V
She knew him, in the distance, perfectly. He was a rather fat, very broad fellow of about thirty-five, and he chewed large mouthfuls of bread. His wife was stiff and dark faced, handsome, sombre. They had no children. So much Juliet had learned.
The peasant worked a great deal alone, on the opposite podere. His clothes were always very clean and cared-for, white trousers and a coloured shirt, and an old straw hat. Both he and his wife had that air of quiet superiority which belongs to individuals, not to a class.
His attraction was in his vitality, the peculiar quick energy which gave a charm to his movements, stout and broad as he was. In the early days before she took to the sun, Juliet had met him suddenly, among the rocks, when she had scrambled over to the next podere. He had been aware of her before she saw him, so that when she did look up, he took off his hat, gazing at her with shyness and pride, from his big blue eyes. His face was broad, sunburnt, he had a cropped brown moustache and thick brown eyebrows, nearly as thick as his moustache, meeting under his low, wide brow.
“Oh!” she said. “Can I walk here?”
“Surely!” he replied, with that peculiar hot haste which characterised his movement. “My padrone would wish you to walk wherever you like on his land.”
And he pressed back his head in the quick, vivid shy generosity of his nature. She had gone on quickly. But instantly she had recognised the violent generosity of his blood, and the equally violent farouche shyness.
Since then she had seen him in the distance every day, and she came to realise that he was one who lived a good deal to himself, like a quick animal, and that his wife loved him intensely, with a jealousy that was almost hate; because, probably, he wanted to give himself still, still further, beyond where she could take him.
One day, when a group of peasants sat under a tree, she had seen him dancing quick and gay with a child—his wife watching darkly.
Gradually Juliet and he had become intimate, across the distance. They were aware of one another. She knew, in the morning, the moment he arrived with his ass. And the moment she went out on to the balcony he turned to look. But they never saluted. Yet she missed him when he did not come to work on the podere.
Once, in the hot morning when she had been walking naked, deep in the gully between the two estates, she had come upon him, as he was bending down, with his powerful shoulders, picking up wood to pile on his motionless, waiting donkey. He saw her as he lifted his flushed face, and she was backing away. A flame went over his eyes, and a flame flew over her body, melting her bones. But she backed away behind the bushes, silently, and retreated whence she had come. And she wondered a little resentfully over the silence in which he could work, hidden in the bushy places. He had that wild animal faculty.
Since then there had been a definite pain of consciousness in the body of each of them, though neither would admit it, and they gave no sign of recognition. But the man’s wife was instinctively aware.
And Juliet had thought: Why shouldn’t I meet this man for an hour, and bear his child? Why should I have to identify my life with a man’s life? Why not meet him for an hour, as long as the desire lasts, and no more? There is already the spark between us.
But she had never made any sign. And now she saw him looking up, from where he sat by the white cloth, opposite his black-clad wife, looking up at Maurice. The wife turned and looked too, saturnine.
And Juliet felt a grudge come over her. She would have to bear Maurice’s child again. She had seen it in her husband’s eyes. And she knew it from his answer, when she spoke to him.
“Will you walk about in the sun, too, without your clothes?” she asked him.
“Why—er—yes! Yes, I should like to, while I’m here—I suppose it’s quite private?”
There was a gleam in his eyes, a desperate kind of courage of his desire, and a glance at the alert lifting of her breasts in her wrapper. In his way, he was a man, too, he faced the world and was not entirely quenched in his male courage. He would dare to walk in the sun, even ridiculously.
But he smelled of the world, and all its fetters and its mongrel cowering. He was branded with the brand that is not a hallmark.
Ripe now, and brown-rosy all over with the sun, and with a heart like a fallen rose, she had wanted to go down to the hot, shy peasant and bear his child. Her sentiments had fallen like petals. She had seen the flushed blood in the burnt face, and the flame in the southern blue eyes, and the answer in her had been a gush of fire. He would have been a procreative sun-bath to her, and she wanted it.
Nevertheless, her next child would be Maurice’s. The fatal chain of continuity would cause it.