The Call of the Blood

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For a moment Hermione's rugged face was lit up by a fire of joy that
made her look beautiful. Maurice went on crumbling his bread.

"I didn't say anything at first," he continued, "because I--well, somehow
I felt so fixed here, almost part of the place, and I had never thought
of going till it got too hot, and especially not now, when the best time
is only just beginning. And then it all came so suddenly. I was still
more than half asleep, too, I believe," he added, with a little laugh,
"when you told me. But now I've had time, and--why shouldn't I come, too,
to look after you?"

As he went on speaking the light in Hermione's face flickered and died
out. It was when he laughed that it vanished quite away.

"Thank you, Maurice," she said, quietly. "Thank you, dear. I should love
to have you with me, but it would be a shame!"

"Why?"

"Why? Why--the best time here is only just beginning, as you say. It
would be selfish to drag you across the sea to a sick-bed, or perhaps to
a death-bed."

"But the journey?"

"Oh, I am accustomed to being a lonely woman. Think how short a time
we've been married! I've nearly always travelled alone."

"Yes, I know," he said. "Of course there's no danger. I didn't mean that,
only--"

"Only you were ready to be unselfish," she said. "Bless you for it. But
this time I want to be unselfish. You must stay here to keep house, and
I'll come back the first moment I can--the very first. Let's try to think
of that--of the day when I come up the mountain again to my--to our
garden of paradise. All the time I'm away I shall pray for the moment
when I see these columns of the terrace above me, and the geraniums,
and--and the white wall of our little--home."

She stopped. Then she added:

"And you."

"Yes," he said. "But you won't see me on the terrace."

"Why not?"

"Because, of course, I shall come to the station to meet you. That day
will be a festa."

She said nothing more. Her heart was very full, and of conflicting
feelings and of voices that spoke in contradiction one of another. One or
two of these voices she longed to hush to silence, but they were
persistent. Then she tried not to listen to what they were saying. But
they were pitilessly distinct.

Dinner was soon over, and Gaspare came to clear away. His face was very
grave, even troubled. He did not like this abrupt departure of his
padrona.

"You will come back, signora?" he said, as he drew away the cloth and
prepared to fold up the table and carry it in-doors.

Hermione managed to laugh.

"Why, of course, Gaspare! Did you think I was going away forever?"

"Africa is a long way off."

"Only nine hours from Trapani. I may be back very soon. Will you forget
me?"

"Did I forget my padrona when she was in England?" the boy replied, his
expressive face suddenly hardening and his great eyes glittering with
sullen fires.

Hermione quickly laid her hand on his.

"I was only laughing. You know your padrona trusts you to remember her as
she remembers you."

Gaspare lifted up her hand quickly, kissed it, and hurried away, lifting
his own hand to his eyes.

"These Sicilians know how to make one love them," said Hermione, with a
little catch in her voice. "I believe that boy would die for me if
necessary."

"I'm sure he would," said Maurice. "But one doesn't find a padrona like
you every day."

"Let us walk to the arch," she said. "I must take my last look at the
mountains with you."

Beyond the archway there was a large, flat rock, a natural seat from
which could be seen a range of mountains that was invisible from the
terrace. Hermione often sat on this rock alone, looking at the distant
peaks, whose outlines stirred her imagination like a wild and barbarous
music. Now she drew down Maurice beside her and kept his hand in hers.
She was thinking of many things, among others of the little episode that
had just taken place with Gaspare. His outburst of feeling, like fire
bursting up through a suddenly opened fissure in the crust of the earth,
had touched her and something more. It had comforted her, and removed
from her a shadowy figure that had been approaching her, the figure of a
fear. She fixed her eyes on the mountains, dark under the silver of the
moon.

"Maurice," she said. "Do you often try to read people?"

The pleasant look of almost deprecating modesty that Artois had noticed
on the night when they dined together in London came to Delarey's face.

"I don't know that I do, Hermione," he said. "Is it easy?"

"I think--I'm thinking it especially to-night--that it is horribly
difficult. One's imagination seizes hold of trifles, and magnifies them
and distorts them. From little things, little natural things, one
deduces--I mean one takes a midget and makes of it a monster. How one
ought to pray to see clear in people one loves! It's very strange, but I
think that sometimes, just because one loves, one is ready to be afraid,
to doubt, to exaggerate, to think a thing is gone when it is there. In
friendship one is more ready to give things their proper value--perhaps
because everything is of less value. Do you know that to-night I realize
for the first time the enormous difference there is between the love one
gives in love and the love one gives in friendship?"

