The Call of the Blood

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

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"Pardon me, monsieur, but are you entirely English?"

"No, monsieur. My mother has Sicilian blood in her veins. But I have
never been in Sicily or Italy."

"Ah, Emile," said Hermione, "how clever of you to find that out. I notice
it, too, sometimes, that touch of the blessed South. I shall take him
there some day, and see if the Southern blood doesn't wake up in his
veins when he's in the rays of the real sun we never see in England."

"She'll take you to Italy, you fortunate, damned dog!" thought Artois.
"What luck for you to go there with such a companion!"

They sat down and the two men began to smoke. Hermione never smoked
because she had tried smoking and knew she hated it. They were alone in
the room, which was warm, but not too warm, and faintly lit by shaded
lamps. Artois began to feel more genial, he scarcely knew why. Perhaps
the good dinner had comforted him, or perhaps he was beginning to yield
to the charm of Delarey's gay and boyish modesty, which was untainted and
unspoiled by any awkward shyness.

Artois did not know or seek to know, but he was aware that he was more
ready to be happy with the flying moment than he had been, or had
expected to be that evening. Something almost paternal shone in his gray
eyes as he stretched his large limbs on Caminiti's notion of a Turkish
divan, and watched the first smoke-wreaths rise from his cigar, a light
which made his face most pleasantly expressive to Hermione.

"He likes Maurice," she thought, with a glow of pleasure, and with the
thought came into her heart an even deeper love for Maurice. For it was a
triumph, indeed, if Artois were captured speedily by any one. It seemed
to her just then as if she had never known what perfect happiness was
till now, when she sat between her best friend and her lover, and
sensitively felt that in the room there were not three separate persons
but a Trinity. For a moment there was a comfortable silence. Then an
Italian boy brought in the coffee. Artois spoke to him in Italian. His
eyes lit up as he answered with the accent of Naples, lit up still more
when Artois spoke to him again in his own dialect. When he had served the
coffee he went out, glowing.

"Is your honeymoon to be Italian?" asked Artois.

"Whatever Hermione likes," answered Delarey. "I--it doesn't matter to me.
Wherever it is will be the same to me."

"Happiness makes every land an Italy, eh?" said Artois. "I expect that's
profoundly true."

"Don't you--don't you know?" ventured Delarey.

"I! My friend, one cannot be proficient in every branch of knowledge."

He spoke the words without bitterness, with a calm that had in it
something more sad than bitterness. It struck both Hermione and Delarey
as almost monstrous that anybody with whom they were connected should be
feeling coldly unhappy at this moment. Life presented itself to them in a
glorious radiance of sunshine, in a passionate light, in a torrent of
color. Their knowledge of life's uncertainties was rocked asleep by their
dual sensation of personal joy, and they felt as if every one ought to be
as happy as they were, almost as if every one could be as happy as they
were.

"Emile," said Hermione, led by this feeling, "you can't mean to say that
you have never known the happiness that makes of every place--Clapham,
Lippe-Detmold, a West African swamp, a Siberian convict settlement--an
Italy? You have had a wonderful life. You have worked, you have wandered,
had your ambition and your freedom--"

"But my eyes have been always wide open," he interrupted, "wide open on
life watching the manifestations of life."

"Haven't you ever been able to shut them for a minute to everything but
your own happiness? Oh, it's selfish, I know, but it does one good,
Emile, any amount of good, to be selfish like that now and then. It
reconciles one so splendidly to existence. It's like a spring cleaning of
the soul. And then, I think, when one opens one's eyes again one
sees--one must see--everything more rightly, not dressed up in frippery,
not horribly naked either, but truly, accurately, neither overlooking
graces nor dwelling on distortions. D'you understand what I mean? Perhaps
I don't put it well, but--"

"I do understand," he said. "There's truth in what you say."

"Yes, isn't there?" said Delarey.

His eyes were fixed on Hermione with an intense eagerness of admiration
and love.

Suddenly Artois felt immensely old, as he sometimes felt when he saw
children playing with frantic happiness at mud-pies or snowballing. A
desire, which his true self condemned, came to him to use his
intellectual powers cruelly, and he yielded to it, forgetting the benign
spirit which had paid him a moment's visit and vanished almost ere it had
arrived.

"There's truth in what you say. But there's another truth, too, which you
bring to my mind at this moment."

"What's that, Emile?"

