A Spirit in Prison. Robert Hichens
Читать онлайн книгу.
were dancing with physical pleasure. Artois wondered how much he felt the beauty of the evening, and how. His friend evidently saw the question in his eyes, for he said:
“The man who knows not Naples knows not pleasure.”
“Is that a Neapolitan saying?” asked Artois.
“Yes, and it is true. There is no town like Naples for pleasure. Even your Paris, Emilio, with all its theatres, its cocottes, its restaurants—no, it is not Naples. No wonder the forestiere come here. In Naples they are free. They can do what they will. They know we shall not mind. We are never shocked.”
“And do you think we are easily shocked in Paris?”
“No, but it is not the same. You have not Vesuvius there. You have not the sea, you have not the sun.”
Artois began laughingly to protest against the last statement, but the Marchesino would not have it.
“No, no, it shines—I know that—but it is not the sun we have here.”
He spoke to the seamen in the Neapolitan dialect. They were brown, muscular fellows. In their eyes were the extraordinary boldness and directness of the sea. Neither of them looked gay. Many of the Neapolitans who are much upon the sea have serious, even grave faces. These were intensely, almost overpoweringly male. They seemed to partake of the essence of the elements of nature, as if blood of the sea ran in their veins, as if they were hot with the grim and inner fires of the sun. When they spoke their faces showed a certain changefulness that denoted intelligence, but never lost the look of force, of an almost tense masculinity ready to battle, perpetually alive to hold its own.
The Marchesino was also very masculine, but in a different way and more consciously than they were. He was not cultured, but such civilization as he had endowed him with a power to catch the moods of others not possessed by these men, in whom persistence was more visible than adroitness, unless indeed any question of money was to the fore.
“We shall get to the Giuseppone by eight, Emilio,” the Marchesino said, dropping his conversation with the men, which had been about the best hour and place for their fishing. “Are you hungry?”
“I shall be,” said Artois. “This wind brings an appetite with it. How well you steer!”
The Marchesino nodded carelessly.
As the boat drew ever nearer to the point, running swiftly before the light breeze, its occupants were silent. Artois was watching the evening, with the eyes of a lover of nature, but also with the eyes of one who takes notes. The Marchesino seemed to be intent on his occupation of pilot. As to the two sailors, they sat in the accustomed calm and staring silence of seafaring men, with wide eyes looking out over the element that ministered to their wants. They saw it differently, perhaps, from Artois, to whom it gave now an intense aesthetic pleasure, differently from the Marchesino, to whom it was just a path to possible excitement, possible gratification of a new and dancing desire. They connected it with strange superstitions, with gifts, with deprivations, with death. Familiar and mysterious it was purely to them as to all seamen, like a woman possessed whose soul is far away.
Just as the clocks of Posilipo were striking eight the Marchesino steered the boat into the quay of the Antico Guiseppone.
Although it was early in the season a few deal tables were set out by the waterside, and a swarthy waiter, with huge mustaches and a napkin over his arm, came delicately over the stones to ask their wishes.
“Will you let me order dinner, Emilio?” said the Marchesino: “I know what they do best here.”
Artois agreed, and while the waiter shuffled to carry out the Marchesino’s directions the two friends strolled near the edge of the sea.
The breeze had been kindly. Having served them well it was now dying down to its repose, leaving the evening that was near to night profoundly calm. As Artois walked along the quay he felt the approach of calm like the approach of a potentate, serene in the vast consciousness of power. Peace was invading the sea, irresistible peace. The night was at hand. Already Naples uncoiled its chain of lamps along the Bay. In the gardens of Posilipo the lights of the houses gleamed. Opposite, but very far off across the sea, shone the tiny flames of the houses of Portici, of Torre del Greco, of Torre Annunziata, of Castellamare. Against the gathering darkness Vesuvius belched slowly soft clouds of rose-colored vapor, which went up like a menace into the dim vault of the sky. The sea was without waves. The boats by the wharf, where the road ascends past the villa Rosebery to the village of Posilipo, scarcely moved. Near them, in a group, lounging against the wall and talking rapidly, stood the two sailors from Naples with the boatmen of the Guiseppone. Oil lamps glimmered upon two or three of the deal tables, round one of which was gathered a party consisting of seven large women, three children, and two very thin middle-aged men with bright eyes, all of whom were eating oysters. Farther on, from a small arbor that gave access to a fisherman’s house, which seemed to be constructed partially in a cave of the rock, and which was gained by a steep and crumbling stairway of stone, a mother called shrilly to some half-naked little boys who were fishing with tiny hand-nets in the sea. By the table which was destined to the Marchesino and Artois three ambulant musicians were hovering, holding in their broad and dirty hands two shabby mandolins and a guitar. In the distance a cook with a white cap on his head and bare arms was visible, as he moved to and fro in the lighted kitchen of the old ristorante, preparing a “zuppa di pesce” for the gentlemen from Naples.
“Che bella notte!” said the Marchesino, suddenly.
His voice sounded sentimental. He twisted his mustaches and added:
“Emilio, we ought to have brought two beautiful women with us to-night. What are the moon and the sea to men without beautiful women?”
“And the fishing?” said Artois.
“To the devil with the fishing,” replied the young man. “Ecco! Our dinner is ready, with thanks to the Madonna!”
They sat down, one on each side of the small table, with a smoking lamp between them.
“I have ordered vino bianco,” said the Marchesino, who still looked sentimental. “Cameriere, take away the lamp. Put it on the next table. Va bene. We are going to have ‘zuppa di pesce,’ gamberi and veal cutlets. The wine is Capri. Now then,” he added, with sudden violence and the coarsest imaginable Neapolitan accent, “if you fellows play ‘Santa Lucia,’ ‘Napoli Bella,’ or ‘Sole mio’ you’ll have my knife in you. I am not an Inglese. I am a Neapolitan. Remember that!”
He proved it with a string of gutter words and oaths, at which the musicians smiled with pleasure. Then, turning again to Artois, he continued:
“If one doesn’t tell them they think one is an imbecile. Emilio caro, do you not love to see the moon with a beautiful girl?”
His curious assumption that Artois and he were contemporaries because they were friends, and his apparently absolute blindness to the fact that a man of sixty and a man of twenty-four are hardly likely to regard the other sex with an exactly similar enthusiasm, always secretly entertained the novelist, who made it his business with this friend to be accommodating, and who seldom, if ever, showed himself authoritative, or revealed any part of his real inner self.
“Ma si!” he replied; “the night and the moon are made for love.”
“Everything is made for love,” returned the Marchesino. “Take plenty of soaked bread, Emilio. They know how to make this zuppa here. Everything is made for love.—Look! There is a boat coming with women in it!”
At a short distance from the shore a rowing boat was visible; and from it now came shrill sounds of very common voices, followed by shouts of male laughter.
“Perhaps they are beautiful,” said the Marchesino, at once on the alert.
The boat drew in to the quay, and from it there sprang, with much noise and many gesticulations, two over-dressed women—probably, indeed almost certainly, canzonettiste—and the two large young men, whose brown