The Call of the Blood

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32

Delarey was almost confused by it all. Half dazed by the noise of the
journey, he was now half dazed by the wonder of the quiet as he stood
near Gaspare and listened to Sebastiano's music, and looked upward to the
white terrace wall.

Hermione was to be his possession here, in this strange and far-off land,
among these simple peasant people. So he thought of them, not versed yet
in the complex Sicilian character. He listened, and he looked at Gaspare.
He saw a boy of eighteen, short as are most Sicilians, but straight as an
arrow, well made, active as a cat, rather of the Greek than of the Arab
type so often met with in Sicily, with bold, well-cut features,
wonderfully regular and wonderfully small, square, white teeth, thick,
black eyebrows, and enormous brown eyes sheltered by the largest lashes
he had ever seen. The very low forehead was edged by a mass of hair that
had small gleams of bright gold here and there in the front, but that
farther back on the head was of a brown so dark as to look nearly black.
Gaspare was dressed in a homely suit of light-colored linen with no
collar and a shirt open at the throat, showing a section of chest tanned
by the sun. Stout mountain boots were on his feet, and a white linen hat
was tipped carelessly to the back of his head, leaving his expressive,
ardently audacious, but not unpleasantly impudent face exposed to the
golden rays of which he had no fear.

As Delarey looked at him he felt oddly at home with him, almost as if he
stood beside a young brother. Yet he could scarcely speak Gaspare's
language, and knew nothing of his thoughts, his feelings, his hopes, his
way of life. It was an odd sensation, a subtle sympathy not founded upon
knowledge. It seemed to now into Delarey's heart out of the heart of the
sun, to steal into it with the music of the "Pastorale."

"I feel--I feel almost as if I belonged here," he whispered to Hermione,
at last.

She turned her head and looked down on him from her donkey. The tears
were still in her eyes.

"I always knew you belonged to the blessed, blessed south," she said, in
a low voice. "Do you care for that?"

She pointed towards the terrace.

"That music?"

"Yes."

"Tremendously, but I don't know why. Is it very beautiful?"

"I sometimes think it is the most beautiful music I have ever heard. At
any rate, I have always loved it more than all other music, and
now--well, you can guess if I love it now."

She dropped one hand against the donkey's warm shoulder. Maurice took it
in his warm hand.

"All Sicily, all the real, wild Sicily seems to be in it. They play it in
the churches on the night of the Natale," she went on, after a moment. "I
shall never forget hearing it for the first time. I felt as if it took
hold of my very soul with hands like the hands of the Bambino."

She broke off. A tear had fallen down upon her cheek.

"Avanti Gaspare!" she said.

Gaspare lifted his switch and gave Tito a tap, calling out "Ah!" in a
loud, manly voice. The donkey moved on, tripping carefully among the
stones. They mounted slowly up towards the "Pastorale." Presently
Hermione said to Maurice, who kept beside her in spite of the narrowness
of the path:

"Everything seems very strange to me to-day. Can you guess why?"

"I don't know. Tell me," he answered.

"It's this. I never expected to be perfectly happy. We all have our
dreams, I suppose. We all think now and then, 'If only I could have this
with that, this person in that place, I could be happy.' And perhaps we
have sometimes a part of our dream turned into reality, though even that
comes seldom. But to have the two, to have the two halves of our dream
fitted together and made reality--isn't that rare? Long ago, when I was a
girl, I always used to think--'If I could ever be with the one I loved in
the south--alone, quite alone, quite away from the world, I could be
perfectly happy.' Well, years after I thought that I came here. I knew at
once I had found my ideal place. One-half of my dream was made real and
was mine. That was much, wasn't it? But getting this part of what I
longed for sometimes made me feel unutterably sad. I had never seen you
then, but often when I sat on that little terrace up there I felt a
passionate desire to have a human being whom I loved beside me. I loved
no one then, but I wanted, I needed to love. Do men ever feel that? Women
do, often, nearly always I think. The beauty made me want to love.
Sometimes, as I leaned over the wall, I heard a shepherd-boy below in the
ravine play on his pipe, or I heard the goat-bells ringing under the
olives. Sometimes at night I saw distant lights, like fire-flies, lamps
carried by peasants going to their homes in the mountains from a festa in
honor of some saint, stealing upward through the darkness, or I saw the
fishermen's lights burning in the boats far off upon the sea. Then--then
I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I
almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize
what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation,
the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now--now
I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know
then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I
never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. Why should
he? What have I ever done to be worthy of such a gift?"

