The Call of the Blood

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"Perhaps I do. Gaspare is terrible, a regular donna[1] of a boy in spite
of all his mischief and fun. You should hear him talk of you. He'd die
for his padrona."

[Footnote: 1. The Sicilians use the word "donna" to express the meaning
we convey by the word "trump."]

"I believe he would. In love, the love that means being in love, I think
Sicilians, though tremendously jealous, are very fickle, but if they take
a devotion to any one, without being in love, they're rocks. It's a
splendid quality."

"If they've got faults, I love their faults," he said. "They're a lovable
race."

"Praising yourself!" she said, laughing at him, but with tender eyes.

"Myself?"

"Never mind. What is it, Gaspare?"

Gaspare had come upon the terrace, his eyes shining with happiness and a
box under his arm.

"The signore knows."

"Revolver practice," said Maurice. "I promised him he should have a try
to-day. We're going to a place close by on the mountain. He's warned off
Ciccio and his goats. Got the paper, Gaspare?"

Gaspare pointed to a bulging pocket.

"Enough to write a novel on. Well--will you come, Hermione?"

"It's too hot in the sun, and I know you're going into the eye of the
sun."

"You see, it's the best place up at the top. There's that stone wall,
and--"

"I'll stay here and listen to your music."

They went off together, climbing swiftly upward into the heart of the
gold, and singing as they went:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao,
Morettina bella, ciao--"

Their voices died away, and with them the dry noise of stones falling
downward from their feet on the sunbaked mountain-side. Hermione sat
still on the seat by the ravine.

"Ciao, ciao, ciao!"

She thought of the young peasants going off to be soldiers, and singing
that song to keep their hearts up. Some day, perhaps, Gaspare would have
to go. He was the eldest of his family, and had brothers. Maurice sang
that song like a Sicilian lad. She thought, she began to think, that even
the timbre of his voice was Sicilian. There was the warm, and yet
plaintive, sometimes almost whining sound in it that she had often heard
coming up from the vineyards and the olive groves. Why was she always
comparing him with the peasants? He was not of their rank. She had met
many Sicilians of the nobility in Palermo--princes, senators, young men
of fashion, who gambled and danced and drove in the Giardino Inglese.
Maurice did not remind her at all of them. No, it was of the Sicilian
peasants that he reminded her, and yet he was a gentleman. She wondered
what Maurice's grandmother had been like. She was long since dead.
Maurice had never seen her. Yet how alive she, and perhaps brothers of
hers, and their children, were in him, how almost miraculously alive!
Things that had doubtless stirred in them--instincts, desires,
repugnances, joys--were stirring in him, dominating his English
inheritance. It was like a new birth in the sun of Sicily, and she was
assisting at it. Very, very strange it was. And strange, too, it was to
be so near to one so different from herself, to be joined to him by the
greatest of all links, the link that is forged by the free will of a man
and a woman. Again, in thought, she went back to her comparison of things
in him with things in the peasants of Sicily. She remembered that she had
once heard a brilliant man, not a Sicilian, say of them, "With all their
faults, and they are many, every Sicilian, even though he wear the long
cap and live in a hut with the pigs, is a gentleman." So the peasant, if
there were peasant in Maurice, could never disturb, never offend her. And
she loved the primitive man in him and in all men who had it. There was a
good deal that was primitive in her. She never called herself democrat,
socialist, radical, never christened herself with any name to describe
her mental leanings, but she knew that, for a well-born woman--and she
was that, child of an old English family of pure blood and high
traditions--she was remarkably indifferent to rank, its claims, its
pride. She felt absolutely "in her bones," as she would have said, that
all men and women are just human beings, brothers and sisters of a great
family. In judging of individuals she could never be influenced by
anything except physical qualities, and qualities of the heart and mind,
qualities that might belong to any man. She was affected by habits,
manners--what woman of breeding is not?--but even these could scarcely
warp her judgment if they covered anything fine. She could find gold
beneath mud and forget the mud.

