There is deep, sweet shadow
around that point."
The boat turned glidingly. Now it was under tall rock, parapeted with
trees.
"Let Giovanni have the boat. Come and sit beside me! You are too far
away for singing together."
Old Giovanni at the helm, boatman upon this lake since youth, used
long since to murmuring words, to touching hands, stayed brown and
wrinkled and silent and unspeculative as a walnut. Perhaps his mind
was sunk in his own stone hut behind vine leaves. The two under the
rose-and-white-fringed canopy leaned toward each other.
"Tell me of your strange, foreign land! Have you roses
there--roses--roses? And nightingales that sing out your heart under
the moon?"
"I will tell you of the heather, the lark, and the mavis."
She listened. "Oh, it does not taste as tastes this lake! Give me
pain! Tell me of women you have loved.... Oh, hear! The nightingales
stop singing."
"Do you ever listen to the silence?"
"Of course ... when a friend dies--or I go to Mass--and sometimes when
I am singing very passionately. But this lake--"
She began to sing. The contralto throbbed, painted, told, brought
delight and melancholy. He sat with his hand loosened from hers, his
eyes upon the lake's blue-green depths. At last she stopped.
"Oh--h!... Let us go back to the talking shore and the chattering
villa! Somebody else is singing--somebody or something! I hear
silence--I hear it in the silence.
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