Marise felt herself in such a nervously heightened state of sensitiveness to everything and everybody in those days, that it did not surprise her to find that for the first time she received something more than a quaint and amusing impression from the old aborigine. She had never noticed it before, but sometimes there was something about Touclé's strange, battered, leathery old face . . . what was it? The idea came to her a new one, that Touclé was also a person, not merely a curious and enigmatic phenomenon.
Touclé was preparing to depart in the silent, unceremonious, absent-minded way she did everything, as though she were the only person in the world. She opened the screen door, stepped out into the torrid glare of the sunshine and, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure, trudged down the path.
"Where does she go?" thought Marise, and "What was that expression on her face I could not name?"
Impulsively she went out quickly herself, and followed after the old woman.
"Touclé! Touclé!" she called, and wondered if her voice in these days sounded to everyone as nervous and uncertain as it did to her.
The old woman turned and waited till the younger had overtaken her. They were under the dense shade of an old maple, beside the road, as they stood looking at each other.
As she had followed, Marise regretted her impulse, and had wondered what in the world she could find to say, but now that she saw again the expression in the other's face, she cried out longingly, "Touclé, where do you go that makes you look peaceful?"
The old woman glanced at her, a faint surprise appearing in her deeply lined face. Then she looked at her, without surprise, seriously as though to see what she might read in the younger woman's eyes. She stood for a long moment, thinking. Finally she sat down on the grass under the maple-tree, and motioned Marise to sit beside her. She meditated for a long time, and then said, hesitatingly, "I don't know as a white person could understand. White people . . . nobody ever asked me before."
She sat silent, her broad, dusty feet in their elastic-sided, worn, run-over shoes straight before her, the thick, horny eyelids dropped over her eyes, her scarred old face carved into innumerable deep lines. Marise wondered if she had forgotten that anyone else was there. She turned her own eyes away, finally, and looking at the mountains saw that black thunderclouds were rolling up over the Eagle Rocks. Then the old woman said, her eyes still dropped, "I tell you how my uncle told me, seventy-five years ago. He said people are like fish in an underground brook, in a black cave. He said there is a place, away far off from where they live, where there is a crack in the rock. If they went 'way off they could get a glimpse of what daylight is. And about once in so often they need to swim there and look out at the daylight. If they don't, they lose their eyesight from always being in the dark. He said that a lot of Indians don't care whether they lose their eyesight or not, so long's they can go on eating and swimming around. But good Indians do. He said that as far as he could make out, none of the white people care. He said maybe they've lost their eyes altogether."
Without a move of her sagging, unlovely old body, she turned her deep black eyes on the flushed, quivering, beautiful woman beside her. "That's where I go," she answered. "I go 'way off to be by myself, and get a glimpse of what daylight is."