Maurice was like the peasants, not like the Palermitan aristocracy. He
was near to the breast of Sicily, of that mother of many nations, who had
come to conquer, and had fought, and bled, and died, or been expelled,
but had left indefaceable traces behind them, traces of Norman of Greek
of Arab. He was no cosmopolitan with characteristics blurred; he was of
the soil. Well, she loved the soil dearly. The almond blossomed from it.
The olive gave its fruit, and the vine its generous blood, and the orange
its gold, at the word of the soil, the dear, warm earth of Sicily. She
thought of Maurice's warm hands, brown now as Gaspare's. How she loved
his hands, and his eyes that shone with the lustre of the south! Had not
this soil, in very truth, given those hands and those eyes to her? She
felt that it had. She loved it more for the gift. She had reaped and
garnered in her blessed Sicilian harvest.

Lucrezia came to her round the angle of the cottage, knowing she was
alone. Lucrezia was mending a hole in a sock for Gaspare. Now she sat
down on the seat under the window, divided from Hermione by the terrace,
but able to see her, to feel companionship. Had the padrone been there
Lucrezia would not have ventured to come. Gaspare had often explained to
her her very humble position in the household. But Gaspare and the
padrone were away on the mountain-top, and she could not resist being
near to her padrona, for whom she already felt a very real affection and
admiration.

"Is it a big hole, Lucrezia?" said Hermione, smiling at her.

"Si, signora."

Lucrezia put her thumb through it, holding it up on her fist.

"Gaspare's holes are always big."

She spoke as if in praise.

"Gaspare is strong," she added. "But Sebastiano is stronger."

As she said the last words a dreamy look came into her round face, and
she dropped the hand that held the stocking into her lap.

"Sebastiano is hard like the rocks, signora."

"Hard-hearted, Lucrezia."

Lucrezia said nothing.

"You like Sebastiano, Lucrezia?"

Lucrezia reddened under her brown skin.

"Si, signora."

"So do I. He's always been a good friend of mine."

Lucrezia shifted along the seat until she was nearly opposite to where
Hermione was sitting.

"How old is he?"

"Twenty-five, signora."

"I suppose he will be marrying soon, won't he? The men all marry young
round about Marechiaro."

Lucrezia began to darn.

"His father, Chinetti Urbano, wishes him to marry at once. It is better
for a man."

"You understand men, Lucrezia?"

"Si, signora. They are all alike."

"And what are they like?"

"Oh, signora, you know as well as I do. They must have their own way and
we must not think to have ours. They must roam where they like, love
where they choose, day or night, and we must sit in the doorway and get
to bed at dark, and not bother where they've been or what they've done.
They say we've no right, except one or two. There's Francesco, to be
sure. He's a lamb with Maria. She can sit with her face to the street.
But she wouldn't sit any other way, and he knows it. But the rest! Eh,
gia!"

"You don't think much of men, Lucrezia!"

"Oh, signora, they're just as God made them. They can't help it any more
than we can help--"

She stopped and pursed her lips suddenly, as if checking some words that
were almost on them.

"Lucrezia, come here and sit by me."

Lucrezia looked up with a sort of doubtful pleasure and surprise.

"Signora?"

"Come here."

Lucrezia got up and came slowly to the seat by the ravine. Hermione took
her hand.

"You like Sebastiano very much, don't you?"

Lucrezia hung her head.

"Si, signora," she whispered.

"Do you think he'd be good to a woman if she loved him?"

"I shouldn't care. Bad or good, I'd--I'd--"

Suddenly, with a sort of childish violence, she put her two hands on
Hermione's arms.

"I want Sebastiano, signora; I want him!" she cried. "I've prayed to the
Madonna della Rocca to give him to me; all last year I've prayed, and
this. D'you think the Madonna's going to do it? Do you? Do you?"

Heat came out of her two hands, and heat flashed in her eyes. Her broad
bosom heaved, and her lips, still parted when she had done speaking,
seemed to interrogate Hermione fiercely in the silence. Before Hermione
could reply two sounds came to them: from below in the ravine the distant
drone of the ceramella, from above on the mountain-top the dry crack of a
pistol-shot.

