Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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THE SIROCCO 163
“ You can call it so. As everything is going now,
you are certainly right to call it so. Ah, if they
had not given me false information; if I had not
come a week too late! Is it not like us Sicilians to
let the government anticipate us ? When I came
the leaders were already arrested, the island
garrisoned with forty thousand men. Everything lost!”
It sounded strangely blank when he said that
“everything lost.” And for that which never could
be anything, he had lost happiness. His opinions
and principles seemed to him now to be dry
cobwebs, which had captured him. He wished to tear
himself away to come to her. She was the only
reality, the only thing that was his. So he had felt
before. It came back now. She was the only
thing in the world.
“They are, however, fighting to-day in Patern6.”
“There has been a disagreement by the
town-gate,” he said. “It is nothing. If I had been able
to inflame all Etna, the whole circle of towns round
about Etna! Then they would have understood us!
they would have listened to us! Now they are
shooting down a few hungry peasants to make a few hungry
mouths the less. They do not yield an inch to us.”
He strove to break through his cobwebs. Could
he venture to go up to her, to tell her that all that
was of no importance? He did not need to think of
politics. He was an artist; he was free! And he
wanted to possess her!
Suddenly it seemed as if the air trembled. A
shot echoed through the night, then another and
another.
She came forward to him and grasped his wrist.
“Is that the uprising?” she asked.
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