NO WINE IN HIS CART
5
1\<-ent down to the wine cart. All the curious little painted men, the wide
mouths, the workman's body like her father's. The body of a workman
was the same everywhere, the cart was covered with the tiny bnght figures
in
every posture and attitude, striking an anvil to shoe a horse, gathering,
treading the grapes,-the same sensitive body moulded close to its labour,
a worn tool.
She sat up bolt in the bright sun. Why had Arnold's body been
distasteful to her, his white hands, his white narrow chest, self conscious,
without use. Making money never made use of man's body, the smell of
it got on him. Perhaps a woman never really could love the body of a
money making man ... could it be true? She put her hand down on the
burning wood of the wine cart and cried. The sun lay warm on her hair,
shoulders, in the pit of her back. She did not know when she stopped
crying but she lay still in the bottom of the wine cart and the warm sun
seemd to dr.own her. There was not a sound, everything stood quite still.
The sunlight moved over her hair, her body. Everything but the sun
seemed to stand quite still. In the spring when they had come out from
the city there had been larks everywhere making the air seem like water
for carrying the sound that came up out of the misty spring like bubbles
breaking over them but since the heat and no rain there hadn't been a bird
sound. There was not a bird now ... still as a mouse.
There seemed to be a presence creeping on the lawn. She thought if
she sat up and looked she would see some colossal force without face slowly
rise up the lawn, pluck: the house like a vile weed and <;rush it and leave
the bald pate of the hill with the trees silently growing. She could bear
it no longer and sat up, her head seemed thrust up into a golden syrup
of heat. The stillness was awful, not a sound. The hills seemed to loom
darl' in the heat and she could see very leaf on the tree distinctly. She
had the impression of spying on something.
Playing a game, it seemed to her in half drowse that the fishermen
far down below must be pulling in fish when she wasn't looking. Arnold
had everything, he certainly would have fish in his lake. An awful grin
seemed to ·split her face. She thought if she would look away and then
back quickly she would see them pulling in a fish but there they sat as if
carved out of burnt wood, smoking a little in the heat.
Stealthily she looked at the
war~
bodied hills in smooth mounds and
Arnold's young shrubs and trees seemed to be wilting. The house had been
a wedding present so the anciet trees stood outside the sharp cut tnmness
of the paths and hills, and beyond the brush and the strong upmounding
hills with their soft fur like on animals. She felt as if spying on them
She always felt that Arnold's shrubs and things belonged to the social
world and not to the natural one anyway. She tried to see into the trees
to see if she might spy a bird waiting for rain but she could only see the
