"That is what you should turn into verse, Vincenzo."
The painter replied with a pensive smile:
"Yes, it's a good subject for a small poem. I think I may be able to do something with it. But when a man is over twenty-five he is a poor lyric poet."
He threw away the crumpled flower, picked another and, looking round, continued quietly:
"When one has covered the road from mother's breast to the breast of one's sweetheart, one must go on to another kind of happiness."
The locksmith became silent, tilting his wine in the glass.
Below them the sea murmurs softly; in the hot air above the vineyards floats the perfume of flowers.
"It is the sun that makes us so lazy and good-for-nothing," murmured the locksmith.
"I don't seem to be able to manage lyric verse satisfactorily now. I am rather sick about it," said Vincenzo quietly, knitting his thin brows.
"Yes, yesterday I wrote something on the roof of the Hotel Como."
And he read in a low tone and pensive and sing-song manner:
"The autumn sun falls softly, taking leave, And lights the greyness of the lonely shore. The greedy waves o'erlip the scattered stones And lick the sun into the cold blue sea. The autumn wind goes gleaning yellow leaves, To toss them idly in the blust'ring air. Pale is the sky, and wild the angry sea, The sun still faintly smiles, and sinks, and sets."
They were both silent for a time. The painter's head had sunk and his eyes were fixed on the ground. The big, burly locksmith smiled and said at last:
"One can speak in a beautiful way about everything, but what is most beautiful of all is a word about a good man, a song of good people."
The sun, like a golden rain, streams down through the dark curtain of vine leaves on to the terrace of the hotel; it is as if golden threads were strung in the air.
On the grey pavement and on the white table-cloths the shadows make strange designs, and it seems as though, if one looked long at them, one might learn to read them as one reads poetry, one might learn the meaning of it all. Bunches of grapes gleam in the sun, like pearls or the strange dull stone olivine, and the water in the decanter on the table sparkles like blue diamonds.
In the passage between the tables lies a round lace handkerchief, dropped, without a doubt, by a woman divinely fair--it cannot be otherwise, one cannot think otherwise on this sultry day full of glowing poetry, a day when everything banal and commonplace becomes invisible and hides from the sun, as if ashamed of itself.