But Delarey was determined. He stripped off his clothes, put on his bathing drawers, took up the net, and, carefully directed by the admiring though protesting Gaspare, he waded into the sea.
For a moment he shuddered as the calm water rose round him. Then, English fashion, he dipped under, with a splash that brought a roar of laughter to him from the shore.
"Meglio così!" he cried, coming up again in the moonlight. "Adesso sto bene!"
The plunge had made him suddenly feel tremendously young and triumphant, reckless with a happiness that thrilled with audacity. As he waded out he began to sing in a loud voice:
"Ciao, ciao, ciao,
Morettina bella ciao,
Prima di partire
Un bacio ti voglio da'."
Gaspare, who was hastily dressing by the boats, called out to him that his singing would frighten away the fish, and he was obediently silent. He imprisoned the song in his heart, but that went on singing bravely. As he waded farther he felt splendid, as if he were a lord of life and of the sea. The water, now warm to him, seemed to be embracing him as it crept upward towards his throat. Nature was clasping him with amorous arms. Nature was taking him for her own.
"Nature, nature!" he said to himself. "That's why I'm so gloriously happy here, because I'm being right down natural."
His mind made an abrupt turn, like a coursed hare, and he suddenly found himself thinking of the night in London, when he had sat in the restaurant with Hermione and Artois and listened to their talk, reverently listened. Now, as the net tugged at his hand, influenced by the resisting sea, that talk, as he remembered it, struck him as unnatural, as useless, and the thoughts which he had then admired and wondered at, as complicated and extraordinary. Something in him said, "That's all unnatural." The touch of the water about his body, the light of the moon upon him, the breath of the air in his wet face drove out his reverence for what he called "intellectuality," and something savage got hold of his soul and shook it, as if to wake up the sleeping self within him, the self that was Sicilian.
As he waded in the water, coming ever nearer to the jagged rocks that shut out from his sight the wide sea and something else, he felt as if thinking and living were in opposition, as if the one were destructive of the other; and the desire to be clever, to be talented, which had often assailed him since he had known, and especially since he had loved, Hermione, died out of him, and he found himself vaguely pitying Artois, and almost despising the career and the fame of a writer. What did thinking matter? The great thing was to live, to live with your body, out-of-doors, close to nature, somewhat as the savages live. When he waded to shore for the first time, and saw, as the net was hauled in, the fish he had caught gleaming and leaping in the light, he could have shouted like a boy.
He seized the net once more, but Gaspare, now clothed, took hold of him by the arm with a familiarity that had in it nothing disrespectful.