“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 Vials 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, forever 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.
