This is of the primitive passions. It is one which we share with, or inherit from the brutes. A cat, a lap-dog, a parrot, will sicken of jealousy. Children, savages, uneducated people, our semi-educated fellow-citizens (our new masters), are subject to severe and protracted fits of this torturing disease. We have known a working-man, middle-aged, of failing health, and with a sickly wife and young family to support, throw up a foreman's post of twenty-eight shillings the week and begin life again upon seventeen as a common labourer, from sheer jealousy of one of the gang under him whom he could not induce his firm to discharge without a reason.
Women are more liable to the malady than men because they have, upon the whole, less distractions for their minds. A man can escape from the proximity of his enemy (once possibly his friend), he can steep his mind in business, in politics, in literature, in sport. A woman has her rival ever at her elbow, in her kitchen, in the nursery, in the school-room or next door.
In the case of poor Pŭl-Yūn the position was reversed. It was he, who with hardening muscles and strengthening passion, was debarred from healthy and adequate physical exercise, and was fain to eat his heart in bitterness of spirit, with an accusing conscience ever at his elbow, a house-mate for which he had no name, for the Thing, like many other Things, rheumatism, gravity, panic-terror, malaria, etc., although maleficent, had not yet been separated, personified and named.
Picture him overlooking with the beady, deep-set, far-sighted eyes of the savage, like an eagle from his eyrie, the doings of his jealously-loved squaw a half-mile away and three hundred feet below.
There, she had set that gin, and half arose, her chert-knife in one hand, her bow in the other. Sudden as the pounce of a lynx (and nothing in nature save the stroke of a snake can be swifter), a man leaped upon her from the scrub. Pŭl-Yūn caught his breath, for the enemy had her by the kaross and must have borne her down had not his foot caught in a trailing bough of pumilus. As it was, it was the nearest thing in the world, for as he stumbled, still fast to her, the skewer at her throat snapped, he reeled back with the kaross, the woman was free. He was at her again, but she doubled under his tossed-up arm, striking back and up as she did so and getting him in the arm-pit, as her husband thought. By some means she was at liberty, off and away; not along the glade, but winding swift and puzzlingly amid the tangling scrub of which she knew every game-track by heart. This was the saving of her, as Pŭl-Yūn saw and breathed again, for two other hunters now upsprang from beside the path which they had anticipated her flying feet would follow. These seemed for a moment somewhat out of it, for their quarry had doubled back and secured a lead, but they were hardened braves in the pink of condition, winter-hunters who seemed to know the valley, and once clear of that patch of scrub what would happen?
There is but one thing that can happen when an unarmed woman is set upon by three armed men—unless, indeed, she be helped. But how was Dêh-Yān to be helped?—and by whom?—By himself only! He smote his stiff knee and yelped a short and very bitter laugh. Yes, the girl must come to him for help at the last.
Meanwhile she was playing the game, running her ring about the thicket, as a vixen does when roused. There was just the off-chance that she might throw her pursuers out, and get back to her earth unviewed. But, with three men (and such men), it was the poorest of chances, and she was incurring the most outrageous risks. She had boasted somewhat to him of her speed, and he had believed that she was fleet for a woman, but what woman, or what man, for the matter of that, could stand up before three?—She was heading down-glen when he lost sight of the chase, and every step would have to be retraced, and the double made in face of a runner-up pressing her for all he was worth, and flankers running wide to cut her off when she turned.
He threw himself upon the cave-floor and gnawed his knuckles in impotent chagrin.
She should not have turned. She should have headed straight for him at once. They would have stood out the siege together, and died together, for that was what it would have come to, as he saw too clearly.
As for his wife making a successful stand anywhere, or under any circumstances, and fighting it out with that new Thing of hers, the idea never occurred to him once during the long hours of his lonely vigil.