"Why, Hermione?" he asked, simply.

He was looking a little puzzled, but still reverential.

"I love Emile as a friend. You know that."

"Yes. Would you go to Kairouan if you didn't?"

"If he were to die it would be a great sorrow, a great loss to me. I pray
that he may live. And yet--"

Suddenly she took his other hand in hers.

"Oh, Maurice, I've been thinking to-day, I'm thinking now--suppose it
were you who lay ill, perhaps dying! Oh, the difference in my feeling, in
my dread! If you were to be taken from me, the gap in my life! There
would be nothing--nothing left."

He put his arm round her, and was going to speak, but she went on:

"And if you were to be taken from me how terrible it would be to feel
that I'd ever had one unkind thought of you, that I'd ever misinterpreted
one look or word or action of yours, that I'd ever, in my egoism or my
greed, striven to thwart one natural impulse of yours, or to force you
into travesty away from simplicity! Don't--don't ever be unnatural or
insincere with me, Maurice, even for a moment, even for fear of hurting
me. Be always yourself, be the boy that you still are and that I love you
for being."

She put her head on his shoulder, and he felt her body trembling.

"I think I'm always natural with you," he said.

"You're as natural as Gaspare. Only once, and--and that was my fault, I
know; but you mean so much to me, everything, and your honesty with me is
like God walking with me."

She lifted her head and stood up.

"Please God we'll have many more nights together here," she said--"many
more blessed, blessed nights. The stillness of the hills is like all the
truth of the world, sifted from the falsehood and made into one beautiful
whole. Oh, Maurice, there is a Heaven on earth--when two people love
each other in the midst of such a silence as this."

They went slowly back through the archway to the terrace. Far below them
the sea gleamed delicately, almost like a pearl. In the distance,
towering above the sea, the snow of Etna gleamed more coldly, with a
bleaker purity, a suggestion of remote mysteries and of untrodden
heights. Above the snow of Etna shone the star of evening. Beside the sea
shone the little light in the house of the sirens.

And as they stood for a moment before the cottage in the deep silence of
the night, Hermione looked up at the star above the snow. But Maurice
looked down at the little light beside the sea.

IX

Only when Hermione was gone, when the train from which she waved her hand
had vanished along the line that skirted the sea, and he saw Gaspare
winking away two tears that were about to fall on his brown cheeks, did
Maurice begin to realize the largeness of the change that fate had
wrought in his Sicilian life. He realized it more sharply when he had
climbed the mountain and stood once more upon the terrace before the
house of the priest. Hermione's personality was so strong, so aboundingly
vital, that its withdrawal made an impression such as that made by an
intense silence suddenly succeeding a powerful burst of music. Just at
first Maurice felt startled, almost puzzled like a child, inclined to
knit his brows and stare with wide eyes and wonder what could be going to
happen to him in a world that was altered. Now he was conscious of being
far away from the land where he had been born and brought up, conscious
of it as he had not been before, even on his first day in Sicily. He did
not feel an alien. He had no sensation of exile. But he felt, as he had
not felt when with Hermione, the glory of this world of sea and
mountains, of olive-trees and vineyards, the strangeness of its great
welcome to him, the magic of his readiness to give himself to it.

He had been like a dancing faun in the sunshine and the moonlight of
Sicily. Now, for a moment, he stood still, very still, and watched and
listened, and was grave, and was aware of himself, the figure in the
foreground of a picture that was marvellous.

The enthusiasm of Hermione for Sicily, the flood of understanding of it,
and feeling for it that she had poured out in the past days of spring,
instead of teaching Maurice to see and to feel, seemed to have kept him
back from the comprehension to which they had been meant to lead him.
With Hermione, the watcher, he had been but as a Sicilian, another
Gaspare in a different rank of life. Without Hermione he was Gaspare and
something more. It was as if he still danced in the tarantella, but had
now for the moment the power to stand and watch his performance and see
that it was wonderful.

This was just at first, in the silence that followed the music.

He gazed at Etna, and thought: "How extraordinary that I'm living up here
on a mountain and looking at the smoke from Etna, and that there's no
English-speaking person here but me!" He looked at Gaspare and at
Lucrezia, and thought: "What a queer trio of companions we are! How
strange and picturesque those two would look in England, how different
they are from the English, and yet how at home with them I feel! By Jove,
it's wonderful!" And then he was thrilled by a sense of romance, of
adventure, that had never been his when his English wife was there beside
him, calling his mind to walk with hers, his heart to beat with hers,
calling with the great sincerity of a very perfect love.

