The Call of the Blood

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

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"Che tempo fa oggi! Santa Madonna, che bel tempo!"

On this morning of February the clearness of the atmosphere was in truth
almost African. Under the cloudless sky every detail of the great view
from the terrace stood out with a magical distinctness. The lines of the
mountains were sharply defined against the profound blue. The forms of
the gray rocks scattered upon their slopes, of the peasants' houses, of
the olive and oak trees which grew thickly on the left flank of Monte
Amato below the priest's house, showed themselves in the sunshine with
the bold frankness which is part of the glory of all things in the south.
The figures of stationary or moving goatherds and laborers, watching
their flocks or toiling among the vineyards and the orchards, were
relieved against the face of nature in the shimmer of the glad gold in
this Eden, with a mingling of delicacy and significance which had in it
something ethereal and mysterious, a hint of fairy-land. Far off, rising
calmly in an immense slope, a slope that was classical in its dignity,
profound in its sobriety, remote, yet neither cold nor sad, Etna soared
towards the heaven, sending from its summit, on which the snows still
lingered, a steady plume of ivory smoke. In the nearer foreground, upon a
jagged crest of beetling rock, the ruins of a Saracenic castle dominated
a huddled village, whose houses seemed to cling frantically to the cliff,
as if each one were in fear of being separated from its brethren and
tossed into the sea. And far below that sea spread forth its waveless,
silent wonder to a horizon-line so distant that the eyes which looked
upon it could scarcely distinguish sea from sky--a line which surely
united not divided two shades of flawless blue, linking them in a
brotherhood which should be everlasting. Few sounds, and these but
slight ones, stirred in the breast of the ardent silence; some little
notes of birds, fragmentary and wandering, wayward as pilgrims who had
forgotten to what shrine they bent their steps, some little notes of
bells swinging beneath the tufted chins of goats, the wail of a woman's
song, old in its quiet melancholy, Oriental in its strange irregularity
of rhythm, and the careless twitter of a tarantella, played upon a
reed-flute by a secluded shepherd-boy beneath the bending silver green of
tressy olives beside a tiny stream.

Lucrezia was accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea.
Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and
played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its
gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental
song--she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare,
brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride
beneath its burdening pannier or its jar of water from the well. And she
had many a time danced to the tarantella that the shepherd-boy was
fluting, clapping her strong hands and swinging her broad hips, while the
great rings in her ears shook to and fro, and her whole healthy body
quivered to the spirit of the tune. She knew it all. It was and had
always been part of her life.

Hermione's garden of paradise generally seemed homely enough to Lucrezia.
Yet to-day, perhaps because she was dressed in her best on a day that was
not a festa, and wore a silver chain with a coral charm on it, and had
shoes on her feet, there seemed to her a newness, almost a strangeness in
the wideness and the silence, in the sunshine and the music, something
that made her breathe out a sigh, and stare with almost wondering eyes on
Etna and the sea. She soon lost her vague sensation that her life lay,
perhaps, in a home of magic, however, when she looked again at the mule
track which wound upward from the distant town, in which the train from
Messina must by this time have deposited her forestieri, and began to
think more naturally of the days that lay before her, of her novel and
important duties, and of the unusual sums of money that her activities
were to earn her.

Gaspare, who, as major-domo, had chosen her imperiously for his assistant
and underling in the house of the priest, had informed her that she was
to receive twenty-five lire a month for her services, besides food and
lodging, and plenty of the good, red wine of Amato. To Lucrezia such
wages seemed prodigal. She had never yet earned more than the half of
them. But it was not only this prospect of riches which now moved and
excited her.

She was to live in a splendidly furnished house with wealthy and
distinguished people; she was to sleep in a room all to herself, in a bed
that no one had a right to except herself. This was an experience that in
her most sanguine moments she had never anticipated. All her life had
been passed en famille in the village of Marechiaro, which lay on a
table-land at the foot of Monte Amato, half-way down to the sea. The
Gabbis were numerous, and they all lived in one room, to which cats,
hens, and turkeys resorted with much freedom and in considerable numbers.
Lucrezia had never known, perhaps had never desired, a moment of privacy,
but now she began to awake to the fact that privacy and daintiness and
pretty furniture were very interesting, and even touching, as well as
very phenomenal additions to a young woman's existence. What could the
people who had the power to provide them be like? She scanned the
mule-track with growing eagerness, but the procession did not appear. She
saw only an old contadino in a long woollen cap riding slowly into the
recesses of the hills on a donkey, and a small boy leading his goats to
pasture. The train must have been late. She turned round from the view
and examined her new home once more. Already she knew it by heart, yet
the wonder of it still encompassed her spirit.