"You've been yourself," he answered.

At this moment the path narrowed and he had to fall behind, and they did
not speak again till they had clambered up the last bit of the way, steep
almost as the side of a house, passed through the old ruined arch, and
came out upon the terrace before the Casa del Prete.

Sebastiano met them, still playing lustily upon his pipe, while the sweat
dripped from his sunburned face; but Lucrezia, suddenly overcome by
shyness, had disappeared round the corner of the cottage to the kitchen.
The donkey boys were resting on the stone seats in easy attitudes,
waiting for Gaspare's orders to unload, and looking forward to a drink of
the Monte Amato wine. When they had had it they meant to carry out a plan
devised by the radiant Gaspare, to dance a tarantella for the forestieri
while Sebastiano played the flute. But no hint of this intention was to
be given till the luggage had been taken down and carried into the house.
Their bright faces were all twinkling with the knowledge of their secret.
When at length Sebastiano had put down the ceramella and shaken Hermione
and Maurice warmly by the hand, and Gaspare had roughly, but with roars
of laughter, dragged Lucrezia into the light of day to be presented,
Hermione took her husband in to see their home. On the table in the
sitting-room lay a letter.

"A letter already!" she said.

There was a sound almost of vexation in her voice. The little white thing
lying there seemed to bring a breath of the world she wanted to forget
into their solitude.

"Who can have written?"

She took it up and felt contrition.

"It's from Emile!" she exclaimed. "How good of him to remember! This must
be his welcome."

"Read it, Hermione," said Maurice. "I'll look after Gaspare."

She laughed.

"Better not. He's here to look after us. But you'll soon understand him,
very soon, and he you. You speak different languages, but you both belong
to the south. Let him alone, Maurice. We'll read this together. I'm sure
it's for you as well as me."

And while Gaspare and the boys carried in the trunks she sat down by the
table and opened Emile's letter. It was very short, and was addressed
from Kairouan, where Artois had established himself for the spring in an
Arab house. She began reading it aloud in French:

"This is a word--perhaps unwelcome, for I think I understand, dear
friend, something of what you are feeling and of what you desire
just now--a word of welcome to your garden of paradise. May there
never be an angel with a flaming sword to keep the gate against
you. Listen to the shepherds fluting, dream, or, better, live, as
you are grandly capable of living, under the old olives of Sicily.
Take your golden time boldly with both hands. Life may seem to most
of us who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured thing,
but when it is not so for a while to one who can think as you can
think, the power of thought, of deep thought, intensifies its
glory. You will never enjoy as might a pagan, perhaps never as
might a saint. But you will enjoy as a generous-blooded woman with
a heart that only your friends--I should like to dare to say only
one friend--know in its rare entirety. There is an egoist here, in
the shadow of the mosques, who turns his face towards Mecca, and
prays that you may never leave your garden.
E. A."

"Does the Sicilian grandmother respond to the magic of the south?"

When she drew near to the end of this letter Hermione hesitated.

"He--there's something," she said, "that is too kind to me. I don't think
I'll read it."

"Don't," said Delarey. "But it can't be too kind."

She saw the postscript and smiled.

"And quite at the end there's an allusion to you."

"Is there?"

"I must read that."

And she read it.

"He needn't be afraid of the grandmother's not responding, need he,
Maurice?"

"No," he said, smiling too. "But is that it, do you think? Why should it
be? Who wouldn't love this place?"

And he went to the open door and looked out towards the sea.

"Who wouldn't?" he repeated.

"Oh, I have met an Englishman who was angry with Etna for being the shape
it is."

"What an ass!"

"I thought so, too. But, seriously, I expect the grandmother has
something to say in that matter of your feeling already, as if you
belonged here."

"Perhaps."

He was still looking towards the distant sea far down below them.

"Is that an island?" he asked.

"Where?" said Hermione, getting up and coming towards him. "Oh, that--no,
it is a promontory, but it's almost surrounded by the sea. There is only
a narrow ledge of rock, like a wall, connecting it with the main-land,
and in the rock there's a sort of natural tunnel through which the sea
flows. I've sometimes been to picnic there. On the plateau hidden among
the trees there's a ruined house. I have spent many hours reading and
writing in it. They call it, in Marechiaro, Casa delle Sirene--the house
of the sirens."

