The Call of the Blood

R >> Robert Smythe Hichens >> The Call of the Blood

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While Artois was thinking this Maurice's expression suddenly changed, his
attitude became easier. He turned round from the wall, and Artois saw
that the keen anxiety had gone out of his eyes. Gaspare was below with
his gun pretending to look for birds, and had made a sign that the
approaching figure was not that of Salvatore. Maurice's momentary sense
of relief was so great that it threw him off his guard.

"What can have been happening beyond the wall?" Artois thought.

He felt as if a drama had been played out there and the denouement had
been happy.

Hermione came back at this moment.

"Poor Lucrezia!" she said. "She's plucky, but Sebastiano is making her
suffer horribly."

"Here!" said Artois, almost involuntarily.

"It does seem almost impossible, I know."

She sat down again near him and smiled at her husband.

"You are coming back to health, Emile. And Maurice and I--well, we are in
our garden. It seems wrong, terribly wrong, that any one should suffer
here. But Lucrezia loves like a Sicilian. What violence there is in these
people!"

"England must not judge them."

He looked at Maurice.

"What's that?" asked Hermione. "Something you two were talking about when
I was in the kitchen?"

Maurice looked uneasy.

"I was only saying that I think the sun--the South has an influence," he
said, "and that----"

"An influence!" exclaimed Hermione. "Of course it has! Emile, you would
have seen that influence at work if you had been with us on our first day
in Sicily. Your tarantella, Maurice!"

She smiled again happily, but her husband did not answer her smile.

"What was that?" said Artois. "You never told me in Africa."

"The boys danced a tarantella here on the terrace to welcome us, and it
drove Maurice so mad that he sprang up and danced too. And the strange
thing was that he danced as well as any of them. His blood called him,
and he obeyed the call."

She looked at Artois to remind him of his words.

"It's good when the blood calls one to the tarantella, isn't it?" she
asked him. "I think it's the most wildly innocent expression of extreme
joy in the world. And yet"--her expressive face changed, and into her
prominent brown eyes there stole a half-whimsical, half-earnest look--"at
the end--Maurice, do you know that I was almost frightened that day at
the end?"

"Frightened! Why?" he said.

He got up from the terrace-seat and sat down in a straw chair.

[Illustration: "'BUT I SOON LEARNED TO DELIGHT IN--IN MY SICILIAN,' SHE
SAID, TENDERLY"]

"Why?" he repeated, crossing one leg over the other and laying his
brown hands on the arms of the chair.

"I had a feeling that you were escaping from me in the tarantella. Wasn't
it absurd?"

He looked slightly puzzled. She turned to Artois.

"Can you imagine what I felt, Emile? He danced so well that I seemed to
see before me a pure-blooded Sicilian. It almost frightened me!"

She laughed.

"But I soon learned to delight in--in my Sicilian," she said, tenderly.

She felt so happy, so at ease, and she was so completely natural, that it
did not occur to her that though she was with her husband and her most
intimate friend the two men were really strangers to each other.

"You'll find that I'm quite English, when we are back in London," Maurice
said. There was a cold sound of determination in his voice.

"Oh, but I don't want you to lose what you have gained here," Hermione
protested, half laughingly, half tenderly.

"Gained!" Maurice said, still in the prosaic voice. "I don't think a
Sicilian would be much good in England. We--we don't want romance there.
We want cool-headed, practical men who can work, and who've no nonsense
about them."

"Maurice!" she said, amazed. "What a cold douche! And from you! Why, what
has happened to you while I've been away?"

"Happened to me?" he said, quickly. "Nothing. What should happen to me
here?"

"Do you--are you beginning to long for England and English ways?"

"I think it's time I began to do something," he said, resolutely. "I
think I've had a long enough holiday."

He was trying to put the past behind him. He was trying to rush into the
new life, the life in which there would be no more wildness, no more
yielding to the hot impulses that were surely showered down out of the
sun. Mentally he was leaving the Enchanted Island already. It was fading
away, sinking into its purple sea, sinking out of his sight with his wild
heart of youth, while he, cold, calm, resolute man, was facing the steady
life befitting an Englishman, the life of work, of social duties, of
husband and father, with a money-making ambition and a stake in his
country.

"Perhaps you're right," Hermione said.

But there was a sound of disappointment in her voice. Till now Maurice
had always shared her Sicilian enthusiasms, had even run before them,
lighter-footed than she in the race towards the sunshine. It was
difficult to accommodate herself to this abrupt change.

