A swarthy oysterman, slender, with eyes like live coals, and enormous mustaches, had his stand at the door of the restaurant, offering cockles and shell fish of strong odor that had been half a week perhaps in ascending from the city to the heights of Vomero. Freya jested about the oysterman's typical good looks and the languishing glances that he was forever casting toward all the ladies that entered the establishment … a prime discovery for a tourist anxious for adventures in local color.
In the background a small orchestra was accompanying a tenor voice or was playing alone, enlarging upon the melodies and amplifying the measures with Neapolitan exaggeration.
Freya felt a childish hilarity upon seating herself at the table, seeing over the cloth the luminous summit. Bisected in the foreground by a crystal vase full of flowers, the distant panorama of the city, the gulf, and its capes spread itself before her eager eyes. The air on this peak enchanted her after two weeks passed without stirring outside of Naples. The harps and violins gave the situation a pathetic thrill and served as a background for conversation, just as the vague murmurs of a hidden orchestra give the effect in the theater of psalmody or of melancholy verses moving the listener to tears.
They ate with the nervousness which joy supplies. At some tables further on a young man and woman were forgetting the courses in order to clasp hands underneath the cloth and place knee against knee with frenzied pressure. The two were smiling, looking at the landscape and then at each other. Perhaps they were foreigners recently married, perhaps fugitive lovers, realizing in this picturesque spot the billing and cooing so many times anticipated in their distant courtship.
Two English doctors from a hospital ship, white haired and uniformed, were disregarding their repast in order to paint directly in their albums, with a childish painstaking crudeness, the same panorama that was portrayed on the postal cards offered for sale at the door of the restaurant.
A fat-bellied bottle with a petticoat of straw and a long neck
attracted Freya's hands to the table. She ridiculed the sobriety of
Ferragut, who was diluting with water the reddish blackness of the
Italian wine.
"Thus your ancestors, the Argonauts, must have drunk," she said gayly.
"Thus your grandfather, Ulysses, undoubtedly drank."
And herself filling the captain's glass with an exaggeratedly careful division of the parts of water and wine, she added gayly:
"We are going to make a libation to the gods."
These libations were very frequent. Freya's peals of laughter made the Englishmen, interrupted in their conscientious work, turn their glances toward her. The sailor felt himself overcome by a warm feeling of well-being, by a sensation of repose and confidence, as though this woman were unquestionably his already.