A Spirit in Prison. Robert Hichens
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would lose it if he did,” said Vere. “I’m sure he would. Just now you were under water nearly a minute by my mother’s watch.”
“Where is the Signora?” said the boy, looking round.
“Why d’you ask?”
“Why—I can stay under longer than that.”
“Now, look here!” said the girl, eagerly. “Never mind Madre! Go down once for me, won’t you? Go down once for me, and you shall have the dolce and two packets of cigarettes.”
“I don’t want the dolce, Signorina; a dolce is for women,” he said, with the complete bluntness characteristic of Southern Italians and of Sicilians.
“The cigarettes, then.”
“Va bene. But the water is too shallow here.”
“We’ll take my boat.”
She pointed to a small boat, white with a green line, that was moored close to them.
“Va bene,” said the boy again.
He rolled his white trousers up above his knees, stripped off his blue jersey, leaving the thin vest that was beneath it, folded the jersey neatly and laid it on the stones, tightened his trousers at the back, then caught hold of the rope by which Vere’s boat was moored to the shore and pulled the boat in.
Very carefully he helped Vere into it.
“I know a good place,” he said, “where you can see right down to the bottom.”
Taking the oars he slowly paddled a little way out to a deep clear pool of the sea.
“I’ll go in here, Signorina.”
He stood up straight, with his feet planted on each side of the boat’s prow, and glanced at the water intimately, as might a fish. Then he shot one more glance at Vere and at the cigarettes, made the sign of the cross, lifted his brown arms above his head, uttered a cry, and dived cleanly below the water, going down obliquely till he was quite dim in the water.
Vere watched him with deep attention. This feat of the boy fascinated her. The water between them made him look remote, delicate and unearthly—neither boy nor fish. His head, she could see, was almost touching the bottom. She fancied that he was actually touching bottom with his hands. Yes, he was. Bending low over the water she saw his brown fingers, stretched out and well divided, promenading over the basin of the sea as lightly and springily as the claws of a crab tip-toeing to some hiding-place. Presently he let himself down a little more, pressed his flat palms against the ground, and with the impetus thus gained made his body shoot back towards the surface feet foremost. Then bringing his body up till it was in a straight line with his feet, he swam slowly under water, curving first in this direction then in that, with a lithe ease that was enchantingly graceful. Finally, he turned over on his back and sank slowly down until he looked like a corpse lying at the bottom of the sea.
Then Vere felt a sickness of fear steal over her, and leaning over the sea till her face almost touched the water, she cried out fiercely:
“Come up! Come up! Presto! Presto!”
As the boy had seemed to obey her when she cried out to him from the summit of the cliff, so he seemed to obey her now.
When her voice died down into the sea-depths he rose from those depths, and she saw his eyes laughing, his lips laughing at her, freed from the strange veil of the water, which had cast upon him a spectral aspect, the likeness of a thing deserted by its soul.
“Did you hear me that time?” Vere said, rather eagerly.
The boy lifted his dark head from the water to shake it, drew a long breath, trod water, then threw up his chin with the touch of tongue against teeth which is the Neapolitan negative.
“You didn’t! Then why did you come up?”
He swam to the boat.
“It pleased me to come.”
She looked doubtful.
“I believe you are birbante,” she said, slowly. “I am nearly sure you are.”
The boy was just getting out, pulling himself up slowly to the boat by his arms, with his wet hands grasping the gunwale firmly. He looked at Vere, with the salt drops running down his sunburnt face, and dripping from his thick, matted hair to his strong neck and shoulders. Again his whole face laughed, as, nimbly, he brought his legs from the water and stood beside her.
“Birbante, Signorina?”
“Yes. Are you from Naples?”
“I come from Mergellina, Signorina.”
Vere looked at him half-doubtfully, but still with innocent admiration. There was something perfectly fearless and capable about him that attracted her.
He rowed in to shore.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Sixteen years old, Signorina.”
“I am sixteen, too.”
They reached the islet, and Vere got out. The boy followed her, fastened the boat, and moved away a few steps. She wondered why, till she saw him stop in a sun-patch and let the beams fall full upon him.
“You aren’t afraid of catching cold?” she asked.
He threw up his chin. His eyes went to the cigarettes.
“Yes,” said Vere, in answer to the look, “you shall have one. Here!”
She held out the packet. Very carefully and neatly the boy, after holding his right hand for a moment to the sun to get dry, drew out a cigarette.
“Oh, you want a match!”
He sprang away and ran lightly to the boat. Without waking his companions he found a matchbox and lit the cigarette. Then he came back, on the way stopping to get into his jersey.
Vere sat down on a narrow seat let into the rock close to the sun-patch. She was nursing the dolce on her knee.
“You won’t have it?” she asked.
He gave her his usual negative, again stepping full into the sun.
“Well, then, I shall eat it. You say a dolce is for women!”
“Si, Signorina,” he answered, quite seriously.
She began to devour it slowly, while the boy drew the cigarette smoke into his lungs voluptuously.
“And you are only sixteen?” she asked.
“Si, Signorina.”
“As young as I am! But you look almost a man.”
“Signorina, I have always worked. I am a man.”
He squared his shoulders. She liked the determination, the resolution in his face; and she liked the face, too. He was a very handsome boy, she thought, but somehow he did not look quite Neapolitan. His eyes lacked the round and staring impudence characteristic of many Neapolitans she had seen. There was something at times impassive in their gaze. In shape they were long, and slightly depressed at the corners by the cheeks, and they had full, almost heavy, lids. The features of the boy were small and straight, and gave no promise of eventual coarseness. He was splendidly made. When Vere looked at him she thought of an arrow. Yet he was very muscular, and before he dived she had noticed that on his arms the biceps swelled up like smooth balls of iron beneath the shining brown skin.
“What month were you born in?” she asked.
“Signorina, I believe I was born in March. I believe I was sixteen last March.”
“Then I am older than you are!”
This seemed to the boy a matter of indifference, though it was evidently exercising