The Story of the Siren
Few things have been more beautiful than my notebook on the Deist Controversy as it fell downward through the waters of the Mediterranean. It dived, like a piece of black slate, but opened soon, disclosing leaves of pale green, which quivered into blue. Now it had vanished, now it was a piece of magical india-rubber stretching out to infinity, now it was a book again, but bigger than the book of all knowledge. It grew more fantastic as it reached the bottom, where a puff of sand welcomed it and obscured it from view. But it reappeared, 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
