came down bitter and dry out of the northwest, she might have forgotten him. But she did not.
Once more the new year came and she went into the town as she did every year and sold some grain and changed her silver into paper and she went and sought a different letter writer, and once more she had the letter written as though the man sent it, and once more the hamlet heard the news and knew she had the money from her man.
But this time their fresh envy and all their talk and praise put nothing in the woman’s empty heart. Not even pride coul
d comfort her this time. She listened to the letter read, her face quiet and cold, and she took it home and that night she put it in the oven with the burning grass. Then she went to the table in the room where there was a small drawer and after a while she opened it and brought out the three letters there, for so long had the man been gone now, and she took them also to the fire and laid them on the flames. The lad saw it, and he cried out astounded,
“Do you burn my father’s letters then?”
“Aye,” the mother answered, cold as death, her eyes on the quick flames.
“But how will we know where he is, then?” the lad wailed.
“I know as well as ever. Do you think I can forget?” the woman said.
So she emptied her heart clean.
But how can any heart live empty? On a day soon after this she went into the city to change again her bit of paper, for these days she did not trouble her cousin often, having learned to be alone, and when she had the ten pieces in her hand she turned to go and there a man stood by the door upon the street, and he stood smiling and smoothing his upper lip, and it was the landlord’s agent.
Not since the late autumn had he seen her close as this, and there was none near who knew them and so he stared at her boldly and smiling and he said, “What do you here, goodwife?”
“I did but change a bit of money—” she broke off here, for she had been about to say on, “that my man sent me,” but the words stuck in her throat somehow and she did not utter them.
“And what then?” he asked her, his lids lifted and his eyes pressing her.
She drooped her head and strove to speak as commonly she did, and she said, “I thought to go and buy a silver pin, or one washed with silver, to hold my hair. The one I had grew thin from long use and broke yesterday.”
It was true her pin to hold her hair had so broken, and she said the truth before she knew it, and turned to go away, ashamed even before people who did not know her to be seen speaking to a man upon a town street, and he was a man somewhat notable in his looks, and being taller than most men and his face very square and pale, so that people were already looking at them curiously as they passed.
But the man followed behind her. She knew he followed behind her as she went soberly and modestly down the way and she was afraid not to do what she had said she would, and so she went to a small silver shop she knew and stood at the silversmith’s counter and asked to see his pins of brass, washed with silver. And while she waited she toyed a moment with some silver earrings that were there and suddenly the agent came up while she toyed and he pretended he did not know her and he said to the silversmith, “How much are these earrings?”
Then the silversmith said, “I will weigh them to see how much silver is there, and then will I sell them to you honestly and fairly by what they weigh.”
And the silversmith let the pin wait a while, seeing this man was clad in silk and a better purchaser, doubtless, than this countrywoman in her blue cotton coat. So the woman could only stand and turn her head away from those bold secret eyes and the man stood indolently waiting as the silversmith put the rings upon the little scales.
“Two ounces and a half,” the silversmith said in a loud voice. Then lowering his voice he added coaxingly, “But if you buy the earrings for your good lady, then why not add a pair of rings? Here are two to match the earrings, and it will all be a fine gift, suited to any woman’s heart.”
The man smiled at this and he said carelessly, “Add them, then.” And then he said laughing, “But they are not for a wife—the wife I had died a six-month ago.”
The silversmith made haste to add the rings, pleased at so fine a sale, and he said, “Then let them be for the new wife.” But the man said no more but stood and stared and smoothed his lip. Not once did this man show he knew the countrywoman was there. He took the rings when they were wrapped and went away. But when he had turned his back the mother sighed and watched him half jealous for the one he had bought the trinkets for, such things as she would have loved and in her girlhood had often longed to have. And indeed they were the very things she had said her husband bade her buy with the silver she spent, and the gossip often asked these days, “Where are those rings you said you have? Let me see what their pattern is.” And the mother was often hard put to it and she said, “The silversmith is making them,” or “I have put them in a certain place and I have forgot where they are for the moment,” and many such excuses had she made until this last year when the gossip had said with how great malice, “And do you never wear those rings yet?” and then the mother answered, “I have not the heart and I will put them on the first day he comes home.”
So when she had bought the pin and slipped it through her coil of hair, she turned home again thinking of the dainty silver things and she sighed and thought she had not heart to take her hard-earned silver and buy herself a toy, after all, seeing that doubtless it mattered to no one how she looked now, and she would let be as she was. Thinking thus and somewhat drearily, she wound her way out of the city gate and upon the narrow country road that branched off to the hamlet from the highway, and she thought of home and of the comfort of her food when she was there, the only comfort now her body had.
Suddenly out of the twilight of the short winter’s evening there stood the man. Out of the twilight he stood, sudden and black, and he seized her wrist in his large soft hand and there was no other soul near by. No, it was the hour when countrymen are in their houses and it was cold and the air full of the night’s frost and such a time as no one lingers out unless he must. Yet here was he, and he had her wrist and held it and she felt his hand on her and she stood still, smitten into stillness.
Then the man took the small parcel of silver he had and with his other hand he forced it into her hand that he held, and he closed her fingers over it and he said, “I bought these for none other than for you. For you alone I bought them. They are yours.”
And he was gone into the gathering shade under the city wall, and there was she left alone, the silver trinkets in her hand.
Then she came to herself and she ran after him crying, “I cannot—but I cannot—”
But he was gone. Although she ran into the gate and peered through the flickering lights that fell from open shops, she could not see him. She was ashamed to run further into the town and look at this man’s face and that in the dim light, and so she stood, uncertain and ashamed, until the soldiers who guarded the city gate called out in impatience, “Goodwife, if you are going out this gate tonight go you must because the hour is come when we must close it fast against the communists, those new robbers we have these days.”
She went her way then once more and crossed the little hill and down into the valley, and after a while she thrust the trinkets in her bosom. The moon rose huge and cold and glittering as soon as the sun was set, and when she came home the children were in their bed, and the old grandmother asleep. Only the lad lay still awake and he cried when his mother came, “I was afraid for you, my mother, and I would have come to find you, only I was afraid to leave the children and my grandmother.”
But she could not even smile at his so calling the other two children as though he were a man beside them. She answered, “Aye, here I be, at last, and very weary somehow,” and she went and fetched a little food and ate it cold, and all the time the trinkets lay in her bosom.
When she had eaten she glanced toward the bed and by the candlelight she saw the lad slept too, and so she fastened the curtains and then she sat down beside the table and took the little packet from her breast and opened the soft paper which enwrapped it. There the rings lay, glittering and white, and the earrings were beautiful. Upon each were fastened three small fine chains, and at the end of each chain hung a little toy. She took them in her hard fingers and looked closely and upon one chain hung a tiny fish and upon the second a little bell and upon the third a little pointed star, all daintily and cleverly made and pleasing to any woman. She had never held such pretty things before in he
r hard brown palm. She sat and looked at them a while and sighed and wrapped them up again, not knowing what to do with them, or how to give them back to that man.
But when she had crept under the quilt with the children she could not sleep. Although her body was cold with the damp chill of the night her cheeks were burning hot and she could not sleep for a long time and then at last but lightly. And partly she dreamed of some strange thing shining, and partly she dreamed of a man’s hot hand upon her.
X
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.