'Take her away, into the sun,' the doctors 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 heavy blackness, shaken over with spilled
dribbles of light. She leaned on 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 forever.

'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 note of
clinging to the last straw of hope.

'No, neither do I,' she responded in a flat voice.

She remembered how bitterly they had 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 which counts, it is the deep iron rhythm of
habit, the year-long, life-long habits; the deep-set stroke of power.

And in their two lives the power was hostile, his and hers. Like two engines
running at variance with each other, 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 the crowd. One among a crowd ! C'est ca !

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, 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, she 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 steeply, 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 the 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 all 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 irritated 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 the 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 naked and molten, sparkling over
the sea's rim. The house faced south-west. 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.

So the desire sprang up secretly in her to go naked in the sun. She cherished
her desire like a secret.

But she wanted 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.

But she found a place: a rocky bluff, shoved out to the sea and sun and
overgrown with large cactus, the flat-leaved cactus called prickly pear. Out
of this blue-grey knoll of cactus rose one cypress tree, with a pallid, thick
trunk, and a tip that leaned over, flexible, up in the blue. It stood like a
guardian looking out to sea; or a low, silvery candle whose huge flame was
darkness against light: earth sending up her proud tongue of gloom.

Juliet sat down by the cypress trees 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 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,
he breasts.

Soon, however, she felt the sun inside them, warmer that ever love had been,
warmer than milk or the hands of her baby. At last, as 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 his look of blue 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 colours 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 white gourd in the sun, that must ripen to gold.

She could feel the sun penetrating even into her bones; nay, farther, even
into her emotions, her 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 feel warm right through. Turning over, she let her shoulders
dissolve in the sun, her loins, the backs of her thighs, even her heels. And
she lay half stunned with wonder at the thing that was happening to her. Her
weary, chilled heart was melting, and, in melting, evaporating.

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

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 drowned heart for once felt none of the anxious love-anguish in return.
She caught the child up in her arms, but she thought: He should not be such a
lump ! If her were in the sun, he would spring up.

She resented, rather, his little hands clutching at her, especially at her
neck. She pulled her throat away. She did not want to be touched. She put the
child gently down.

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

And there and then she took off her 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, 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, querulous, 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 interested in 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 her mating
with him. Her life was now a whole ritual. She lay always awake, before dawn,
watching for the grey to colour to pale gold, to know if cloud 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. Then thin little wild crocuses came up
mauve and striped, the wild narcissi hung in 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.

She knew the sun in heaven, 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 knew
her, in the cosmic carnal sense of the word, came over her a feeling of
detachment from people, and a certain contempt for human beings altogether.
They were so un-elemental, so unsunned. 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 men cowered in fear of death, and in fear of the natural blaze of life. He
dared not quite emerge: 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 unseen. 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 over sixty, 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 that underlies all long experience. Tragedy is lack of
experience.

'It must be beautiful to go unclothed 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 temple. Marinina was a woman
of Magna Graæcia, and had far memories. She looked again at Juliet. 'But you
have to be beautiful yourself, if you're not going to give offence to the sun
? Isn't it so ?' 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 fishy
and unhealthy.

And she would rub a little olive oil in her skin, and wander a moment in the
dark underworld of the lemons, balancing a lemon flower in her navel, laughing
to herself. There was just a chance some peasant might see her. But if he did
he would be more afraid of her that she of him. She knew the white core of
fear in the clothed bodies of men.

She knew it even in her little son. How he mistrusted her, now that she
laughed at him, with the sun in her face ! She insisted on his toddling naked
in the sunshine everyday. And now his little body was pink, too, his blond
hair was pushed thick from his brow, his cheeks had a pomegranate scarlet, in
te delicate gold of the sunny skin. He was bonny and healthy, and the
servants, loving his red and gold and blue, called him and angel from heaven.

But he mistrusted his mother: she laughed at him. And she saw in his wide blue
eyes, under the little frown, that centre of fear, misgiving, which she
believed was at the centre of all male eyes now. She called it the fear of the
sun.

'He fears the sun,' she would say to herself, looking down into the eyes of
the child.

And as she watched him toddling, swaying, tumbling in the sunshine, making his
little, bird-like noises, she saw that he held himself tight and hidden from
the sun, inside himself. His spirit was like a snail in a shell, in a damp,
cold crevice inside himself. It made her think of his father. She wished she
could make him come forth, break out in a gesture of recklessness and
salutation.

She determined to take him with her, down to the cypress tree among the
cactus. She would have to watch him, because of the thorns. But surely in that
place he would come forth from that little shell, deep inside him. That little
civilised tension would disappear off his brow.

She spread a rug for him and sat him down. Then she slid off her wrapper and
lay down herself, watching a hawk high in the blue, and the tip of the cypress
hanging over.

The boy played with stones on the rug. When he got up to toddle away, she sat
up too. He turned and looked at her. Almost, from his blue eyes, it was the
challenging, warm look of the true male. And he was handsome, with the scarlet
in the golden blond of his skin. He was not really white. His skin was
gold-dusky.

'Mind the thorns, darling,' she said.

'Thorns !' re-echoed the child, in a birdy chirp, still looking at her over
his shoulder, like some naked cherub in a picture, doubtful.

'Nasty prickly thorns.'

''Ickly thorns !'

He staggered in his little sandals over the stones, pulling at the dry, wild
mint. She was quick as a serpent, leaping to him, when he was going to fall
against the prickles. It surprised even herself. 'What a wild cat I am, really
!' she said to herself.

