The Call of the Blood

Suddenly Maurice laughed, showing his white teeth. He stretched up his

arms to the blue heaven and the sun that sent its rays filtering down to

him through the leaves of the oak-trees, and he laughed again gently.

"What is it, signore?"

"It is good to live, Gaspare. It is good to be young out here on the

mountain-side, and to send learning and problems and questions of

conscience to the devil. After all, real life is simple enough if only

you'll let it be. I believe the complications of life, half of them, and

its miseries too, more than half of them, are the inventions of the

brains of the men and women we call clever. They can't let anything

alone. They bother about themselves and everybody else. By Jove, if you

knew how they talk about life in London! They'd make you think it was the

most complicated, rotten, intriguing business imaginable; all

misunderstandings and cross-purposes, and the Lord knows what. But it

isn't. It's jolly simple, or it can be. Here we are, you and I, and we

aren't at loggerheads, and we've got enough to eat and a pair of boots

apiece, and the sun, and the sea, and old Etna behaving nicely--and what

more do we want?"

"Signore--"

"Well?"

"I don't understand English."

"Mamma mia!" Delarey roared with laughter. "And I've been talking

English. Well, Gaspare, I can't say it in Sicilian--can I? Let's see."

He thought a minute. Then he said: "It's something like this. Life is simple and splendid if you let it

alone. But if you worry it--well, then, like a dog, it bites you."

He imitated a dog biting. Gaspare nodded seriously.

"Mi piace la vita," he remarked, calmly.

"E anche mi piace a me," said Maurice. "Now I'll give you a lesson in

English, and when the signora comes back you can talk to her."

"Si, signore."

The afternoon had gone in a flash. Evening came while they were still

under the oak-trees, and the voice of Lucrezia was heard calling from the

terrace, with the peculiar baaing intonation that is characteristic of

southern women of the lower classes.

Gaspare baaed ironically in reply.

"It isn't dinner-time already?" said Maurice, getting up reluctantly.

"Yes, meester sir, eef you pleesi," said Gaspare, with conscious pride.

"We go way."

"Bravo. Well, I'm getting hungry."

As Maurice sat alone at dinner on the terrace, while Gaspare and Lucrezia

ate and chattered in the kitchen, he saw presently far down below the

shining of the light in the house of the sirens. It came out when the

stars came out, this tiny star of the sea. He felt a little lonely as he

sat there eating all by himself, and when the light was kindled near the

water, that lay like a dream waiting to be sweetly disturbed by the moon,

he was pleased as by the greeting of a friend. The light was company. He

watched it while he ate. It was a friendly light, more friendly than the

light of the stars to him. For he connected it with earthly

things--things a man could understand. He imagined Maddalena in the

cottage where he had slept preparing the supper for Salvatore, who was

presently going off to sea to spear fish, or net them, or take them with

lines for the market on the morrow. There was bread and cheese on the

table, and the good red wine that could harm nobody, wine that had all

the laughter of the sun-rays in it. And the cottage door was open to the

sea. The breeze came in and made the little lamp that burned beneath the

Madonna flicker. He saw the big, white bed, and the faces of the saints,

of the actresses, of the smiling babies that had watched him while he

slept. And he saw the face of his peasant hostess, the face he had kissed

in the dawn, ere he ran down among the olive-trees to plunge into the

sea. He saw the eyes that were like black jewels, the little feathers of

gold in the hair about her brow. She was a pretty, simple girl. He liked

the look of curiosity in her eyes. To her he was something touched with

wonder, a man from a far-off land. Yet she was at ease with him and he

with her. That drop of Sicilian blood in his veins was worth something to

him in this isle of the south. It made him one with so much, with the

sunburned sons of the hills and of the sea-shore, with the sunburned

daughters of the soil. It made him one with them--or more--one of them.

He had had a kiss from Sicily now--a kiss in the dawn by the sea, from

lips fresh with the sea wind and warm with the life that is young. And

what had it meant to him? He had taken it carelessly with a laugh. He had

washed it from his lips in the sea. Now he remembered it, and, in

thought, he took the kiss again, but more slowly, more seriously. And he

took it at evening, at the coming of night, instead of at dawn, at the

coming of day--his kiss from Sicily.