Swiftly Lucrezia turned and looked downward, but Hermione looked upward
towards the bare flank that rose behind the cottage.

"It's Sebastiano, signora."

The ceramella droned on, moving slowly with its player on the hidden path
beneath the olive-trees.

A second pistol-shot rang out sharply.

"Go down and meet him, Lucrezia."

"May I--may I, really, signora?"

"Yes; go quickly."

Lucrezia bent down and kissed her padrona's hand.

"Bacio la mano, bacio la mano a Lei!"

Then, bareheaded, she went out from the awning into the glare of the
sunshine, passed through the ruined archway, and disappeared among the
rocks. She had gone to her music. Hermione stayed to listen to hers, the
crack of the pistol up there near the blue sky.

Sebastiano was playing the tune she loved, the "Pastorale," but to-day
she did not heed it. Indeed, now that she was left alone she was not
conscious that she heard it. Her heart was on the hill-top near the blue.

Again and again the shots rang out. It seemed to Hermione that she knew
which were fired by Maurice and which by Gaspare, and she whispered to
herself "That's Maurice!" when she fancied one was his. Presently she was
aware of some slight change and wondered what it was. Something had
ceased, and its cessation recalled her mind to her surroundings. She
looked round her, then down to the ravine, and then at once she
understood. There was no more music from the ceramella. Lucrezia had met
Sebastiano under the olives. That was certain. Hermione smiled. Her
woman's imagination pictured easily enough why the player had stopped.
She hoped Lucrezia was happy. Her first words, still more her manner, had
shown Hermione the depth of her heart. There was fire there, fire that
burned before a shrine when she prayed to the Madonna della Rocca. She
was ready even to be badly treated if only she might have Sebastiano. It
seemed to be all one to her. She had no illusions, but her heart knew
what it needed.

Crack went the pistol up on the mountain-top.

"That's not Maurice!" Hermione thought.

There was another report, then another.

"That last one was Maurice!"

Lucrezia did not seem even to expect a man to be true and faithful.
Perhaps she knew the Sicilian character too well. Hermione lifted her
face up and looked towards the mountain. Her mind had gone once more to
the Thames Embankment. As once she had mentally put Gaspare beside
Artois, so now she mentally put Lucrezia. Lucrezia distrusted the south,
and she was of it. Men must be as God had made them, she said, and
evidently she thought that God had made them to run wild, careless of
woman's feelings, careless of everything save their own vagrant desires.
The tarantella--that was the dance of the soil here, the dance of the
blood. And in the tarantella each of the dancers seemed governed by his
own sweet will, possessed by a merry, mad devil, whose promptings he
followed with a sort of gracious and charming violence, giving himself up
joyously, eagerly, utterly--to what? To his whim. Was the tarantella an
allegory of life here? How strangely well Maurice had danced it on that
first day of their arrival. She felt again that sense of separation which
brought with it a faint and creeping melancholy.

"Crack! Crack!"

She got up from the seat by the ravine. Suddenly the sound of the firing
was distressing to her, almost sinister, and she liked Lucrezia's music
better. For it suggested tenderness of the soil, and tenderness of faith,
and a glory of antique things both pagan and Christian. But the
reiterated pistol-shots suggested violence, death, ugly things.

"Maurice!" she called, going out into the sun and gazing up towards the
mountain-top. "Maurice!"

The pistol made reply. They had not heard her. They were too far or were
too intent upon their sport to hear.

"Maurice!" she called again, in a louder voice, almost as a person calls
for help. Another pistol-shot answered her, mocking at her in the sun.
Then she heard a distant peal of laughter. It did not seem to her to be
either Maurice's or Gaspare's laughter. It was like the laughter of
something she could not personify, of some jeering spirit of the
mountain. It died away at last, and she stood there, shivering in the
sunshine.

"Signora! Signora!"