"The poor signora!" said Gaspare. "I saw her beginning to cry when the
train went away. She loves my country and cannot bear to leave it. She
ought to live here always, as I do."

"Courage, Gaspare!" said Maurice, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder.
"She'll come back very soon."

Gaspare lifted his hand to his eyes, then drew out a red-and-yellow
handkerchief with "Caro mio" embroidered on it and frankly wiped them.

"The poor signora!" he repeated. "She did not like to leave us."

"Let's think of her return," said Maurice.

He turned away suddenly from the terrace and went into the house.

When he was there, looking at the pictures and books, at the open piano
with some music on it, at a piece of embroidery with a needle stuck
through the half-finished petal of a flower, he began to feel deserted.
The day was before him. What was he going to do? What was there for him
to do? For a moment he felt what he would have called "stranded." He was
immensely accustomed to Hermione, and her splendid vitality of mind and
body filled up the interstices of a day with such ease that one did not
notice that interstices existed, or think they could exist. Her physical
health and her ardent mind worked hand-in-hand to create around her an
atmosphere into which boredom could not come, yet from which bustle was
excluded. Maurice felt the silence within the house to be rather dreary
than peaceful. He touched the piano, endeavoring to play with one finger
the tune of "O sole mio!" He took up two or three books, pulled the
needle out of Hermione's embroidery, then stuck it in again. The feeling
of loss began to grow upon him. Oddly enough, he thought, he had not felt
it very strongly at the station when the train ran out. Nor had it been
with him upon the terrace. There he had been rather conscious of change
than of loss--of change that was not without excitement. But now--He
began to think of the days ahead of him with a faint apprehension.

"But I'll live out-of-doors," he said to himself. "It's only in the house
that I feel bad like this. I'll live out-of-doors and take lots of
exercise, and I shall be all right."

He had again taken up a book, almost without knowing it, and now, holding
it in his hand, he went to the head of the steps leading to the terrace
and looked out. Gaspare was sitting by the wall with a very dismal face.
He stared silently at his master for a minute. Then he said:

"The signora should have taken us with her to Africa. It would have been
better."

"It was impossible, Gaspare," Maurice said, rather hastily. "She is going
to a poor signore who is ill."

"I know."

The boy paused for a moment. Then he said:

"Is the signore her brother?"

"Her brother! No."

"Is he a relation?"

"No."

"Is he very old?"

"Certainly not."

Gaspare repeated:

"The signora should have taken us with her to Africa."

This time he spoke with a certain doggedness. Maurice, he scarcely knew
why, felt slightly uncomfortable and longed to create a diversion. He
looked at the book he was holding in his hand and saw that it was _The
Thousand and One Nights_, in Italian. He wanted to do something definite,
to distract his thoughts--more than ever now after his conversation with
Gaspare. An idea occurred to him.

"Come under the oak-trees, Gaspare," he said, "and I'll read to you. It
will be a lesson in accent. You shall be my professore."

"Si, signore."

The response was listless, and Gaspare followed his master with listless
footsteps down the little path that led to the grove of oak-trees that
grew among giant rocks, on which the lizards were basking.

"There are stories of Africa in this book," said Maurice, opening it.

Gaspare looked more alert.

"Of where the signora will be?"

"Chi lo sa?"

He lay down on the warm ground, set his back against a rock, opened the
book at hazard, and began to read slowly and carefully, while Gaspare,
stretched on the grass, listened, with his chin in the palm of his hand.
The story was of the fisherman and the Genie who was confined in a
casket, and soon Gaspare was entirely absorbed by it. He kept his
enormous brown eyes fixed upon Maurice's face, and moved his lips,
silently forming, after him, the words of the tale. When it was finished
he said:

"I should not like to be kept shut up like that, signore. If I could not
be free I would kill myself. I will always be free."

He stretched himself on the warm ground like a young animal, then added:

"I shall not take a wife--ever."

Maurice shut the book and stretched himself, too, then moved away from
the rock, and lay at full length with his hands clasped behind his head
and his eyes, nearly shut, fixed upon the glimmer of the sea.

"Why not, Gasparino?"

"Because if one has a wife one is not free."

"Hm!"

"If I had a wife I should be like the Mago Africano when he was shut up
in the box."

"And I?" Maurice said, suddenly sitting up. "What about me?"

For the first time it seemed to occur to Gaspare that he was speaking to
a married man. He sat up, too.

