Seekers in Sicily - Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica

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Title: Seekers in Sicily - Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica
Author: Hoyt, Anne, Bisland, Elizabeth
Language: English
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SEEKERS IN SICILY

[Illustration: “Demeter’s Well-Beloved Children”]

SEEKERS IN SICILY

Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica

Done into the Vernacular

ELIZABETH BISLAND AND ANNE HOYT

New York: John Lane Company. MCMIX
London: John Lane, The Bodley Head

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration: Decoration]

ANDERS AND FRAU ZORN

FROM THE NORTH, IN MEMORY
OF THE SUN AND THE SOUTH,
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

A PAIR OF “WORD BRAIDERS”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration: Decoration]

=NOTE=

_THE designs upon the cover of this book, and at the heads of the
chapters, are the tribe signs or totems of the original inhabitants of
the island of Sicily, which have survived all conquests and races and
are still considered as tokens of good luck and defenders from the
Evil-eye._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration: Decoration]

PREFACE

WHEN this book was written—in the spring of the year—the Land of the
Older Gods was unmarred by the terrible seismic convulsions which
wrought such ruin in the last days of 1908.

Very sad to each of us it is when time and the sorrows of “this
unintelligible world” carve furrows upon our own countenances, but when
the visage of the globe shrivels and wrinkles with the lapse of ages
then the greatness of the disaster touches the whole race. Sicily, whose
history is so full of blood and tears, has been the victim of the
greatest natural tragedy that man’s chronicles record because of this
line drawn by Time upon our planet’s face—yet it leaves her still so
fair, so poignantly lovely, that pilgrims of beauty will—forgetting this
slight blemish—still journey to see the sweetest remnant of the world’s
youth. Happily Messina, the one city injured, was the one city where
travellers rarely paused. All the others remain unmarred and are still
exactly as they were when this chronicle of their ancient beauty and
charm was set down.

E. B. AND A. H.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTENTS

PAGE
PREFACE 9
CHAPTER
I ON THE ROAD TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 15
II A NEST OF EAGLES 45
III ONE DEAD IN THE FIELDS 126
IV THE RETURN OF PERSEPHONE 178
V A CITY OF TEMPLES 192
VI THE GOLDEN SHELL 229

------------------------------------------------------------------------

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“Demeter’s Well-Beloved Children” _Frontispiece_

PAGE

“A Place Where the Past Reveals Itself” 68

“Pan’s Goatherd” 132

“Ætna, The Salient Fact of Sicily” 186

“The Saffron Mass of Concordia” 198

“Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of 218
Flowers”

“Sicily’s Picture-book, The Painted 234
Cart”

“The Last Resting Place of Queen 248
Constance”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration: Decoration]

SEEKERS IN SICILY

CHAPTER I

ON THE ROAD TO THE LAND OF THE GODS

“He ne’er is crown’d with immortality
Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.”

“OH, Persephone, Persephone!... Surely Koré is in Hell.”

This is a discouraged voice from the window.

“Peripatetica, that _sounds_ both insane and improper. Would it fatigue
you too much to explain in the vernacular what you are trying, in your
roundabout way, to suggest?”

Thus Jane, a mere diaphanous mauve cloud, from which the glimmering fire
picked out glittering points here and there. When Jane takes to teagowns
she is really very dressy.

Peripatetica strolled up and down the dusky drawing-room two or three
times, without answering. Outside a raging wind drove furiously before
it in the darkness the snow that flew upward in long spirals, like
desperate hunted ghosts. Finally she took up a book from the table, and
kneeling, to get the light from the logs on the page, began to read
aloud.

These two were on such kindly terms that either one could read aloud
without arousing the other to open violence.

“Persephone, sometimes called Koré—” read Peripatetica, “having been
seized by Pluto, as she gathered narcissus, and wild thyme, and mint,
and the violet into her green kirtle—was carried, weeping very bitterly,
into his dark hell. And Demeter, her mother, missing her fair and
sweet-curled daughter, sought her through all the world with tears and
ravings; the bitter sound and moisture of her grief making a noise as of
winter wind and rain. And her warm heart being so cold with pain the
blossoms died on her bosom, and her vernal hair was shredded abroad into
the air, and all growing things drooped and perished, and her brown
benignant face became white as the face of the dead are white——”

Peripatetica closed the book, put it back on the table, and drew a
hassock under her for a seat.

“I see,” said Jane. “Demeter is certainly passing this way to-night,
poor dear! It’s a pity she can’t realize Persephone, that sweet soul of
Spring, will come back. She always does come back.”

“Yes; but Demeter, the mother-earth, always fears that this time she may
not; that Pluto will keep her in hell always. And every time she makes
the same outcry about it.”

“I suppose she always finds her first in Enna,” Jane hazarded. “Isn’t
Enna in Sicily?”

“Yes, I think so; but I don’t know much about Sicily, though everybody
goes there nowadays. Let’s go there, Jane, and help Demeter find
Persephone.”

“Let’s!” agreed Jane, with sympathetic enthusiasm, and they went.

* * * * *

Now, being Americans, and therefore accustomed to the most obliging
behaviour on the part of the male sex, it never occurred to them that
Pluto might be ungallant enough to object to their taking a hand in. But
he did—as they might have foreseen would be likely in a person so
unmannerly as to snatch lovely daughters from devoted mothers.

It began on the ocean. On quite a calm evening a wave, passing from
under the side of the ship, threw its crest back—perhaps to look at the
stars—and fell head over heels into their open port. Certainly as much
as two tons of green and icy Atlantic entered impulsively, and by the
time they were dried out and comforted by the tight-corseted, rosy,
sympathetic Lemon every object they possessed was a mere bunch of
depressed rumples. Throughout the rest of the voyage they presented the
unfortunate appearance of having slept in their clothes, including their
hats. These last, which they had believed refreshingly picturesque, or
coquettish, at starting, had that defiantly wretched aspect displayed by
the broody hen after she has been dipped in the rain-barrel to check her
too exuberant aversion to race-suicide.

That was how Pluto began, and it swiftly went from bad to worse.

Three large tourist ships discharged bursting cargoes of humanity upon
Naples on one and the same day, and the hotel-keepers rose to their
opportunity and dealt guilefully with the horde clamouring as with one
voice for food and shelter. That one’s hard-won shelter was numbered 12
_bis_ (an artful concealment of the unlucky number 13) was apparently an
unimportant detail. It was shelter, though even a sea-sodden mind should
have seen something suspicious in those egregious frescoes of fat ladies
sitting on the knife edge of crescent moons with which Room 13
endeavoured to conceal its real banefulness. Even such a mind should
have distrusted that flamingly splendid fire-screen in front of a
walled-up fireplace; should have scented danger in that flamboyant black
and gold and blue satin furniture of the vintage of 1870. There was
plainly, to an observant eye, something sinister and meretricious in so
much dressiness, but Jane and Peripatetica yielded themselves up to that
serpent lodging without the smallest precaution, and lived to rue their
impulsive confidence.

To begin with, Naples, instead of showing herself all flowers and
sunshine, tinkling mandolins, and moonlight and jasper seas, was as
merry and pleasing as an iced sponge. Loud winds howled through the
streets, driving before them cold deluges of rain, and in these chilling
downpours the street troubadours stood one foot in the puddles snuffling
songs of “Bella Napoli” to untuned guitars, with water dripping from the
ends of their noses. Peripatetica—whose eyes even under her low-spirited
hat had been all through the voyage full of dreamful memories of
Neapolitan tea-roses and blue blandness—curled up like a disappointed
worm and retired to a fit of neuralgia and a hot-water bottle. There was
something almost uncanny in the scornful irony of her expression as she
hugged her steaming comforter to her cheek, and paced the floor in time
to those melancholy damp wails from the street. Instead of tea-roses she
was prating all day of American comforts, as she clasped the three tepid
coils of the chilly steam-heater to her homesick bosom, while Jane
paddled about under an umbrella in search of the traditional ideal
Italian maid, who would be willing to contribute to the party all the
virtues and a cheerful disposition, for sixty francs a month.

Minna, when she did appear, proved to be Swiss instead of Italian, but
she carried an atmosphere of happy comfort about her, could spin the
threads of three languages with her gifted tongue, while sixty francs
seemed to satisfy her wildest dreams of avarice. So the two depressed
pilgrims, soothed by Minna’s promise to assume their burdens the next
day, fell asleep dreaming that the weather might moderate or even clear.

Eight o’clock of the following morning came, but Minna didn’t. Jane
interviewed the concierge, who had recommended her. The concierge
interviewed the heavens and the earth, and the circumambient air, but
spite of outflung fingers and polyglot cries, the elements had nothing
to say about the matter, and for twenty-four hours they declined to let
the secret leak out that other Americans in the same hotel had ravished
their Minna from them with the glittering lure of twenty francs more.

Finally it dawned upon two damp and depressed minds that some unknown
enemy had put a _comether_ on them—though at that time they had no
inkling of his identity. Large-eyed horror ensued. First aid to the
hoodooed must be sought. Peripatetica tied a strip of red flannel around
her left ankle.

“In all these very old countries,” she said oracularly, “secret malign
influences from the multitudes of wicked dead rise up like vapours from
the soil where they have been buried.”

Jane listened and, pale but resolute, went forth and purchased a coral
_jettatura_.

“Let us pass on at once from this moist Sodom,” she said.

Visions of sun and Sicily dawned upon their mildewed imaginations.

Now there is really but one way to approach Sicily satisfactorily. Of
course a boat leaves Naples every evening for Palermo, but the
Mediterranean is a treacherous element in February. It had broken night
after night in thunderous shocks upon the sea wall, making the heavy
stone-built hotel quiver beneath their beds, and in the darkness of each
night they had seen the water squadron charge again and again, the
foremost spinning up tall and white to fling itself in frenzied futile
spray across the black street. So that the thought of trusting insides
jaded by two weeks of the Atlantic to such a foe as this was far from
their most reckless dreams. The none too solid earth was none too good
for such as they, and a motor eats up dull miles by magic. Motors are to
be had in Naples even when fair skies lack, and with a big Berliet
packed with luggage, and with the concierge’s tender, rueful smile
shedding blessings, at last they slid southward.

—Pale clouds of almond blossoms were spread against grey terraces....
Less pale smells rose in gusty whiffs.... Narrow yellow streets crooked
before them, where they picked a cautious hooting way amid Italy’s
rising population complicated with goats and asses.... Then flat, muddy
roads, and Berliet bumping, splashing between fields of green
artichokes.... The clouds held up; thinned, and parted, showing rifts of
blue.... Vesuvius pushed the mists from her brow, and purple shadows
dappled her shining, dripping flanks.... Orange groves rose along the
way. Flocks of brown goats tinkled past. More almond boughs leaned over
walls washed a faded rose. Church bells clanked sweetly through the
moist air from far-away hills. Runnels chattered out from secret
channels fringed with fern. Grey olive orchards hung like clouds along
the steep.... The sun was fairly out, and Italy assuming her old
traditional air of professional beauty among the nations of the
earth....

The Berliet climbed as nimbly as a goat toward Sorrento. The light
deepened; the sea began to peacock. More and more the landscape assumed
the appearance of the impossibly chromatic back drop of an opera, and as
the turn was made under the orange avenue of the hotel at Sorrento
everything was ready for the chorus of merry villagers, and for the
prima donna to begin plucking song out of her bosom with stereotyped
gestures.

It was there they began to offer the light wines of the country, as
sweetly perfumed and innocent as spring violets; no more like to the
astringent red inks masquerading in straw bottles in America under the
same names, than they to Hercules. The seekers of Persephone drank
deeply—as much as a wine-glass full—and warmed by this sweet ichor of
Bacchus they bid defiance to hoodoos and pushed on to Amalfi.

Berliet swam along the Calabrian shore, lifting them lightly up the
steeps, swooping purringly down the slopes,—swinging about the bold
curves of the coast; rounding the tall spurs, where the sea shone, green
and purple as a dove’s neck, five hundred feet below, and where orange,
lemon, and olive groves climbed the narrow terraces five hundred feet
above. They were following the old, old way, where the Greeks had gone,
where the Romans went, where Normans rode, where Spaniards and Saracens
marched; the line of the drums and tramplings of not three, but of three
hundred conquests! They were following—in a motor car—the passageway of
three thousand years of European history that was to lead them back
beyond history itself to the old, old gods.

The way was broad and smooth, looping itself like a white ribbon along
the declivity, and even Peripatetica admitted it was lovely, though she
has an ineradicable tendency to swagger about the unapproachable
superiority of Venezuelan scenery; probably because so few are in a
position to contradict her, or because she enjoys showing off her
knowledge of out-of-the-way places which most of us don’t go to. She had
always sniffed at the Mediterranean as overrated in the matter of
colour, and declared it pale and dull beside the green and blue fire of
Biscayne Bay in Florida, but it was a nice day, and a nice sight, and
Peripatetica handsomely acknowledged that _after_ Venezuela this was the
very best scenery she knew.

At Amalfi

“Where amid her mulberry trees
Sits Amalfi in the heat,
Bathing ever her white feet
In the tideless summer seas,”

they climbed 175 steps to the Cappucini convent which hangs like a
swallow’s nest in a niche of the cliffs, flanked by that famous terrace
the artists paint again and again, from every angle, at every season of
the year, at every hour of the day. There they imbibed a very superior
tea, while sea and sky did their handsomest, listening meanwhile to a
fellow tourist brag of having climbed to Ravello in his motor car.