Sebastiano's lusty voice came to her from below. She turned and saw him
standing with Lucrezia on the terrace, and his arm was round Lucrezia's
waist. He took off his cap and waved it, but he still kept one arm round
Lucrezia.

Hermione hesitated, looking once more towards the mountain-top. But
something within her held her back from climbing up to the distant
laughter, a feeling, an idiotic feeling she called it to herself
afterwards. She had shivered in the sunshine, but it was not a feeling of
fear.

"Am I wanted up there?"

That was what something within her said. And the answer was made by her
body. She turned and began to descend towards the terrace.

And at that moment, for the first time in her life, she was conscious of
a little stab of pain such as she had never known before. It was pain of
the mind and of the heart, and yet it was like bodily pain, too. It made
her angry with herself. It was like a betrayal, a betrayal of herself by
her own intellect, she thought.

She stopped once more on the mountain-side.

"Am I going to be ridiculous?" she said to herself. "Am I going to be one
of the women I despise?"

Just then she realized that love may become a tyrant, ministering to the
soul with persecutions.

VI

Sebastiano took his arm from Lucrezia's waist as Hermione came down to
the terrace, and said:

"Buona sera, signora. Is the signore coming down yet?"

He flung out his arm towards the mountain.

"I don't know, Sebastiano. Why?"

"I've come with a message for him."

"Not for Lucrezia?"

Sebastiano laughed boldly, but Lucrezia, blushing red, disappeared into
the kitchen.

"Don't play with her, Sebastiano," said Hermione. "She's a good girl."

"I know that, signora."

"She deserves to be well treated."

Sebastiano went over to the terrace wall, looked into the ravine, turned
round, and came back.

"Who's treating Lucrezia badly, signora?"

"I did not say anybody was."

"The girls in Marechiaro can take care of themselves, signora. You don't
know them as I do."

"D'you think any woman can take care of herself, Sebastiano?"

He looked into her face and laughed, but said nothing. Hermione sat down.
She had a desire to-day, after Lucrezia's conversation with her, to get
at the Sicilian man's point of view in regard to women.

"Don't you think women want to be protected?" she asked.

"What from, signora?"

There was still laughter in his eyes.

"Not from us, anyway," he added. "Lucrezia there--she wants me for her
husband. All Marechiaro knows it."

Hermione felt that under the circumstances it was useless to blush for
Lucrezia, useless to meet blatant frankness with sensitive delicacy.

"Do you want Lucrezia for your wife?" she said.

"Well, signora, I'm strong. A stick or a knife in my hand and no man can
touch me. You've never seen me do the scherma con coltello? One day I'll
show you with Gaspare. And I can play better even than the men from
Bronte on the ceramella. You've heard me. Lucrezia knows I can have any
girl I like."

There was a simplicity in his immense superiority to women that robbed it
of offensiveness and almost made Hermione laugh. In it, too, she felt the
touch of the East. Arabs had been in Sicily and left their traces there,
not only in the buildings of Sicily, but in its people's songs, and in
the treatment of the women by the men.

"And are you going to choose Lucrezia?" she asked, gravely.

"Signora, I wasn't sure. But yesterday, I had a letter from Messina. They
want me there. I've got a job that'll pay me well to go to the Lipari
Islands with a cargo."

"Are you a sailor, too?"

"Signora, I can do anything."

"And will you be long away?"

"Who knows, signora? But I told Lucrezia to-day, and when she cried I
told her something else. We are 'promised.'"

"I am glad," Hermione said, holding out her hand to him.

He took it in an iron grip.

"Be very good to her when you're married, won't you?"

"Oh, she'll be all right with me," he answered, carelessly. "And I won't
give her the slap in the face on the wedding-day."

"Hi--yi--yi--yi--yi!"

There was a shrill cry from the mountain and Maurice and Gaspare came
leaping down, scattering the stones, the revolvers still in their hands.

"Look, signora, look!" cried Gaspare, pulling a sheet of paper from his
pocket and holding it proudly up. "Do you see the holes? One, two,
three--"

He began to count.

"And I made five. Didn't I, signore?"