Hermione's cottage, the eyrie to which she was bringing Maurice Delarey,
was only a cottage, although to Lucrezia it seemed almost a palace. It
was whitewashed, with a sloping roof of tiles, and windows with green
Venetian shutters. Although it now belonged to a contadino, it had
originally been built by a priest, who had possessed vineyards on the
mountain-side, and who wished to have a home to which he could escape
from the town where he lived when the burning heats of the summer set in.
Above his vineyards, some hundreds of yards from the summit of the
mountain, and close to a grove of oaks and olive-trees, which grew among
a turmoil of mighty boulders, he had terraced out the slope and set his
country home. At the edge of the rough path which led to the cottage from
the ravine below was a ruined Norman arch. This served as a portal of
entrance. Between it and the cottage was a well surrounded by crumbling
walls, with stone seats built into them. Passing that, one came at once
to the terrace of earth, fronted by a low wall with narrow seats covered
with white tiles, and divided by broken columns that edged the ravine and
commanded the great view on which Lucrezia had been gazing. On the wall
of this terrace were stone vases, in which scarlet geraniums were
growing. Red roses twined around the columns, and, beneath, the steep
side of the ravine was clothed with a tangle of vegetation, olive and
peach, pear and apple trees. Behind the cottage rose the bare
mountain-side, covered with loose stones and rocks, among which in every
available interstice the diligent peasants had sown corn and barley. Here
and there upon the mountains distant cottages were visible, but on Monte
Amato Hermione's was the last, the most intrepid. None other ventured to
cling to the warm earth so high above the sea and in a place so
solitary. That was why Hermione loved it, because it was near the sky
and very far away.

Now, after an earnest, ruminating glance at the cottage, Lucrezia walked
across the terrace and reverently entered it by a door which opened onto
a flight of three steps leading down to the terrace. Already she knew the
interior by heart, but she had not lost her awe of it, her sense almost
of being in a church when she stood among the furniture, the hangings,
and the pictures which she had helped to arrange under Gaspare's orders.
The room she now stood in was the parlor of the cottage, serving as
dining-room, drawing-room, boudoir, and den. Although it must be put to
so many purposes, it was only a small, square chamber, and very simply
furnished. The walls, like all the walls of the cottage inside and out,
were whitewashed. On the floor was a carpet that had been woven in
Kairouan, the sacred African town where Artois was now staying and making
notes for his new book. It was thick and rough, and many-colored almost
as Joseph's coat; brilliant but not garish, for the African has a strange
art of making colors friends instead of enemies, of blending them into
harmonies that are gay yet touched with peace. On the walls hung a few
reproductions of fine pictures: an old woman of Rembrandt, in whose
wrinkled face and glittering dark eyes the past pleasures and past
sorrows of life seemed tenderly, pensively united, mellowed by the years
into a soft bloom, a quiet beauty; an allegory of Watts, fierce with
inspiration like fire mounting up to an opening heaven; a landscape of
Frederick Walker's, the romance of harvest in an autumn land;
Burne-Jones's "The Mill," and a copy in oils of a knight of Gustave
Moreau's, riding in armor over the summit of a hill into an unseen
country of errantry, some fairy-land forlorn. There was, too, an old
Venetian mirror in a curiously twisted golden frame.