If one cranes one’s neck from the Cappucini terrace, on a small peak
will be seen what purports to be a town, but the conclusion will be
irresistible that the only way to reach such a dizzy eminence is by
goat’s feet, or hawk’s wings, and the natural inference is that the
fellow tourist is fibbing. Nevertheless one hates to be outdone, and one
abandons all desire to sleep in one of those coldly clean little
monk-cells of the convent, and climbs resolutely down the 175 steps
again and interviews Berliet. Berliet thinks his chassis is too long for
the sharp turns. Thinks that the road is bad; that it is also unsafe;
that the hotel in Ravello is not possible; that he suspects his off fore
tire; that there’s not time to do it before dark; that his owner forbids
his going to Ravello at all; that he has an appointment that evening
with a good-looking lady in Amalfi; that he is tired with his long run,
and doesn’t want to any way. All of which eleven reasons appeared so
irrefutable, collectively and individually, that Jane and Peripatetica
climbed into their seats and announced that they would go to Ravello,
and go immediately.

Berliet muttered unpleasant things in his native tongue as to signori
being reckless, obstinate, and inconsiderate; wound them up sulkily and
took them.

Peripatetica admitted in a whisper that up to that very day she had
never even heard of Ravello, which proved to be a really degrading piece
of ignorance, for every human being they met for the next three months
knew all about the place—or said they did. Further experience taught
them to know that Italy is crowded with little crumbling towns one has
never heard of before, which when examined prove to be the very
particular spots in which took place about a half of all the history
that ever happened. History being a thing one must be pretty skilful if
one means to evade it in Italy, for the truth is that whenever history
took a notion to _be_, it promptly went on a trip to Italy and _was_.

They hooted slowly again through narrow streets, pushed more goats and
children out their way, and then Berliet swung round on one wheel and
began to mount. Began to climb like the foreseen goat, to soar like the
imagined hawk, up sharp zigzags that lifted them by almost exact
parallels. Everything that puts on power and speed, and makes noises
like bomb explosions in a saw-factory, was pushed forward or pulled
back. They rushed noisily round and round the peak at locomotive speed,
and finally half way up into the very top of the sky they pulled up
sharply in a cobble-paved square. Berliet leaped nimbly out, unscrewed a
hot lid—with the tail of his linen duster—from which lid liquids and
steam and smells boiled as from an angry geyser, and they found
themselves in the wild eyrie of Ravello. That ubiquituosity—(with the
name of a hotel on his cap)—who springs out from every stone in Italy
like a spider upon the foolish swarming tourist fly, was waiting for
them in the square as if by appointment, and before they could draw the
first gasp of relief he had their possessions loaded upon the backs of
the floating population, and they were climbing in the dusk a stone
stairway that called itself a street—meekly and weakly unwitting of
their possible destination. The destination proved to be a vaulted
courtyard, opening behind a doorway which was built of a choice
assortment of loot from four periods of architecture and sculpture;
proved to be a reckless jumble of winding steps, of crooked passages, of
terraces, balconies, and loggias, and the whole of this destination went
by the name of the Hotel Bellevue. And once there, then suddenly, after
all the noise and odours, the confusion and human clatter of the last
three weeks, they stepped quietly out upon a revetment of Paradise.

Below—a thousand feet below—in the blue darkness little sparks of light
were Amalfi. In the blue darkness above, hardly farther away it seemed,
were the larger sparks of the rolling planets. The cool, lonely darkness
bathed their spirits as with a blessed chrism. The place was, for the
night, theirs alone, and for one holy moment the swarming tourist failed
to swarm.

* * * * *

“In the Highlands! In the country places!”—

murmured Jane, gratefully declining upon a broad balustrade, and
Peripatetica echoed softly—declining in her turn—

... “Oh, to dream; oh, to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render
Through the trance of silence
Quiet breath.”...

And Jane took it up again—

... “Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And forever in the hill recesses
Her more lovely music broods and dies.”

Just then essential silence was broken by the last protesting squawk of
a virtuous hen, who seemed to be about to die that they might live.
Peripatetica recognized that plaintive cry. Hens were kept handy in
fattening-coops on the Plantation, against the sudden inroads of
unexpected guests.

“When the big-gate slams chickens begin to squawk,” was a
well-remembered Plantation proverb.

“How tough she will be, though,” Jane gently moaned, “and we shan’t be
able to eat her, and she will have died in vain.”

Little did she reck of Signor Pantaleone Caruso’s beautiful art, for
when they had dressed by the dim, soothing flicker of candles in big
clean bed-rooms that were warmed by smouldering olive-wood fires, they
were sweetly fed on a dozen lovely dishes; dishes foamy and yellow, with
hot brown crusts, made seemingly of varied combinings of meal and
cheese, and called by strange Italian cognomens. And the late—so very
late—pullet appeared in her due course amid maiden strewments of crisp
salads; proving, by some Pantaleonic magic, to be all that a hen could
or should be. And they drank gratefully to her manes in Signor Caruso’s
own wine, as mellow and as golden as his famous cousin’s voice. After
which they ate small, scented yellow apples which might well have grown
in Hesperidian gardens, and drowsed contentedly by the musky olive-wood
blaze, among bowls of freesias and violets, until the almost weird hour
of half past eight, when inward blessedness and a day of mountain air
would no longer be denied their toll.

Yet all through the hours of sleep “old forgotten, far-off things, and
battles long ago” stirred like an undertone of dreams within dreams. The
clank of armed feet moved in the street. Ghostly bells rang whispered
tocsins of alarm, and shadowy life swept back and forth in the broken,
deserted town. The “Brass Hats” glimmered in the darkness. Goths set
alight long extinguished fires. Curved Saracen swords glittered faintly,
and Normans grasped the heights with mailed hands. The Rufolis, the
d’Affliti, the Confalones, and della Maras married, feasted, and warred
again in dumb show, and up and down the stairs of this very house
rustled the silk robes and soft shod feet of sleek prelates.

Even the sea below—where the new moon floated at the western rim like a
golden canoe—was astir with the myriad sails of _revenants_. First the
white wings of that—

“Grave Syrian trader ...
Who snatched his rudder and shook out his sail ...
Between the Syrtes and soft Sicily.”

After him followed hard the small ghostly sails of the Greeks.

“They were very perfect men, and could do all and bear all that could be
done and borne by human flesh and blood. Taking them all together they
were the most faultlessly constructed human beings that ever lived, and
they knew it, for they worshipped bodily health and strength, and spent
the lives of generations in the cultivation of both. They were fighting
men, trained to use every weapon they knew, they were boxers and
wrestlers, athletes, runners and jumpers, and drivers of chariots; but
above all they were seamen, skilled at the helm, quick at handling the
sails, masters of the oar, and fearless navigators when half of all
navigation led sooner or later to certain death. For though they loved
life, as only the strong and the beautiful can love it, and though they
looked forward to no condition of perpetual bliss beyond, but only to
the shadowy place where regretful phantoms flitted in the gloom as in
the twilight of the Hebrew Sheol, yet they faced dying as fighters
always have and always will, with desperate hands and a quiet heart.”

The golden canoe of the young moon filled and sank behind the sea’s rim,
but through the darkness came the many-oared beat of ponderous Roman
galleys carrying the dominion of the earth within their great sides, and
as they vanished like a fog-wreath along the horizon, followed fast the
hawk-winged craft of the keen-bladed, keen-faced Saracen, whose
sickle-like crescent would never here on this coast round to the full.
For, far away on the grey French coast of Coutance was a Norman
gentleman named Tancred, very strong of heart, and very stout of his
hands. There was no rumour of him here, as he rode to the hunt and
spitted the wild boar upon his terrible length of steel. What should the
Moslems know of a simple Norman gentleman, or care?—and yet in those
lion loins lay the seeds of a dozen mighty whelps who were to rend their
Christian prey from the Moslem and rule this warm coloured South as
kings and dukes and counts, and whose blood was to be claimed by every
crown in Europe for a thousand years. Very few among the shadowy sails
were those of the de Hautevilles, but quality, not quantity, counts most
among men, and those ships carried a strange, potent race. Anna Comnena
thus describes one of them:

“This Robert de Hauteville was of Norman origin—he united a marvellous
astuteness with immense ambition, and his bodily strength was
prodigious. His whole desire was to attain to the wealth and power of
the greatest living men; he was extremely tenacious of his designs and
most wise in finding means to attain his ends. In stature he was taller
than the tallest; of a ruddy hue and fair-haired, he was
broad-shouldered, and his eyes sparkled with fire; the perfect
proportion of all his limbs made him a model of beauty from head to
heel, as I have often heard people tell. Homer says of Achilles that
those who heard his voice seemed to hear the thundering shout of a great
multitude, but it used to be said of the de Hautevilles that their
battle cry would turn back tens of thousands. Such a man, one in such a
position, of such a nature, and of such spirit, naturally hated the idea
of service, and would not be subject to any man; for such are those
natures which are born too great for their surrounding.”

* * * * *

When morning dawned all spirits of the past had vanished, and only the
noisy play of the young hopes of the Caruso family disturbed the peace
of the echoing court. Jane insisted upon calling these innocent infants
Knickerbockers, because, she said, they were only short
Pantaleones—which is the sort of mild pleasantry Jane affects.
Peripatetica doesn’t lend herself to these gentler forms of jest. It was
she who put in all that history and poetry. (See above.)

Ravello used to be famous for her dye stuffs, and for the complete
thorough-goingness of her attacks of plague, but her principal
industries to-day are pulpits, and fondness for the Prophet Jonah. Her
population in the day of dyes and plague was 36,000, and is now, by
generous computation, about thirty-six—which does not include the
Knickers. Just opposite the Hotel Bellevue is one of these pulpits, in
the church of St. John of the Bull; a church which about a thousand
years ago was a very superior place indeed; but worse than Goths or
Vandals, or Saracens, or plague, was the pernicious activity of the
Eighteenth Century. Hardly a church in Italy has escaped unscathed from
its busy rage. No sanctuary was too reverend or too beautiful to be
ravaged in the name of Palladio, or of “the classic style.” Marbles were
broken, mosaics torn out, dim aisles despoiled, brass and bronze melted,
carvings chopped and burned, rich glass shattered, old tapestries flung
on the dust heap. All the treasures of centuries—sweet with incense,
softened and tinted by time, sanctified by a thousand prayers, and
beautified by the tenderest emotions—were bundled out of the way of
those benighted savages, and tons of lime were had into the poor gaunt
and ruined fanes to transform them into whited sepulchres of beauty.
Blank plaster walls hid the sweetest of frescoes; clustered grey columns
were limed into ghastly imitations of the Doric; soaring arches—flowered
like forest boughs—vanished in stodgy vaultings; Corinthian pilasters
shoved lacelike rood-screens out of the way, and fat sprawling cherubs
shouldered bleeding, shadowy Christs from the altars.

The spirit which inspired this stupid ruthlessness was perfectly
expressed by Addison, who, commenting upon the great Cathedral of Siena,
said pragmatically:

“When a man sees the prodigious pains that our forefathers have been at
in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy what miracles of
architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed in
the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than
it is at present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal
of the priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic
churches as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings
than have been raised before or since that time. Than these Gothic
churches nothing can make a prettier show to those who prefer false
beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity”—of
dull plaster!

Much has been said of the irreverence of the Nineteenth Century. The
Eighteenth respected nothing their forefathers had wrought; not even in
this little far-away mountain town, and St. John of the Bull is now—poor
Saint!—housed drearily in a dull, dusty, echoing white cavern, with not
one point of beauty to hold the protesting eye save the splendid marble
pulpit—escaped by some miracle of ruth to stand out in that dull waste
upon delicate twisted alabaster columns, which stand in their turn upon
crawling marble lions. Its four sides, and its baldachino, show
beautiful patterns of precious mosaics, wrought with lapis lazuli, with
verd antique, and with sanguine Egyptian marbles. The carefullest and
richest of these mosaics, of course—along the side of the pulpit’s
stair—is devoted to picturing that extremely qualmish archaic whale who
in all Ravello’s churches _unswallows_ the Prophet Jonah with every
evidence of emotion and relief.

Recently, in the process of removing some of the acres of Eighteenth
Century plaster, there was brought to light in a little chapel in the
crypt a life-sized relief of St. Catherine and her wheel.

Such a lovely lady!—so fair, so pure, so saint-like; with faint memories
of old tinting on her small lips, on her close-folded hair, and her
downcast eyes—that even the most frivolous of tourists might be moved to
tears by the thought that she alone is the one sweet ghost escaped from
all that brutal destruction of mediæval beauty; resurrected by the
merest chance from her plaster tomb.

Jane at the thought of it became quite dangerously violent. She insisted
upon digging up the Eighteenth Century and beating it to death again
with its own dusty old wig, and was soothed and calmed only by being
taken outside to look once more by daylight at the delicious marble
mince of fragments which the Hotel Bellevue has built into its
portals—Greek and Roman capitals upside down; marble lambs and crosses,
gargoyles, and corbels adorning the sides and lintels in a charming
confusion of styles, periods, and purposes.

Ravello, as are all these arid ancient towns from which the tides of
life have drained away, is as dry and empty as an old last year’s nut; a
mere hollow shell, ridged and parched, out of which the kernel of
existence has vanished.

A tattered, rosy-cheeked child runs up the uncertain footway—the
stair-streets—with feet as light and sure as a goat’s. An old, old man,
with head and jaws bound in a dirty red kerchief, and with the keen
hawk-like profile of some far-off Saracen ancestry, crouches in a
doorway with an outstretched hand. He makes no appeal, but his apparent
confidence that his age and helplessness will touch them, does touch
them, and they search their pockets hastily for coppers, with a faint
anguished sense of the thin shadow of a dial-finger which for them too
creeps round and round, as for this old derelict man, for this old
skeleton city....

A donkey heaped with brushwood patters up the steep narrow way; so
narrow that they must flatten themselves against the wall to admit of
his stolidly sorrowful passage. They may come and go, as all the others
have come and gone, but our brother, the ass, is always there, recking
not of Greek or Roman, of American or Tedeschi; for all of them he bears
burdens with the same sorrowful stolidity, and from none does he receive
any gratitude....

