"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.