I wanted to draw him out, for I was interested in his sudden gravity, and there was a suggestion of irony in his last remark that puzzled me.
‘Have you ever seen her?’ he asked.
‘Often and often.’
‘I, never.’
‘But you have heard her sing?’
He put on his coat and said impatiently, ‘How can she sing under the water? Who could? She sometimes tries, but nothing comes from her but great bubbles.’
‘She should climb on to the rock.’
‘How can she?’ he cried again, quite angry. ‘The priests have blessed the air, so she cannot breathe it, and blessed the rocks, so that she cannot sit on them. But the sea no man can bless, because it is too big, and always changing. So she lives in the sea.’
I was silent.
At that his face took a gentler expression. He looked at me as though something was on his mind, and going out to the entrance rock gazed at the external blue then returning into our twilight he said, ‘As a rule only good people see the Siren.’
I made no comment. There was a pause, and he continued. ‘That is a very strange thing, and the priests do not know how to account for it; for she of course is wicked. Not only those who fast and go to Mass are in danger, but even those who are merely good in daily life. No one in the village had seen her for two generations. I am not surprised. We all cross ourselves before we enter the water, but it is unnecessary. Giuseppe, we thought, was safer than most. We loved him, and many of us he loved: but that is a different thing from being good.’
I asked who Giuseppe was.
‘That day – I was seventeen and my brother was twenty and a great deal stronger than I was, and it was the year when the visitors, who have brought such prosperity and so many alterations into the village, first began to come. One English lady in particular, of very high birth, came, and has written a book about the place, and it was through her that the Improvement Syndicate was formed, which is about to connect the hotels with the station by a funicular railway.’
‘Don’t tell me about that lady in here,’ I observed.
‘That day we took her and her friends to see the grottoes. As we rowed close under the cliffs I put out my hand, as one does, and caught a little crab, and having pulled off its claws offered it as a curiosity. The ladies groaned, but a gentleman was pleased, and held out money. Being inexperienced, I refused it, saying that his pleasure was sufficient reward! Giuseppe, who was rowing behind, was very angry with me and reached out with his hand and hit me on the side of the mouth, so that a tooth cut my lip, and I bled. I tried to hit him back, but he always was too quick for me, and as I stretched round he kicked me under the armpit, so that for a moment I could not even row. There was a great noise among the ladies, and I heard afterward that they were planning to take me away from my brother and train me as a waiter. That, at all events, never came to pass.
‘When we reached the grotto – not here, but a larger one – the gentleman was very anxious that one of us should dive for money, and the ladies consented, as they sometimes do. Giuseppe, who had discovered how much pleasure it gives foreigners to see us in the water, refused to dive for anything but silver, and the gentleman threw in a two-lira piece.
‘Just before my brother sprang off he caught sight of me holding my bruise, and crying, for I could not help it. He laughed and said, “This time, at all events, I shall not see the Siren!” and went into the water without crossing himself. But he saw her.’
He broke off and accepted a cigarette. I watched the golden entrance rock and the quivering walls and the magic water through which great bubbles constantly rose.
At last he dropped his hot ash into the ripples and turned his head away, and said, ‘He came up without the coin. We pulled him into the boat, and he was so large that he seemed to fill it, and so wet that we could not dress him. I have never seen a man so wet. I and the gentleman rowed back, and we covered Giuseppe with sacking and propped him up in the stern.’
‘He was drowned, then?’ I murmured, supposing that to be the point.
‘He was not,’ he cried angrily. ‘He saw the Siren. I told you.’
I was silenced again.
‘We put him to bed, though he was not ill. The doctor came, and took money, and the priest came and spattered him with holy water. But it was no good. He was too big – like a piece of the sea. He kissed the thumb-bones of San Biagio and they never dried till evening.’
‘What did he look like?’ I ventured.