"The payment that is exacted from great happiness. These intense joys of
which you speak--what are they followed by? Haven't you observed that any
violence in one direction is usually, almost, indeed, inevitably,
followed by a violence in the opposite direction? Humanity is treading a
beaten track, the crowd of humanity, and keeps, as a crowd, to this
highway. But individuals leave the crowd, searchers, those who need the
great changes, the great fortunes that are dangerous. On one side of the
track is a garden of paradise; on the other a deadly swamp. The man or
woman who, leaving the highway, enters the garden of paradise is almost
certain in the fulness of time to be struggling in the deadly swamp."

"Do you really mean that misery is born of happiness?"

"Of what other parent can it be the child? In my opinion those who are
said to be 'born in misery' never know what real misery is. It is only
those who have drunk deep of the cup of joy who can drink deep of the cup
of sorrow."

Hermione was about to speak, but Delarey suddenly burst in with the
vehement exclamation:

"Where's the courage in keeping to the beaten track? Where's the courage
in avoiding the garden for fear of the swamp?"

"That's exactly what I was going to say," said Hermione, her whole face
lighting up. "I never expected to hear a counsel of cowardice from you,
Emile."

"Or is it a counsel of prudence?"

He looked at them both steadily, feeling still as if he were face to face
with children. For a man he was unusually intuitive, and to-night
suddenly, and after he had begun to yield to his desire to be cruel, to
say something that would cloud this dual happiness in which he had no
share, he felt a strange, an almost prophetic conviction that out of the
joy he now contemplated would be born the gaunt offspring, misery, of
which he had just spoken. With the coming of this conviction, which he
did not even try to explain to himself or to combat, came an abrupt
change in his feelings. Bitterness gave place to an anxiety that was far
more human, to a desire to afford some protection to these two people
with whom he was sitting. But how? And against what? He did not know. His
intuition stopped short when he strove to urge it on.

"Prudence," said Hermione. "You think it prudent to avoid the joy life
throws at your feet?"

Abruptly provoked by his own limitations, angry, too, with his erratic
mental departure from the realm of reason into the realm of fantasy--for
so he called the debatable land over which intuition held sway--Artois
hounded out his mood and turned upon himself.

"Don't listen to me," he said. "I am the professional analyst of life. As
I sit over a sentence, examining, selecting, rejecting, replacing its
words, so do I sit over the emotions of myself and others till I cease
really to live, and could almost find it in my head to try to prevent
them from living, too. Live, live--enter into the garden of paradise and
never mind what comes after."

"I could not do anything else," said Hermione. "It is unnatural to me to
look forward. The 'now' nearly always has complete possession of me."

"And I," said Artois, lightly, "am always trying to peer round the corner
to see what is coming. And you, Monsieur Delarey?"

"I!" said Delarey.

He had not expected to be addressed just then, and for a moment looked
confused.

"I don't know if I can say," he answered, at last. "But I think if the
present was happy I should try to live in that, and if it was sad I
should have a shot at looking forward to something better."

"That's one of the best philosophies I ever heard," said Hermione, "and
after my own heart. Long live the philosophy of Maurice Delarey!"

Delarey blushed with pleasure like a boy. Just then three men came in
smoking cigars. Hermione looked at her watch.

"Past eleven," she said. "I think I'd better go. Emile, will you drive
with me home?"

"I!" he said, with an unusual diffidence. "May I?"

He glanced at Delarey.

"I want to have a talk with you. Maurice quite understands. He knows you
go back to Paris to-morrow."

They all got up, and Delarey at once held out his hand to Artois.

"I am glad to have been allowed to meet Hermione's best friend," he said,
simply. "I know how much you are to her, and I hope you'll let me be a
friend, too, perhaps, some day."

He wrung Artois's hand warmly.

"Thank you, monsieur," replied Artois.

He strove hard to speak as cordially as Delarey.

Two or three minutes later Hermione and he were in a hansom driving down
Regent Street. The fog had lifted, and it was possible to see to right
and left of the greasy thoroughfare.

"Need we go straight back?" said Hermione. "Why not tell him to drive
down to the Embankment? It's quiet there at night, and open and fine--one
of the few fine things in dreary old London. And I want to have a last
talk with you, Emile."

Artois pushed up the little door in the roof with his stick.

"The Embankment--Thames," he said to the cabman, with a strong foreign
accent.

"Right, sir," replied the man, in the purest cockney.

As soon as the trap was shut down above her head Hermione exclaimed:

"Emile, I'm so happy, so--so happy! I think you must understand why now.
You don't wonder any more, do you?"