"Oh, but you--you are a signore and rich. It is different. I am poor. I
shall have many loves, first one and then another, but I shall never take
a wife. My father wishes me to when I have finished the military service,
but"--and he laughed at his own ingenious comparison--"I am like the Mago
Africano when he was let out of the casket. I am free, and I will never
let myself be stoppered-up as he did. Per Dio!"

Suddenly Maurice frowned.

"It isn't like--" he began.

Then he stopped. The lines in his forehead disappeared, and he laughed.

"I am pretty free here, too," he said. "At least, I feel so."

The dreariness that had come upon him inside the cottage had disappeared
now that he was in the open air. As he looked down over the sloping
mountain flank--dotted with trees near him, but farther away bare and
sunbaked--to the sea with its magic coast-line, that seemed to promise
enchantments to wilful travellers passing by upon the purple waters, as
he turned his eyes to the distant plain with its lemon groves, its
winding river, its little vague towns of narrow houses from which thin
trails of smoke went up, and let them journey on to the great, smoking
mountain lifting its snows into the blue, and its grave, not insolent,
panache, he felt an immense sense of happy-go-lucky freedom with the
empty days before him. His intellect was loose like a colt on a prairie.
There was no one near to catch it, to lead it to any special object, to
harness it and drive it onward in any fixed direction. He need no longer
feel respect for a cleverness greater than his own, or try to understand
subtleties of thought and sensation that were really outside of his
capacities. He did not say this to himself, but whence sprang this new
and dancing feeling of emancipation that was coming upon him? Why did he
remember the story he had just been reading, and think of himself for a
moment as a Genie emerging cloudily into the light of day from a narrow
prison which had been sunk beneath the sea? Why? For, till now, he had
never had any consciousness of imprisonment. One only becomes conscious
of some things when one is freed from them. Maurice's happy efforts to
walk on the heights with the enthusiasms of Hermione had surely never
tired him, but rather braced him. Yet, left alone with peasants, with
Lucrezia and Gaspare, there was something in him, some part of his
nature, which began to frolic like a child let out of school. He felt
more utterly at his ease than he had ever felt before. With these
peasants he could let his mind be perfectly lazy. To them he seemed
instructed, almost a god of knowledge.

Suddenly Maurice laughed, showing his white teeth. He stretched up his
arms to the blue heaven and the sun that sent its rays filtering down to
him through the leaves of the oak-trees, and he laughed again gently.

"What is it, signore?"

"It is good to live, Gaspare. It is good to be young out here on the
mountain-side, and to send learning and problems and questions of
conscience to the devil. After all, real life is simple enough if only
you'll let it be. I believe the complications of life, half of them, and
its miseries too, more than half of them, are the inventions of the
brains of the men and women we call clever. They can't let anything
alone. They bother about themselves and everybody else. By Jove, if you
knew how they talk about life in London! They'd make you think it was the
most complicated, rotten, intriguing business imaginable; all
misunderstandings and cross-purposes, and the Lord knows what. But it
isn't. It's jolly simple, or it can be. Here we are, you and I, and we
aren't at loggerheads, and we've got enough to eat and a pair of boots
apiece, and the sun, and the sea, and old Etna behaving nicely--and what
more do we want?"

"Signore--"

"Well?"

"I don't understand English."

"Mamma mia!" Delarey roared with laughter. "And I've been talking
English. Well, Gaspare, I can't say it in Sicilian--can I? Let's see."

He thought a minute. Then he said:

"It's something like this. Life is simple and splendid if you let it
alone. But if you worry it--well, then, like a dog, it bites you."

He imitated a dog biting. Gaspare nodded seriously.

"Mi piace la vita," he remarked, calmly.

"E anche mi piace a me," said Maurice. "Now I'll give you a lesson in
English, and when the signora comes back you can talk to her."

"Si, signore."

The afternoon had gone in a flash. Evening came while they were still
under the oak-trees, and the voice of Lucrezia was heard calling from the
terrace, with the peculiar baaing intonation that is characteristic of
southern women of the lower classes.

Gaspare baaed ironically in reply.

"It isn't dinner-time already?" said Maurice, getting up reluctantly.

"Yes, meester sir, eef you pleesi," said Gaspare, with conscious pride.
"We go way."

"Bravo. Well, I'm getting hungry."