"But don't let us think of going to-day," she added. "Remember--I have
only just come back."

"And I!" said Artois. "Be merciful to an invalid, Monsieur Delarey!"

He spoke lightly, but he felt fully conscious now that his suspicion was
well founded. Maurice was uneasy, unhappy. He wanted to get away from
this peace that held no peace for him. He wanted to put something behind
him. To a man like Artois, Maurice was a boy. He might try to be subtle,
he might even be subtle--for him. But to this acute and trained observer
of the human comedy he could not for long be deceptive.

During his severe illness the mind of Artois had often been clouded, had
been dispossessed of its throne by the clamor of the body's pain. And
afterwards, when the agony passed and the fever abated, the mind had been
lulled, charmed into a stagnant state that was delicious. But now it
began to go again to its business. It began to work with the old rapidity
that had for a time been lost. And as this power came back and was felt
thoroughly, very consciously by this very conscious man, he took alarm.
What affected or threatened Delarey must affect, threaten Hermione.
Whether he were one with her or not she was one with him. The feeling of
Artois towards the woman who had shown him such noble, such unusual
friendship was exquisitely delicate and intensely strong. Unmingled with
any bodily passion, it was, or so it seemed to him, the more delicate and
strong on that account. He was a man who had an instinctive hatred of
heroics. His taste revolted from them as it revolted from violence in
literature. They seemed to him a coarseness, a crudity of the soul, and
almost inevitably linked with secret falseness. But he was conscious that
to protect from sorrow or shame the woman who had protected him in his
dark hour he would be willing to make any sacrifice. There would be no
limit to what he would be ready to do now, in this moment, for Hermione.
He knew that, and he took the alarm. Till now he had been feeling
curiosity about the change in Delarey. Now he felt the touch of fear.

Something had happened to change Maurice while Hermione had been in
Africa. He had heard, perhaps, the call of the blood. All that he had
said, and all that he had felt, on the night when he had met Maurice for
the first time in London, came back to Artois. He had prophesied, vaguely
perhaps. Had his prophecy already been fulfilled? In this great and
shining peace of nature Maurice was not at peace. And now all sense of
peace deserted Artois. Again, and fiercely now, he felt the danger of the
South, and he added to his light words some words that were not light.

"But I am really no longer an invalid," he said. "And I must be getting
northward very soon. I need the bracing air, the Spartan touch of the
cold that the Sybarite in me dreads. Perhaps we all need them."

"If you go on like this, you two," Hermione exclaimed, "you will make me
feel as if it were degraded to wish to live anywhere except at Clapham
Junction or the North Pole. Let us be happy as we are, where we are,
to-day and--yes, call me weak if you like--and to-morrow!"

Maurice made no answer to this challenge, but Artois covered his silence,
and kept the talk going on safe topics till Gaspare came to the terrace
to lay the cloth for collazione.

It was past noon now, and the heat was brimming up like a flood over the
land. Flies buzzed about the terrace, buzzed against the white walls and
ceilings of the cottage, winding their tiny, sultry horns ceaselessly,
musicians of the sun. The red geraniums in the stone pots beneath the
broken columns drooped their dry heads. The lizards darted and stopped,
darted and stopped upon the wall and the white seats where the tiles were
burning to the touch. There was no moving figure on the baked mountains,
no moving vessel on the shining sea. No smoke came from the snowless lips
of Etna. It was as if the fires of the sun had beaten down and slain the
fires of the earth.

Gaspare moved to and fro slowly, spreading the cloth, arranging the pots
of flowers, the glasses, forks, and knives upon it. In his face there was
little vivacity. But now and then his great eyes searched the hot world
that lay beneath them, and Artois thought he saw in them the
watchfulness, the strained anxiety that had been in Maurice's eyes.

"Some one must be coming," he thought. "Or they must be expecting some
one to come, these two."

"Do you ever have visitors here?" he asked, carelessly.

"Visitors! Emile, why are we here? Do you anticipate a knock and 'If you
please, ma'am, Mrs. and the Misses Watson'? Good Heavens--visitors on
Monte Amato!"

He smiled, but he persisted.

"Never a contadino, or a shepherd, or"--he looked down at the sea--"or a
fisherman with his basket of sarde?"

Maurice moved in his chair, and Gaspare, hearing a word he knew, looked
hard at the speaker.

"Oh, we sometimes have the people of the hills to see us," said Hermione.
"But we don't call them 'visitors.' As to fishermen--here they are!"

She pointed to her husband and Gaspare.

