In the morning the strange land of Provence opened out under mist which presently cleared away beneath the steady drive of the sun. The low hills that border the valley of the Rhone cantered past him—quaint, treeless hills here scarped and sun-scorched, there covered with low balsam shrubs. Now and again they passed a straggling white village roofed with big, curved, sun-mellowed tiles. Around the village there would be a few trees, and on these the early Spring of the Midi had laid her fingers in tender caress.
The air was keen and yet strangely soft; to Rivière it was wine of life. He drew it in thirstily; let the wind of the train blow his hair as it listed; watched greedily the ever-changing landscape. The strange bare beauty of this land of sunshine and romance brought him a keen thrill of happiness.
It was as though he had loosed himself from prison chains and had emerged into a new life of freedom.
In full morning they reached Arles, the old Roman city in the delta of the Rhone. It clusters, huddles around the stately Roman arena on the hill in the centre of the town—a place of narrow, tortuous ruelles where every stone cries out a message from the past. In the lanes, going about the business of the day, were women and girls moulded in the strange dark beauty of the district—the "belles Arlésiennes" famous in prose and verse.
Yet chiefly it was the arena that fascinated him. All through the afternoon he wandered about the great stone tiers, flooded in sunlight, and reconstructed for himself a picture of the days when gladiators down below had striven with one another for success—or death. The arena was the archetype of civilized life.
Now he was a spectator, one of the multitude who look on. It was good to sit in the flooding sunlight and know that he was no longer a gladiator in the arena. There was higher work for him to do, away from the merciless stabbing sword and the cunning of net and trident.
At intervals during the afternoon a few tourists—mostly Americans—rushed up in high-powered, panting cars to the gateway of the arena; gave a hurried ten minutes to the interior; and then whirled away across the white roads of the Rhone delta in a scurry of dust.
Only one visitor seemed to realize, like himself, the glamour of the past and to steep the mind in it. This was a woman. Her age was perhaps twenty-five, in her bearing was that subtle, scarcely definable, sureness of self which marks off womanhood from girlhood. She climbed from tier to tier of the amphitheatre with firm confident step; stood gazing down on her dream pictures of the scene in the arena; moved on to a fresh vantage-point. She wore a short tailored skirt which ignored the ugly, skin-tight convention of the current fashion. Her cheeks were fresh with a healthy English colour; her eyes were deep blue, toning almost to violet; her hair was burnished chestnut under the soft felt hat curled upwards in front; a faint odour of healthy womanhood formed as it were an aura around her.
All this John Rivière had noticed subconsciously as she passed close by him on the ledge where he sat, walking with her firm, confident step. Though he noted it appreciatively, yet it disturbed him. He did not want to notice any woman. He had big work to do, and on that he wanted to concentrate all his faculties. He had had no thought of a woman in his life when he broke the chains that shackled him to the Clifford Matheson existence. He purposed to have no call of sex to divert him from the realization of his big idea.
Presently she had climbed to the topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, and stood out against the sky-line of the sunset-to-be, deep-chested, straight, clean-limbed, a very perfect figure of a modern Diana.