"No, I don't wonder. But did I ever express any wonder?"

"I think you felt some. But I knew when you saw him it would go. He's got
one beautiful quality that's very rare in these days, I think--reverence.
I love that in him. He really reverences everything that is fine, every
one who has fine and noble aspirations and powers. He reverences you."

"If that is the case he shows very little insight."

"Don't abuse yourself to me to-night. There's nothing the matter now, is
there?"

Her intonation demanded a negative, but Artois did not hasten to give it.
Instead he turned the conversation once more to Delarey.

"Tell me something more about him," he said. "What sort of family does he
come from?"

"Oh, a very ordinary family, well off, but not what is called specially
well-born. His father has a large shipping business. He's a cultivated
man, and went to Eton and Oxford, as Maurice did. Maurice's mother is
very handsome, not at all intellectual, but fascinating. The Southern
blood comes from her side."

"Oh--how?"

"Her mother was a Sicilian."

"Of the aristocracy, or of the people?"

"She was a lovely contadina. But what does it matter? I am not marrying
Maurice's grandmother."

"How do you know that?"

"You mean that our ancestors live in us. Well, I can't bother. If Maurice
were a crossing-sweeper, and his grandmother had been an evilly disposed
charwoman, who could never get any one to trust her to char, I'd marry
him to-morrow if he'd have me."

"I'm quite sure you would."

"Besides, probably the grandmother was a delicious old dear. But didn't
you like Maurice, Emile? I felt so sure you did."

"I--yes, I liked him. I see his fascination. It is almost absurdly
obvious, and yet it is quite natural. He is handsome and he is charming."

"And he's good, too."

"Why not? He does not look evil. I thought of him as a Mercury."

"The messenger of the gods--yes, he is like that."

She laid her hand on his arm, as if her happiness and longing for
sympathy in it impelled her to draw very near to a human being.

"A bearer of good tidings--that is what he has been to me. I want you to
like and understand him so much, Emile; you more, far more, than any one
else."

The cab was now in a steep and narrow street leading down from the Strand
to the Thames Embankment--a street that was obscure and that looked sad
and evil by night. Artois glanced out at it, and Hermione, seeing that he
did so, followed his eyes. They saw a man and a woman quarrelling under a
gas-lamp. The woman was cursing and crying. The man put out his hand and
pushed her roughly. She fell up against some railings, caught hold of
them, turned her head and shrieked at the man, opening her mouth wide.

"Poor things!" Hermione said. "Poor things! If we could only all be good
to each other! It seems as if it ought to be so simple."

"It's too difficult for us, nevertheless."

"Not for some of us, thank God. Many people have been good to me--you for
one, you most of all my friends. Ah, how blessed it is to be out here!"

She leaned over the wooden apron of the cab, stretching out her hands
instinctively as if to grasp the space, the airy darkness of the
spreading night.

"Space seems to liberate the soul," she said. "It's wrong to live in
cities, but we shall have to a good deal, I suppose. Maurice needn't
work, but I'm glad to say he does."

"What does he do?"

"I don't know exactly, but he's in his father's shipping business. I'm an
awful idiot at understanding anything of that sort, but I understand
Maurice, and that's the important matter."

[Illustration: "'SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,' SHE SAID"]

They were now on the Thames Embankment, driving slowly along the broad
and almost deserted road. Far off lights, green, red, and yellow, shone
faintly upon the drifting and uneasy waters of the river on the one side;
on the other gleamed the lights from the houses and hotels, in which
people were supping after the theatres. Artois, who, like most fine
artists, was extremely susceptible to the influence of place and of the
hour, with its gift of light or darkness, began to lose in this larger
atmosphere of mystery and vaguely visible movement the hitherto
dominating sense of himself, to regain the more valuable and more
mystical sense of life and its strange and pathetic relation with nature
and the spirit behind nature, which often floated upon him like a tide
when he was creating, but which he was accustomed to hold sternly in
leash. Now he was not in the mood to rein it in. Maurice Delarey and his
business, Hermione, her understanding of him and happiness in him, Artois
himself in his sharply realized solitude of the third person, melted into
the crowd of beings who made up life, whose background was the vast and
infinitely various panorama of nature, and Hermione's last words, "the
important matter," seemed for the moment false to him. What was, what
could be, important in the immensity and the baffling complexity of
existence?