"Questo vino e bello e fino,"

cried Gaspare's voice outside.

"A Brindisi!" said Hermione. "Gaspare's treating the boys. Questo
vino--oh, how glorious to be here in Sicily!"

She put her arm through Delarey's, and drew him out onto the terrace.
Gaspare, Lucrezia, Sebastiano, and the three boys stood there with
glasses of red wine in their hands raised high above their heads.

"Questo vino e bello e fino,
E portato da Castel Perini,
Faccio brindisi alla Signora Ermini,"

continued Gaspare, joyously, and with an obvious pride in his poetical
powers.

They all drank simultaneously, Lucrezia spluttering a little out of
shyness.

"Monte Amato, Gaspare, not Castel Perini. But that doesn't rhyme, eh?
Bravo! But we must drink, too."

Gaspare hastened to fill two more glasses.

"Now it's our turn," cried Hermione.

"Questo vino e bello e fino,
E portato da Castello a mare,
Faccio brindisi al Signor Gaspare."

The boys burst into a hearty laugh, and Gaspare's eyes gleamed with
pleasure while Hermione and Maurice drank. Then Sebastiano drew from the
inner pocket of his old jacket a little flute, smiling with an air of
intense and comic slyness which contorted his face.

"Ah," said Hermione, "I know--it's the tarantella!"

She clapped her hands.

"It only wanted that," she said to Maurice. "Only that--the tarantella!"

"Guai Lucrezia!" cried Gaspare, tyrannically.

Lucrezia bounded to one side, bent her body inward, and giggled with all
her heart. Sebastiano leaned his back against a column and put the flute
to his lips.

"Here, Maurice, here!" said Hermione.

She made him sit down on one of the seats under the parlor window, facing
the view, while the four boys took their places, one couple opposite to
the other. Then Sebastiano began to twitter the tune familiar to the
Sicilians of Marechiaro, in which all the careless pagan joy of life in
the sun seems caught and flung out upon a laughing, dancing world.
Delarey laid his hands on the warm tiles of the seat, leaned forward, and
watched with eager eyes. He had never seen the tarantella, yet now with
his sensation of expectation there was blended another feeling. It seemed
to him as if he were going to see something he had known once, perhaps
very long ago, something that he had forgotten and that was now going to
be recalled to his memory. Some nerve in his body responded to
Sebastiano's lively tune. A desire of movement came to him as he saw the
gay boys waiting on the terrace, their eyes already dancing, although
their bodies were still.

Gaspare bent forward, lifted his hands above his head, and began to snap
his fingers in time to the music. A look of joyous invitation had come
into his eyes--an expression that was almost coquettish, like the
expression of a child who has conceived some lively, innocent design of
which he thinks that no one knows except himself. His young figure surely
quivered with a passion of merry mischief which was communicated to his
companions. In it there began to flame a spirit that suggested undying
youth. Even before they began to dance the boys were transformed. If they
had ever known cares those cares had fled, for in the breasts of those
who can really dance the tarantella there is no room for the smallest
sorrow, in their hearts no place for the most minute regret, anxiety, or
wonder, when the rapture of the measure is upon them. Away goes
everything but the pagan joy of life, the pagan ecstasy of swift
movement, and the leaping blood that is quick as the motes in a sunray
falling from a southern sky. Delarey began to smile as he watched them,
and their expression was reflected in his eyes. Hermione glanced at him
and thought what a boy he looked. His eyes made her feel almost as if
she were sitting with a child.

The mischief, the coquettish joy of the boys increased. They snapped
their fingers more loudly, swayed their bodies, poised themselves first
on one foot, then on the other, then abruptly, and with a wildness that
was like the sudden crash of all the instruments in an orchestra breaking
in upon the melody of a solitary flute, burst into the full frenzy of the
dance. And in the dance each seemed to be sportively creative, ruled by
his own sweet will.

"That's why I love the tarantella more than any other dance," Hermione
murmured to her husband, "because it seems to be the invention of the
moment, as if they were wild with joy and had to show it somehow, and
showed it beautifully by dancing. Look at Gaspare now."

