Gaspare, who was hastily dressing by the boats, called out to him that
his singing would frighten away the fish, and he was obediently silent.
He imprisoned the song in his heart, but that went on singing bravely. As
he waded farther he felt splendid, as if he were a lord of life and of
the sea. The water, now warm to him, seemed to be embracing him as it
crept upward towards his throat. Nature was clasping him with amorous
arms. Nature was taking him for her own.
"Nature, nature!" he said to himself. "That's why I'm so gloriously happy
here, because I'm being right down natural."
His mind made an abrupt turn, like a coursed hare, and he suddenly found
himself thinking of the night in London, when he had sat in the
restaurant with Hermione and Artois and listened to their talk,
reverently listened. Now, as the net tugged at his hand, influenced by
the resisting sea, that talk, as he remembered it, struck him as
unnatural, as useless, and the thoughts which he had then admired and
wondered at, as complicated and extraordinary. Something in him said,
"That's all unnatural." The touch of the water about his body, the light
of the moon upon him, the breath of the air in his wet face drove out his
reverence for what he called "intellectuality," and something savage got
hold of his soul and shook it, as if to wake up the sleeping self within
him, the self that was Sicilian.
As he waded in the water, coming ever nearer to the jagged rocks that
shut out from his sight the wide sea and something else, he felt as if
thinking and living were in opposition, as if the one were destructive of
the other; and the desire to be clever, to be talented, which had often
assailed him since he had known, and especially since he had loved,
Hermione, died out of him, and he found himself vaguely pitying Artois,
and almost despising the career and the fame of a writer. What did
thinking matter? The great thing was to live, to live with your body,
out-of-doors, close to nature, somewhat as the savages live. When he
waded to shore for the first time, and saw, as the net was hauled in, the
fish he had caught gleaming and leaping in the light, he could have
shouted like a boy.
He seized the net once more, but Gaspare, now clothed, took hold of him
by the arm with a familiarity that had in it nothing disrespectful.
"Signore, basta, basta! Giulio will go in now."