"But they eat all the fish they catch, and we never see the fin of even
one at the cottage."

Collazione was ready now. Hermione helped Artois up from his chaise
longue, and they went to the table under the awning.

"You must sit facing the view, Emile," Hermione said.

"What a dining-room!" Artois exclaimed.

Now he could see over the wall. His gaze wandered over the
mountain-sides, travelled down to the land that lay along the edge of the
sea.

"Have you been fishing much since I've been away, Maurice?" Hermione
asked, as they began to eat.

"Oh yes. I went several times. What wine do you like, Monsieur Artois?"

He tried to change the conversation, but Hermione, quite innocently,
returned to the subject.

"They fish at night, you know, Emile, all along that coast by Isola Bella
and on to the point there that looks like an island, where the House of
the Sirens is."

A tortured look went across Maurice's face. He had begun to eat, but now
he stopped for a moment like a man suddenly paralyzed.

"The House of the Sirens!" said Artois. "Then there are sirens here? I
could well believe it. Have you seen them, Monsieur Maurice, at night,
when you have been fishing?"

He had been gazing at the coast, but now he turned towards his host.
Maurice began hastily to eat again.

"I'm afraid not. But we didn't look out for them. We were prosaic and
thought of nothing but the fish."

"And is there really a house down there?" said Artois.

"Yes," said Hermione. "It used to be a ruin, but now it's built up and
occupied. Gaspare"--she spoke to him as he was taking a dish from the
table--"who is it lives in the Casa delle Sirene now? You told me, but
I've forgotten."

A heavy, obstinate look came into the boy's face, transforming it. The
question startled him, and he had not understood a word of the
conversation which had led up to it. What had they been talking about? He
glanced furtively at his master. Maurice did not look at him.

"Salvatore and Maddalena, signora," he answered, after a pause.

Then he took the dish and went into the house.

"What's the matter with Gaspare?" said Hermione. "I never saw him look
like that before--quite ugly. Doesn't he like these people?"

"Oh yes," replied Maurice. "Why--why, they're quite friends of ours. We
saw them at the fair only yesterday."

"Well, then, why should Gaspare look like that?"

"Oh," said Artois, who saw the discomfort of his host, "perhaps there is
some family feud that you know nothing of. When I was in Sicily I found
the people singularly subtle. They can gossip terribly, but they can keep
a secret when they choose. If I had won the real friendship of a
Sicilian, I would rather trust him with my secret than a man of any other
race. They are not only loyal--that is not enough--but they are also very
intelligent."

"Yes, they are both--the good ones," said Hermione. "I would trust
Gaspare through thick and thin. If they were only as stanch in love as
they can be in friendship!"

Gaspare came out again with another course. The ugly expression had gone
from his face, but he still looked unusually grave.

"Ah, when the senses are roused they are changed beings," Artois said.
"They hate and resent governance from outside, but their blood governs
them."

"Our blood governs us when the time comes--do you remember?"

Hermione had said the words before she remembered the circumstances in
which they had been spoken and of whom they were said. Directly she had
uttered them she remembered.

"What was that?" Maurice asked, before Artois could reply.

He had seen a suddenly conscious look in Hermione's face, and instantly
he was aware of a feeling of jealousy within him.

"What was that?" he repeated, looking quickly from one to the other.

"Something I remember saying to your wife," Artois answered. "We were
talking about human nature--a small subject, monsieur, isn't it?--and I
think I expressed the view of a fatalist. At any rate, I did say
that--that our blood governs us when the time comes."

"The time?" Maurice asked.

His feeling of jealousy died away, and was replaced by a keen personal
interest unmingled with suspicions of another.

"Well, I confess it sometimes seems to me as if, when a certain hour
strikes, a certain deed must be committed by a certain man or woman. It
is perhaps their hour of madness. They may repent it to the day of their
death. But can they in that hour avoid that deed? Sometimes, when I
witness the tragic scenes that occur abruptly, unexpectedly, in the
comedy of life, I am moved to wonder."

"Then you should be very forgiving, Emile," Hermione said.

"And you?" he asked. "Are you, or would you be, forgiving?"

Maurice leaned forward on the table and looked at his wife with
intensity.

"I hope so, but I don't think it would be for that--I mean because I
thought the deed might not have been avoided. I think I should forgive
because I pitied so, because I know how desperately unhappy I should be
myself if I were to do a hateful thing, a thing that was exceptional,
that was not natural to my nature as I had generally known it. When one
really does love cleanliness, to have thrown one's self down deliberately
in the mud, to see, to feel, that one is soiled from head to foot--that
must be terrible. I think I should forgive because I pitied so. What do
you say, Maurice?"

