But she, with a gesture like that of a warrior-queen, whose lightest word was obeyed by thousands, lifted both her arms towards him, took his bare head in her bare hands, and, drawing it down towards her breast, kissed him on the forehead.
Peleg felt this to be a momentous kiss, a sacramental kiss, a kiss belonging to a ritual for the union of a man and a woman that was older than Sodom and Gomorrha, older than Tyre and Sidon, older than Babylon and Nineveh.
For a moment he stood with his eyes closed; and then, with a deep gasp for breath, as if he had just defeated an army of rivals, he bent down and picked up his iron weapon. This he now grasped tightly in his right hand, and taking Ghosta’s right hand in his own left, he led her away, up a mossy slope between scattered yellow stalks of last autumn’s bracken and a few dead clumps of last summer’s heather, till, completely hidden from any possible onlookers from either Convent or Priory, he led her into the entrance chamber of the cave of Manawyddan, which had been a favourite resort of his since he first followed Sir Mort to that district of Wessex.
The cave was indeed so completely hidden by a grove of alders and willows that it was by no means universally known even to natives of those parts. The two of them had no sooner entered it than Ghosta’s whole attitude changed. The maternal heart in her was at once touched to the quick by the various little semi-domestic arrangements that this gigantic lover of hers had made in this secret hermitage of his, such as the strewings of dry reeds that covered the floor, such as a couple of great iron trivets, one of which was carrying a deep copper basin and the other supporting a kind of extempore frying-pan which had clearly served its purpose extremely well not so very long ago. In one corner of the cave there was a large earthenware bowl of water and by the side of it a little jug with a handle that looked more Greek than Roman for ladling the water into other receptacles.
As Peleg noticed the deeply amused, and intensely practical interest that Ghosta took in all these objects, he told himself that he had been wise to keep the existence of this cave, which had originally been shown to him by a travelling tinker from Wales, entirely to himself. This Welsh tinker had told him about certain ancient Welsh gods, who had travelled through the land like himself doing work in leather and in various metals. He had explained that he himself, in every district he visited, selected some special spot where he could labour unmolested at his job and fulfil the various professional orders he obtained in that neighbourhood; and he swore that it had been in a vision of one of these old tribal deities, a being who called himself Manawyddan fab-Llyr, that he had learnt of this cave and been assured, that if he kept the secret to himself, nobody would disturb him there.
It was too early for more than a few tiny leaf-buds to have appeared on the willow and alder boughs that in a confused mass hid the mouth of the cave; but at about ten yards distance outside this half-circle of entangled trunks, and closely twisted twigs, grew an immense pine.
The rough bark of this tree, for it was a tree that stood with its back, so to speak, to the cave and to the cave’s bodyguard of entwined branches and twigs, had become for Peleg a token of the precise hour; for its colour darkened and lightened, flickered and shadowed, according to the advancing and retreating, the self-concealing and self-revealing, of Sun and Moon and the intermittent rising and falling of the wind.
Though he had only once or twice actually passed a night in this cave, he had of late amused himself by making careful preparations for a winter night there. He had prepared a tall barrier of wooden bars that exactly fitted the mouth of the cave, but was easily lifted up and could be deposited, after use, beneath one of the interior walls, a barrier that he could render proof against wind and snow and rain by covering it with the skins of cattle and sheep.
What he felt especially proud of, as he showed the cave’s domestic conveniences to his beautiful Hebrew friend, was a tightly wedged mass of clean and dry hay, with which he had packed from floor to ceiling a rocky recess in one of the cave’s corners, towards which the ground sloped upwards a little.
He studied every flicker of her expression with boyish solemnity, as he now proceeded to strew on the ground at the back of the cave a thick sprinkling of this pleasantly-scented summer-hay for their February siesta. It seemed to him that she whitened a little at the first glance she threw upon this lover’s bed, then reddened a little, but she continued to watch his every movement with an expression that it would have been totally impossible for him to interpret; but which revealed in reality something of that infinitely maternal and desperately romantic tenderness that young Tilton was struggling now so intensely, day after day, with his hammer and chisel, to convey to his carved image of the Virgin as he imagined her uttering her immemorial “Magnificat”.
And quite suddenly, and as it may well be imagined, to Peleg’s wonder and delight, Ghosta took the whole situation into her own hands. “Let’s make a good fire,” she cried, “and warm the whole place before we lie down! And let’s heat some water and have a good drink of hot red wine!”
Such had been his secret meticulous preparations for a situation exactly like this one, only built up entirely in his imagination, that few lovers would believe, however deeply they trusted their tale-bearers, how small was the lapse of time before a blazing fire of sticks and logs, unattended by any great volume of smoke, was burning triumphantly, and before they were exchanging with each other deep draughts of red wine mixed with bubbling water.
The effect of these timely preparations were enhanced by the noon-day sunshine, which poured down upon them past the great pine-tree outside, one of whose two big boughs lay on the ground, while the other was extended wide, with a gesture as comprehensive as that with which Jacob, after wrestling all night with the angel, must have greeted the hills and valleys and rivers of the Promised Land.
Then as they replaced the goblets, from which they had been drinking, on the wide shelf that ran round the cave, Ghosta uttered the most astonishing words that her companion had ever heard issuing from human lips.
“Now is the moment, O my friend, when you and I must strip ourselves of all. For a man knoweth not the woman he loves, nor does a woman know the man she loves, until each is as naked as the other.”
The words struck him like a ritual, mystical and solemn, but the natural, half-laughing way she came close up to him and proceeded to loosen the buckle of his belt, and then, drawing back a few paces, began with incredible rapidity, but with gay and laughing interjections, and indeed with half-humorous and almost mischievous smiles at certain particularly crucial moments, to fling off every stitch of her clothing, made him feel at ease with the whole universe.
Peleg imitated her as fast as he could; but perhaps it was significant of the double stream of blood in his veins that, before they lay down together on that sweet-scented bed of hay, he lifted his wooden screen across the entrance to their amorous hermitage and hung over it a large bull’s hide.
As he did so he couldn’t help being struck by the sun-warmth which reached his fingers from this same skin, for he had snatched it up from the top of a pile that ever since dawn had been in reach of the Sun. Nor did the gigantic amorist, while the Sun above the bull’s-hide screen caressed his own swarthy neck, fail to note with something like philosophical vanity that he was not so absorbed by the passion of love as to be unable to get, even at this moment of moments, a quite definite sensuous pleasure from the touch of the Lord of Life.