Chapter II

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

My old mother, God rest her, said that to me when first she began to see that my love was set on Magali--and saw, too, that I was winning from Magali the love that belonged to Jan, who had her promise.

"It is an old man's lifetime, mother," I said, "since a wolf has been seen near Les Martigues." And I laughed and kissed her.

"Worse than a wolf is a heart that covets what it may not have, Marius," she answered. "Magali is as good as Jan's wife, and you know it. For a year she has been promised to him. She is my dead sister's child, and she is in my care--and in your care too, because you and she and I are all that is left of us, and you are the head of our house, the man. You are doing wickedness in trying to take her away from Jan--and Jan your own close friend, who saved your life out of the sea. The match is a good match for Magali, and she was contented with it until you--living here close beside her in your own house--began to steal away her heart from him. It is rascal work, Marius, that you are doing. You are playing false as a house-father and false as a friend--and God help me that I must speak such words to my own son! That is why I say, and I say it solemnly, 'God keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!' That desire has no right to be in your heart, Marius. Drag it out of your heart and cast it away!"

But I only laughed and kissed her again, and told her that I would take good care of myself if a she-wolf tried to eat me--and so I went away, still laughing, to my fishing in the Gulf of Fos.

But I did not laugh when I was alone in my boat, slipping down the Étang de Caronte seaward. What she had said had made me see things clearly which until then had been half hid in a haze. We had slipped into our love for each other, Magali and I, softly and easily--just as my boat was slipping down the étang. Every day of our lives we were together, in the close way that housemates are together in a little house of four rooms. Before I got up in the morning I could hear her moving near me, only a thin wall between us; and her movements, again, were the last sounds that I heard at night. She waited on me at my meals. She helped my mother to mend my clothes--the very patches on my coat would bring to my mind the sight of her as she sat sewing at night beside the lamp. We were as close together as a brother and a sister could be; and in my dulness I had fancied for a long while that what I had felt for her was only what a brother would feel.

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.