During this time she did not feel unhappy. Seldom had she felt calmer, more at rest, more able to be still. She had no desire to do anything. It seemed to her that she would be quite satisfied to sit where she was in the sun forever.
While she sat there she was always thinking, but vaguely, slowly, lethargically. And her thoughts reiterated themselves, were like recurring fragments of dreams, and were curiously linked together. The green parrot she always connected with the death-charm, because the latter had once been green. Whenever the one presented itself to her mind it was immediately followed by the other. The shawl at which the old woman’s yellow fingers had perpetually pulled led her mind to the thought of the tunnel, because she imagined that the latter must eventually end in blackness, and the shawl was black. She knew, of course, really that the tunnel was lit from end to end by electricity. But her mind arbitrarily put aside this knowledge. It did not belong to her strange mood, the mood of one drawing near to the verge either of some abominable collapse or of some terrible activity. Occasionally, she thought of Ruffo; but always as one of the brown boys bathing from the rocks beyond the harbor, shouting, laughing, triumphant in his glorious youth. And when the link was, as it were, just beginning to form itself from the thought-shape of youth to another thought-shape, her mind stopped short in that progress, recoiled, like a creature recoiling from a precipice it has not seen but has divined in the dark. She sipped the vermouth and the iced water, and stared at the drops chasing each other down the clouded glass. And for a time she was not conscious where she was, and heard none of the noises round about her.
It was the song of Mergellina, sung at some distance off in dialect, by a tenor voice to the accompaniment of a piano-organ. Hermione ceased from gazing at the drops on the glass, looked up, listened.
The song came nearer. The tenor voice was hard, strident, sang lustily but inexpressively in the glaring sunshine. And the dialect made the song seem different, almost new. Its charm seemed to have evaporated. Yet she remembered vaguely that it had charmed her. She sought for the charm, striving feebly to recapture it.
The piano-organ hurt her, the hard voice hurt her. It sounded cruel and greedy. But the song—once it had appealed to her. Once she had leaned down to hear it, she had leaned down over the misty sea, her soul had followed it out over the sea.
“Oh, dolce luna bianca de l’ estate
Mi fugge il sonno accanto a la Marina:
Mi destan le dolcissime serate
Gli occhi di Rosa e il mar di Mergellina.”
Those were the real words. And what voice had sung them?
And then, suddenly, her brain worked once more with its natural swiftness and vivacity, her imagination and her heart awaked. She was again alive. She saw the people. She heard the sounds about her. She felt the scorching heat of the sun. But in it she was conscious also of the opposite of day, of the opposite of heat. At that moment she had a double consciousness. For she felt the salt coolness of the night around the lonely island. And she heard not only the street singer, but Ruffo in his boat.
Ruffo—in his boat.
Suddenly she could not see anything. Her sight was drowned by tears. She got up at once. She felt for her purse, found it, opened it, felt for money, found some coins, laid them down on the table, and began to walk. She was driven by fear, the fear of falling down in the sun in the sight of all men, and crying, sobbing, with her face against the ground. She heard a shout. Some one gave her a violent push, thrusting her forward. She stumbled, recovered herself. A passer-by had saved her from a tram. She did not know it. She did not look at him or thank him. He went away, swearing at the English. Where was she going?