With his hands held high above his head, and linked together, Gaspare was
springing into the air, as if propelled by one of those boards which are
used by acrobats in circuses for leaping over horses. He had thrown off
his hat, and his low-growing hair, which was rather long on the forehead,
moved as he sprang upward, as if his excitement, penetrating through
every nerve in his body, had filled it with electricity. While Hermione
watched him she almost expected to see its golden tufts give off sparks
in response to the sparkling radiance that flashed from his laughing
eyes. For in all the wild activity of his changing movements Gaspare
never lost his coquettish expression, the look of seductive mischief that
seemed to invite the whole world to be merry and mad as he was. His
ever-smiling lips and ever-smiling eyes defied fatigue, and his young
body--grace made a living, pulsing, aspiring reality--suggested the
tireless intensity of a flame. The other boys danced well, but Gaspare
outdid them all, for they only looked gay while he looked mad with joy.
And to-day, at this moment, he felt exultant. He had a padrona to whom he
was devoted with that peculiar sensitive devotion of the Sicilian which,
once it is fully aroused, is tremendous in its strength and jealous in
its doggedness. He was in command of Lucrezia, and was respectfully
looked up to by all his boy friends of Marechiaro as one who could
dispense patronage, being a sort of purse-bearer and conductor of rich
forestieri in a strange land. Even Sebastiano, a personage rather apt to
be a little haughty in his physical strength, and, though no longer a
brigand, no great respecter of others, showed him to-day a certain
deference which elated his boyish spirit. And all his elation, all his
joy in the present and hopes for the future, he let out in the dance. To
dance the tarantella almost intoxicated him, even when he only danced it
in the village among the contadini, but to-day the admiring eyes of his
padrona were upon him. He knew how she loved the tarantella. He knew,
too, that she wanted the padrone, her husband, to love it as she did.
Gaspare was very shrewd to read a woman's thoughts so long as her love
ran in them. Though but eighteen, he was a man in certain knowledge. He
understood, almost unconsciously, a good deal of what Hermione was
feeling as she watched, and he put his whole soul into the effort to
shine, to dazzle, to rouse gayety and wonder in the padrone, who saw him
dance for the first time. He was untiring in his variety and his
invention. Sometimes, light-footed in his mountain boots, with an almost
incredible swiftness and vim, he rushed from end to end of the terrace.
His feet twinkled in steps so complicated and various that he made the
eyes that watched him wink as at a play of sparks in a furnace, and his
arms and hands were never still, yet never, even for a second, fell into
a curve that was ungraceful. Sometimes his head was bent whimsically
forward as if in invitation. Sometimes he threw his whole body backward,
exposing his brown throat, and staring up at the sun like a sun
worshipper dancing to his divinity. Sometimes he crouched on his
haunches, clapping his hands together rhythmically, and, with bent knees,
shooting out his legs like some jovially grotesque dwarf promenading
among a crowd of Follies. And always the spirit of the dance seemed to
increase within him, and the intoxication of it to take more hold upon
him, and his eyes grew brighter and his face more radiant, and his body
more active, more utterly untiring, till he was the living embodiment
surely of all the youth and all the gladness of the world.

Hermione had kept Artois's letter in her hand, and now, as she danced in
spirit with Gaspare, and rejoiced not only in her own joy, but in his,
she thought suddenly of that sentence in it--"Life may seem to most of us
who think in the main a melancholy, even a tortured, thing." Life a
tortured thing! She was thinking now, exultantly thinking. Her thoughts
were leaping, spinning, crouching, whirling, rushing with Gaspare in the
sunshine. But life was a happy, a radiant reality. No dream, it was more
beautiful than any dream, as the clear, when lovely, is more lovely than
even that which is exquisite and vague. She had, of course, always known
that in the world there is much joy. Now she felt it, she felt all the
joy of the world. She felt the joy of sunshine and of blue, the joy of
love and of sympathy, the joy of health and of activity, the joy of sane
passion that fights not against any law of God or man, the joy of liberty
in a joyous land where the climate is kindly, and, despite poverty and
toil, there are songs upon the lips of men, there are tarantellas in
their sun-browned bodies, there are the fires of gayety in their bold,
dark eyes. Joy, joy twittered in the reed-flute of Sebastiano, and the
boys were joys made manifest. Hermione's eyes had filled with tears of
joy when among the olives she had heard the far-off drone of the
"Pastorale." Now they shone with a joy that was different, less subtly
sweet, perhaps, but more buoyant, more fearless, more careless. The glory
of the pagan world was round about her, and for a moment her heart was
like the heart of a nymph scattering roses in a Bacchic triumph.

Maurice moved beside her, and she heard him breathing quickly.