It was like a return to their talk in London at Caminiti's restaurant,
when Hermione and Artois discussed topics that interested them, and
Maurice listened until Hermione appealed to him for his opinion. But now
he was more deeply interested than his companions.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about pitying and forgiving, but I
expect you're right, Hermione."

"How?"

"In what you say about--about the person who's done the wrong thing
feeling awful afterwards. And I think Monsieur Artois is right,
too--about the hour of madness. I'm sure he is right. Sometimes an hour
comes and one seems to forget everything in it. One seems not to be
really one's self in it, but somebody else, and--and--"

Suddenly he seemed to become aware that, whereas Hermione and Artois had
been considering a subject impersonally, he was introducing the personal
element into the conversation. He stopped short, looked quickly from
Hermione to Artois, and said:

"What I mean is that I imagine it's so, and that I've known fellows--in
London, you know--who've done such odd things that I can only explain it
like that. They must have--well, they must have gone practically mad for
the moment. You--you see what I mean, Hermione?"

The question was uneasy.

"Yes, but I think we can control ourselves. If we couldn't, remorse would
lose half its meaning. I could never feel remorse because I had been
mad--horror, perhaps, but not remorse. It seems to me that remorse is our
sorrow for our own weakness, the heart's cry of 'I need not have done the
hateful thing, and I did it, I chose to do it!' But I could pity, I could
pity, and forgive because of my pity."

Gaspare came out with coffee.

"And then, Emile, you must have a siesta," said Hermione. "This is a
tiring day for you. Maurice and I will leave you quite alone in the
sitting-room."

"I don't think I could sleep," said Artois.

He was feeling oddly excited, and attributed the sensation to his weak
state of health. For so long he had been shut up, isolated from the
world, that even this coming out was an event. He was accustomed to
examine his feelings calmly, critically, to track them to their sources.
He tried to do so now.

"I must beware of my own extra sensitiveness," he said to himself. "I'm
still weak. I am not normal. I may see things distorted. I may
exaggerate, turn the small into the great. At least half of what I think
and feel to-day may come from my peculiar state."

Thus he tried to raise up barriers against his feeling that Delarey had
got into some terrible trouble during the absence of Hermione, that he
was now stricken with remorse, and that he was also in active dread of
something, perhaps of some Nemesis.

"All this may be imagination," Artois thought, as he sipped his coffee.
But he said again:

"I don't think I could sleep. I feel abnormally alive to-day. Do you
know the sensation, as if one were too quick, as if all the nerves were
standing at attention?"

"Then our peace here does not soothe you?" Hermione said.

"If I must be truthful--no," he answered.

He met Maurice's restless glance.

"I think I've had enough coffee," he added. "Coffee stimulates the nerves
too much at certain times."

Maurice finished his and asked for another cup.

"He isn't afraid of being overstimulated," said Hermione. "But, Emile,
you ought to sleep. You'll be dead tired this evening when you ride
down."

"This evening," Hermione had said. Maurice wondered suddenly how late
Artois was going to stay at the cottage.

"Oh no, it will be cool," Artois said.

"Yes," Maurice said. "Towards five we get a little wind from the sea
nearly always, even sooner sometimes. I--I usually go down to bathe about
that time."

"I must begin to bathe, too," Hermione said.

"What--to-day!" Maurice said, quickly.

"Oh no. Emile is here to-day."

Then Artois did not mean to go till late. But he--Maurice--must go down
to the sea before nightfall.

"Unless I bathe," he said, trying to speak naturally--"unless I bathe I
feel the heat too much at night. A dip in the sea does wonders for me."

"And in such a sea!" said Artois. "You must have your dip to-day. I shall
go directly that little wind you speak of comes. I told a boy to come up
from the village at four to lead the donkey down."

He smiled deprecatingly.

"Dreadful to be such a weakling, isn't it?" he said.

"Hush. Don't talk, like that. It's all going away. Strength is coming.
You'll soon be your old self. But you've got to look forward all the
time."

Hermione spoke with a warmth, an energy that braced. She spoke to Artois,
but Maurice, eager to grasp at any comfort, strove to take the words to
himself. This evening the climax of his Sicilian tragedy must come. And
then? Beyond, might there not be the calm, the happiness of a sane life?
He must look forward, he would look forward.

But when he looked, there stood Maddalena weeping.