These are the only inhabitants of Ravello they see until they reach the
Piazza and the Cathedral of Saint Pantaleone. They know beforehand that
the Cathedral too has been spoiled and desecrated, but there still
remain the fine bronze doors by the same Barisanus who made the famous
ones in the church at Monreale in Sicily, and here they find the most
beautiful of the pulpits, and the very biggest Jonah and the very
biggest whale in all Ravello.

Before that accursed Bishop Tafuri turned it into a white-washed cavern
the old chroniclers exhausted their adjectives in describing the glories
of Saint Pantaleone’s Cathedral. The richness of its sixteen enormous
columns of verd antique; its raised choir with fifty-two stalls of
walnut-wood, carved with incredible richness; its high altar of
alabaster under a marble baldachino glowing with mosaics and supported
upon huge red Egyptian Syenite columns—its purple and gold Episcopal
throne; its frescoed walls, its silver lamps and rich tombs, its
pictures and shrines and hangings—all pitched into the scrap heap by
that abominable prelate, save only this fine pulpit, and the Ambo. The
Ambo gives itself wholly to the chronicles of the prophet Jonah. On one
stairside he leaps nimbly and eagerly down the wide throat which looks
so reluctant to receive him, as if suspecting already the discomfort to
be caused by the uneasy guest. But Jonah’s aspect is all of a careless
gaiety; he is not taking this lodging for more than a day or two, and is
aware that after his brief occultation his reappearance will be dramatic
and a portent. On the opposite stair it happens as he had prophetically
foreseen, the mosaic monster disgorging him with an air of mingled
violence and exhausted relief.

No one can tell us why Jonah is so favourite a topic in Ravello. “_Chi
lo sara_” everyone says, with that air of weary patience Italy so
persistently assumes before the eccentric curiosity of Forestieri.

Rosina Vokes once travelled about with a funny little playlet called
“The Pantomime Rehearsal,” which concerned itself with the sufferings of
the author and stage manager of an English house-party’s efforts at
amateur theatricals. The enthusiastic conductor used to say
dramatically:

“Now, Lord Arthur, you enter as the Chief of the fairies!”

To which the blond guardsman replies with puzzled heaviness: “Yes; but
_why_ fairies?”

Producing in the wretched author a sort of paralysis of bafflement. The
same look comes so often into these big Italian eyes. The thing just
_is_. Why clamour for reasons? It is as if these curious wandering folk,
always staring and chattering and rushing about, and paying good money
that would buy bread and wine, merely to look at old stones, should ask
_why_ the sun, or why the moon, or why anything at all?...

So they abandon Jonah and take on the pulpit instead, the most famous of
all the mosaic pulpits in a region celebrated for mosaic pulpits. It is
done after the same pattern as that of St. John of the Bull, but the
pattern raised to the _n_th power. More and bigger lions; more and
taller columns; richer scrolls of mosaics; the bits of stone more deeply
coloured; the marble warmed by time to a sweeter and creamier blond. The
whole being crowned, moreover, by an adorable bust of Sigelgaita Rufolo,
wife of the founder of the Cathedral and giver of the pulpit. A pompous
Latin inscription under the bust records the virtues of this magnificent
patron of religion. The inscription including the names of all the long
string of stalwart sons Sigelgaita brought forth, and it calls in
dignified Latinity the attention of the heavenly powers to the eminent
deserts of this generous Rufolo, this mediæval Carnegie.

Sigelgaita’s bust is an almost unique example of the marble portraiture
of the Thirteenth Century—if indeed it truly be a work of that time, for
so noble, so lifelike is this head with its rolled hair, its princely
coronet and long earrings, so like is it to the head of the Capuan Juno,
that one half suspects it of being from a Roman hand—those masters of
marmoral records of character—and that it was seized upon by Sigelgaita
to serve as a memorial of herself.

Bernardo Battinelli, a notary of Ravello, writing in 1540 relates an
anecdote which shows what esteem was inspired by this marble portrait
long after its original was dust:

“I remember in the aforesaid month and year, the Spanish Viceroy Don
Pietro di Toledo sent for the marble bust, which is placed in the
Cathedral and much honest resistance was made, so that the first time he
that came returned empty-handed, but shortly after he came back, and it
was necessary to send it to Naples in his keeping, and having sent the
magnifico Giovanni Frezza, who was in Naples, and Ambrose Flomano from
this place to his Excellency, after much ado, by the favour of the
glorious Virgin Mary, and by virtue of these messengers from thence
after a few days the head was returned.”

In the year 1851 the palace of these splendid Rufoli, which in the time
of Roger of Sicily had housed ninety knights with their men at arms, had
fallen to tragical decay. A great landslide in the Fifteenth Century
destroyed the harbour of Amalfi; hid its great quays and warehouses, its
broad streets and roaring markets beneath the sea, and reduced it from a
powerful Republic, the rival of Venice and Genoa, to a mere fishing
village. A little later the plague followed, and decimated the now
poverty-stricken inhabitants of Ravello, and then the great nobles began
to drift away to Naples, came more and more rarely to visit their
Calabrian seats, and these gradually sank in the course of time into
ruin and decay. Fortunately in the year before mentioned a rich English
traveller, making the still fashionable “grand tour,” happened into
Ravello, saw the possibilities of this crumbling castle set upon one of
the most beautiful sites in the world, and promptly purchased it from
its indifferent Neapolitan owner. He, much absorbed in the opera dancers
and the small intrigues of the city, was secretly and scornfully amused
that a mad Englishman should be willing to part with so much good hard
money in exchange for ivied towers and gaping arches in a remote country
town.

The Englishman mended the arches, strengthened the towers, gathered up
from among the weeds the delicate sculptures and twisted columns,
destroyed nothing, preserved and restored with a reverent hand, and made
for himself one of the loveliest homes in all Italy. It was in that
charming garden, swung high upon a spur of the glorious coast, that Jane
and Peripatetica contracted that passion for Ravello which haunted them
with a homesickness for it all through Sicily. For never again did they
find anywhere such views, such shadowed green ways of ilex and cypress,
such ivy-mantled towers, such roses, such sheets of daffodils and blue
hyacinths. They dreamed there through the long day, regretting that
their luggage had been sent on to Sicily by water, and—forgetting quite
their quest of Persephone—that they were therefore unable to linger in
the sweet precincts of the Pantaleone wines and cooking, devoting weeks
to exploring the neighbouring hills, and to unearthing more pulpits and
more Jonahs in the nearby churches.

In the dusk they lingered by the Fountain of Strange Beasts, in the dusk
they wandered afoot down the cork-screwed paths up which they had so
furiously and smellily mounted. Berliet hooted contemptuously behind
them as he crawled after, jeering as at “scare-cats,” who dared mount,
but shrank from descending these abrupt curves and tiptilted inclines
except in the safety of their own low-heeled shoes.

At Amalfi they plunged once again into the noisy tourist belt—the _va et
vient_, the chatter, the screaming flutter of the passenger pigeons of
the Italian spring. And yet there was peace in the tiny white cells in
which they hung over the sheer steep, while the light died nacreously
along the West. There was quiet in certain tiny hidden courts and
terraces under the icy moonlight, and Jane said in one of these—her
utterance somewhat interrupted by the chattering of her teeth, for
Italian spring nights are as cold as Italian spring days are warm—Jane
said:

“What idiotic assertions are made in our time about ancient Europe
having no love for, no eye for, Nature’s beauty! Did you ever come
across a mediæval monastery, a Greek or Roman temple that was not placed
with an unerring perception of just the one point at which it would look
best, just at the one point at which everything would look best from
it?”

“Of course I never did,” Peripatetica admitted with sympathetic
conviction. “We get that absurd impression of their indifference from
the fact that our forebears were not nearly so fond of talking about
their emotions as we. They had a trust in their fellow man’s
comprehension that we have lost. We always imagine that no one can know
things unless we tell them, and tell them with all our t’s carefully
crossed and our i’s elaborately dotted. The old literatures are always
illustrating that same confidence in other people’s imaginations,
stating facts with what to our modern diffuseness appears the baldest
simplicity, and yet somehow conveying all their subtlest meanings. Our
ancestors happily were not ‘inebriated with the exuberance of their own
verbosity.’... And now, Jane, bring that congealed nose of yours in out
of the open air. The moon isn’t going on a vacation. She will be doing
her old romance and beauty business at the same old stand long after we
are dead and buried, not to mention to-morrow night.”

Berliet was all his old self the next day, and they swooped and soared,
slid and climbed toward Pæstum, every turn around every spur showing
some new beauty, some new effect. Gradually the coast sank and sank
toward the sea; the snow-caps moved further back into the horizon; grew
more and more mere white clouds above, more and more mere vapoury
amethyst below, and at last they shot at a right angle into a wide level
plain, and commenced to experience thrills. For the guide-books were
full, one and all, of weird tales of Pæstum which lay, so they said, far
back in a country as cursed and horrible as the dreadful land of the
Dark Tower. About it, they declared, stretched leprous marshes of
stagnant ooze choked with fat reeds, where fierce buffalo wallowed in
the slime. The contadini passed through its deadly miasma in shuddering
haste, gazing large-eyed upon a dare-devil Englishman who had once had
the courage to pass a night there in order to gratify a bold, fantastic
desire to see the temples by moonlight. It was such a strange,
tremendous story, that of the Greek Poseidonia, later the Roman Pæstum.

Long ago those adventuring mariners from Greece had seized the fertile
plain which at that time was covered with forests of great oak and
watered by two clear and shining rivers. They drove the Italian natives
back into the distant hills, for the white man’s burden even then
included the taking of all the desirable things that were being wasted
by incompetent natives, and they brought over colonists—whom the
philosophers and moralists at home maligned, no doubt, in the same
pleasant fashion of our own day. And the colonists cut down the oaks,
and ploughed the land, and built cities, and made harbours, and finally
dusted their busy hands and busy souls of the grime of labour and
wrought splendid temples in honour of the benign gods who had given them
the possessions of the Italians and filled them with power and fatness.
Every once in so often the natives looked lustfully down from the hills
upon this fatness, made an armed snatch at it, were driven back with
bloody contumely, and the heaping of riches upon riches went on. And
more and more the oaks were cut down—mark that! for the stories of
nations are so inextricably bound up with the stories of trees—until all
the plain was cleared and tilled; and then the foothills were denuded,
and the wave of destruction crept up the mountain sides and they too
were left naked to the sun and the rains.

At first these rains, sweeping down torrentially, unhindered by the lost
forests, only enriched the plain with the long hoarded sweetness of the
trees, but by and by the living rivers grew heavy and thick, vomiting
mud into the ever-shallowing harbours, and the lands soured with the
undrained stagnant water. Commerce turned more and more to deeper ports,
and mosquitoes began to breed in the brackish soil that was making fast
between the city and the sea. Who of all those powerful land-owners and
rich merchants could ever have dreamed that little buzzing insects could
sting a great city to death? But they did. Fevers grew more and more
prevalent. The malaria-haunted population went more and more languidly
about their business. The natives, hardy and vigorous in the hills, were
but feebly repulsed. Carthage demanded tribute, and Rome took it, and
changed the city’s name from Poseidonia to Pæstum. After Rome grew weak
Saracen corsairs came in by sea and grasped the slackly defended riches,
and the little winged poisoners of the night struck again and again,
until grass grew in the streets, and the wharves crumbled where they
stood. Finally the wretched remnant of a great people wandered away into
the more wholesome hills, the marshes rotted in the heat and grew up in
coarse reeds where corn and vine had flourished, and the city melted
back into the wasted earth. So wicked a name had the miasmatic,
fever-haunted plain that age after age rolled away and only birds and
serpents and wild beasts dared dwell there, or some outlaw chose to face
its sickly terrors rather than the revenge of the law.

“Think,” said Jane, “of the sensations of the man who came first upon
those huge temples standing lonely in the naked plain! So lonely that
their very existence had been long forgotten. Imagine the awe and
surprise of such a discovery——”

They were spinning—had been spinning for half an hour—along a rather bad
highway, and Peripatetica found it hard to call up the proper emotions
in answer to Jane’s suggestion, so occupied was she in looking for the
relishing grimness insisted upon by the guide-books. There were reeds;
there were a very few innocuous-looking buffalo, but for the most part
there were nice cultivated fields of grain and vines on either hand, and
occasionally half a mile or so of neglected shrubby heath.

“Why, half of Long Island is wilder than this!” grumbled Peripatetica.
“Where’s the Dark Tower country? Childe Roland would think this a formal
garden. I _insist_ upon Berliet taking us somewhere that will thick our
blood with horror.”

As it turned out, a wise government had drained the accursed land,
planted eucalyptus trees, and was slowly reclaiming the plain to its old
fertility, but the guide-books feel that the story is too good to be
spoiled by modern facts, and cling to the old version of 1860.

Just then—by way of compensation, Berliet having fortunately slowed down
over a bad bit—an old altar-piece of a Holy Family stepped down out its
frame and came wandering toward them in the broad light of day. On the
large mild gray ass—a real altar-piece ass—sat St. Anna wrapped in a
faded blue mantle, carrying on her arm a sleeping child. At her right
walked the child’s mother, whose thin olive cheek and wide, timid eyes
seemed half ghostly under the white linen held together with one hand
under her chin. Young St. John led the ass. A wreath of golden-brown
curls blew about his golden-red cheeks, and he wore goat-hide shoes, and
had cross-gartered legs.

Jane now says they never saw them at all. That it was just a mirage, or
a bit of glamourie, and that there is nothing remaining in new Italy
which could look so like the typical old Italy—but if Jane is right then
how did the two happen to have exactly the same glamour at exactly the
same moment? How could they both imagine the benign smile of that
strayed altar picture? Is it likely that a motor car would lend itself
to sacred visions? I ask you that!