"Look at those lights," he said, pointing to those that gleamed across
the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy
beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and
cryptic like our thoughts. Is anything important?"

"Almost everything, I think, certainly everything in us. If I didn't feel
so, I could scarcely go on living. And you must really feel so, too. You
do. I have your letters to prove it. Why, how often have I written
begging you not to lash yourself into fury over the follies of men!"

"Yes, my temperament betrays the citadel of my brain. That happens in
many."

"You trust too much to your brain and too little to your heart."

"And you do the contrary, my friend. You are too easily carried away by
your impulses."

She was silent for a moment. The cabman was driving slowly. She watched a
distant barge drifting, like a great shadow, at the mercy of the tide.
Then she turned a little, looked at Artois's shadowy profile, and said:

"Don't ever be afraid to speak to me quite frankly--don't be afraid now.
What is it?"

He did not answer.

"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to me in your little
red-and-yellow room, the morocco slipper of a room."

"And if it were the Sicilian grandmother?"

He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh with her at
himself if she began to laugh.

But she said, gravely:

"Go on."

"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness of yours misery
will be born."

"Yes? What sort of misery?"

"I don't know."

"Misery to myself or to the sharer of my happiness?"

"To you."

"That was why you spoke of the garden of paradise and the deadly swamp?"

"I think it must have been."

"Well?"

"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust what I love, and I see
the South in him."

"The grace, the charm, the enticement of the South."

"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence. Probably he has, but has
he faithfulness?"

"Oh, Emile!"

"You told me to be frank."

"And I wish you to be. Go on, say everything."

"I've only seen Delarey once, and I'll confess that I came prepared to
see faults as clearly as, perhaps more clearly than, virtues. I don't
pretend to read character at a glance. Only fools can do that--I am
relying on their frequent assertion that they can. He strikes me as a man
of great charm, with an unusual faculty of admiration for the gifts of
others and a modest estimate of himself. I believe he's sincere."

"He is, through and through."

"I think so--now. But does he know his own blood? Our blood governs us
when the time comes. He is modest about his intellect. I think it quick,
but I doubt its being strong enough to prove a good restraining
influence."

"Against what?"

"The possible call of the blood that he doesn't understand."

"You speak almost as if he were a child," Hermione said. "He's much
younger than I am, but he's twenty-four."

"He is very young looking, and you are at least twenty years ahead of him
in all essentials. Don't you feel it?"

"I suppose--yes, I do."

"Mercury--he should be mercurial."

"He is. That's partly why I love him, perhaps. He is full of swiftness."

"So is the butterfly when it comes out into the sun."

"Emile, forgive me, but sometimes you seem to me deliberately to lie down
and roll in pessimism rather as a horse--"

"Why not say an ass?"

She laughed.

"An ass, then, my dear, lies down sometimes and rolls in dust. I think
you are doing it to-night. I think you were preparing to do it this
afternoon. Perhaps it is the effect of London upon you?"

"London--by-the-way, where are you going for your honeymoon? I am sure
you know, though Monsieur Delarey may not."

"Why are you sure?"

"Your face to-night when I asked if it was to be Italian."

She laid her hand again upon his arm and spoke eagerly, forgetting in a
moment his pessimism and the little cloud it had brought across her
happiness.

"You're right; I've decided."

"Italy--and hotels?"

"No, a thousand times no!"

"Where then?"

"Sicily, and my peasant's cottage."

"The cottage on Monte Amato where you spent a summer four or five years
ago contemplating Etna?"

"Yes. I've not said a word to Maurice, but I've taken it again. All the
little furniture I had--beds, straw chairs, folding-tables--is stored in
a big room in the village at the foot of the mountain. Gaspare, the
Sicilian boy who was my servant, will superintend the carrying up of it
on women's heads--his dear old grandmother takes the heaviest things,
arm-chairs and so on--and it will all be got ready in no time. I'm having
the house whitewashed again, and the shutters painted, and the stone
vases on the terrace will be filled with scarlet geraniums, and--oh,
Emile, I shall hear the piping of the shepherds in the ravine at twilight
again with him, and see the boys dance the tarantella under the moon
again with him, and--and--"

She stopped with a break in her voice.

"Put away your pessimism, dear Emile," she continued, after a moment.
"Tell me you think we shall be happy in our garden of paradise--tell me
that!"

But he only said, even more gravely:

"So you're taking him to the real South?"