At the two small windows on either side of the door, which was half
glass, half white-painted wood, were thin curtains of pale gray-blue and
white, bought in the bazaars of Tunis. For furniture there were a
folding-table of brown, polished wood, a large divan with many cushions,
two deck-chairs of the telescope species, that can be made long or short
at will, a writing-table, a cottage piano, and four round wicker chairs
with arms. In one corner of the room stood a tall clock with a burnished
copper face, and in another a cupboard containing glass and china. A door
at the back, which led into the kitchen, was covered with an Oriental
portiere. On the writing-table, and on some dwarf bookcases already
filled with books left behind by Hermione on her last visit to Sicily,
stood rough jars of blue, yellow, and white pottery, filled with roses
and geraniums arranged by Gaspare. To the left of the room, as Lucrezia
faced it, was a door leading into the bedroom, of the master and
mistress.

After a long moment of admiring contemplation, Lucrezia went into this
bedroom, in which she was specially interested, as it was to be her
special care. All was white here, walls, ceiling, wooden beds, tables,
the toilet service, the bookcases. For there were books here, too, books
which Lucrezia examined with an awful wonder, not knowing how to read. In
the window-seat were white cushions. On the chest of drawers were more
red roses and geraniums. It was a virginal room, into which the bright,
golden sunbeams stole under the striped awning outside the low window
with surely a hesitating modesty, as if afraid to find themselves
intruders. The whiteness, the intense quietness of the room, through
whose window could be seen a space of far-off sea, a space of
mountain-flank, and, when one came near to it, and the awning was drawn
up, the snowy cone of Etna, struck now to the soul of Lucrezia a sense of
half-puzzled peace. Her large eyes opened wider, and she laid her hands
on her hips and fell into a sort of dream as she stood there, hearing
only the faint and regular ticking of the clock in the sitting-room. She
was well accustomed to the silence of the mountain world and never heeded
it, but peace within four walls was almost unknown to her. Here no hens
fluttered, no turkeys went to and fro elongating their necks, no children
played and squalled, no women argued and gossiped, quarrelled and worked,
no men tramped in and out, grumbled and spat. A perfectly clean and
perfectly peaceful room--it was marvellous, it was--she sighed again.
What must it be like to be gentlefolk, to have the money to buy calm and
cleanliness?

Suddenly she moved, took her hands from her hips, settled her yellow
handkerchief, and smiled. The silence had been broken by a sound all true
Sicilians love, the buzz and the drowsy wail of the ceramella, the
bagpipes which the shepherds play as they come down from the hills to the
villages when the festival of the Natale is approaching. It was as yet
very faint and distant, coming from the mountain-side behind the cottage,
but Lucrezia knew the tune. It was part of her existence, part of Etna,
the olive groves, the vineyards, and the sea, part of that old, old
Sicily which dwells in the blood and shines in the eyes, and is alive in
the songs and the dances of these children of the sun, and of legends and
of mingled races from many lands. It was the "Pastorale," and she knew
who was playing it--Sebastiano, the shepherd, who had lived with the
brigands in the forests that look down upon the Isles of Lipari, who now
kept his father's goats among the rocks, and knew every stone and every
cave on Etna, and who had a chest and arms of iron, and legs that no
climbing could fatigue, and whose great, brown fingers, that could break
a man's wrist, drew such delicate tones from the reed pipe that, when he
played it, even the old man's thoughts were turned to dancing and the
old woman's to love. But now he was being important, he was playing the
ceramella, into which no shepherd could pour such a volume of breath as
he, from which none could bring such a volume of warm and lusty music. It
was Sebastiano coming down from the top of Monte Amato to welcome the
forestieri.

The music grew louder, and presently a dog barked outside on the terrace.
Lucrezia ran to the window. A great white-and-yellow, blunt-faced,
pale-eyed dog, his neck surrounded by a spiked collar, stood there
sniffing and looking savage, his feathery tail cocked up pugnaciously
over his back.

"Sebastiano!" called Lucrezia, leaning out of the window under the
awning--"Sebastiano!"

Then she drew back laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by
the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone
seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and
its silence. Still squatting on the floor, Lucrezia called out once more:

"Sebastiano!"

Abruptly the tune ceased and the silence returned, emphasized by the
vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she
was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered
her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's
foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above
her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and
looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and
very masculine face, roughened by wind and toughened by sun, with keen,
steady, almost insolent eyes, black and shining, stiff, black hair, that
looked as if it had been crimped, a mustache sprouting above a wide,
slightly animal mouth full of splendid teeth, and a square, brutal, but
very manly chin. On the head was a Sicilian cap, long and hanging down
at the left side. There were ear-rings in the man's large, well-shaped
ears, and over the window-ledge protruded the swollen bladder, like a
dead, bloated monster, from which he had been drawing his antique tune.