There was certainly some illusion—not sacred—about the dare-devilishness
of that Englishman who once spent a moonlit night at the temples, for a
little farming village lies close to the enclosure that shuts off the
temples from the highway, the inhabitants of which village seemed as
meek as sheep and anything but foolhardy, and there was reason to
believe that they spend every night there, whether the moon shines or
not.

But the Temples were no illusion, standing in stately splendour in the
midst of that wide shining green plain, by a sea of milky chalcedony,
and in a semicircle behind them a garland of purple mountains crowned
with snow. Great-pillared Neptune was all of dull, burned gold, its
serried columns marching before the blue background with a curious
effect of perfect vigour in repose, of power pausing in solid ease. No
picture or replica gives the sense of this energy and power. Doric
temples tend to look lumpish and heavy in reproductions, but the real
thing at its very best (and this shrine of Neptune is the perfectest of
Greek temples outside of Athens) has a mighty grace, a prodigious
suggestion of latent force, of contained, available strength that wakes
an awed delight, as by the visible, material expression of an ineffable,
glorious, all-powerful god.

“Well, certainly those Greeks——!” gasped Jane when the full meaning of
it all began to dawn upon her, and Peripatetica, who usually suffers
from chronic palpitation of the tongue, simply sat still staring with
shining eyes. Greeks to her are as was King Charles’ head to Mr. Dick.
She is convinced the Greeks knew everything worth knowing, and did
everything worth doing, and any further proof of their ability only
fills her with a gratified sense of “I-told-you-so-ness.” So she lent a
benign ear to a young American architect there, who pointed out many
constructive details, which, under an appearance of great simplicity,
proved consummate grasp of the art, and of the subtlest secrets of
architectural harmonics.

Before the land made out into the harbour Poseidon’s temple stood almost
on the sea’s edge. The old pavement of the street before its portals
being disinterred shows the ruts made by the chariot wheels still
deep-scored upon it, and it was here

“The merry Grecian coaster came
Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,
Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine—”

anchoring almost under the shadow of the great fane of the Lord of the
Waters; and here, when his cargo was discharged, he went up to offer
sacrifices and thanks to the Sea-god of Poseidonia, and

“Hung his sea-drenched garments on the wall,”

and prayed for skill to outwit his fellows in trade; for fair winds to
blow him once more to Greece.

Besides the temple of Neptune there was, of course, the enormous
Basilica, and a so-called temple of Ceres, and some Roman fragments, but
these were so much less interesting than the golden-pillared shrine of
the Trident God, that the rest of the time was spent in looking vainly
and wistfully for Pæstum’s famous rose gardens, of which not even the
smallest bud remained, and then Berliet gathered them up, and went in
search of the Station of La Cava.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration: Decoration]

CHAPTER II

A NEST OF EAGLES

“So underneath the surface of To-day
Lies yesterday and what we call the Past,
The only thing which never can decay.”

TRUSTFULLY and sleepily Jane and Peripatetica, in the icy starlight of
La Cava, boarded the express of European _de Luxe_. Drowsy with the long
day’s rush through the wind, they believed that the train’s clatter
would be a mere lullaby to dreams of golden temples and iris seas and
“the glory that was Greece.” No robbers or barbarians nearer than
defunct corsairs crossed their imaginings; the hoodoo had faded from
mind, shaken off by the glorious swoop of Berliet, and they supposed it
left behind at Naples, clinging bat-like under the gaudy frescoes of
Room 13 to descend on other unwary travellers.

Half of their substance had been paid to the Compagnie Internationale
des Wagon Lits for this night’s rolling lodging, and they begrudged it
not, remembering that it entitled their fatigue to the comforts of a
room to themselves in all the vaunted superior civilization and
decencies of a European compartment car. Presenting their tickets in
trusting calm they prepared to follow the porter to a small but cosy
room where two waiting white beds lay ready for their weary heads. But
the Hoodoo had come on from Naples in that very train. Compartments and
beds there were, but not for them. The porter led on, and in a toy
imitation of an American Pullman, showed them to a Lilliputian blue
plush seat and a ridiculous wooden shelf two feet above that pretended
it could unfold itself into an upper berth. This baby section in the
midst of a shrieking babble of tongues, a suffocation of unaired Latin
and Teutonic humanity, was their compartment room, “à vous seules,
Mesdames!” telegraphed for to Rome and made over to them with such
flourish by the polite agent at Naples!

If the car was Lilliputian its passengers were not. Mammoth French
dowagers and barrel-like Germans overflowed all its tiny blue seats, and
the few slim Americans more than made good by their generous excess of
luggage. It was a very sardine box.

In a fury too deep for words or tears Peripatetica and Jane sank into
the few narrow inches the porter managed to clear for them, and resigned
themselves to leaving their own dear bags in the corridor.

“They will, of course, be stolen, but then we may never need them again.
We can’t undress, and shall probably be suffocated long before morning,”
remarked Peripatetica bitterly, with a hopeless glare at the imitation
ventilators not made to open. Their fury deepened at the slow struggles
of the porter to adjust the inadequate little partitions, at the grimy
blankets and pillows on the little shelves, at the curtains which didn’t
conceal them, the wash-room without water or towels and the
cattle-train-like burden of grunts and groans and smells floating on the
unbreathable atmosphere.

Morning dawned golden on the flying hills at last, and then deepest fury
of all was Peripatetica’s, that passionate lover of fresh air, to find
that in spite of everything she _had_ slept, and was still breathing!

Calabria, lovely as ever, melted down to her glowing seas; one last
swooping turn of the rails, and another line of faint hills rose
opposite—and that was Sicily!

The train itself coiled like a weary serpent into a waiting steamer,
which slipt smoothly by the ancient perils of Scylla and Charybdis; and
nearer and nearer it rose, that gold and amethyst mountain-home of the
Old Gods. The white curve of Messina, “the Sickle,” showed clear at the
base of the cloud-flecked hills. Kronos, father of Demeter, enthroned on
those very mountain peaks, had dropped his scythe at the sea’s edge,
cutting space there for the little homes of men, and leaving them the
name of his shining blade, “Zancle,” the sickle, through all Greek days.
It was there, really there in actual vision, land of fire and myths; the
place of the beginnings of gods and men.

Peripatetica and Jane burst from the car and climbed to the narrow deck
above to get clearer view. The sea wind swept the dust from their eyes
and all fatigue and discomfort from their memories. Their spirits rose
to meet that Spirit Land where Immortals had battled and labored; had
breathed themselves into man,—the divine spirit stirring his little
passing life with revelation of that which passeth not; that soul of
beauty and wisdom, and of poetry which should move through the ages.
Their eyes were wide to see the land where man’s imaginings had brought
the divine into all surroundings of his life, until every tree and
spring and rock and mountain grew into semblance of a god. Oh, was it
all a “creed outworn”? Here might not one perchance still see

“Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn”?

In these very mountains before them had man himself been shaped;
hammered out by Vulcan upon his forge in Ætna. Here, in this land he had
been taught by Demeter to nourish himself from the friendly earth,
taught how to shelter himself from the inclement elements by Orion,
Hunter and Architect—a god before he was a star. There Zeus,
all-conquering wisdom, had prevailed against his opponents and placed
his high and fiery seat, this very Ætna, upon the bound body of the last
rebellious Titan, making even the power of ignorance the pediment of his
throne. There the fair maiden goddesses, Artemis and Minerva and
Persephone, had played in flowery fields. There had Pluto stolen the
fairest away from among the blossoms, the entrance to his dark
underworld gaping suddenly among the sunny meadows. There had the
desolate mother Demeter lit at Ætna the torch for her long and desperate
search. There had demi-gods and heroes lived and loved and struggled.
Its very rivers were transformed nymphs, its islands rocks tossed in
Cyclop’s battles. There Ulysses had wandered and suffered; there
Pythagoras had taught, Theocritus had sung. There—but man nor woman
either is yet entirely spirit; and though it was in truth the actual
land of their pilgrimage, of the birthplace of myth, of beauty and
wonder, Persephone had not yet returned. The icy wind was turning all
sentiment into shivers and they fled back to the Twentieth Century and
its Pullman car.

Messina looked still more enticing when close at hand; both prosperous
and imposing with its lines of stone quays and palaces on the sea front.
Beyond these there were famous fountains they knew, and colourful
marketplaces, and baroque churches with spires like fluted seashells,
and interiors gleaming like sea caverns with all the rich colour and
glow of Sicilian mosaics. In one of the churches was the shrine of a
miracle-working letter from the Madonna, said to have been written by
her own hand. There was besides an old Norman Cathedral, built of Greek
ruins and Roman remains; much surviving Spanish quaintness, but to two
unbreakfasted _Wagon Lit_ passengers all this was but ashes in the
mouth. They felt that the attractions of Messina could safely remain in
the guide-books. They were impelled on to Taormina.... No prophetic
vision warned them that in their haste they were losing the chance of
ever seeing that doomed Sickle-City at all. In that placid, modern port,
where travellers for pleasure rarely paused, there seemed nothing to
stay them. No ominous shadow lay upon it to tell that it was marked for
destruction by “the Earth-Shaker,” or that before the year had gone it
would be echoing the bitter cry of lost Berytus:

“Here am I, that unhappy city—no more a city—lying in ruins, my citizens
dead men, alas! most ill-fated of all! The Fire-god destroyed me after
the shock of the Earth-Shaker. Ah me! From so much loveliness I am
become ashes. Yet do ye who pass me by bewail my fate, and shed a tear
in my honour who am no more. A tomb of tombless men is the city, under
whose ashes we lie.”

Taormina, the little mountain town, crouched under Ætna’s southern side,
not far from those meadows of Enna from which Persephone had been
ravished away. There she would surely first return to the upper world,
and Demeter’s joy burst into flowers and sunshine. So there they decided
to seek her, and turned their grimy faces straight to the train. The
only sight-seeing that appealed to them now was a vision of the San
Domenico Hotel with quiet white monkish cells like to Amalfi’s to rest
their weariness in, peaceful pergolas, large bathtubs, and a hearty
table d’hôte luncheon.

So they stayed not for sights, and stopped not for stone—nor breakfast,
nor washing, nor even for their trunks, which had not materialized, but
sat in a dusty railway carriage impatient for the train to start.

“It was beautiful,” remarked Jane, thinking of the harbour approach to
the city.

“Yes,” said Peripatetica, jumping at her unexpressed meaning as usual.
“Messina has always been a famous beauty, and always will be. But she
is, and always has been, an incorrigible cocotte,—submitting without a
struggle to every invader of Sicily in turn. And she certainly doesn’t
in the least look her enormous age in spite of having led a _vie
orageuse_. Whenever the traces of her past become too obvious she goes
and takes an earthquake shock, they say, and rises fresh and rejuvenated
from the ruins, ready to coquette again with a new master and be
enticing and treacherous all over again.”[1]

Footnote 1:

Messina suffered a terrific earthquake shock in 1783 and has had in
her history serious damage from seismic convulsions no less than nine
times.

It was hard to imagine on her modern boulevards the armies of the
past—all those many conquerors that Messina had herself called in,
causing half the wars and troubles of Sicily by her invitations to new
powers to come and take possession, and to do the fighting for her that
she never would do for herself; betraying in turn every master, good or
bad, for the excitement of getting a new one....

Greeks, Carthagenians, Mamertines, Romans, Arabs, Normans,
Spaniards—where were the ways of their tramplings now? On that modern
light-house point there was not even a trace of the Golden Temple in
which Neptune sat on a crystal altar “begirt with smooth-necked shells,
sea-weeds, and coral, looking out eastward to the morning sun?”

“If it were near the 15th of August I would stay here in spite of
everything,” ventured Peripatetica, looking up from her book. “The
Procession of the Virgin is the only thing really worth seeing left in
Messina.” And in answer to Jane’s enquiring eyebrows Peripatetica began
to read aloud of that extraordinary pageant of the Madonna della Lettera
and her car, that immense float, dragged through Messina’s streets by
hundreds of men and women; of its tower fifty feet high, on which are
ranged tiers over tiers of symbolically dressed children standing upon
all its different stories; poor babies with painted wings made to fly
around on iron orbits up to the very top of the erection; of the great
blue globe upon which stands a girl dressed in spangled gauze,
representing the Saviour, holding upon her right hand—luckily supported
by iron machinery—another child representing the Soul of the Blessed
Virgin.

“Not real children—not live babies!” protested Jane.

“Yes, indeed, just listen to Hughes’ account of it.” Peripatetica read:
“At an appointed signal this well-freighted car begins to move, when it
is welcomed with reiterated shouts and vivas by the infatuated populace;
drums and trumpets play; the Dutch concert in the machine commences, and
thousands of _pateraroes_ fired off by a train of gunpowder make the
shores of Calabria re-echo with the sound; then angels, cherubim,
seraphim, and ‘animated intelligences,’ all begin to revolve in such
implicated orbits as to make even the spectators giddy with the sight;
but alas for the unfortunate little actors in the pantomime; they in
spite of their heavenly characters are soon doomed to experience the
infirmities of mortality; angels droop, cherubim are scared out of their
wits, seraphim set up outrageous cries, ‘souls of the universe’ faint
away, and ‘moving intelligences’ are moved by the most terrible
inversion of the peristaltic nerves; then thrice happy are those to whom
an upper station has been allotted. Some of the young brats, in spite of
the fracas, seem highly delighted with their ride, and eat their
ginger-bread with the utmost composure as they perform their evolutions;
but it not unfrequently happens that one or more of these poor innocents
fall victims to this revolutionary system and earn the crown of
martyrdom.”

