In Great Waters: Four Stories

by Thomas A. Janvier

What first opened my eyes a little was the way that I felt about it when she gave her promise to Jan. For all our lives Jan and I had been close friends: and most close since that day when the squall struck our boats, as we lay near together, and I went overboard, and Jan—letting his own boat take its chances—came overboard after me because he knew that I could not swim. It was by a hair's-breadth only that we were not drowned together. After we were safe I told him that my life was his. And I meant it, then. Until Magali came between us I would have died for him with a right good will. After that I was ready enough that he should do the dying—and so be gone out of my way.

When he got Magali's promise, I say, my ugly feeling against him began. But it was not very strong at first, and I was not clear about it in my own mind. All that I felt was that, somehow, he had got between me and the sun. For one thing, I did not want to be clear about it. Down in the roots of me I knew that I had no right to that sunshine, and that Jan had—and I could not help thinking about how he had come overboard after me and had held me up there in the tumbling sea, and how I had told him that my life was his. But with this went a little thin thought, stirring now and then in the bottom of my mind though I would not own to it, that in giving him my life—which still was his if he wanted it—I had not given him the right to spoil my life for me while leaving me still alive. And I did my best not to think one way or the other, and was glad that it all was a blur and a haze.

And all the while I was living close beside Magali in that little house, with the sound of her steps always near me and the sound of her voice always in my ears. She had a very sweet voice, with a freshness and a brightness in it that seemed to me like the brightness of her eyes—and Magali's great black eyes were the brightest eyes that ever I saw. Even in Arles, where all the women are beautiful, there would be a buzz among the people lining Les Lices when Magali walked there of a feast-day, wearing the beautiful dress that our women wear here in Provence. To look at her made you think of an Easter morning sun.

III

"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!"

My mother's words kept on ringing in my ears after I had left her. Suddenly the haze was gone and I saw clearly—and I knew that my heart's deep desire was to have Magali for my very own. And with that sudden coming of clear sight I knew, too, that I could have her. Out of the past came a crowd of memories which proved it to me. In my dull way, I say, I had fancied that I loved Magali as a sister, and I had tried to keep that fancy always by me in my haze. But with the haze gone—swept away by my mother's words as the mistral sweeps away our Mediterranean fogs—I knew that Magali never had been the fool that I had been.

I remembered her looks and her ways with me from the very day when she came to us, when she was just turned of sixteen: how she used sometimes to lay her hand lightly on my shoulder, how she would bend over to look at the net that I was mending until her hair brushed against my cheek or my forehead, how she always was bringing things to show me that I could not see rightly unless she stood very close at my side, and most of all how a dozen times a day she would be flashing at me her great black eyes. And I remembered how moody and how strange in her ways she was just before Jan got his promise from her; and how, when she told me that her promise was given, she gave me a look like none that ever I had from her, and said slowly: "The fisherman who will not catch any fish at all because he cannot catch the fish he wants most—is a fool, Marius!"

Yet even then I did not understand; though, as I say, my eyes were opened a little and I had the feeling that Jan had got between me and the sun. That feeling grew stronger because of the way that she treated him and treated me. Jan was for hurrying the marriage, but she kept him dangling and always was putting him off. As for me, I got all sides of her moods and tempers. Sometimes she scarcely would speak to me. Sometimes she would give me looks from those big black eyes of hers that thrilled me through! Sometimes she would hang about me in a patient sad way that made me think of a dog begging for food. And the colour so went out of her face that her big black eyes looked bigger and blacker still.

Then it was that I began to find in the haze that was about me a refuge—because I did not want to see clear. I let my thoughts go out to Magali, and stopped them before they got to Jan. It would be time enough, I reasoned—though I did not really reason it: I only felt it—to think about him when I had to. For the passing hours it was enough to have the sweetness of being near Magali—and that grew to be a greater sweetness with every fresh new day. Presently I noticed that her colour had come back again; and it seemed to me—though that may have been only because of my new love of her—that she had a new beauty, tender and strange. Certainly there was a new brightness, a curiously glowing brightness, in her eyes.