He stared down at Lucrezia with a half-contemptuous humor, and she up at
him with a wide-eyed, unconcealed adoration. Then he looked curiously
round the room, with a sharp intelligence that took in every detail in a
moment.

"Per Dio!" he ejaculated. "Per Dio!"

He looked at Lucrezia, folded his brawny arms on the window-sill, and
said:

"They've got plenty of soldi."

Lucrezia nodded, not without personal pride.

"Gaspare says--"

"Oh, I know as much as Gaspare," interrupted Sebastiano, brusquely. "The
signora is my friend. When she was here before I saw her many times. But
for me she would never have taken the Casa del Prete."

"Why was that?" asked Lucrezia, with reverence.

"They told her in Marechiaro that it was not safe for a lady to live up
here alone, that when the night came no one could tell what would
happen."

"But, Gaspare--"

"Does Gaspare know every grotto on Etna? Has Gaspare lived eight years
with the briganti? And the Mafia--has Gaspare--"

He paused, laughed, pulled his mustache, and added:

"If the signora had not been assured of my protection she would never
have come up here."

"But now she has a husband."

"Yes."

He glanced again round the room.

"One can see that. Per Dio, it is like the snow on the top of Etna."

Lucrezia got up actively from the floor and came close to Sebastiano.

"What is the padrona like, Sebastiano?" she asked. "I have seen her, but
I have never spoken to her."

"She is simpatica--she will do you no harm."

"And is she generous?"

"Ready to give soldi to every one who is in trouble. But if you once
deceive her she will never look at you again."

"Then I will not deceive her," said Lucrezia, knitting her brows.

"Better not. She is not like us. She thinks to tell a lie is a sin
against the Madonna, I believe."

"But then what will the padrone do?" asked Lucrezia, innocently.

"Tell his woman the truth, like all husbands," replied Sebastiano, with a
broadly satirical grin. "As your man will some day, Lucrezia mia. All
husbands are good and faithful. Don't you know that?"

"Macche!"

She laughed loudly, with an incredulity quite free from bitterness.

"Men are not like us," she added. "They tell us whatever they please, and
do always whatever they like. We must sit in the doorway and keep our
back to the street for fear a man should smile at us, and they can stay
out all night, and come back in the morning, and say they've been fishing
at Isola Bella, or sleeping out to guard the vines, and we've got to say,
'Si, Salvatore!' or 'Si, Guido!' when we know very well--"

"What, Lucrezia?"

She looked into his twinkling eyes and reddened slightly, sticking out
her under lip.

"I'm not going to tell you."

"You have no business to know."

"And how can I help--they're coming!"

Sebastiano's dog had barked again on the terrace. Sebastiano lifted the
ceramalla quickly from the window-sill and turned round, while Lucrezia
darted out through the door, across the sitting-room, and out onto the
terrace.

"Are they there, Sebastiano? Are they there?"

He stood by the terrace wall, shading his eyes with his hand.

"Ecco!" he said, pointing across the ravine.

Far off, winding up from the sea slowly among the rocks and the
olive-trees, was a procession of donkeys, faintly relieved in the
brilliant sunshine against the mountain-side.

"One," counted Sebastiano, "two, three, four--there are four. The signore
is walking, the signora is riding. Whose donkeys have they got? Gaspare's
father's, of course. I told Gaspare to take Ciccio's, and--it is too far
to see, but I'll soon make them hear me. The signora loves the
'Pastorale.' She says there is all Sicily in it. She loves it more than
the tarantella, for she is good, Lucrezia--don't forget that--though she
is not a Catholic, and perhaps it makes her think of the coming of the
Bambino and of the Madonna. Ah! She will smile now and clap her hands
when she hears."

He put the pipe to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and began to play the
"Pastorale" with all his might, while Lucrezia listened, staring across
the ravine at the creeping donkey, which was bearing Hermione upward to
her garden of paradise near the sky.