"You're a dead shot, Gasparino. Did you hear us, Hermione?"

"Yes," she said. "But you didn't hear me."

"You? Did you call?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Sebastiano's got a message for you," Hermione said.

She could not tell him now the absurd impulse that had made her call him.

"What's the message, Sebastiano?" asked Maurice, in his stumbling
Sicilian-Italian that was very imperfect, but that nevertheless had
already the true accent of the peasants about Marechiaro.

"Signore, there will be a moon to-night."

"Gia. Lo so."

"Are you sleepy, signorino?"

He touched his eyes with his sinewy hands and made his face look drowsy.
Maurice laughed.

"No."

"Are you afraid of being naked in the sea at night? But you need not
enter it. Are you afraid of sleeping at dawn in a cave upon the sands?"

"What is it all?" asked Maurice. "Gaspare, I understand you best."

"I know," said Gaspare, joyously. "It's the fishing. Nito has sent. I
told him to. Is it Nito, Sebastiano?"

Sebastiano nodded. Gaspare turned eagerly to Maurice.

"Oh, signore, you must come, you will come!"

"Where? In a boat?"

"No. We go down to the shore, to Isola Bella. We take food, wine, red
wine, and a net. Between twenty-two and twenty-three o'clock is the time
to begin. And the sea must be calm. Is the sea calm to-day, Sebastiano?"

"Like that."

Sebastiano moved his hand to and fro in the air, keeping it absolutely
level. Gaspare continued to explain with gathering excitement and
persuasiveness, talking to his master as much by gesture as by the words
that Maurice could only partially understand.

"The sea is calm. Nito has the net, but he will not go into the sea. Per
Dio, he is birbante. He will say he has the rheumatism, I know, and walk
like that." (Gaspare hobbled to and fro before them, making a face of
acute suffering.) "He has asked for me. Hasn't Nito asked for me,
Sebastiano?"

Here Gaspare made a grimace at Sebastiano, who answered, calmly:

"Yes, he has asked for you to come with the padrone."

"I knew it. Then I shall undress. I shall take one end of the net while
Nito holds the other, and I shall go out into the sea. I shall go up to
here." (He put his hands up to his chin, stretching his neck like one
avoiding a rising wave.) "And I shall wade, you'll see!--and if I come to
a hole I shall swim. I can swim for hours, all day if I choose."

"And all night too?" said Hermione, smiling at his excitement.

"Davvero! But at night I must drink wine to keep out the cold. I come out
like this." (He shivered violently, making his teeth chatter.) "Then I
drink a glass and I am warm, and when they have taken the fish I go in
again. We fish all along the shore from Isola Bella round by the point
there, where there's the Casa delle Sirene, and to the caves beyond the
Caffe Berardi. And when we've got enough--many fish--at dawn we sleep on
the sand. And when the sun is up Carmela will take the fish and make a
frittura, and we all eat it and drink more wine, and then--"

"And then--you're ready for the Campo Santo?" said Hermione.

"No, signora. Then we will dance the tarantella, and come home up the
mountain singing, 'O sole mio!' and 'A mezzanotte a punto,' and the song
of the Mafioso, and--"

Hermione began to laugh unrestrainedly. Gaspare, by his voice, his face,
his gestures, had made them assist at a veritable orgie of labor,
feasting, sleep, and mirth, all mingled together and chasing one another
like performers in a revel. Even his suggestion of slumber on the sands
was violent, as if they were to sleep with a kind of fury of excitement
and determination.

"Signora!" he cried, staring as if ready to be offended.

Then he looked at Maurice, who was laughing, too, threw himself back
against the wall, opened his mouth, and joined in with all his heart. But
suddenly he stopped. His face changed, became very serious.

"I may go, signora?" he asked. "No one can fish as I can. The others will
not go in far, and they soon get cold and want to put on their clothes.
And the padrone! I must take care of the padrone! Guglielmo, the
contadino, will sleep in the house, I know. Shall I call him? Guglielmo!
Guglielmo!"

He vanished like a flash, they scarcely knew in what direction.

