The eternal moment, and other stories
quite sane though a little tremulous, lying decently open on its back,
while unseen fingers fidgeted among its leaves.
"It is such pity," said my aunt, "that you will not finish your work
in the hotel. Then you would be free to enjoy yourself and this would
never have happened."
"Nothing of it but will change into something rich and strange,"
warbled the chaplain, while his sister said, "Why, it's gone in the
water!" As for the boatmen, one of them laughed, while the other,
without a word of warning, stood up and began to take his clothes off.
"Holy Moses," cried the Colonel. "Is the fellow mad?"
"Yes, thank him, dear," said my aunt: "that is to say, tell him he is
very kind, but perhaps another time."
"All the same I do want my book back," I complained. "It's for my
Fellowship Dissertation. There won't be much left of it by another
time."
"I have an idea," said some woman or other through her parasol. "Let
us leave this child of nature to dive for the book while we go on to
the other grotto. We can land him either on this rock or on the ledge
inside, and he will be ready when we return."
The idea seemed good; and I improved it by saying I would be left
behind too, to lighten the boat. So the two of us were deposited
outside the little grotto on a great sunlit rock that guarded the
harmonies within. Let us call them blue, though they suggest rather the
spirit of what is clean--cleanliness passed from the domestic to the
sublime, the cleanliness of all the sea gathered together and radiating
light. The Blue Grotto at Capri contains only more blue water, not
bluer water. That colour and that spirit are the heritage of every cave
in the Mediterranean into which the sun can shine and the sea flow.
As soon as the boat left I realized how imprudent I had been to trust
myself on a sloping rock with an unknown Sicilian. With a jerk he
became alive, seizing my arm and saying, "Go to the end of the grotto,
and I will show you something beautiful."
He made me jump off the rock on to the ledge over a dazzling crack of
sea; he drew me away from the light till I was standing on the tiny
beach of sand which emerged like powdered turquoise at the farther end.
There he left me with his clothes, and returned swiftly to the summit
of the entrance rock. For a moment he stood naked in the brilliant sun,
looking down at the spot where the book lay. Then he crossed himself,
raised his hands above his head, and dived.
If the book was wonderful, the man is past all description. His effect
was that of a silver statue, alive beneath the sea, through whom life
throbbed in blue and green. Something infinitely happy, infinitely
wise--but it was impossible that it should emerge from the depths
sunburned and dripping, holding the notebook on the Deist Controversy
between its teeth.
A gratuity is generally expected by those who bathe. Whatever I
offered, he was sure to want more, and I was disinclined for an
argument in a place so beautiful and also so solitary. It was a relief
that he should say in conversational tones, "In a place like this one
might see the Siren."
I was delighted with him for thus falling into the key of his
surroundings. We had been left together in a magic world, apart from
all the commonplaces that are called reality, a world of blue whose
floor was the sea and whose walls and roof of rock trembled with the
sea's reflections. Here only the fantastic would be tolerable, and it
was in that spirit I echoed his words, "One might easily see the Siren."
He watched me curiously while he dressed. I was parting the sticky
leaves of the notebook as I sat on the sand.
"Ah," he said at last. "You may have read the little book that was
printed last year. Who would have thought that our Siren would have
given the foreigners pleasure!"
(I read it afterwards. Its account is, not unnaturally, incomplete, in
spite of there being a woodcut of the young person, and the words of
her song.)
"She comes out of this blue water, doesn't she," I suggested, "and sits
on the rock at the entrance, combing her hair."
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 this 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 any one 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 any one 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 mineowner, 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