Her dress was a peasant girl's dress, which must not be invulnerable when the swain of her choice beckons her away from the other harvesters into a warm bower. No one knows better than she how easily its lacings and buttons and clasps may be circumvented by trembling, awkward hands—unless it was her mother who fashioned it and her grandmother who watched and her great-grandmother of failing mind, who has not forgot the spring-sowing, the sunlight on the fields, and their deep meanings. My hands found their way to her virgin breasts. They made love to them with unstudied art, whereby she gave me unstinted countless kisses, and her arms crept and clasped around my neck.
I broke the silence with a murmur strange-sounding in the whist.
"I love you, Sophia. Will you marry me?"
She drew a long, deeply troubled breath.
"I love you, Homer, and I wish I would!"
"Do you mean, you wish you could?"
"No, for I could if I would. Don't speak of it now, or I'll have to go home."
"Do you understand that if you stay here, I must do the same as though you'd promised?"
She hesitated, then brought her lips close to my ear and whispered one breathless word.
"Yes."
The spell that love casts on youth and maiden grew deeper and more rapturous. Yet it did not quite eclipse a sense of guilt that returned again and again to me, bequeathed to me by my Puritan ancestors, a shame of the flesh that is always an anomaly in nature and often base. Sophia had no such shame. She was eighteen, free, and falling in love with me. I wanted to marry her, to have her beauty always, and I had no fear that I could not make her happy once her old ties were broken; and instinct told me that I would not succeed unless we became interbound so firmly that some older chains fell off.
One moment I had brought her breasts into the strange sea lights and half-bared her glimmering thighs, and she was whispering to me of love. The next, she raised her head as though listening, then gazed wide-eyed into my face, and very slowly, reluctantly, I thought, drew back.
"I fooled myself, Homer, and tried to fool you," she said quietly, after her hands had busied. "This isn't Calypso's cave. I wanted to believe it, to make untrue—to take out of the world—anything we did. Instead it's a limestone cavern that happens to run down under water, and not even secure against surprise."
"It's a beautiful place," I told her.
"Oh, do you believe that?"
"Don't doubt your eyes, Sophia, or yourself. Will you meet me here tomorrow?"
"No."
"The next day?"
"Not here. Perhaps on the beach."
"No, on the cliffs above the cove. The view's good there." I meant I could keep better watch.
"I'll come if I can. The day after tomorrow, early in the morning."
"Will you tell your father I'm in love with you?"
"I might tell him that. But how could I ever tell him—I'm in love with you?"
"Remember what you said? You could if you would. I can, and if you give me leave, I will."
"And I'll tell you now—still playing Calypso and Ulysses—that you'd be safer in the cave of the Cyclops."
She smiled to tell me she was only joking in some trenchant way and came once more into my arms. But she wanted only to feel my warmth and strength; and as though in augury of long farewell, there were tears in her eyes.
My dreams were troubled on the night following Sophia's and my visit to the cave, and -I was glad to get shed of them when, coming wide awake, I heard seven bells, denoting half past three. I would buy my breakfast from a street vender, I thought—they always had bread and goat's milk and fried fish, a combination pleasing to my innards—then return to the cavern. I wanted to look again at the carving on the wall and search the upper chambers for other mementos of long ago.
I had brought a piece of oilskin to keep dry a couple of candles and my flint-and-tinder. At the last minute I put in some bread and fried fish left from my breakfast, not with the intention of a long stay, but half-unthinkingly in the way of habit. Sailors are not nearly as thriftless as the adage makes them out. At least this is true of those who live long and win authority, for mariners are subject to sudden and deadly attack in various forms. More than any other guild's, "secure" is a sailor's word. I lashed the oilskin tight enough to stand a brief ducking. My other cargo for the short voyage was a flask of water on a strap over my shoulder and a stout ten-fathom line I might use in climbing.
When first coming up from the luminous pool, I must stop and daydream, then doggedly I went ahead with my plans. The flickering glimmer of one of my candles guided me past the carving into a short passage Sophia and I had not entered yesterday, and into a chamber so lofty my light would not glim its ceiling. Although not a hundred paces from the entrance, I had left behind the last dim sifting of daylight or sea light, and no slightest rift appeared in the blackness overhead. The wall that I examined was deeply pitted, as in many limestone caves. These black gaps in the faintly sparkling stone and my own shadow endlessly changing shape and pouncing whenever I moved my hand began to excite my imagination. Although reason told me there was nothing to fear, my sense of separation from everyone became sharp, my nerves tightened, and I found myself on guard.
Holding the candle high, I looked in vain for any carving in the stone. Then the glimmer showed me a tiny object whose surface was either wet or smooth enough to refract light. I picked it up, and to my stupefaction, it was the seed of a date. Still sticky, it could not have been cast here more than a few hours before.
I was looking at it, my skin prickling, when the furthest dying glimmer of my candle disclosed something else foreign to the scene. I would not have believed that its beam could cast so far—a good thirty feet—and there seemed a gap of darkness between the aura and a wan glint further up the cavern wall. I saw it out of the side of my eye which, as all sailors know, will sometimes detect a distant beacon light invisible to a straight glance. And because I was already on high guard, in which every instinct of survival was awake and moving, I did not turn my head or give any sign that I had discovered it.
I knew to start with that it was a high light on metal, and almost instantly surmised that the latter was the steel barrel of a pistol.
I gave my candle a quick jerk to whisk out the flame. The act was as natural and unthinking as a scared rabbit's dive into cover. My body, too, moved swiftly to get out from under the gun's aim if it blazed in the dark—I think with a deep crouch and twist that brought me about six feet from my former position. A second passed in silence. My enemy kept his head and held his fire. At first I could hardly doubt that he was Sophia's lover, father, or brother, or their hired bully. Evidence to the contrary put my mind in turmoil. The date seed on the floor; the ambush being laid—if it were that—in a back chamber of the cave which Sophia and I or I alone would not necessarily visit; the high improbability of any of these three men resorting to crime to stop a love affair that had barely started. . . . Then the heat and confusion passed out of my head, and I was almost certain I had surprised the hiding place of a fugitive whom I did not know, or who knew not me, from Adam. He could be a smuggler with contraband. Quite possibly he was waiting for darkness for his chance to fly the island.
The belligerence went out of me as soon as I became persuaded he was not seeking my life, and I began creeping along the wall toward the cavern entrance. If I walked carefully, my bare feet would make no more noise than the wings of a bat. I intended to make a run for it as soon as I neared the pool, dive in, and swim to the shore of the cove. Except by carefully wrapping his gun in oilskin, he could not cross the water gap with dry powder.