"He's alive!" exclaimed Maurice. "By Jove, he's alive, that boy!
Glorious, glorious life! Oh, there's something here that--"

He broke off, looked down at the broad sea shimmering in the sun, then
said:

"The sun, the sea, the music, the people, the liberty--it goes to my
head, it intoxicates me."

"You'll go to-night?" she said.

"D'you mind if I do?"

"Mind? No. I want you to go. I want you to revel in this happy time, this
splendid, innocent, golden time. And to-morrow we'll watch for you,
Lucrezia and I, watch for you down there on the path. But--you'll bring
us some of the fish, Maurice? You won't forget us?"

"Forget you!" he said. "You shall have all--"

"No, no. Only the little fish, the babies that Carmela rejects from the
frittura."

"I'll go into the sea with Gaspare," said Maurice.

"I'm sure you will, and farther out even than he does."

"Ah, he'll never allow that. He'd swim to Africa first!"

That night, at twenty-one o'clock, Hermione and Lucrezia stood under the
arch, and watched Maurice and Gaspare springing down the mountain-side as
if in seven-leagued boots. Soon they disappeared into the darkness of the
ravine, but for some time their loud voices could be heard singing
lustily:

"Ciao, ciao, ciao,
Morettina bella ciao,
Prima di partire
Un bacio ti voglio da';
Un bacio al papa,
Un bacio alla mamma,
Cinquanta alla mia fidanzata,
Che vado a far solda'."

"I wish I were a man, Lucrezia," said Hermione, when the voices at length
died away towards the sea.

"Signora, we were made for the men. They weren't made for us. But I like
being a girl."

"To-night. I know why, Lucrezia."

And then the padrona and the cameriera sat down together on the terrace
under the stars, and talked together about the man the cameriera loved,
and his exceeding glory.

Meanwhile, Maurice and Gaspare were giving themselves joyously to the
glory of the night. The glamour of the moon, which lay full upon the
terrace where the two women sat, was softened, changed to a shadowy
magic, in the ravine where the trees grew thickly, but the pilgrims did
not lower their voices in obedience to the message of the twilight of the
night. The joy of life which was leaping within them defied the subtle
suggestions of mystery, was careless because it was triumphant, and all
the way down to the sea they sang, Gaspare changing the song when it
suited his mood to do so; and Maurice, as in the tarantella, imitating
him with the swiftness that is born of sympathy. For to-night, despite
their different ages, ranks, ways of life, their gayety linked them
together, ruled out the differences, and made them closely akin, as they
had been in Hermione's eyes when they danced upon the terrace. They did
not watch the night. They were living too strongly to be watchful. The
spirit of the dancing faun was upon them, and guided them down among the
rocks and the olive-trees, across the Messina road, white under the moon,
to the stony beach of Isola Bella, where Nito was waiting for them with
the net.

Nito was not alone. He had brought friends of his and of Gaspare's, and a
boy who staggered proudly beneath a pannier filled with bread and cheese,
oranges and apples, and dark blocks of a mysterious dolce. The
wine-bottles were not intrusted to him, but were in the care of Giulio,
one of the donkey-boys who had carried up the luggage from the station.
Gaspare and his padrone were welcomed with a lifting of hats, and for a
moment there was a silence, while the little group regarded the
"Inglese" searchingly. Had Maurice felt any strangeness, any aloofness,
the sharp and sensitive Sicilians would have at once been conscious of
it, and light-hearted gayety might have given way to gravity, though not
to awkwardness. But he felt, and therefore showed, none. His soft hat
cocked at an impudent angle over his sparkling, dark eyes, his laughing
lips, his easy, eager manner, and his pleasant familiarity with Gaspare
at once reassured everybody, and when he cried out, "Ciao, amici, ciao!"
and waved a pair of bathing drawers towards the sea, indicating that he
was prepared to be the first to go in with the net, there was a general
laugh, and a babel of talk broke forth--talk which he did not fully
understand, yet which did not make him feel even for a moment a stranger.

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