‘Like anyone who has seen the Siren. If you have seen her “often and often” how is it you do not know? Unhappy, unhappy because he knew everything. Every living thing made him unhappy because he knew it would die. And all he cared to do was sleep.’
I bent over my notebook.
‘He did no work, he forgot to eat, he forgot whether he had his clothes on. All the work fell on me, and my sister had to go out to service. We tried to make him into a beggar, but he was too robust to inspire pity, and as for an idiot, he had not the right look in his eyes. He would stand in the street looking at people, and the more he looked at them the more unhappy he became. When a child was born he would cover his face with his hands. If anyone was married – he was terrible then, and would frighten them as they came out of church. Who would have believed he would marry himself! I caused that, I. I was reading out of the paper how a girl at Ragusa had “gone mad through bathing in the sea”. Giuseppe got up, and in a week he and that girl came in.
‘He never told me anything, but it seems that he went straight to her house, broke into her room, and carried her off. She was the daughter of a rich mine-owner, so you may imagine our peril. Her father came down, with a clever lawyer, but they could do no more than I. They argued and they threatened, but at last they had to go back and we lost nothing – that is to say, no money. We took Giuseppe and Maria to the church and had them married. Ugh! that wedding! The priest made no jokes afterward, and coming out the children threw stones . . . I think I would have died to make her happy; but as always happens, one could do nothing.’
‘Were they unhappy together then?’
‘They loved each other, but love is not happiness. We can all get love. Love is nothing. I had two people to work for now, for she was like him in everything – one never knew which of them was speaking. I had to sell our own boat and work under the bad old man you have today. Worst of all, people began to hate us. The children first – everything begins with them – and then the women and last of all the men. For the cause of every misfortune was – you will not betray me?’
I promised good faith, and immediately he burst into the frantic blasphemy of one who has escaped from supervision, cursing the priests, who had ruined his life, he said. ‘Thus are we tricked!’ was his cry, and he stood up and kicked at the azure ripples with his feet, till he had obscured them with a cloud of sand.
I too was moved. The story of Giuseppe, for all its absurdity and superstition, came nearer to reality than anything I had known before. I don’t know why, but it filled me with desire to help others – the greatest of all our desires, I suppose, and the most fruitless. The desire soon passed.
‘She was about to have a child. That was the end of everything. People said to me, “When will your charming nephew be born? What a cheerful, attractive child he will be, with such a father and mother!” I kept my face steady and replied, “I think he may be. Out of sadness shall come gladness” – it is one of our proverbs. And my answer frightened them very much, and they told the priests, who were frightened too. Then the whisper started that the child would be Antichrist. You need not be afraid: he was never born.
‘An old witch began to prophesy, and no one stopped her. Giuseppe and the girl, she said, had silent devils, who could do little harm. But the child would always be speaking and laughing and perverting, and last of all he would go into the sea and fetch up the Siren into the air and all the world would see her and hear her sing. As soon as she sang, the Seven Vial
s would be opened and the Pope would die and Mongibello flame, and the veil of Santa Agata would be burned. Then the boy and the Siren would marry, and together they would rule the world, for ever and ever.
‘The whole village was in tumult, and the hotel-keepers became alarmed, for the tourist season was just beginning. They met together and decided that Giuseppe and the girl must be sent inland until the child was born, and they subscribed the money. The night before they were to start there was a full moon and wind from the east, and all along the coast the sea shot up over the cliffs in silver clouds. It is a wonderful sight, and Maria said she must see it once more.
‘“Do not go,” I said. “I saw the priest go by, and someone with him. And the hotel-keepers do not like you to be seen, and if we displease them also we shall starve.”
‘“I want to go,” she replied. “The sea is stormy, and I may never feel it again.”
‘“No, he is right,” said Giuseppe. “Do not go – or let one of us go with you.”
‘“I want to go alone,” she said; and she went alone.
