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

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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."




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