Jane seized the book to make sure it was actually so written and not
just one of Peripatetica’s flights of fancy, and plunged into an account
of another part of the pageant—the giant figures of Saturn and Cybele
fraternizing amiably with the Madonna; Cybele “seated on a large horse
clothed like a warrior. Her hair is tied back with a crown of leaves and
flowers with a star in front, and the three towers of Messina. She wears
a collar and a large blue mantle covered with stars, which lies on the
back of the horse. A mace of flowers in her right hand and a lance in
her left. The horse is barded, and covered with rich trappings of red,
with arabesques of flowers and ribbons.”...[2]

Footnote 2:

All this, along with every treasure of her past, has now disappeared.

“What curious folk the Sicilians are! They accept new creeds and
ceremonies, but the old never quite lose their place. Where else would
the Madonna allow a Pagan goddess to figure in her train? And did you
notice in this very procession they still carry the identical skin of
the camel on which Roger entered the city when he began his conquest of
Sicily? I wish it were near the 15th of August!”

“I wish it were near the time this train starts, if it ever does,”
replied Peripatetica crossly.

And, as if but waiting the expression of her wish, the train did begin
to stream swiftly along the deeply indented coast beside whose margin
came that wild Norman raid upon Messina of the dauntless young hawks of
de Hauteville. Roger, the youngest and greatest of the twelve sons,
accompanied by but sixty knights and their squires, two hundred men in
all, pouncing daringly upon a kingdom. A half dozen galleys slipped over
from Reggio by night, and the morning sun flashed upon the dew-wet
armour as they galloped through the dawn to Messina’s walls. The great
fortified city was in front of them, a hostile country around them, and
a navy on the watch to cut them off from reinforcements or return by
sea. That they should succeed was visibly impossible. But determined
faces were under the steel visors, the spirit of conquering adventure
shining in their grey eyes. Every man of the host was confessed and
absolved for this fight of the Cross against the Crescent and their
young Commander was dedicated to a life pure and exemplary, if to him
was entrusted the great task of winning Sicily to Christian dominion.

They did it because they thought they could do it; as in the old Greek
games success was to the man who believed in his success. The Saracens
fell into a panic at the sight of that intrepid handful at their gates,
thinking from the very smallness of the band that it must be the advance
pickets of a great army already past their guarding navy and advancing
upon the city.

“So the Saracens gave up in panic, and Roger and his two hundred took
all the town with much gold and many slaves, as was a conquering
warrior’s due.”

The key of Messina was sent to Brother Robert in Calabria with the proud
message that the city was his to come and take possession of. And the
Normans went on with the same bold confidence; and always their belief
was as a magic buckler to them as over all the island they extended
their conquest. Seven hundred Normans routed an army of 15,000 Saracens,
killing 10,000. And young Serbo, nephew of Roger, conquered 30,000
Arabs, attacking them with only one hundred knights.

It was one of Jane’s pet romances, the career of this landless youngest
son of a small French noble carving out with sword and brain “the most
brilliant of European Kingdoms,” leaving a dominion to his successors
with power stretching far beyond Sicily as long as they governed upon
his principles. The young conqueror, unspoiled by his dazzling success,
ruled with justice, mercy, and genius, making Sicily united and
prosperous; the freest country in the world at that time; the only one
where all religions were tolerated, where men of different creeds and
tongues could live side by side, each in his own way; each governed
justly and liberally according to his own laws—French statutes for
Normans, the Koran for Mussulmen, the Lombard laws for Italians, and the
old Roman Code for the natives.

“Peripatetica,” Jane burst out. “Roger must have been a delightful
person—‘so good, _so dear_, so great a king!’ Don’t you think there is
something very appealing in a king’s being called ‘so dear’? It is much
easier for them to be ‘great.’”

“Normans are too modern for me now,” said Peripatetica, whose own
enthusiasm was commencing to catch fire. “We are coming to the spot of
all the Greek beginnings, where their very first settlement began—do you
realize that?”

And Jane, who had been hard at work with her histories, could see it
clearly. The little narrow viking-like boats of Theocles, the Greek
merchant, driven before the sudden northeast storm they could not beat
up against nor lie to, straight upon the coast of this dread land. It
had always been a land awesome and mysterious to the Greeks. They had
imagined half the dramas of their mythology as happening there. It was
sacred ground, too sacred to be explored by profane foot; and was
besides the home of fierce cannibals, as they believed the Sikilians to
be, and of all manner of monstrous and half divine beings. But,
desperately choosing before certain destruction at sea the unknown
perils of the shore, Theocles had rounded the point and beached his
boats safely on that strip of yellow sand that still fringes the cove
below Taormina.

He and his companions, who feared to adventure no perils of the
treacherous Mediterranean in their tiny crafts, but feared very much the
monsters of their imagination in this haunted country, built to Apollo
an altar of the sea-worn rocks, and sacrificed on it their last meal and
wine, praying him for protection and help to save them from the
Læstrygones, from Polyphemus, and Hephæstos at his nearby smoking forge.
And Apollo must have found it good, the savour of that his first
sacrifice on Sicilian land, for straightway succour came. The natives,
drawn down from the hillsides in curiosity at that strange fire on the
shore, were not raging cannibals but peaceful and friendly farmer folk,
who looked kindly on the shipwrecked merchants, and gladly bartered food
and rich dark wine for Greek goods. And through the days of the storm
the Greeks lived unmolested on the shore, impressed by all that met
their eyes; the goodness of that “fairest place in the world.” When at
last came favourable winds and the Greeks could set sail again, Theocles
vowed to return to that fertile shore, and if Apollo, protector of
colonists and giver of victory, should favour his enterprise, to build
there a shrine in his honour.

But in Athens none would believe his accounts of the rich land and the
mild natives. They said that even so it would be unwise to disturb
Polyphemus, or to run the risk of angering Hephæstos, and that it was no
proper site for a colony any way! Theocles did not falter at
discouragement; he took his tale to other cities and over in Eubœa the
Chalcydians were won to him. After the oracle of Apollo had promised
them his protection and all good fortune, more Ionians and some Dorians
joined them; and in the spring they set forth, a great fleet of vessels
laden with all necessary things to found a colony. Theocles piloted them
to the spot of his first sheltering; and there on the red rock horns of
the point above the beach they founded Naxos, and built the great shrine
of Apollo Archagates, founder and beginner, with that wonderful statue
which is spoken of as still existing in the time of Augustus, 36 B.C.

Naxos itself had no such length of life. It knew prosperous centuries of
growth and importance, of busy commerce and smiling wealth. Then came
Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse, subdued the mother city to his jealous
power and absolutely exterminated it, killing or carrying off into
slavery all its population. “The buildings were swept away, and the site
of Naxos given back to the native Sikilians. They never returned, and
for twenty-two centuries no man has dwelt there.” Of all the shrines and
palaces of Naxos not one stone remains upon another, not one surviving
trace to identify now the exact site even of the Mother of all Greek
cities in Sicily. But from her sprang Taormina.

Such of her population as managed to escape from Dionysius, climbed up
to those steep rocks above and there, sheltering with the Sikilians, out
of tyrants’ reach in that inaccessible mountain nest, Greek and Sikilian
mingling produced a breed of eagles that with fierce strugglings has
held fast its own on those peaks through all the centuries.

But these shipwrecks and temples and sieges grew dim behind the gritty
cloud of railroad cinders. Jane felt the past melt away from her and
fade entirely into the cold discomfort of the present. She subsided into
limp weariness in a corner of the carriage, incapable of interest in
anything, while Peripatetica’s spirits revived, approaching the tracks
of her adored Greeks, and her imagination took fire and burst into
words.

“Oh those wonderful days!” she cried. “If one could only have seen that
civilization, that beauty, with actual eyes. Jane, wouldn’t you give
anything to get back into the Past even for a moment?”

“No, I’d rather get somewhere in the now—and to breakfast,” grumbled
Jane with hopeless materialism as she vainly tried to stay her hunger on
stale chocolate. So Peripatetica saw visions alone, Jane only knowing
dimly that miles and miles of orange groves, and of a sea a little paled
and faded from its Calabrian blue, were slipping by.

A box of a station announced itself as Giardini-Taormina. A red-cheeked
porter bore the legend “Hotel San Domenico” on his cap; and much luggage
and two travellers fell upon him. But, ah, that hoodoo!

“Desolated, but the hotel was full. Yes, their letter had been received,
but it had been impossible to reserve rooms,” said the cheerful porter
heartlessly; “no doubt other hotels could accommodate them.” He didn’t
seem to feel his cheerfulness in the least diminished by the dismay
pictured in the dusty faces before him.

“Oh, well,” said Jane bravely, “picturesque monasteries are all very
well, but modern comfort does count in the end. We will probably like
the Castel-a-Mare, and if we don’t, there is the Timeo.”

A small man buzzing “Metropole, Metropole! Come with me,
Ladies—beautiful rooms—my omnibus is just going!” hung upon their
skirts, but they brushed him sternly aside, and permitted the
rosy-cheeked porter to pile them and the mountains of their
motoring-luggage into a dusty cab, and sing “Castel-a-Mare” cheerily to
its driver.

“We will go there first as it’s nearest,” they agreed, “but if the rooms
aren’t very nice, then the Timeo—the royalties all prefer the Timeo.”

The road was twisting up and up a bare hillside. They roused themselves
to think that they were approaching Taormina, the crown of Sicily’s
beauty, the climax of all earthly loveliness, the spot apostrophised
alike with dying breath by German poets and English statesmen, as being
the fairest of all that their eyes had beheld on earth, place of
“glories far worthier seraph’s eyes” than anything sinful man ought to
expect in this blighted world according to Cardinal Newman.

But where was it, that glamour of beauty? Underneath was a leaden
stretch of sea, overhead a cold, clouded sky, jagged into by forbidding
peaks. The grey road wound up and folded back upon itself, and slowly—oh
dear departed Berliet, how slowly!—up they crawled. It was all grey,
receding sea and rocky hillside, grey dust thick on parched bushes and
plants, greyer still on grey olives and cactus, and what—those other
dingy trees—could they be _almonds_!—those shrivelled and pallid ghosts
of rosy bloom shivering in the icy wind? Was it all but a chill shadow,
that for which they had left home and roaring fires and good steam heat?

A furry grey head surmounted a dust wave, a donkey and a small square
cart emerged behind him, following a line of others even greyer and
dustier. Jane looked listlessly at the forlorn procession until her eyes
discerned colour and figures dim beneath the dirt on the cart’s sides,
and underneath fantastic mud gobs what appeared to be carvings. Could
these be the famous Painted Carts, the “walking picture books” of a
romance and colour loving people, the pride of a Sicilian peasant,
frescoed and wrought, though the owner lived in a cave—the asses hung
with velvet and glittering bits of mirrors though he himself walked in
rags? Was everything hoped for in Sicily to prove a delusion?

Up whirled the San Domenico porter in a cloud of dust, his empty
carriage passing their laden one.

“You might try the ‘Pension Bellevue,’ ladies—beautiful outlook—opposite
the Castel-a-Mare, if you are not suited there,” he called out as he
rolled by.

They thanked him coldly, with spines stiffening in spite of fatigue.

A pension? Never! If they could not have ascetic cells at San Domenico
or the flowery loggias of the Castel-a-Mare, then at least the chambers
that had sheltered a German Empress!

Gardens and flowers began to appear behind the dust; a wave-fretted
promontory ran into the sea below, a towering peak crowned with a brown
rim loomed overhead. In a few more dusty twists of road the
Castel-a-Mare was reached, and two large rooms with the best view
carelessly demanded.

The Concierge looked troubled and sent for a bland proprietor. Rooms? He
had none! wouldn’t have for a month—could give one room just for that
very night—that was all!

To the Timeo then.

More dusty road, a quaint gateway, a narrow street with all the town’s
population walking in the middle of it, a stop in front of a delightful
bit of garden. A stern and decided concierge this time—_No rooms!_

In the mile and a half from the Castel-a-Mare at the end of one
promontory, to the Internationale at the extreme end of the other, that
dusty cab stopped at every hotel and, oh lost pride! at every pension in
the town and out. The same stern refusal everywhere; no one wanted the
weary freight. They felt their faces taking on the meek wistfulness of
lost puppies vainly trying to ingratiate themselves into homes with
bones.

“Does no one in the world want us?” wailed Peripatetica. “Can’t any one
see how nice we really are and give us a mat and a crust?”

“The Metropole man did want us,” reminded Jane hopefully. “He even
begged for us. Let’s go there!”

That had been the one and only place passed by, the Domenico porter had
seemed so scornful of its claim at the station, but now they would
condescend to any roof, and thought gratefully of that only welcome
offered them in all Taormina.

How pleased the little porter would be to have them coming to his
beautiful rooms after all! Their meek faces became proud again. They
looked with approving proprietorship on the waving palm in front of the
Metropole, and the old bell tower rising above it.

Peripatetica’s foot was on the carriage step ready to alight and Jane
was gathering up wraps and beloved Kodak when out came a languid
concierge and the usual words knelled in their ears—“_No rooms!_”

They refused to believe. “But your porter said you had.”

“Yes, an hour ago, but now they are taken.”

A merciful daze fell upon Peripatetica and Jane....

How they returned to the “Castel-a-Mare” and got themselves and their
mountain of luggage into the one room in all Taormina they might call
theirs for as much as a night, they never knew; when consciousness came
back they were sitting in front of food in a bright dining-room, and
knew by each other’s faces that hot water and soap must have happened in
the interval.

Speech came back to Peripatetica, and she announced that she was never
going to travel more, except to reach some place where she might stay on
and on forever. Jane might tour through Sicily if she liked, but as for
her, Syracuse and Girgenti and all could remain mere words on the map,
and Cook keep her tickets—if she had to move on again on the morrow, she
would go straight to Palermo and there stay!

Jane admitted to congenial feelings, and resigned all intervening Sicily
without a pang. There would be no place in inhospitable Taormina for
Persephone to squeeze into any way!

