“Frightened—hu!” he made sudden gesticulations and ejaculations, which added volumes to his few words.
“And did you like it, your village?” she said.
He put his head on one side in deprecation.
“No,” he said, “because, you see—hé, there is nothing to do—no money—work—work—work—no life—you see nothing. When I was a small boy my father, he died, and my mother comes with me to Naples. Then I go with the little boats on the sea—fishing, carrying people—” He flourished his hand as if to make her understand all the things that must be wordless. He smiled at her—but there was a faint, poignant sadness and remoteness in him, a beauty of old fatality, and ultimate indifference to fate.
“And were you very poor?”
“Poor?—why yes! Nothing. Rags—no shoes—bread, little fish from the sea—shell-fish—”
His hands flickered, his eyes rested on her with a profound look of knowledge. And it seemed, in spite of all, one state was very much the same to him as another, poverty was as much life as affluence. Only he had a sort of jealous idea that it was humiliating to be poor, and so, for vanity’s sake, he would have possessions. The countless generations of civilization behind him had left him an instinct of the world’s meaninglessness. Only his little modern education made money and independence an idée fixe. Old instinct told him the world was nothing. But modern education, so shallow, was much more efficacious than instinct. It drove him to make a show of himself to the world. Alvina watching him, as if hypnotized, saw his old beauty, formed through civilization after civilization; and at the same time she saw his modern vulgarianism, and decadence.
“And when you go back, you will go back to your old village?” she said.
He made a gesture with his head and shoulders, evasive, non-committal.
“I don’t know, you see,” he said.