The mother

by Pearl S. Buck

“Mine is there around the hill,” she said half unwillingly, and now her eyes were dropped and she made as if to take the hoe again.

“Around the hill?” the man said and then his voice grew soft and he smoothed that lip of his with his big soft hand and smiled and said, “But show me, goodwife!”

He fixed his eyes on her steadily now and openly and his gaze had power to move her somehow and she put down her hoe and went with him, following after him as women do when they walk with men.

The sun beat down on them as they went and the earth was warm beneath their feet and green and soft with grass. Suddenly as she walked the woman felt her blood grow all sweet and languorous in her with the hot sun. And without knowing why, it gave her some deep pleasure to look at the man who walked ahead of her, at his strong pale neck, shining with sweat, at his body moving in the long smooth robe of summer stuff, at his feet in white clean hose and black shoes of cloth. And she went silently on her bare feet and she came near to him and caught some fragrance from him, too strong for perfume, some compound of man’s blood and flesh and sweat. When she caught it in her nostrils she was stirred with longing and it was such a longing she grew frightened of herself and of what she might do, and she cried out faltering, and standing still upon the grassy path, “I have forgot something for my old mother!” and when he turned and looked at her, she faltered out again thickly, her whole body suddenly hot and weak, “I have forgot a thing I had to do—” and she turned from him and walked as quickly as she could and left him there staring after her.

Straight she went to her house and she crept across the threshold and none noticed her, for everyone lay sleeping. The heat of the day had grown heavier as the afternoon wore on. Across the way the cousin’s wife sat sleeping, her mouth ajar, and the last babe sleeping at her breast. Here the old grandmother slept too, her head drooped and her nose upon her chin, and her clothes slipped to her waist still as she had sat in the sun. The girl had come out of the close room and lay curled against a cool stone for a pillow and she slept, and the younger lad lay naked and stretched to his full length beneath the willow tree, asleep.

The very day had changed. It was grown darker and more still and full of deeper and more burning heat. Great clouds loomed swollen, black and monstrous, up from the hills. But they shone silver-edged, luminous from some strange inner light. Even the sound of any insect, the call of any bird, was stilled in the vast hot silence of that day.

But the mother was far from sleep. She went softly into the darkened, silent room, and she sat herself upon the bed and the blood thundered in her ears, the blood of her strong hungry body. Now she knew what was amiss with her. She pretended nothing to herself now, as a townswoman might pretend, that there was some illness she had. No, she was too simple to pretend when well she knew how it was with her, and she was more frightened than she had ever been in her whole life, for she knew that such hunger as was in her now grew raving if it were not fed.... She did not even dream she could repulse him, now she knew her own hunger was the same as his, and she groaned aloud and cried to her heart, “It would be better if he would not have me—Oh, I wish he would not have me, and that I might be saved!”

But even while she groaned she rose driven from off that bed and went from the sleeping hamlet and to the fields along the way that she had come. She walked along under the great, black, bright-edged clouds and about her were the hills, livid green and clean against the blackness. She went under such a sky, along the little winding turn the path took where it turned past a small and ruined shrine, and there in the door of the shrine the man stood, waiting.

And she could not pass him. No, when he went inside and waited she followed to the door and looked and there he stood inside the twilight of the windowless shrine, waiting, and his eyes gleamed out of that twilight, shining as a beast’s eyes, waiting, and she went in.

They looked at each other in the dim light, two people in a dream, desperate, beyond any power now to stay, and they made ready for what they must do.