Then the mother flew up bravely as she always did for her little son and she said, “A very good younger brother, my son, and you should praise him and be glad he has gone and found a thing to do for himself and not stayed here to share the land with you!”
And the elder son said sneeringly, “Oh, aye, he would do anything I swear to keep from labor on the land.”
But the son’s wife said nothing. She was pleased these days because the house was all her own and it was naught to her what the young man did, and she did not complain because he bought his clothes elsewhere now and she needed not to make them for him.
So the time went on and spring came and passed and early summer came and still the mother never could forget her maid. One day she sat counting on her fingers the days since that one when she saw the hill cut the maid off from her sight, and it was more than twelve times all the fingers on her hands and then she lost the count, and so she thought sadly, “I must go to her. I have let this old heaviness weigh on me and I ought to have gone before. If she had been a sound maid she would have come by now to pay the visit that wives do to their old homes, and I could have asked her how she did and felt her hands and arms and cheeks and seen the color of her face.”
And the mother sat and looked at those hills around and saw how the summer came on to its full height and every hillside was green and all the grain high in the fields, and she forced her body that was weary always now even though she was idle all the livelong day, and she thought, “I must go and see my maid and I will go at once, seeing I am not needed on the land and here I sit idle. I will go and before the great heat comes, lest my flux drop on me again unaware. Yes — I will go this very tomorrow since there is no sign of cloud in this fair sky — this blue sky—” she looked up at the sky and saw how blue it was and remembered suddenly as she did nowadays some bit of her life long gone, and she remembered the blue robe her man had bought once and that he wore away and she sighed and thought with some dim old pang, “On such a day as this he bought the robe and we quarreled — on just such a fair day, for I remember the robe was the color of the sky that day.” She sighed and rose to drive the thought away and when her elder son came she said restlessly, “I think to go and see your sister tomorrow, and how she does in the house where she was wed, seeing she cannot come to me.”
Then the son said, anxiously, “Mother, I cannot go with you now, for there is work to do tomorrow. Wait until the harvest is over and the grain threshed and measured, and I have a little free time.”
But suddenly the mother could not wait. There was strength in her a plenty yet when she had something she set her mind to do, and she was weary of her idleness and sitting and she said, “No, I will go tomorrow!”
And the son said, worried still and he was always easily worried if aught came that was sudden and out of the common and he could not think what to do quickly, “But how will you go, mother?”
She said, “Why, I will ride my cousin’s ass if he will lend it, and do you bid a lad of his to go and call your brother to walk beside and lead the ass, and we will go safe enough, the two of us, for there are no robbers near these days that I have heard tell of, except that new kind in the town they call the communists, who do not harm the poor, they say—”
At last the son was willing, though not too easily and not until his wife said quietly, “It is true I cannot see any great danger if the younger one goes with her.”
So they let the mother have her way at last, and the cousin’s lad was sent to town to search until he found the younger son and so he did and came back wide-eyed and said, “My cousin and your second son will come, aunt.” And then he thought a while and twisted the button on his coat and said again, “I swear it is a strange and secret place where he lives and a hard place to find. He lives in a long room full of beds, some twenty beds or so above a shop, and the room is filled with books and papers. But he does not work in the shop for I asked him. I did not know my cousin could read, aunt. If he reads those books he must be very learned.”
“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 willfully, “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.