IV
It was March, and the sun was growing very powerful. In the hot hours she would lie in the shade of the trees, or she would even go down to the depths of the cool lemon grove. The child ran in the distance, like a young animal absorbed in life.
One day she was sitting in the sun on the steep slope of the gully, having bathed in one of the great tanks. Below, under the lemons, the child was wading among the yellow oxalis flowers of the shadow, gathering fallen lemons, passing with his tanned little body into flecks of light, moving all dappled.
Suddenly, high over the land’s edge, against the full-lit pale blue sky, Marinina appeared, a black cloth tied round her head, calling quietly: “Signora! Signora Julietta!”
Juliet faced round, standing up. Marinina paused a moment, seeing the naked woman standing alert, her sun-faded fair hair in a little cloud. Then the swift old woman came on down the slant of the steep track.
She stood a few steps, erect, in front of the sun-coloured woman, and eyed her shrewdly.
“But how beautiful you are, you!” she said coolly, almost cynically. “There is your husband.”
“My husband!” cried Juliet.
The old woman gave a shrewd bark of a little laugh, the mockery of the women of the past.
“Haven’t you got one, a husband, you?” she taunted.
“But where is he?” cried Juliet.
The old woman glanced over her shoulder.
“He was following me,” she said. “But he will not have found the path.” And she gave another little bark of a laugh.
The paths were all grown high with grass and flowers and nepitella, till they were like bird-trails in an eternally wild place. Strange, the vivid wildness of the old places of civilisation, a wildness that is not gaunt.
Juliet looked at her serving-woman with meditating eyes.
“Oh, very well!” she said at last. “Let him come.”
“Let him come here? Now?” asked Marinina, her laughing, smoke-grey eyes looking with mockery into Juliet’s. Then she gave a little jerk of her shoulders.
“All right, as you wish. But for him it is a rare one!”
She opened her mouth in a laugh of noiseless joy. Then she pointed down to the child, who was heaping lemons against his little chest. “Look how beautiful the child is! That, certainly, will please him, poor thing. Then I’ll bring him.”
“Bring him,” said Juliet.
The old woman scrambled rapidly up the track again. Maurice was standing grey-faced, in his grey felt hat and his dark grey suit, at a loss among the vine terraces. He looked pathetically out of place, in that resplendent sunshine and the grace of the old Greek world; like a blot of ink on the pale, sun-glowing slope.
“Come!” said Marinina to him. “She is down here.”
And swiftly she led the way, striding with a rapid stride, making her way through the grasses. Suddenly she stopped on the brow of the slope. The tops of the lemon trees were dark, away below.
“You, you go down here,” she said to him, and he thanked her, looking up at her swiftly.
He was a man of forty, clean-shaven, grey faced, very quiet and really shy. He managed his own business carefully, without startling success, but efficiently. And he confided in nobody. The old woman of Magna Græcia saw him at a glance: he is good, she said to herself, but not a man, poor thing.
“Down there is the Signora!” said Marinina, pointing like one of the Fates.
And again he said “Thank you! Thank you!” without a twinkle, and stepped carefully into the track. Marinina lifted her chin with a joyful wickedness. Then she strode off towards the house.
Maurice was watching his step, through the tangle of Mediterranean herbage, so he did not catch sight of his wife till he came round a little bend, quite near her. She was standing erect and nude by the jutting rock, glistening with the sun and with warm life. Her breasts seemed to be lifting up, alert, to listen, her thighs looked brown and fleet. Her glance on him, as he came like ink on blotting-paper, was swift and nervous.
Maurice, poor fellow, hesitated, and glanced away from her. He turned his face aside.
“Hello, Julie!” he said, with a little nervous cough—“Splendid! Splendid!”
He advanced with his face averted, shooting further glances at her, as she stood with the peculiar satiny gleam of the sun on her tanned skin. Somehow she did not seem so terribly naked. It was the golden-rose tan of the sun that clothed her.
“Hello, Maurice!” she said, hanging back from him. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.”
“No,” he said, “No! I managed to slip away a little earlier.”
And again he coughed awkwardly.
They stood several yards away from one another, and there was silence.
“Well!” he said, “er—this is splendid, splendid! You are—er—splendid! Where is the boy?”
“There he is,” she said, pointing down to where a naked urchin in the deep shade was piling fallen lemons together.
The father gave an odd little laugh.
“Ah, yes! there he is! So there’s the little man! Fine!” he said. He really was thrilled in his suppressed, nervous soul. “Hello, Johnny!” he called, and it sounded rather feeble. “Hello, Johnny!”
The child looked up, spilling lemons from his chubby arms, but did not respond.
