But she could not even smile at his so calling the other two children as though he were a man beside them. She answered, “Aye, here I be, at last, and very weary somehow,” and she went and fetched a little food and ate it cold, and all the time the trinkets lay in her bosom.
When she had eaten she glanced toward the bed and by the candlelight she saw the lad slept too, and so she fastened the curtains and then she sat down beside the table and took the little packet from her breast and opened the soft paper which enwrapped it. There the rings lay, glittering and white, and the earrings were beautiful. Upon each were fastened three small fine chains, and at the end of each chain hung a little toy. She took them in her hard fingers and looked closely and upon one chain hung a tiny fish and upon the second a little bell and upon the third a little pointed star, all daintily and cleverly made and pleasing to any woman. She had never held such pretty things before in her hard brown palm. She sat and looked at them a while and sighed and wrapped them up again, not knowing what to do with them, or how to give them back to that man.
But when she had crept under the quilt with the children she could not sleep. Although her body was cold with the damp chill of the night her cheeks were burning hot and she could not sleep for a long time and then at last but lightly. And partly she dreamed of some strange thing shining, and partly she dreamed of a man’s hot hand upon her.
X
She did not see the man again through the whole spring, although she remembered him. She did not see him until a day in the early summer, when the wheat was turning faintly gold, and she had sown her rice in beds for seedlings, and it was sprouted new and green and set in small blocks of jade near the house where it could be well watched by the old grandmother against the greedy birds that loved its tenderness. And all this time her heart lay in her hot and fallow.
But there came a day in that early summer, a day windless and full of soft new heat. The cicadas called their sharp loves and when they had called past the crisis their voices trailed slow and languorous into silence again. Into the valley the sun poured down its heat like clear warm wine and the smooth warm stones of the solitary street of the little hamlet threw back the heat again so that the air shimmered and danced above them, and through those waves the little naked children ran and played, their smooth bodies shining with their sweat.
There was no little passing wind of any sort at all. Standing upon her threshold the mother thought she had never felt such close and sudden heat as this so soon in summer. The younger boy ran to the edge of the pool and sat in the water there, laughing and shouting to his playmates to come and join him, and the elder lad took off his coat and rolled his trousers high and put on his head a wide old bamboo hat that had been his father’s once and went out to the field of newly sprouted corn. The girl sat in the house for darkness and her mother heard her sighing there. Only the old woman loved this heat and she sat in the sun and slipped the coat from her old withered frame and let the sun soak down into her old bones and on her breasts that hung like bits of dried skin on her bosom, and she piped when she saw her son’s wife there, “I never fear to die in summer, daughter! The sun is good as new blood and bones to an old dried thing like me!”
But the mother could not bear the outer heat. Heat there was enough inside her and her blood seemed this day to thunder through her veins with too much heat. She left the house then saying, “I must go and water the rice a while. A very drying sun today, old mother,” and she took her hoe and on her shoulder slung her empty water buckets and so walked down the narrow path to where a further pond lay somewhat higher than the seed beds of the rice, and she walked gratefully, because the air though hot was not so shut and lifeless as it had been on the street.
She walked on and met no one at all, because it was the hour after noon when men take their rest. Here and there if a man had gone early to his field he sought the shade, for, after all, the heat was too great for labor, and he lay sleeping under some tree, his hat covering his face against the flies, and beside him stood his beast, its head drooping and all its body slack with heat and drowsiness. But the mother could bear the heat because it came down out of the sky and was not shut between walls or all in her own veins.
She worked on a while then in her seed beds and with her hoe she cut a little gate in the higher edge of the bed and she dug a small water way to the pond, and then she went to the pond’s edge and with her buckets slung upon the pole she dipped first one and then the other into the water and then emptied them into the ditch she had dug. Over and over she dipped the water and watched the earth grow dark and moist and