They went to question the Concierge of trains to Palermo. He took it as
a personal grief that they must leave Taormina so soon. “The air of
Palermo is not like ours.” They hoped it was not, as they shivered in a
cold blast from the open door, and put it to him that they could hardly
live on air alone, and that Taormina offered them nothing more. But he
had something to suggest—furnished rooms that he had heard that a German
shop-keeper wished to let. Peripatetica did not take to the suggestion
kindly, in fact her aristocratic nose quite curled up at it. But she
assented dejectedly that they might as well walk there as anywhere, and
give the place a look.

Through the dust and shrivelled almond blossoms they trailed back into
town. The sun was still behind grey clouds and an icy wind whipped up
the dust.

“Too late for the almond bloom, too early for warmth. What _is_ the
right moment for Sicily?” murmured Peripatetica.

The mountains with their sweeping curves into the sea were undeniably
beautiful; the narrow town street they entered through the battlemented
gate was full of gay colour, but it left them cold and homesick for
Calabria. A little old Saracen palace, with some delicate Moorish
windows and mouldings still undefaced, held the antiquity shop of the
Frau Schuler. Brisk and rosy she seemed indeed the “trustable person” of
the Concierge’s description.

Yes, indeed, she had rooms and hoped they might please the ladies. Her
niece would show them. A white-haired loafer was beckoned from the
Square, and Peripatetica and Jane turned over to his guidance. Behind
his faded blue linen back they threaded their way between the swarming
tourists, children, panniered donkeys, and painted carts.

Suddenly the old man vanished into a crack between two houses, which
turned out to be an alley, half stair, half gutter, dropping down to
lower levels. Everything no longer needed in the kitchen economy of the
houses on either side had been cast into the alley—the bones of
yesterday’s dinners, vegetable parings of to-day’s, the baby’s bath, the
father’s old shoes lay in a rich ooze through which chickens clucked and
squabbled. At the bottom of the crack a high wall and a pink gateway ...
they were in a delicious garden, descending a pergola of roses and
grapes. Violets and freesias, geraniums and heliotrope spread in a
dazzle of colour and sweetness under gnarled olives and almonds and
blossoming plums; stone benches, bits of old marbles, a violet-fringed
pool and a terrace leading down to a square white house, a smiling young
German girl inviting them in, and then a view—dazzling to even their
fatigued, dulled eyes.

In front a terrace, and then nothing but the sea, 700 feet below, the
surf-rimmed coast line melting on and off indefinitely to the right in
great soft curves of up-springing mountains, a deep ravine, then the San
Domenico point with the old convent and church rising out of its
gardens. On the left the ruins of the Greek theatre hanging over their
heads; and on the very edge of the terrace an old almond-tree with
chairs and a table under it, all waiting for tea.

Fortunately the villa’s interior showed comfortable rooms, clean, airy,
and spacious. But the terrace settled it. They would have slept anywhere
to belong to that. No longer outcast tramps but semi-proprietors of a
villa, a terrace, a garden, and a balcony, they returned beaming to the
friendly Concierge.

And all Taormina looked different now. The brocades and laces waved
enticingly at the “antichita’s” doors, old jewels and enamels gleamed
temptingly; mountains rose more majestic, the sea seemed less
disappointingly lacking in Calabrian colour.... And as for the tourists,
so disgustingly superior in the morning with their clean faces and
unrumpled clothes, assured beds and table d’hôtes; now, how the balance
had changed! They were mere tourists. What a superior thing to be an
inhabitant, with a terrace all one’s own!

Life at the Villa Schuler was inaugurated in a pouring rain. But even
that did not dim its charm; though to descend the Scesa Morgana—as the
gutter-alley called itself—was like shooting a polluted Niagara, and the
stone floors of the villa itself were damply chill, and American bones
ached for once despised steam heat. Yet smiling little Sicilian maids,
serving with an ardour of willingness that never American maid knew,
with radiant smiles staggered through the rain bearing big pieces of
luggage, carried in huge pitchers of that acqua calda the forestieri had
such a strange passion for, and then, as if it were the merriest play in
the world, pulled about heavy pieces of furniture to rearrange the rooms
according to American ideas, which demanded that dressing-tables should
have light on their mirrors, and sofas not be barriered behind the
immemorial German tables.

Maria of the beaming smile, and Carola of the gentle eyes, what genius
was yours? Two dumb forestieri, who had never learned your beautiful
tongue, found that they had no more need of words to express their wants
than a baby has to tell his to knowing mother and nurses. Did they have
a wish, all they had to do was to call “Maria!”—smile and stutter, look
into her sympathetic face, and somehow from the depths of their eyes she
drew out their desire....

“Si, si, Signora!”

She was off and back again with a smile still more beaming.

“Questo?”

Yes, “questo” was always the desired article!

At first they did make efforts at articulate speech, and with many
turnings over of dictionary and phrase-book attempted to translate their
meaning. But that was fatal. Compilers of phrase-books may be able to
converse with each other, but theirs is a language apart—of their own,
apparently—known to no other living Italians. They soar in cloudy
regions of politeness, those phrase-books, all flourishes and
unnecessary compliments; but when it comes to the solid substantials of
existence they are nowhere! Towels are not towels to them, nor butter,
butter.

At first two trusting forestieri loyally believed in them, and book in
hand read out confidently to Maria their yearnings for a clean table
cloth, or a spoon. But a dictionary spoon never was a spoon to
Maria—dazed for once she would look at them blankly until meaning dawned
on her from their eyes; then “ah!” and she would exclaim an entirely
different word from the dictionary’s, and produce the article at last.

But then according to Maria’s vocabulary “_questo?_” “_qui!_” were the
only really vital and necessary words in all the Italian language. It
merely depended upon how you inflected these to make them express any
human need or emotion. “Questo” meant everything from mosquito-bars to
vegetables; and the combination of the two words with a sprinkling of
“si’s” and “non’s” were all one needed to define any shade of
feeling—pride, surprise, delight, regret, apology, sadness. From the
time Maria brought in the breakfast trays in the mornings to the
hot-water bottles at night it rang through the villa all day long; for
the intricacies of her duties, the demands of the lodgers, scoldings
from the Fraulein, chatter with other maids, “questo! qui!” sounded near
and echoed from the distance like a repeated birdnote.

No nurse ever showed more pride in a precocious infant’s lispings than
did Maria when they caught up her phrases and repeated them to her—when
the right words to express the arrangement of tub and dinner table were
remembered and stammered out. She seemed to feel that there might be
hope of her charges eventually developing into rational articulate
beings, and “questo-ed” every article about to them, with all the
enthusiasm of a kindergartner.

* * * * *

Next morning the sun had come out, and so had Ætna. There it suddenly
was, towering over the terrace, a great looming presence dominating
everything; incredibly high and white, its glittering cone clear cut as
steel against the blue morning sky, rising far above the clouds which
still clung in tatters of drapery about the immense purple flanks.
Enceladus for once lay quiet upon his fiery bed; no tortured breathings
of steam floated about the icy clearness of the summit. It was a vision
all of frozen majestic peace, yet awesomely full of menace, of the times
when the prisoned Titan turned and groaned and shook the earth with his
struggles, and poured out tears of blood in floods of burning
destruction over all the smiling orchards and vineyards and soft green
valleys.

Suddenly, Germans armed with easels and palettes sprang up fully
equipped at every vantage viewpoint. The terrace produced a fertile crop
of them, solemnly reducing the wonderful vision to mathematical dabs of
purple and mauve and grey upon yellow canvas. One felt it comforting to
know that even if Ætna never pierced the clouds again all Germany might
feast its eyes on the colored snap shots then being made of that
morning’s aspect of the Great Presence amid a patronising chorus of
“Kolossals” and “achs reizends.” But once seen, it remained impressed on
sense and spirit, that vision—whether visible or not. It was always with
one, dominating all imaginings as it did every actual circumstance of
life at Taormina, the weather, the temperature, the colour of every
prospect. Though the sky behind San Domenico might be a blank and empty
grey, _one knew it was there_, that mysterious and wonderful presence.
And when it stood out, a Pillar of Heaven indeed, all clear and fair in
white garment of fresh-fallen snow, it was still a menace to the
blossoming land below, whether from its summit were sent down icy winds
and grey mists or shrivelling fire and black pall of lava.

[Illustration: “A PLACE WHERE THE PAST REVEALS ITSELF”]

Equal in importance with this vision of Ætna was the appearance of
Domenica—both events happening in the same day. Domenica too began as a
bland outline. Small, middle-aged, and primly shawled; a smooth black
head, gold earrings, and a bearing and nose of such Roman dignity and
ability that two weary forestieri yearned at once to put themselves and
their undarned stockings into the charge of her capable little hands.
She respectfully asserted her willingness to serve them; they could make
that out—but how tell her their requirements and the routine of the
service they wished? It was seen to be beyond the powers of any
phrase-book or even of Maria, presiding over the interview with beaming
interest, and carefully repeating with louder tone and hopeful smile all
Domenica’s words. No mutual understanding could be reached. They gave it
up, and regretfully saw the shining black head bow itself out. But
Domenica had to be. Their fancy clamoured for her, and all their poor
clothes, full of the dust of travel and the rents of ruthless
washerwoman, demanded her insistently. A more competent interpreter was
found, and their needs explained at length. Domenica’s eyes sparkled
with willing intelligence; she professed herself capable of doing
anything and everything they asked of her; and mutual delight gilded the
scene until the question of terms came up. What would the ladies pay?
They mentioned a little more than the Frau Schuler had told them would
be expected, and waited for the pleased response to their generosity—but
what was happening? The grey shawl was tossed from shoulders that
suddenly shrugged, and arms that flew about wildly; fierce lightnings
flashed from the black eyes, a torrent of ever faster and shriller words
rose almost into shrieks.

Peripatetica and Jane shrank aghast, expecting to see a stiletto plunged
into the stolid form of their interpreter, bravely breasting the fury.

“What _is_ the matter?” they cried.

“Oh nothing,” smiled the interpreter, “she is saying it isn’t enough;
that the ladies at the hotels pay their maids more, and her husband
wouldn’t permit her to take so little.”

Dear me, she need not! they certainly would not want such a fury.

The fury had subsided into tragic melancholy, and subdued
after-mutterings of the storm rumbled up from the reshawled bosom.

“She says she will talk it over with her husband to-night,” said the
gentle interpreter with a meaning wink. “She is really good and able;
the ladies will find her a brave woman.”

They didn’t exactly feel that bravery was needed on her side as much as
on theirs after that storm, but they had liked no other applicant, and
again the imposing nose and capable appearance asserted their charm, and
they remembered their stockings. Their offer still stood, they said, but
it must be accepted or declined at once; they wanted a maid that very
evening. Renewed flashes—she dared not accept such a pittance without
consulting her husband.... Very well, other maids had applied, expecting
less. A change of aspect dawned—she would like to serve the ladies,
would they not give half of what she asked for? Consultation with the
interpreter—ten cents more a day offered only—instant breaking out of
smiles and such delighted bobbings and bowings as she departed that it
seemed impossible to believe that furious transformation had ever really
happened.

They felt a little uneasy. Had they caught a Tartar? Remembering all the
tales of Sicilian temper it seemed scarcely comfortable to have a maid
who might draw a stiletto should one give her an unpleasing order. They
awaited the beginning of her service a bit doubtfully. But when that
grey shawl was hung inside the villa door, the only fierceness its owner
showed was in her energy for work. The black eyes never flashed again,
until ... but that comes later. They beamed almost as happy and instant
a comprehension of all needs as Maria’s. And her capacity for work was
appalling. At first they watched its effects with mutual
congratulations; such an accumulation of the dilapidations of travel as
was theirs had seemed to them quite hopeless ever to catch up with, but
now the great heaps of tattered stockings turned into neat-folded pairs
in their drawers, under-linen coquetted into ribbons again, and all
their abused belongings straightened into freshness and neatness once
more. Domenica’s energy was as fiery as Ætna’s during an eruption, only
unlike the mountains it never seemed to know a surcease. Dust departed
from skirts instantly at the fierce onslaught of her brushings; things
flew into their places; sewing seemed to get itself done as if at the
wave of a magician’s wand. Accustomed to the dilatoriness of Irish
Abigails at home, Peripatetica and Jane were quite dazzled with delight
at first—but then incredibly soon came the time when there was nothing
left undone; when the little personal waiting on they needed could not
possibly fill Domenica’s days, and it became a menace, the sight of that
little grey-clad figure asking with empty hands, “what next, Signora?”

“The Demon,” they began calling her instead of Domenica, and felt that
like Michael Scott and his demon servant, they would be obliged to set
her to weaving ropes of sand, the keeping her supplied with normal tasks
seemed so impossible. It became almost a pleasure to find a gown too
loose or too tight, that she might alter it, or to spot or tear one, and
as for ripped skirt bindings or torn petticoat ruffles, they looked at
each other in delight and cried exultantly, “a job for the Demon!”
Tea-basket kettles to scour they gave her, silver to clean, errands to
do, fine things to wash, their entire wardrobes to press out; yet still
the little figure sat in her corner reproachfully idle, looking at them
questioningly, and sighing like a furnace until some new task was
procured her. Desperately they took to giving her afternoons off, and
invariably dismissed her before the bargained time in the evening. But
still to find grist for the mill of her industry kept them racking their
brains unsuccessfully through all their Taormina days.

* * * * *

Home comforts and maid once secured they could turn to Taormina itself
with open minds, and plunge into a flood of beauty and queernesses and
history. Of the guide-books some say that Taormina was the acropolis of
Naxos, an off-shoot of that first Greek town, others that it, like Mola,
was a Sikilian stronghold long before the days of the Greeks. Jane’s
private theory was that neither Greeks nor Sikilians had been its
founders, that eagles alone would ever first have built on that dizzy
windy perch!