"Yes, to the blue and the genuine gold, and the quivering heat, and the
balmy nights when Etna sends up its plume of ivory smoke to the moon.
He's got the south in his blood. Well, he shall see the south first with
me, and he shall love it as I love it."

He said nothing. No spark of her enthusiasm called forth a spark from
him. And now she saw that, and said again:

"London is making you horrible to-night. You are doing London and
yourself an injustice, and Maurice, too."

"It's very possible," he replied. "But--I can say it to you--I have a
certain gift of--shall I call it divination?--where men and women are
concerned. It is not merely that I am observant of what is, but that I
can often instinctively feel that which must be inevitably produced by
what is. Very few people can read the future in the present. I often can,
almost as clearly as I can read the present. Even pessimism, accentuated
by the influence of the Infernal City, may contain some grains of truth."

"What do you see for us, Emile? Don't you think we shall be happy
together, then? Don't you think that we are suited to be happy together?"

When she asked Artois this direct question he was suddenly aware of a
vagueness brooding in his mind, and knew that he had no definite answer
to make.

"I see nothing," he said, abruptly. "I know nothing. It may be London. It
may be my own egoism."

And then he suddenly explained himself to Hermione with the extraordinary
frankness of which he was only capable when he was with her, or was
writing to her.

"I am the dog in the manger," he concluded. "Don't let my growling
distress you. Your happiness has made me envious."

"I'll never believe it," she exclaimed. "You are too good a friend and
too great a man for that. Why can't you be happy, too? Why can't you find
some one?"

"Married life wouldn't suit me. I dislike loneliness yet I couldn't do
without it. In it I find my liberty as an artist."

"Sometimes I think it must be a curse to be an artist, and yet I have
often longed to be one."

"Why have you never tried to be one?"

"I hardly know. Perhaps in my inmost being I feel I never could be. I am
too impulsive, too unrestrained, too shapeless in mind. If I wrote a book
it might be interesting, human, heart-felt, true to life, I hope, not
stupid, I believe; but it would be a chaos. You--how it would shock your
critical mind! I could never select and prune and blend and graft. I
should have to throw my mind and heart down on the paper and just leave
them there."

"If you did that you might produce a human document that would live
almost as long as literature, that even just criticism would be powerless
to destroy."

"I shall never write that book, but I dare say I shall live it."

"Yes," he said. "You will live it, perhaps with Monsieur Delarey."

And he smiled.

"When is the wedding to be?"

"In January, I think."

"Ah! When you are in your garden of paradise I shall not be very far
off--just across your blue sea on the African shore."

"Why, where are you going, Emile?"

"I shall spend the spring at the sacred city of Kairouan, among the
pilgrims and the mosques, making some studies, taking some notes."

"For a book? Come over to Sicily and see us."

"I don't think you will want me there."

The trap in the roof was opened, and a beery eye, with a luscious smile
in it, peered down upon them.

"'Ad enough of the river, sir?"

"Comment?" said Artois.

"We'd better go home, I suppose," Hermione said.

She gave her address to the cabman, and they drove in silence to Eaton
Place.

III

Lucrezia Gabbi came out onto the terrace of the Casa del Prete on Monte
Amato, shaded her eyes with her brown hands, and gazed down across the
ravine over the olive-trees and the vines to the mountain-side opposite,
along which, among rocks and Barbary figs, wound a tiny track trodden by
the few contadini whose stone cottages, some of them scarcely more than
huts, were scattered here and there upon the surrounding heights that
looked towards Etna and the sea. Lucrezia was dressed in her best. She
wore a dark-stuff gown covered in the front by a long blue-and-white
apron. Although really happiest in her mind when her feet were bare, she
had donned a pair of white stockings and low slippers, and over her
thick, dark hair was tied a handkerchief gay with a pattern of brilliant
yellow flowers on a white ground. This was a present from Gaspare bought
at the town of Cattaro at the foot of the mountains, and worn now for the
first time in honor of a great occasion.

To-day Lucrezia was in the service of distinguished forestieri, and she
was gazing now across the ravine straining her eyes to see a procession
winding up from the sea: donkeys laden with luggage, and her new padrone
and padrona pioneered by the radiant Gaspare towards their mountain home.
It was a good day for their arrival. Nobody could deny that. Even
Lucrezia, who was accustomed to fine weather, having lived all her life
in Sicily, was struck to a certain blinking admiration as she stepped out
on to the terrace, and murmured to herself and a cat which was basking
on the stone seat that faced the cottage between broken columns, round
which roses twined:

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