As Maurice sat alone at dinner on the terrace, while Gaspare and Lucrezia
ate and chattered in the kitchen, he saw presently far down below the
shining of the light in the house of the sirens. It came out when the
stars came out, this tiny star of the sea. He felt a little lonely as he
sat there eating all by himself, and when the light was kindled near the
water, that lay like a dream waiting to be sweetly disturbed by the moon,
he was pleased as by the greeting of a friend. The light was company. He
watched it while he ate. It was a friendly light, more friendly than the
light of the stars to him. For he connected it with earthly
things--things a man could understand. He imagined Maddalena in the
cottage where he had slept preparing the supper for Salvatore, who was
presently going off to sea to spear fish, or net them, or take them with
lines for the market on the morrow. There was bread and cheese on the
table, and the good red wine that could harm nobody, wine that had all
the laughter of the sun-rays in it. And the cottage door was open to the
sea. The breeze came in and made the little lamp that burned beneath the
Madonna flicker. He saw the big, white bed, and the faces of the saints,
of the actresses, of the smiling babies that had watched him while he
slept. And he saw the face of his peasant hostess, the face he had kissed
in the dawn, ere he ran down among the olive-trees to plunge into the
sea. He saw the eyes that were like black jewels, the little feathers of
gold in the hair about her brow. She was a pretty, simple girl. He liked
the look of curiosity in her eyes. To her he was something touched with
wonder, a man from a far-off land. Yet she was at ease with him and he
with her. That drop of Sicilian blood in his veins was worth something to
him in this isle of the south. It made him one with so much, with the
sunburned sons of the hills and of the sea-shore, with the sunburned
daughters of the soil. It made him one with them--or more--one of them.
He had had a kiss from Sicily now--a kiss in the dawn by the sea, from
lips fresh with the sea wind and warm with the life that is young. And
what had it meant to him? He had taken it carelessly with a laugh. He had
washed it from his lips in the sea. Now he remembered it, and, in
thought, he took the kiss again, but more slowly, more seriously. And he
took it at evening, at the coming of night, instead of at dawn, at the
coming of day--his kiss from Sicily.

He took it at evening.

He had finished dinner now, and he pushed back his chair and drew a cigar
from his pocket. Then he struck a match. As he was putting it to the
cigar he looked again towards the sea and saw the light.

"Damn!"

"Signore!"

Gaspare came running.

"I didn't call, Gaspare, I only said 'Mamma mia!' because I burned my
fingers."

He struck another match and lit the cigar.

"Signore--" Gaspare began, and stopped.

"Yes? What is it?"

"Signore, I--Lucrezia, you know, has relatives at Castel Vecchio."

Castel Vecchio was the nearest village, perched on the hill-top opposite,
twenty minutes' walk from the cottage.

"Ebbene?"

"Ebbene, signorino, to-night there is a festa in their house. It is the
festa of Pancrazio, her cousin. Sebastiano will be there to play, and
they will dance, and--"

"Lucrezia wants to go?"

"Si, signore, but she is afraid to ask."

"Afraid! Of course she can go, she must go. Tell her. But at night can
she come back alone?"

"Signore, I am invited, but I said--I did not like the first evening that
the padrona is away--if you would come they would take it as a great
honor."

"Go, Gaspare, take Lucrezia, and bring her back safely."

"And you, signore?"

"I would come, too, but I think a stranger would spoil the festa."

"Oh no, signore, on the contrary--"

"I know--you think I shall be sad alone."

"Si, signore."

"You are good to think of your padrone, but I shall be quite content. You
go with Lucrezia and come back as late as you like. Tell Lucrezia! Off
with you!"

Gaspare hesitated no longer. In a few minutes he had put on his best
clothes and a soft hat, and stuck a large, red rose above each ear. He
came to say good-bye with Lucrezia on his arm. Her head was wrapped in a
brilliant yellow-and-white shawl with saffron-colored fringes. They went
off together laughing and skipping down the stony path like two children.

When their footsteps died away Delarey, who had walked to the archway to
see them off, returned slowly to the terrace and began to pace up and
down, puffing at his cigar. The silence was profound. The rising moon
cast its pale beams upon the white walls of the cottage, the white seats
of the terrace. There was no wind. The leaves of the oaks and the
olive-trees beneath the wall were motionless. Nothing stirred. Above the
cottage the moonlight struck on the rocks, showed the nakedness of the
mountain-side. A curious sense of solitude, such as he had never known
before, took possession of Delarey. It did not make him feel sad at
first, but only emancipated, free as he had never yet felt free, like one
free in a world that was curiously young, curiously unfettered by any
chains of civilization, almost savagely, primitively free. So might an
animal feel ranging to and fro in a land where man had not set foot. But
he was an animal without its mate in the wonderful breathless night. And
the moonlight grew about him as he walked, treading softly he scarce knew
why, to and fro, to and fro.

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