On the very ridge of a mountain spine with higher peaks overhanging,
Taormina twists its one real street, houses climbing up or slipping down
hill as best they may, all clinging tight, and holding hands fast along
the street to balance themselves there at all. Dark stairway cracks
between lead up or down, and overhead flying arches or linked stories
keep the clasp unbroken. Here and there a little street manages to twist
off and find a few curves for itself on another level, or the street
widens into a wee square, or a terrace beside an old church is edged
with a stone-benched balustrade where ancient loafers may sun themselves
and look down at the tiny busy specks of fishing boats in the sea far
below.

Every hour of the day the Street is a variety show with the mixed life
passing through it, and acting its dramas there. Flocks of goats
squeezing through on their way to pasture; donkeys carrying distorted
wine skins or gay glazed pottery protruding from their panniers; women
going to the fountain, balancing slender Greekish water jars on their
heads; the painted carts carrying up the tourists’ luggage; the tourists
themselves in veils and goggles bargaining at enticing shop doorways, or
peering into the windowless room of Taormina’s kindergarten, where a
dozen or more infants are primly ranged, every mother’s daughter with
knitting pins in hand and silky brown curls knotted on top of head like
little old women, sitting solemnly in the scant light of the open door,
acquiring from a gentle old crone the art of creating their own
stockings. There the barber strums his guitar on a stool outside the
“Salone” door while he waits for custom; the Polichinello man obstructs
traffic with the delighted crowds of boys collected by Punch’s nasal
chantings and the shrill squeaks of “Il Diavolo.” There come the golden
loads of oranges and lemons; green glistening lettuces and feathery
finochi; bread hot from the bakers in queer twists and rings; live
chickens borne squawking from market, and poor little kids going to the
butchers. The busy tide of every-day life never ebbed its colourful flow
from the beginning of the street at the arch of one old gateway until
its end at the arch of the other. Buying and selling, learning, working,
and idling, the Present surged there, but a step aside into any of the
backways, and one was instantly in the Past. Old women spinning in
doorways with the very same twirling spindles as those of two thousand
years ago. The very same old women, one had almost said, their hawk-like
dried faces were so unimaginably far removed from youth, from all
modernness.

The very names of the streets spell history and drama. History rises up
and becomes alive.

In the Street of Timoleon one hears the clank of armour—the Great Leader
and his Corinthians swing down the road. Only a few days ago they had
landed at the beach of ruined Naxos in answer to the call of
Andromachus, Taormenium’s ruler. They have been warmly entertained at
his palace, have there rested, learning from him of the lay of the land
and state of affairs; now they set out to begin the campaign. The
staring people stand watching the march of these strong new friends,
murmuring among themselves in awestruck whispers of the portents
attending the setting forth of these allies. How great Demeter and
Persephone herself had appeared to the servitors of their temple,
promising divine assistance and protection to this expedition for the
succour of their island—a rumour too that Apollo had dropped the laurel
wreath of victory from his statue at Delphi upon Timoleon’s head; a
marvel, not a rumour, for it was beheld with very eyes by some amongst
themselves. How the ships bringing these deliverers had come in through
the night to the harbour below with mysterious unearthly fires hovering
in front of them and hanging in balls at the masthead, to light them on
the way!

In the midst of the soldiers is a taller figure—or one that seems so—a
face like Jupiter’s own, of such majesty and sternness and calm. The
crowd surges and thrills and shouts with all its heart and soul and
stout Sicilian lungs.

“Who is that?” ask the children.

“Timoleon! Timoleon, the Freer!” they are answered when the shouting is
over. “Remember all your life long that you have seen him.”

And when years later those boys, grown to manhood in a free prosperous
Sicily, hear of the almost divine honours that grateful Syracuse is
paying to her adored deliverer, of the impassioned crowds thronging the
theatre, mad with excitement at every appearance of the great old blind
man, they too thrill to know that their eyes too have seen “The
Liberator,” greatest and simplest of men.

It is the Street of the Pro-Consulo Romano. Here comes Verres, cruelest
of tyrants, most rapacious of robbers. The people shrink out of the way,
out of sight as fast as may be, at the first gleam of the helmets of the
Pro-Consul’s guard, when “carried by eight stalwart slaves in a litter,
lying upon cushions stuffed with rose leaves, clad in transparent gauze
and Maltese lace, with garlands of roses on his head and round his neck,
and delicately sniffing at a little net filled with roses lest any other
odour should offend his nostrils,” the sybarite tyrant is borne along,
passing the statue of himself he has just had erected in the Forum, on
his way to the theatre.

The Street of Cicero; it is only necessary to close one’s eyes to see
that lean, long-nosed Roman lawyer. A fixed, silent sleuth-hound on this
same Verres’ track; following, following close, nose fixed to the trail,
for all the cunning doublings and roundings of the fox, questing all
over Sicily, gathering everywhere evidence, building up his case,
silently, inexorably; until at last his quarry is cornered, no squirming
tricks of further avail. Verres is caught by the throat, exposed,
denounced; so passionately, that as long as man’s appreciation of logic
and eloquence endures the great lawyer’s pleading of that case is
remembered and quoted.

Children are playing in the Via Sextus Pompeius, but one sees instead a
gleam of golden armour, of white kilts swinging from polished limbs—the
proud figure of Pompey; splendid perfumed young dandy who, the fair
naughty ladies say, is the “sweetest-smelling man in Rome.”

Here, with instinctive climb to the heights, he is desperately watching
the surge of that great new power flooding, foaming, submerging all the
world; rising up to him even here, the bubbling wave started by that
other Roman dandy, the young man Julius Cæsar, who knotted his girdle so
exquisitely....

The street from which the Villa Schuler’s pink door opened was that of
the Bastiones, where the town’s fortified wall had once been.
Corkscrewing dizzily down the sheer hillside among the cacti and rocks
ran a narrow little trail. Jane had settled it to her own satisfaction
that this was the scene of Roger’s adventure when besieging Taormina,
then Saracen Muezza—last stronghold on the East coast to hold out
against him; as it had two hundred years ago been one of the last in
succumbing to the Moslems.

Roger had completely surrounded the strong place with works outside its
walls, and was slowly reducing it by starvation. Going the rounds one
day, with his usual reckless courage almost unaccompanied, he is caught
in a narrow way by a strong party of the enemy. The odds are
overwhelming, even to Normans, on that steep hillside. Roger must
retreat or be cut down. For attackers and pursued the only foothold is
the one narrow path. Evisand, devoted follower of Roger, is quick to see
the advantage of that—one man alone may delay a whole host for a few
important minutes there, and he offers up his life to cover his master’s
escape. Alone, on the narrow way he makes a stand against all the Moslem
swarm, with such mighty wielding of sword that it is five minutes before
the crooked Moslem blades can clear that impediment from their way.
Roger, who has had time to reach safety before the brave heart succumbs
to innumerable wounds, dashes back with reinforcements, wins the day,
recovers his loyal servitor’s body, buries it with royal honours, and
afterwards builds a church in memory of this preservation, and for the
soul of his preserver. And Taormina, yielding to Roger and starvation,
regains her name and the Cross....

Picking their way one morning up through the puddles and hens of their
own alleyway, Peripatetica, raising her eyes an instant from the slime
to look at the label on the house corner, said:

“Who could have been the Morgana this scandal of a street ever stole its
name from? ... you don’t suppose....”

“What?”

“Why, that it could have been the Fata Morgana? Her island first
appeared somewhere off the Sicilian coast.”

“Oh, Peripatetica! how could a fairy, lovely and enchanting, ever have
become associated with this!”

Peripatetica had a fine newborn theory on her tongue’s tip, but ere she
could voice it, a nervous hen above them suddenly decided there was no
room on that road for two to pass on foot, and took to her wings with
wild squawk and a lunge straight at Peripatetica’s face in an attempt to
pass overhead. Peripatetica ducked and safely dodged all the succeeding
hens whom the first dame’s hysteria instantly infected to like
behaviour. By the time she caught her breath again in safety at the
street’s level, the theory was lost, but another more interesting one
was born to her as they proceeded.

“‘Street of Apollo Archagates,’—Jane, do you see meaning in that? The
Greeks always put their greatest temples _on the heights_—Athens,
Girgenti, Eryx, wherever there were hills the Great Shrine was on the
Acropolis. Taormina must have been the Acropolis of those Naxos
people—they certainly never stayed on the unprotected shore below
without mounting to these heights. I believe Apollo’s temple stood up
here, not below. Here they built it, dominating the city, shining far
out to sea, a mark for miles to all their ships and to the sailormen
worshipping Apollo, Protector of Commerce.”

“No one has ever suggested that,” said Jane.

“What if they haven’t? It’s just as apt to be true, though even
tradition has left no trace of it now but the name of this dirty little
street. I for one am going to believe it, and that was why the statue
survived until the time of the Romans.”

And so it was that every step they took stirred up wraiths of myth and
history. Even on the Street in the midst of all its humming bustle,
rotund German tourists and donkeys, all the modern life would suddenly
melt away, and they would resurrect old St. Elio, attired only in chains
and his drawers, kneeling in front of the Catania gate, exhorting the
Byzantine soldiers to cleanse themselves from their sins before
destruction came from the Saracens then raging like mad wolves outside
the devoted town’s walls, in a fury that it alone—save Rometta—of all
Christian Sicily should still hold out against them. Then the air would
fill with the screaming and strugglings of those old fierce eagle
fights, and the donkey boys’ cries of “A-ah-ee!” would change to the
fierce triumphant shouts of “Allah Akbar!” with which Ibrahim’s cruel
soldiery finally broke in to massacre garrison and townsfolk.

Although Taormina sat apart on her mountain eyrie with no epoch-making
events finding room on her perch to happen, the stream of all Sicily’s
history, from first Greek settlement to the revolts of modern days
against King Bomba’s tyranny, have surged around and through her. An
American living in Taormina did a kindness to her native cook, for which
in grateful return the cook insisted on presenting her a quantity of old
coins, which her husband had turned up through the years in their little
garden. Showing them to the Curator of a Museum, “Madame,” he said to
the fortunate recipient of the gift, “you have a complete epitome of all
Sicilian history in these coins.”

All the different races and dynasties dominating Sicily from her
beginning, all the great cities that rose into local power were
represented in these treasure troves from the silt of the centuries, dug
by a peasant from the soil of one little garden.

It was the Greek theatre which first revealed the Sicily of their dreams
to Peripatetica and Jane; consoling for the vague disappointment of
those first days of dust and rain by the glamour of its presentment of
the loveliness of nature and the majesty of the past.

Greek that wonderful ruin still essentially is, for all its Roman
remodelling and incrusting of brick. Only the Greeks could have so
lovingly and instinctively combined with nature and seized so
harmoniously all nature’s fairest to enhance their own creation. The
place, the setting, the spirit of it is Greek; what matter if the actual
material shape now is Roman, with the Greek form only glimmering through
like a body of the old statuesque beauty cramped and hidden under
distorting modern dress? Not that the theatre’s Roman clothing is
ugly—the warm red brick, contrasting with the creamy marble fragments,
has an undeniable charm, Greek and Roman together. It is an exquisite
ruin of human conceivings, contrived to have blue sea and curving shore
and Ætna’s snowy cone as the background of the open stage arches, and in
the foyer, the arcaded walk back and behind the top tiers of the
auditorium, all the differing panorama of beauty of the northern coast
line.

Nature from the beginning did more than man for the building, and now
she has taken it back to herself again, blending Greek and Roman in
binding of vine and flower and moss; twining all the stone-seated tiers
into an herb and flower garden, and putting the song of birds into the
vaulted halls of the Greek Chorus.

An enchanting place, where the Past seems to reveal itself in all that
it had most of beauty and splendour. Peripatetica and Jane thought
themselves fortunate to live under its wings; actually in its shadow,
and so be on intimate calling terms at any hour of the day, learning its
beauty familiarly through every changing transformation of light, cool
morning’s grey and glowing noon’s gold, fiery sunsets, blue twilights,
and early moonrise—mountains and sea and wide-flung sky dissolving
magically and mysteriously into ever different pictures.

They wandered through chorus halls and dressing-rooms, the obscure
regions under the stage and the dizzy ones on top of it; strolled in the
outside arcade on top of the auditorium, where the loveliness of the
view was a fresh wonder every time it burst on them, sat in the top rows
and the bottom ones on the flowery sod now covering all the seats,
looking from every angle at that most charming of marble stage settings
and most wonderful of all backgrounds, trying to imagine the times when
the surrounding tiers had been filled with 4,000 eager spectators, and
the walls had echoed to the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides.

Looking wonderingly at the curious drains and holes and underground
passages below the stage, they wondered if Æschylus, that eminent stage
manager as well as poet, had not himself perhaps contrived some of them
on his visit to Sicily, to introduce new thrills of stage effects into
the performances of his tragedies here. Æschylus, who was inventor of
stage realism, first to introduce rich costuming, accessories, and stage
machinery, the mutter of stage thunder, shrieks, and sounds from behind
the scenes suggestive of the deeds considered too shocking to happen in
the audience’s sight—inventor of the “Deus ex Machina,” that obliging
god popping from out his trap-door to divinely straighten out a
situation snarled past natural conclusion.

As one sat there in the calm splendour of the setting of earth and sky,
sun, and great winds streaming overhead, it became easier to understand
the spirit of the old Greek plays; how the drama had been to them not
mere amusement but almost a form of religion, and an expounding of their
beliefs, an attempt to “justify the ways of God to man.” If perhaps such
settings had not instinctively formed the differing tendencies of their
great play-writers; Æschylus to represent suffering as the punishment of
sin; Sophocles to justify the law of God against the presumption of man;
and in these spacious open-air settings if the great rugged elementary
simplicity of their plays had not been necessary and inevitable.