‘I tied up their luggage in a piece of cloth, and then I was so unhappy at thinking I should lose them that I went and sat down by my brother and put my arm round his neck, and he put his arm round me, which he had not done for more than a year, and we remained thus I don’t remember how long.
‘Suddenly the door flew open and moonlight and wind came in together, and a child’s voice said laughing, “They have pushed her over the cliffs into the sea.”
‘I stepped to the drawer where I keep my knives.
‘“Sit down again,” said Giuseppe – Giuseppe of all people! “If she is dead, why should others die too?”
‘“I guess who it is,” I cried, “and I will kill him.”
‘I was almost out of the door, and he tripped me up and, kneeling upon me, took hold of both my hands and sprained my wrists; first my right one then my left. No one but Giuseppe would have thought of such a thing. It hurt more than you would suppose, and I fainted. When I woke up, he was gone, and I never saw him again.’
But Giuseppe disgusted me.
‘I told you he was wicked,’ he said. ‘No one would have expected him to see the Siren.’
‘How do you know he did see her?’
‘Because he did not see her “often and often,” but once.’
‘Why do you love him if he is wicked?’
He laughed for the first time. That was his only reply.
‘Is that the end?’ I asked.
‘I never killed her murderer, for by the time my wrists were well he was in America; and one cannot kill a priest. As for Giuseppe, he went all over the world too, looking for someone else who had seen the Siren – either a man, or, better still, a woman, for then the child might still have been born. At last he came to Liverpool – is the district probable? – and there he began to cough, and spat blood until he died.
‘I do not suppose there is anyone living now who has seen her. There has seldom been more than one in a generation, and never in my life will there be both a man and a woman from whom that child can be born, who will fetch up the Siren from the sea, and destroy silence, and save the world!’
‘Save the world?’ I cried. ‘Did the prophecy end like that?’
He leaned back against the rock, breathing deep. Through all the blue-green reflections I saw him colour. I heard him say: ‘Silence and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing.’ I would have asked him more, but at that moment the whole cave darkened, and there rode in through its narrow entrance the returning boat.
THE ETERNAL MOMENT
I
‘Do you see that mountain just behind Elizabeth’s toque? A young man fell in love with me there so nicely twenty years ago. Bob your head a minute, would you, Elizabeth, kindly.’
‘Yes’m,’ said Elizabeth, falling forward on the box like an unstiffened doll. Colonel Leyland put on his pince-nez, and looked at the mountain where the young man had fallen in love.
‘Was he a nice young man?’ he asked, smiling, though he lowered his voice a little on account of the maid.
‘I never knew. But it is a very gratifying incident to remember at my age. Thank you, Elizabeth.’
‘May one ask who he was?’
‘A porter,’ answered Miss Raby in her usual tones. ‘Not even a certificated guide. A male person who was hired to carry the luggage, which he dropped.’
‘Well! well! What did you do?’
‘What a young lady should. Screamed and thanked him not to insult me. Ran, which was quite unnecessary, fell, sprained my ankle, screamed again; and he had to carry me half a mile, so penitent that I thought he would fling me over a precipice. In that state we reached a certain Mrs Harbottle, at sight of whom I burst into tears. But she was so much stupider than I was, that I recovered quickly.’
‘Of course you said it was all your own fault?’
‘I trust I did,’ she said more seriously. ‘Mrs Harbottle, who, like most people, was always right, had warned me against him; we had had him for expeditions before.’
‘Ah! I see.’
‘I doubt whether you do. Hitherto he had known his place. But he was too cheap: he gave us more than our money’s worth. That, as you know, is an ominous sign in a low-born person.’
‘But how was this your fault?’
‘I encouraged him: I greatly preferred him to Mrs Harbottle. He was handsome and what I call agreeable; and he wore beautiful clothes. We lagged behind, and he picked me flowers. I held out my hand for them – instead of which he seized it and delivered a love oration which he had prepared out of I promessi Sposi.’
‘Ah! an Italian.’
