Especially he did not want to come into contact with a woman again. He
feared it; for he had a big wound from old contacts. He felt if he could not
be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die. His recoil away
from the outer world was complete; his last refuge was this wood; to hide
himself there!
Connie grew warm by the fire, which she had made too big: then she grew
hot. She went and sat on the stool in the doorway, watching the man at work.
He seemed not to notice her, but he knew. Yet he worked on, as if
absorbedly, and his brown dog sat on her tail near him, and surveyed the
untrustworthy world.
Slender, quiet and quick, the man finished the coop he was making,
turned it over, tried the sliding door, then set it aside. Then he rose,
went for an old coop, and took it to the chopping log where he was working.
Crouching, he tried the bars; some broke in his hands; he began to draw the
nails. Then he turned the coop over and deliberated, and he gave absolutely
no sign of awareness of the woman's presence.
So Connie watched him fixedly. And the same solitary aloneness she had
seen in him naked, she now saw in him clothed: solitary, and intent, like an
animal that works alone, but also brooding, like a soul that recoils away,
away from all human contact. Silently, patiently, he was recoiling away from
her even now. It was the stillness, and the timeless sort of patience, in a
man impatient and passionate, that touched Connie's womb. She saw it in his
bent head, the quick quiet hands, the crouching of his slender, sensitive
loins; something patient and withdrawn. She felt his experience had been
deeper and wider than her own; much deeper and wider, and perhaps more
deadly. And this relieved her of herself; she felt almost irresponsible.
So she sat in the doorway of the hut in a dream, utterly unaware of
time and of particular circumstances. She was so drifted away that he
glanced up at her quickly, and saw the utterly still, waiting look on her
face. To him it was a look of waiting. And a little thin tongue of fire
suddenly flickered in his loins, at the root of his back, and he groaned in
spirit. He dreaded with a repulsion almost of death, any further close human
contact. He wished above all things she would go away, and leave him to his
own privacy. He dreaded her will, her female will, and her modern female
insistency. And above all he dreaded her cool, upper-class impudence of
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