He hated himself. He loved happiness, he longed for it, but he knew he
had lost his right to it, if any man ever has such a right. He had
created suffering. How dared he expect, how dared he even wish, to escape
from suffering?

"Now, Emile," Hermione said, "you have really got to go in and lie down
whether you feel sleepy or not. Don't protest. Maurice and I have hardly
seen anything of each other yet. We want to get rid of you."

She spoke laughingly, and laughingly he obeyed her. When she had settled
him comfortably in the sitting-room she came out again to the terrace
where her husband was standing, looking towards the sea. She had a rug
over her arm and was holding two cushions.

"I thought you and I might go down and take our siesta under the
oak-trees, Maurice. Would you like that?"

He was longing to get away, to go up to the heap of stones on the
mountain-top and set a match to the fragments of Hermione's letter, which
the dangerous wind might disturb, might bring out into the light of day.
But he acquiesced at once. He would go later--if not this afternoon, then
at night when he came back from the sea. They went down and spread the
rug under the shadow of the oaks.

"I used to read to Gaspare here," he said. "When you were away in
Africa."

"What did you read?"

"The _Arabian Nights_."

She stretched herself on the rug.

"To lie here and read the _Arabian Nights_! And you want to go away,
Maurice?"

"I think it's time to go. If I stayed too long here I should become fit
for nothing."

"Yes, that's true, I dare say. But--Maurice, it's so strange--I have a
feeling as if you would always be in Sicily. I know it's absurd, and yet
I have it. I feel as if you belonged to Sicily, and Sicily did not mean
to part from you."

"That can't be. How could I stay here always?"

"I know."

"Unless," he said, as if some new thought had started suddenly into his
mind--"unless I were--"

He stopped. He had remembered his sensation in the sea that gray morning
of sirocco. He had remembered how he had played at dying.

"What?"

She looked at him and understood.

"Maurice--don't! I--I can't bear that!"

"Not one of us can know," he answered.

"I--I thought of that once," she said--"long ago, on the first night that
we were here. I don't know why--but perhaps it was because I was so
happy. I think it must have been that. I suppose, in this world, there
must aways be dread in one's happiness, the thought it may stop soon, it
may end. But why should it? Is God cruel? I think He wants us to be
happy."

"If he wants us--"

"And that we prevent ourselves from being happy. But we won't do that,
Maurice--you and I--will we?"

He did not answer.

"This world--nature--is so wonderfully beautiful, so happily beautiful.
Surely we can learn to be happy, to keep happy in it. Look at that sky,
that sea! Look at the plain over there by the foot of Etna, and the
coast-line fading away, and Etna. The God who created it all must have
meant men to be happy in such a world. It isn't my brain tells me that,
Maurice, it's my heart, my whole heart that you have made whole. And I
know it tells the truth."

Her words were terrible to him. The sound of a step, a figure standing
before her, a few Sicilian words--and all this world in which she gloried
would be changed for her. But she must not know. He felt that he would be
willing to die to keep her ignorant of the truth forever.

"Now we must try to sleep," he said, to prevent her from speaking any
more of the words that were torturing him. "We must have our siesta. I
had very little sleep last night."

"And I had none at all. But now--we're together."

He arranged the cushion for her. They lay in soft shadow and could see
the shining world. The distant gleams upon the sea spoke to her. She
fancied them voices rising out of the dream of the waters, voices from
the breast of nature that was the breast of God, saying that she was not
in error, that God did mean men to be happy, that they could be happy if
they would learn of Him.

She watched those gleams until she fell asleep.

XX

When Hermione woke it was four o'clock. She sat up on the rug, looked
down over the mountain flank to the sea, then turned and saw her husband.
He was lying with his face half buried in his folded arms.

"Maurice!" she said, softly.

"Yes," he answered, lifting his face.

"Then you weren't asleep!"

"No."

"Have you been asleep?"

"No."

She looked at her watch.

"All this time! It's four. What a disgraceful siesta! But I was really
tired after the long journey and the night."

She stood up. He followed her example and threw the rug over his arm.

"Emile will think we've deserted him and aren't going to give him any
tea."

"Yes."

They began to walk up the track towards the terrace.

"Maurice," Hermione said, presently, more thoroughly wide-awake now. "Did
you get up while I was asleep? Did you begin to move away from me, and
did I stop you, or was it a dream? I have a kind of vague
recollection--or is it only imagination?--of stretching out my hand and
saying, 'Don't leave me alone--don't leave me alone!'"

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