She brought him every day, when the sun shone, to the cypress tree.

'Come !' she said. 'Let us go to the cypress tree.'

And if there was a cloudy day, with the tramontana blowing, so that she could
not go down, the child would chirp incessantly: 'Cypress tree ! Cypress tree !'

He missed it as much as she did.

It was not just taking sunbaths. It was much more that that. Something deep
inside her unfolded and relaxed, and she was given. By some mysterious power
inside her, deeper than her known consciousness and will, she was put into
connection with the sun, and the stream flowed of itself, from her womb. She
herself, her conscious self, was secondary, a secondary person, almost an
onlooker. The true Juliet was this dark flow from the her deep body to the sun.

She had always been mistress of herself, aware of what she was doing, and held
tense for her own power. Now she felt inside her quite another sort of power,
something greater than herself, flowing by itself.

Now she was vague, but she had a power beyond herself.

III

The end of February was suddenly very hot. Almond blossom was falling like
pink snow, in the touch of the smallest breeze. The mauve, silky little
anemonies were out, the asphodels tall in bud, and the sea was cornflower blue.

Juliet had ceased to trouble about anything. Now, most of the day, she and the
child were naked in the sun, and it was all she wanted. Sometimes she went
down to the sea to bathe: often she wandered in the gullies where the sun
shone in, and she was out of sight. Sometimes she saw a peasant with an ass,
and he saw her. But she went on simply and quietly with her child; and the
fame of the sun's healing power, for the soul as well as for the body, had
already spread among the people; so that there was no excitement.

The child and she were now both tanned with a rosy-golden tan all over. 'I am
another being !' she said to herself, as she looked at her red-gold breasts
and thighs.

The child, too, was a another creature, with a peculiar, quiet, sun-darkened
absorption. Now he played by himself in silence, and she hardly need notice
him. He seemed no longer to know when he was alone.

There was a breeze, and the sea was ultra marine. She sat by the great silver
paw of the cypress tree, drowsed in the sun, but her breasts alert, full of
sap. She was becoming aware that an activity was rousing in her, an activity
which would carry her into a new way of life. Still she did not want to be
aware. She knew well enough the vast cold apparatus of civilisation, so
difficult to evade.

The child had gone a few yards down the rocky path, round the great sprawling
of a cactus. She had seen him, a real gold-brown infant of the winds, with
burnt gold hair and red cheeks, collecting the speckled pitcher-flowers and
laying them in rows. He could balance now, and was quick for his own
emergencies, like an absorbed young animal playing silent.

Suddenly she heard him speaking: 'Look Mummy ! Mummy, look !' A note in
his bird-like voice made her lean forward sharply.

Her heart stood still. He was looking over his naked little shoulder at her,
and pointing with a loose little hand at a snake which had reared itself up a
yard away from him, and was opening its mouth so that its forked, soft tongue
flickered black like a shadow, uttering a short hiss.

'Look, Mummy !'

'Yes, darling, it's a snake !' came the slow, deep voice.

He looked at he, his wide blue eyes uncertain whether to be afraid or not.
Some stillness of the sun in her reassured him.

'Snake !' he chirped.

'Yes, darling. Don't touch it, it can bite.'

The snake had sunk down, and was reaching away from the coils in which it had
been basking asleep. and slowly was easing its long, gold-brown body into the
rocks, with slow curves. The boy turned and watched in silence. Then he said:

'Snake going !'

'Yes ! Let it go. It likes to be alone.'

He still watched the slow, easing length as the creature drew itself apathetic
out of sight.

'Snake gone back,' he said.

'Yes, it's gone back. Come to Mummy a moment.'

He came and sat with his plump, naked little body on her naked lap, and she
smoothed his burnt, bright hair. She said nothing, feeling that everything was
passed. The curious soothing power of the sun filled her, filled the whole
place like a charm, and the snake was part of the place, along with her and
the child.

Another day, in the dry stone wall of one of the olive terraces, she saw a
black snake horizontally creeping.

'Marinina,' she said, 'I saw a black snake. Are they harmful ?'

'Ah, the black snakes, no ! But the yellow ones, yes ! If the yellow ones bite
you, you die. But the y frighten me, they frighten me, even the black ones,
when I see one.'

Juliet still went to the cypress tree with the child. But she always looked
carefully round before she sat down, examining everywhere where the child
might go. Then she would lie and turn to the sun again, her tanned,
pear-shaped breasts pointing up. She would take no thought for the morrow. She
refused to think outside her garden, and she could not write letters. She
would tell the nurse to write.

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 Giulietta !'

Juliet faced round, standing up. Marinina paused for 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 cooly, 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 externally 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, birdily 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, so ! 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. The
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 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 on 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 midday. That
meant lunch.

She slipped into her grey crepe kimono, and fastened a broad green sash round
her waist. The 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, his 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 midday 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 sat facing. Because,
the moment she and Maurice had come out on the balcony, the peasant had
glanced up.

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 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 and sunburnt, he
had a cropped brown 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 pardone 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 violentfarouche 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. There were
aware of one another. She new, in the morning, the moment he arrived with his
ass. And the moment she went out on 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 was her as he lifted his flushed face, and she was backing away. A
flame went over his eyes, and 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 would
work, hidden in 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 this 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 hall-mark.

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 blue eyes, and the answer in her had been a
gush of fire. He would had 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.