They were crossing the frontier at that moment. On a little bridge amid fir trees were two poles, one painted red, white, and green, and the other black and yellow.
‘He lived in Italia Irredenta,’ said Miss Raby. ‘But we were to fly to the Kingdom. I wonder what would have happened if we had.’
‘Good Lord!’ said Colonel Leyland, in sudden disgust. On the box Elizabeth trembled.
‘But it might have been a most successful match.’
She was in the habit of talking in this mildly unconventional way. Colonel Leyland, who made allowances for her brilliancy, managed to exclaim: ‘Rather! yes, rather!’
She turned on him with: ‘Do you think I’m laughing at him?’
He looked a little bewildered, smiled, and did not reply. Their carriage was now crawling round the base of the notorious mountain. The road was built over the debris which had fallen and which still fell from its sides; and it had scarred the pine woods with devastating rivers of white stone. But farther up, Miss Raby remembered, on its gentler eastern slope, it possessed tranquil hollows, and flower-dad rocks, and a most tremendous view. She had not been quite as facetious as her companion supposed. The incident, certainly, had been ludicrous. But she was somehow able to laugh at it without laughing much at the actors or the stage.
‘I had rather he made me a fool than that I thought he was one,’ she said, after a long pause.
‘Here is the Custom House,’ said Colonel Leyland, changing the subject.
They had come to the land of Ach and Ja. Miss Raby sighed; for she loved the Latins, as everyone must who is not pressed for time. But Colonel Leyland, a military man, respected Teutonia.
‘They still talk Italian for seven miles,’ she said comforting herself like a child.
‘German is the coming language,’ answered Colonel Leyland. ‘All the important books on any subject are written in it.’
‘But all the books on any important subject are written in Italian. Elizabeth – tell me an important subject.’
’Human Nature, ma’am,’ said the maid, half shy, half impertinent.
‘Elizabeth is a novelist, like her mistress,’ said Colonel Leyland. He turned away to look at the scenery, for he did not like being entang
led in a mixed conversation. He noted that the farms were more prosperous, that begging had stopped, that the women were uglier and the men more rotund, that more nourishing food was being eaten outside the wayside inns.
‘Colonel Leyland, shall we go to the Grand Hôtel des Alpes, to the Hôtel de Londres, to the Pension Liebig, to the Pension Atherley-Simon, to the Pension Belle Vue, to the Pension Old-England, or to the Albergo Biscione?’
‘I suppose you would prefer the Biscione.’
‘I really shouldn’t mind the Grand Hôtel des Alpes. The Biscione people own both, I hear. They have become quite rich.’
‘You should have a splendid reception – if such people know what gratitude is.’
For Miss Raby’s novel, The Eternal Moment, which had made her reputation, had also made the reputation of Vorta.
‘Oh, I was properly thanked. Signor Cantù wrote to me about three years after I had published. The letter struck me as a little pathetic, though it was very prosperous: I don’t like transfiguring people’s lives. I wonder whether they live in their old house or in the new one.’
Colonel Leyland had come to Vorta to be with Miss Raby; but he was very willing that they should be in different hotels. She, indifferent to such subtleties, saw no reason why they should not stop under the same roof, just as she could not see why they should not travel in the same carriage. On the other hand, she hated anything smart. He had decided on the Grand Hôtel des Alpes, and she was drifting towards the Biscione, when the tiresome Elizabeth said: ‘My friend’s lady is staying at the Alpes.’
‘Oh! if Elizabeth’s friend is there that settles it: we’ll all go.’
‘Very well’m,’ said Elizabeth, studiously avoiding even the appearance of gratitude. Colonel Leyland’s face grew severe over the want of discipline.
‘You spoil her,’ he murmured, when they had all descended to walk up a hill.
‘There speaks the military man.’
‘Certainly I have had too much to do with Tommies to enter into what you call “human relations”. A little sentimentality, and the whole army would go to pieces.’