IV

"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona loves Zampaglione,
and you must be sure to--'"

"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard--Yes, it is, it is! Hush!
Maurice--listen!"

Hermione pulled up her donkey, which was the last of the little
procession, laid her hand on her husband's arm, and held her breath,
looking upward across the ravine to the opposite slope where, made tiny
by distance, she saw the white line of the low terrace wall of the Casa
del Prete, the black dots, which were the heads of Sebastiano and
Lucrezia. The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished,
with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great
rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on
her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and
listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him.

"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The 'Pastorale'!"

Her lips parted. Tears came into her eyes, those tears that come to a
woman in a moment of supreme joy that seems to wipe out all the sorrows
of the past. She felt as if she were in a great dream, one of those rare
and exquisite dreams that sometimes bathe the human spirit, as a warm
wave of the Ionian Sea bathes the Sicilian shore in the shadow of an
orange grove, murmuring peace. In that old tune of the "Pastorale" all
her thoughts of Sicily, and her knowledge of Sicily, and her
imaginations, and her deep and passionately tender and even ecstatic
love of Sicily seemed folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She
could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with
its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely
breathed out. Ulysses stood to listen among the flocks of Polyphemus.
Empedocles stayed his feet among the groves of Etna to hear it. And
Persephone, wandering among the fields of asphodel, paused with her white
hands out-stretched to catch its drowsy beauty; and Arethusa, turned into
a fountain, hushed her music to let it have its way. And Hermione heard
in it the voice of the Bambino, the Christ-child, to whose manger-cradle
the shepherds followed the star, and the voice of the Madonna, Maria
stella del mare, whom the peasants love in Sicily as the child loves its
mother. And those peasants were in it, too, people of the lava wastes and
the lava terraces where the vines are green against the black, people of
the hazel and the beech forests, where the little owl cries at eve,
people of the plains where, beneath the yellow lemons, spring the yellow
flowers that are like their joyous reflection in the grasses, people of
the sea, that wonderful purple sea in whose depth of color eternity seems
caught. The altars of the pagan world were in it, and the wayside shrines
before which the little lamps are lit by night upon the lonely
mountain-sides, the old faith and the new, and the love of a land that
lives on from generation to generation in the pulsing breasts of men.

And Maurice was in it, too, and Hermione and her love for him and his for
her.

Gaspare did not move. He loved the "Pastorale" almost without knowing
that he loved it. It reminded him of the festa of Natale, when, as a
child, dressed in a long, white garment, he had carried a blazing torch
of straw down the steps of the church of San Pancrazio before the canopy
that sheltered the Bambino. It was a part of his life, as his mother
was, and Tito the donkey, and the vineyards, the sea, the sun. It pleased
him to hear it, and to feel that his padrona from a far country loved it,
and his isle, his "Paese" in which it sounded. So, though he had been
impatient to reach the Casa del Prete and enjoy the reward of praise
which he considered was his due for his forethought and his labors, he
stood very still by Tito, with his great, brown eyes fixed, and the
donkey switch drooping in the hand that hung at his side.

And Hermione for a moment gave herself entirely to her dream.

She had carried out the plan which she had made. She and Maurice Delarey
had been married quietly, early one morning in London, and had caught the
boat-train at Victoria, and travelled through to Sicily without stopping
on the way to rest. She wanted to plunge Maurice in the south at once,
not to lead him slowly, step by step, towards it. And so, after three
nights in the train, they had opened their eyes to the quiet sea near
Reggio, to the clustering houses under the mountains of Messina, to the
high-prowed fishermen's boats painted blue and yellow, to the coast-line
which wound away from the straits till it stole out to that almost
phantasmal point where Siracusa lies, to the slope of Etna, to the orange
gardens and the olives, and the great, dry water courses like giant
highways leading up into the mountains. And from the train they had come
up here into the recesses of the hills to hear their welcome of the
"Pastorale." It was a contrast to make a dream, the roar of ceaseless
travel melting into this radiant silence, this inmost heart of peace.
They had rushed through great cities to this old land of mountains and of
legends, and up there on the height from which the droning music dropped
to them through the sunshine was their home, the solitary house which was
to shelter their true marriage.

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