“I guess we’ll go down to him,” said Juliet, as she turned and went striding down the path. Her husband followed, watching the rosy, fleet-looking lifting and sinking of her quick hips, as she swayed a little in the socket of her waist. He was dazed with admiration, but also, at a deadly loss. What should he do with himself? He was utterly out of the picture, in his dark grey suit and pale grey hat, and his grey, monastic face of a shy business man.
“He looks all right, doesn’t he?” said Juliet, as they came through the deep sea of yellow-flowering oxalis, under the lemon trees.
“Ah!—yes! yes! Splendid! Splendid!—Hello, Johnny! Do you know Daddy? Do you know Daddy, Johnny?”
He crouched down and held out his hands.
“Lemons!” said the child, birdly chirping. “Two lemons!”
“Two lemons!” replied the father. “Lots of lemons.”
The infant came and put a lemon in each of his father’s open hands. Then he stood back to look.
“Two lemons!” repeated the father. “Come, Johnny! Come and say Hello to Daddy.”
“Daddy going back?” said the child.
“Going back? Well—well—not to-day.”
And he gathered his son in his arms.
“Take a coat off! Daddy take a coat off!” said the boy, squirming debonair away from the cloth.
“All right, son! Daddy take a coat off.”
He took off his coat and laid it carefully aside, then again took his son in his arms. The naked woman looked down at the naked infant in the arms of the man in his shirt sleeves. The boy had pulled off the father’s hat, and Juliet looked at the sleek, black-and-grey hair of her husband, not a hair out of place. And utterly, utterly indoors. She was silent for a long time, while the father talked to the child, who was fond of his Daddy.
“What are you going to do about it, Maurice?” she said, suddenly.
He looked at her swiftly, sideways.
“Er—about what, Julie?”
“Oh, everything! About this! I can’t go back into East Forty-Seventh.”
“Er—,” he hesitated, “no, I suppose not—Not just now at least.”
“Never,” she said, and there was a silence.
“Well—er—I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you think you can come out here?” she said.
“Yes!—I can stay for a month. I think I can manage a month,” he hesitated. Then he ventured a complicated, shy peep at her, and hid his face again.
She looked down at him, her alert breasts lifted with a sigh, as if a breeze of impatience shook them.
“I can’t go back,” she said slowly. “I can’t go back on this sun. If you can’t come here——”
She ended on an open note. He glanced at her again and again, furtively, but with growing admiration and lessening confusion.
“No!” he said. “This kind of thing suits you. You are splendid! No, I don’t think you can go back.”
He was thinking of her in the New York flat, pale, silent, oppressing him terribly. He was the soul of gentle timidity, in his human relations, and her silent, awful hostility after the baby was born, had frightened him deeply. Because he had realised she couldn’t help it. Women were like that. Their feelings took a reverse direction, even against their own selves, and it was awful—awful! Awful, awful to live in the house with a woman like that, whose feelings were reversed even against herself! He had felt himself ground down under the millstone of her helpless enmity. She had ground even herself down to the quick, and the child as well. No, anything rather than that.
“But what about you?” she asked.
“I? Oh, I!—I can carry an the business; and—er—come over here for the holidays—as long as you like to stay. You stay as long as you wish.” He looked, a long time down at the earth, then glanced up at her with a touch of supplication in his uneasy eyes.
“Even for ever?”
“Well—er—yes, if you like. For ever is a long time. One can’t set a date.”
“And I can: do anything I like?” She looked him straight in the eyes, challenging. And he was powerless against her rosy, wind-hardened nakedness.
“Er—yes!—I suppose so! So long as you don’t make yourself unhappy—or the boy.”
Again he looked up at her with, a complicated, uneasy appeal—thinking of the child; but hoping for himself.
“I won’t,” she said, quickly.
“No!” he said. “No! I don’t think you will.”
There was a pause. The bells of the village were hastily clanging mid-day. That meant lunch.
She slipped into her grey crepe kimono, and fastened a broad green sash round her waist. Then she slipped a little blue shirt over the boy’s head, and they went up to the house.
At table she watched her husband, his grey city face, hie fixed, black-grey hair, his very precise table manners, and his extreme moderation in eating and drinking. Sometimes he glanced at her, furtively, from under his black lashes. He had the gold-grey eyes of an animal that has been caught young, and reared completely in captivity.
They went on to the balcony for coffee. Below, beyond, on the next podere across the steep little gully, a peasant and his wife were sitting under an almond tree, near the green wheat, eating their mid-day meal from a little white cloth spread on the ground. There was a huge piece of bread, and glasses with dark wine.
Juliet put her husband with his back to this picture: she set facing. Because, the moment she and Maurice had come out on the balcony, the peasant had glanced up.