"What is it, Maurice?" she asked. "You--do you--"

"Yes," he answered, understanding the question she had not fully asked.
"It drives me almost mad to sit still and see those boys. Gaspare's like
a merry devil tempting one."

As if Gaspare had understood what Maurice said, he suddenly spun round
from his companions, and began to dance in front of Maurice and Hermione,
provocatively, invitingly, bending his head towards them, and laughing
almost in their faces, but without a trace of impertinence. He did not
speak, though his lips were parted, showing two rows of even, tiny teeth,
but his radiant eyes called to them, scolded them for their inactivity,
chaffed them for it, wondered how long it would last, and seemed to deny
that it could last forever.

"What eyes!" said Hermione. "Did you ever see anything so expressive?"

Maurice did not answer. He was watching Gaspare, fascinated, completely
under the spell of the dance. The blood was beginning to boil in his
veins, warm blood of the south that he had never before felt in his body.
Artois had spoken to Hermione of "the call of the blood." Maurice began
to hear it now, to long to obey it.

Gaspare clapped his hands alternately in front of him and behind him,
leaping from side to side, with a step in which one foot crossed over the
other, and holding his body slightly curved inward. And all the time he
kept his eyes on Delarey, and the wily, merry invitation grew stronger in
them.

"Venga!" he whispered, always dancing. "Venga, signorino, venga--venga!"

He spun round, clapped his hands furiously, snapped his fingers, and
jumped back. Then he held out his hands to Delarey, with a gay authority
that was irresistible.

"Venga, venga, signorino! Venga, venga!"

All the blood in Delarey responded, chasing away something--was it a
shyness, a self-consciousness of love--that till now had held him back
from the gratification of his desire? He sprang up and he danced the
tarantella, danced it almost as if he had danced it all his life, with a
natural grace, a frolicsome abandon that no pure-blooded Englishman could
ever achieve, danced it as perhaps once the Sicilian grandmother had
danced it under the shadow of Etna. Whatever Gaspare did he imitated,
with a swiftness and a certainty that were amazing, and Gaspare,
intoxicated by having such a pupil, outdid himself in countless changing
activities. It was like a game and like a duel, for Gaspare presently
began almost to fight for supremacy as he watched Delarey's startling
aptitude in the tarantella, which, till this moment, he had considered
the possession of those born in Sicily and of Sicilian blood. He seemed
to feel that this pupil might in time become the master, and to be put
upon his mettle, and he put forth all his cunning to be too much for
Delarey.

And Hermione was left alone, watching, for Lucrezia had disappeared,
suddenly mindful of some household duty.

When Delarey sprang up she felt a thrill of responsive excitement, and
when she watched his first steps, and noted the look of youth in him, the
supple southern grace that rivalled the boyish grace of Gaspare, she was
filled with that warm, that almost yearning admiration which is the
child of love. But another feeling followed--a feeling of melancholy. As
she watched him dancing with the four boys, a gulf seemed to yawn between
her and them. She was alone on her side of this gulf, quite alone. They
were remote from her. She suddenly realized that Delarey belonged to the
south, and that she did not. Despite all her understanding of the beauty
of the south, all her sympathy for the spirit of the south, all her
passionate love of the south, she was not of it. She came to it as a
guest. But Delarey was of it. She had never realized that absolutely till
this moment. Despite his English parentage and upbringing, the southern
strain in his ancestry had been revived in him. The drop of southern
blood in his veins was his master. She had not married an Englishman.

Once again, and in all the glowing sunshine, with Etna and the sea before
her, and the sound of Sebastiano's flute in her ears, she was on the
Thames Embankment in the night with Artois, and heard his deep voice
speaking to her.

"Does he know his own blood?" said the voice. "Our blood governs us when
the time comes."

And again the voice said:

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

"The call of the blood." There was now something almost terrible to
Hermione in that phrase, something menacing and irresistible. Were men,
then, governed irrevocably, dominated by the blood that was in them?
Artois had certainly seemed to imply that they were, and he knew men as
few knew them. His powerful intellect, like a search-light, illumined the
hidden places, discovering the concealed things of the souls of men. But
Artois was not a religious man, and Hermione had a strong sense of
religion, though she did not cling, as many do, to any one creed. If the
call of the blood were irresistible in a man, then man was only a slave.
The criminal must not be condemned, nor the saint exalted. Conduct was
but obedience in one who had no choice but to obey. Could she believe
that?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32