“He cannot read,” the mother said astonished. “He never told me that he lived by books, a very strange odd thing, I swear! I must ask him of it.”
The next day when she was on the ass and they went winding through the valleys she took the chance of being alone with him and she did ask her son, “What are those books and papers that my cousin’s son says you have in that room where you all live? You never told me you could read or that you live by books. I never saw you read a word, my son.”
Then the young man stopped the little song he had been singing as they went for he had a good voice to sing and loved to sing, and he said, “Aye, I have learned a little.” And when she pressed him further he said, evading her, “Mother, do not ask me now, for some day you will know everything and when the hour comes. A great day, mother, and I was singing of it just now, a song we sing together where I work, and on that day we shall all be eased, and there shall be no more rich and no more poor and all of us shall have the same.”
Now this was the wildest talk the mother had ever heard, for well she knew heaven wills who shall be rich and who shall be poor, and men have naught to say but take their destiny and bear it, and she cried out afraid, “I hope you are not in some wicked company, my son, not with thieves or some such company! It sounds the way robbers talk, my son! There is no other way for poor to be rich than that, and it is ill to be rich and lose your life if you be caught at it!”
But the young man grew angry at this and said, “Mother, you do not understand at all! I am sworn to silence now, but some day you shall know. Yes, I shall not forget you on that day. But only you. I will not share with any who have not shared with me.” This last he said so loudly that she knew he felt against his brother and so she was silent for a while, fearing to rouse his wrath.
But she could not let him be. She sat as bid upon the ass and clung to the beast’s hairy skin and thought about this son and looked at him secretly. There he walked ahead of her, the beast’s halter in his hand, and now he was singing again, some song she had never heard, some beating fiery song whose words she could not catch, and she thought to herself that she must know more of his life. Yes, and she must bind him somehow more closely to his home and to them all. She would wed him and have his wife there in the house. Then would he often come and even live there, perhaps, for the wife’s sake. She would seek and find a pretty, touching maid whom he could love, for the elder son’s wife could do the work, and she would find another sort for this son. And as she thought of this her heart was eased because it seemed a good way and she could not keep it back and so she said, “Son, you are more than twenty now, and near to twenty-one, and I think to wed you soon. How is that for a merry thing?”
But who can tell what a young man’s heart will be? Instead of smiling silence, half pleased and half ashamed, he stopped and turned and said to her most wilfully, “I have been waiting for you to say some such thing—it is all that mothers’ heads run upon, I do believe! My comrades tell me it is the chiefest thing their parents say—wed—wed—wed! Well then, mother, I will not wed! And if you wed me against my will, then shall you never see my face again! I never will come home again!”
He turned and went on more quickly and she dared not say a word, but only sat amazed and frightened at his anger and that he did not sing again.
Yet she forgot all this now in what was to come. The path along which they had come since early dawn grew narrower and more narrow toward noon, and those hills which around their own valleys were so gently shaped, so mild in their round curves against the sky and so green with grass and bamboo, rose now as they went among them into sharper, bolder lines. At last when noon was full and the sun poured its heat down straight the gentle hills were gone, and in their place rose a range of mountains bare and rocky and cruelly pointed against the sky. They seemed the sharper too because the sky that day was so cloudless, bright and hard and blue, above the sand color of the bare mountains.
Beneath great pale cliffs the path wound, the stones not black and dark, but pale as light in hue and very strange, and nothing grew there, for
