"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
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,
for ever 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 some one 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 some one 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 any one 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. I heard him say: "Silence and
loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand
years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and
sing." I would have asked him more, but at that moment the whole cave
darkened, and there rode in through its narrow entrance the returning
boat.