Ogo’s shame was too radical a growth to die: it went on existing side by side with this new exultant feeling of release and fulfilment. There was room in him for these contradictions: his mind, because he never looked into it, accommodated them without the smallest difficulty. And at present, with Wooma at hand to see and touch, joy was uppermost. He was not even now capable of questioning the rightness of the law that condemned him; and yesterday, in the first onset of his despair, the mere instinct of gregariousness and the driving torment of guilt might have sent him back to Koor and to death. He had not in that moment doubted that he must suffer the penalty of his crime; nor even, so profound his identity with the tribe, wished to do so. But with the going down of the sun, the long warm night of friendliness and love, and the waking that found beauty still in his arms, the scope and direction of his being were imperceptibly changed. Shame, not repudiated, was forgotten. Pride lifted his head. Towards the world in general he felt masterful; towards Wooma he felt, not only swaggeringly possessive, but patrimaternal, as though she had been, as no doubt his idea of her was, a very part of himself, child begotten and born of his conscious and unconscious desires. The penalties he and she had incurred were well known to him: for the man, death; for the woman, mutilation, and a banishment that in practice amounted to death. Except at the seedtime sacrifice, when the earth-god demanded the blood of a ripe virgin, the killing of a woman after puberty was of bad omen: it was sufficient that the offending female should be formally cast out, with the curse of Hasta on her head, and driven with spears into the wild, so that she might carry her contamination to a foreign people, or, as was more probable, be eaten by wolves or die of starvation and the terror of the curse. This was the fate that Ogo feared for Wooma; for though it was all a matter of tradition and hearsay, no event of the kind being in his personal memory, there were tales in plenty, a body of sacred legend, to give force and shape to his imaginings. It was necessary therefore that he should take Wooma as far as possible away from the Koor squat. As for himself, he was enlarged and completed in this woman, and his appetite for life was doubled.
Of these facts however—especially of the need for flight—he was something less than conscious, except in fleeting moments of alarm. With even more decision than usual, the present—its needs and its joys—occupied him to the exclusion of remote dangers; and when he and Wooma had come down from their high place, and foraged for food, and caught a young rabbit and shared it, they turned their attention again to each other and spent the morning in idle amorous play. Yesterday and its terrors seemed far away indeed: the new life alone was real. The gods having not yet stricken them, they had forgotten the gods. Yet pictures that might at any moment become plans were forming in Ogo’s mind. He fell into a long silence.
‘What are you seeing?’ asked Wooma. Silence she could endure, but not pensiveness. It troubled her that he should have thoughts secret from her. ‘What are you seeing, Ogo? Wooma is here.’
‘I am seeing a river,’ said Ogo, ‘with many fishes in it that a man might catch with his hands. I am seeing a small squat near this river, and a man and a woman eating the fishes.’
‘The man is Ogo. And the woman is Wooma, his woman.’
‘It is so.’
He continued his daydreaming. The door of the squat opened towards the river. There was the forest for hunting in and the river for escape. And at the river’s end there was the sea.
Wooma searched his face. ‘What are you seeing now?’ she asked anxiously.
‘I am seeing a tree strook down by the man’s axe. The tree groans, and the tree’s demon is angry. But the man is not afraid. He is mighty. He is fearless.’
‘The man is Ogo,’ affirmed Wooma.
‘It is so. With his axe the man strips the tree of its waving arms. The tree has a fat body and now it is naked. Many days and many darks the man works with his axe at the tree. He is making a boat.’
Wooma said nothing. Her face assumed the fixed grin of incomprehension, and she stared at the ground.
‘And now,’ said Ogo excitedly, ‘the boat is on the top of the water, and the man is sitting in it. He beats the water with a flat stick, and the boat swims away.’ Ogo laughed with pleasure and glanced at Wooma for applause. Her face was downcast. ‘Ugh?’ he said. He was puzzled and his tone impatient.
‘Lord!’ She nestled closer, and looked timidly up at him.
Ogo sat rigid and sulky. ‘Doesn’t it please you, what I am seeing?’
Her face crumpled with grief. ‘Lord,’ she wailed, ‘at first you were seeing a man and a woman. Now you are seeing only a man.’