"There, just there."
A woman came up, a hook-nosed scold, with hard eyes and a bitter tongue—the comrade's mother. One could plainly see on her features a suspicious anxiety, as if she feared an accusation against her own son. She spoke sourly, and displayed almost irritation against the victim.
"It was his fate. God told him, 'Go in the sea and die.'"
She gesticulated vehemently.
"Why did he go in when he couldn't swim?"
A child who did not belong to the district, a boatman's son, repeated disdainfully:
"Why did he go in? Yes, we fellows all know how to swim."
People came up, looked on with cold curiosity, stopped or passed on. One group occupied the railway embankment; another group was looking from the top of the promontory, as at a spectacle. Children, seated or kneeling, played with the little pebbles that they threw in the air to catch them alternately on the backs of their hands and in their palms. Everyone displayed profound indifference at the sight of another's misfortune, and at death.
Another woman, on her way back from mass, came up, in a silk dress, decked with all her gold trinkets. To her, also, the weary guardian repeated his story, and showed the place in the water. This woman was loquacious.
"I always say to my children, 'Don't go near the sea, or I'll kill you.' The sea is the sea. You can't save yourself."