Moved by his abrupt desire to stand well with everybody during this last festa, Maurice began to speak to Salvatore of the donkey auction. When would it begin?
"Chi lo sa?"
No one knew. In Sicily all feasts are movable. Even mass may begin an hour too late or an hour too early. One thought the donkey auction would start at fourteen, another at sixteen o'clock. Gaspare was imperiously certain, over the macaroni, which had now made its appearance, that the hour was seventeen. There were to be other auctions, auctions of wonderful things. A clock that played music—the "Marcia Reale" and the "Tre Colori"—was to be put up; suits of clothes, too; boots, hats, a chair that rocked like a boat on the sea, a revolver ornamented with ivory. Already—no one knew when, for no one had missed him—he had been to view these treasures. As he spoke of them tongues were loosed and eyes shone with excitement. Money was in the air. Prices were passionately discussed, values debated. All down the table went the words "soldi," "lire," "lire sterline," "biglietti da cinque," "biglietti da dieci." Salvatore's hatred died away, suffocated for the moment under the weight of his avarice. A donkey—yes, he meant to get a donkey with the stranger's money. But why stop there? Why not have the clock and the rocking-chair and the revolver? His sharpness of the Sicilian, a sharpness almost as keen and sure as that of the Arab, divined the intensity, the recklessness alive in the Englishman to-day, bred of that limit, "my last day of the careless life," to which his own limit was twin-brother, but of which he knew nothing. And as Maurice was intense to-day, because there were so few hours left to him for intensity, so was Salvatore intense in a different way, but for a similar reason. They were walking in step without being aware of it. Or were they not rather racing neck to neck, like passionate opponents?
There was little time. Then they must use what there was to the full. They must not let one single moment find them lazy, indifferent.
Under the cover of the flood of talk Maurice turned to Maddalena. She was taking no part in it, but was eating her macaroni gently, as if it were a new and wonderful food. So Maurice thought as he looked at her. To-day there was something strange, almost pathetic, to him in Maddalena, a softness, an innocent refinement that made him imagine her in another life than hers, and with other companions, in a life as free but less hard, with companions as natural but less ruthless to women.
"Maddalena," he said to her. "They all want to buy things at the auction."
"Si, signore."
"And you?"
"I, signorino?"