“In the Greek tragedy the general point of view predominates over
particular persons. It is human nature that is represented in the broad,
not this or that highly specialized variation.... To the realization of
this general aim the whole form of the Greek drama was admirably
adapted. It consisted very largely of conversations between two persons
representing two opposed points of view, and giving occasion for an
almost scientific discussion of every problem of action raised in the
play; and between these conversations were inserted lyric odes in which
the chorus commented on the situation, bestowed advice or warning,
praise or blame, and finally summed up the moral of the whole.”

More akin to an opera than to a play in our modern sense, the Greek
drama had as its basis music. The song and stately dance of its mimetic
chorus being the binding cord of the whole, “bringing home in music to
the passion of the heart the idea embodied in lyric verse, the verse
transfigured by song, and song and verse reflecting as in a mirror to
the eye by the swing and beat of the limbs they stirred to consonance of
motion.”

Sitting in the thyme-scented breeze Peripatetica and Jane read Euripides
until they seemed to become a part of a breathless audience waiting for
his tragedies to be performed before their eyes, waiting for the first
gleam of the purple and saffron robes of the chorus, sweeping out from
their halls in chanting procession. And it would all seem to take place
once more on the stage in front of them, that feast for the eye and ear
and intelligence at once. It became clear that across such great
unroofed space the actors could not rely on “acting,” in our sense, for
their results. It must be something bigger and simpler than any exact
realism of petty actions; play of facial expression, subtle changes of
voice and gesture would be ineffectually lost there. So, though at first
the stage conventions of a different age seemed strange to these modern
spectators, the actors raised above their natural height on stilted
boots, their faces covered by masks, their voices mechanically
magnified; yet in wonderful effects of statuesque posings the meaning
came clear to the eye, and the chanting intonation brought out every
beautiful measure of the rolling majestic verse which a realistic
conversational delivery would have obscured. So the representation
became “moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep
of music between the intenser intervals of the chorus,” and the
spectators found themselves “without being drawn away by an imitative
realism from the calm of impassioned contemplation into the fever and
fret of a veritable actor on the scene,” receiving all the beautiful
lucid thought and sentiment of the text, heightened by the accompanying
appeal to the senses of perfect groupings of forms and colours, of
swaying dance, and song and recitative, until it all blended into one
perfect satisfying whole—perhaps the most wonderful form of art
production that has ever existed.

And then some German tourist would scream, “Ach Minna, komm mal her! ’s
doch famos hier oben!” and they would be waked from their day dream of
old harmonies into the shrill bustling present again.

“It is like all really great fresco painting,” said Peripatetica on one
of these comings back, “kept in the flat. Anything huge has to be
treated so as to make its meaning tell; it has to be done in flat
outline to stay in the picture, to make the whole effective. All the
great imposing frescoes are like that; when the seventeenth century
tried to heighten its effects by moulding out arms and legs in the
round, its pictures dropped to pieces; any idea it was trying to express
became lost. One is conscious of nothing but the nearest sprawling
realistic limb thrusting out at one. Oh, those delicious marvellous
Greeks! everything that is beautiful and perfect they did first, and
anything good that has ever been done since is only copying them.”

Jane had a deep respect for the Greeks herself, but she sometimes turned
against too much laudation of them.

“Do you suppose the æsthetic effect of their tragedies was really
greater than that of a Wagner opera, well given? That the lament for
Iphigenia could be more deeply thrilling than Siegfried’s funeral
march?”

Peripatetica almost bounded from her seat.

“But that’s just it!” she cried. “Wagner operas are a revival of the
Greek ideal! the only modern analogy of their drama! He had the same
idea of painting on a huge canvas great heroic figures in the flat,
keeping them in the picture without rounding out into petty realism. And
he has attempted exactly what they did, to present his dramatic theme in
a mingling of music, poetry, picture, and dance, every branch of art
combined!”

“That’s interesting, and perhaps true, my dear, but if you discourse on
about King Charles’ head, we shall get caught by that shower racing down
the coast. There is just time to beat it to home and Vesuvius!”

Vesuvius was, after Domenica, their greatest acquisition, and the one
that most soothingly spread about an atmosphere of home comfort. Until
he came life had been a thing of shivers and sneezes, of days spent in
ceaseless trampings to keep their chilled blood in circulation, and of
evenings sitting swathed in fur coats and steamer rugs, with feet raised
high above the cold drafts of the floor.

Fireplaces, or any means of artificial heating were unknown to the
villa. They had waited patiently for the Southern sun to come and do his
duty, but he didn’t; and a day came when Jane took to bed as the only
hope of warmth, when even Domenica sneezed and said it was “_molto
freddo_,” and then Peripatetica sallied forth determined to find some
warmth nearer than Ætna. “Vesuvius” was the result of her quest. Not
much was he to look at outwardly. Small was his round black form; oh,
pitifully small he seemed at first view to those whose only hope he was.
A mere rusty tin lantern on three little feet, he looked—but when his
warm heart began to glow and to send delicious hot rays percolating
through the holes of his sides and pointed lid, the charms of his fiery
nature won respect at once. He made his small presence felt incredibly,
from stone floor to high ceiling. Shawls and coats could be shed, feet
lowered and at once frozen spines relaxed into long-forgotten comfort.

His breath was not pleasant to be sure, his charcoal fumes troubled at
first, but when a Sicilian oracle had recommended the laying of sliced
lemons on his head, all fumes were absorbed, he breathed only refreshing
incense and became altogether a joy. Every day, except on rainy ones,
when his company was called for earlier, he made his appearance at six
of the evening—and how eagerly the sight of Maria bearing him in used to
be waited for! Then with feet toasting and backs relaxing in delightful
warmth, Peripatetica and Jane sat over his little glowing holes with
quite the thrill and comfort of a real hearthstone.

Ardent fire worshippers they found themselves becoming in this
supposedly Southern land. If Persephone had ever been as cold as they,
they doubted if that _enlèvement_ to Pluto’s warm, furnace-heated realm
could have been so distasteful after all!

* * * * *

Paddling out in the rain to hotels for meals was at first a drawback to
life in the Villa Schuler. To sit with damp ankles through the endless
procession of table d’hôte meals, and afterwards have the odoriferous
bespatterings of the Scesa Morgana as dessert, was not an enjoyable
feature of local colour. Frau Schuler was implored to feed her lodgers.

“But we are simple people; our plain cooking would not satisfy the
ladies,” she protested, distressed. But the ladies felt that a crust and
an egg in their own sitting-room would be more satisfying than all the
triumphs of hotel chefs out in the wet. And to bread and eggs they
resigned themselves. Instead came a five-course banquet, served by
beaming Butler Maria in a dazzling new grass-green bodice—soup and
macaroni, meat and vegetables, perfect in seasoning and succulence,
crisp salad from the garden, and with it the demanded poached eggs which
were to have constituted the whole dinner, almond pudding with a
wondrous sauce; dates, oranges, sugary figs beaded on slivers of bamboo,
mellow red wine. It seemed a very elastic two lire which could cover all
that, as Frau Schuler said it did! Truly the Fraulein Niece was an
artist. Peripatetica and Jane thereafter dined at home in tea gowns and
luxury—and the pudding sauces grew more bland and wonderful every night.
Also eggs continued to give originality by the vagaries of their
appearance. As Peripatetica said, “they just ran along anyhow, and
jumped on at any course they took a fancy to!” And to see where they
were going to land—in the soup, the vegetables, the salad, the stewed
fruit of dessert—or what still other and stranger companionships they
might form, lent a sort of prize-packet excitement to each succeeding
course. Dinner at the Villa Schuler, with little Vesuvius glowing
warmingly through all his fiery eyes and steaming out spicy incense of
lemon and mandarin peel, the soft low lamplight, the gleam of Maria’s
smile and green bodice, the blessed remoteness from all tourist gabble,
was truly a cosy function. They took to making elaborate toilets in
honour of it, adding their Taormina acquisitions of old lace and jewels
to Maria’s round-eyed amazement. When Jane burst out in an Empire
diadem, and Peripatetica not to be outdone donned a ravishing lace cap,
their status as good republicans was forever lost in the villa. Maria
spread the tale of this splendour abroad, firmly convinced that these
lodgers were incognito members of the most exalted nobility of distant
“Nuova Yorka.” The tongues which could not pronounce their harsh foreign
names insisted on labelling them the “Big and Little Princess”—and no
protests could bring their rank down lower than “the most gentle
Countesses,” upon their washing-bills.

It amused them in fine weather to try the various hotels for lunch. In
mid-town was the Hotel Victoria, the haunt of artists and gourmets,
famous for its food and for its garden, which climbed the hillside in
blooming terraces and loggias, all stairways, springing bridges, and
queer little passages leading to buildings and courts on different
levels. Peripatetica and Jane wandered into it almost by accident. They
noticed the name over a dingy door as they were strolling aimlessly one
day, and Peripatetica remembered having heard of a picturesque garden
within. Penetrating through empty hall and up various winding stairways
they came to a charming garden court. There appeared the proprietor, and
in Parisian French treated their curiosity as a boon and a pleasure. A
little man, the Padrone, with nothing large about him but the checks of
his trousers and the soft black eyes which turned upon the gay colour
about him with gentle melancholy. He did the honours of the place with
all the courtesy and dignity of Louis XIV showing Versailles. When they
admired the aviary of Sicilian and tropical birds, the budding roses
clambering everywhere, the strange feathery-fringed irises like gaudy
little cockatoos, the delicate bits of Moorish carving and arches built
into the hotel walls, he accepted all their enthusiasm for the charms of
his property with no sign of pride, but rather with the pensive
melancholy of one whose soul was above such things, as of one who knew
the hollowness of earthly delights. Courteously he exhibited everything,
taking them to still higher and more glowing terraces where his laden
orange trees were burnished green and gold, and his violets sheets of
deepest, royalest purple underneath.

A pair of monkeys lived in cage up there, and while the Signor deftly
fed them for the amusement of his visitors he warmed up into caustic
philosophic comment upon human and monkey nature, comment not unspiced
with wit. Peripatetica, always ready for philosophy, immediately plunged
into the depths of her French vocabulary and responded in kind. The
discussion grew warm and fluent, and the little Padrone became a new
man. With kindling eye and a pathetic eagerness he kept the ball rolling
in polished Voltairian periods, intoxicated apparently with the joy of
mental intercourse. He snatched and clung to it, inventing new pretexts
to detain them, new things to exhibit, while the talk rolled on.

But Peripatetica, whose next passion to Philosophy is Floriculture,
broke off to exclaim at the violets as they passed a bed of purple
marvels. Emperors they were among violets. The Padrone immediately
proffered some, setting two contadini to picking more. Peripatetica
contemplating gluttonously the wonderful spread of the deep purple
calyx, the long firm stems of those in her hand, and at the profusion of
others sweetening the air, cried from her heart, “Oh, Monsieur, what
luxury to have such a garden! You should be one of the happiest
creatures in the world to be able to grow such flowers as these!”

The Padrone, from his knees, picking more violets, glanced up, and gloom
fell over him again.

“Madame,” he inquired bitterly, “does happiness ever consist in what one
possesses of material things? Contentment, perhaps—but happiness? Not
the most beautiful garden in the world can grow that,” and with dark
Byronic mystery, “Ah, one can live amid brightness and yet be very
miserable.”

They parted with much friendliness, the Padrone hoping the ladies would
do his hotel the honour of visiting it again. Surely, yes, they said;
they would give themselves the pleasure of lunching there some day....
Upon that it seemed as if his gloom grew darker, but he implied
courteously that that would do him too much honour, but if they did
venture as much he would do his best to content them. His was but a
rough little place, but it had been wont to be the haunt of artists and
“they, you know, are always ‘_un peu gourmet!_’”

“What do you suppose is the story of that man?” they asked each other;
and amused themselves inventing romantic pretexts to explain his air of
blighted hopes and poetic pain.

Before long their curiosity impelled them to try the Victoria’s cuisine.
They were a half hour before the time. No guests had yet gathered. They
stood again in front of the aviary, but no polite philosopher made his
appearance. A little yellow-haired maid in a frock as brightly purple as
the violets, carrying decanters into the empty dining-room, was the only
creature about. The sitting room offered them shelter from the wind, and
for entertainment heaps of German novels and innumerable sketches of
Sicilian scenery and types, which they hoped the Victoria’s artist
patrons had not given in settlement of their hotel bills. A bell rang,
and people streamed in until every seat in the clean, bare dining-room
had its occupant. Not the artists Peripatetica and Jane were looking
for, but types fixed and amusing, such as they had never before
encountered in such numbers and contrasts. Rosy, bland English curates
and their meek little wives; flashy fat Austrians, with powdered ladies
of unappetizing look; limp English spinsters of the primmest propriety;
seedy old men with dyed moustaches and loud clothes, diffusing an aroma
of shady gambling-rooms. Scholarly old English professors; and Germans,
Germans, Germans of all varying degrees of fatness, shininess, and
loud-voicedness, but all united in double-action feeding power of knife
and fork.

An expectant hush held them all for a while before empty plates. Then
the little purple-gowned maid, and a sister one in ultramarine blue,
with the same brilliant yellow hair knotted on top of her head, appeared
with omelettes. Omelettes of such melting perfection as to explain the
solemn expectancy of the waiting faces.

Followed a meal in which every course—fish, vegetables, meat, and salad,
in a land where the tourist expects to subsist alone on oranges and
scenery—was of a deliciousness to have made a Parisian epicure
compliment the chef of his pet restaurant.

The Germans were explained; lovers of feeding and of thrift, of course,
they had come in their hordes to this modest Inn. And how they made the
most of it! Back they called the little maids for two and three helpings
of each delicious platter. Food was piled upon plates in mountains, but
before Peripatetica and Jane could more than nibble at their own share,
the German plates would be polished clean, and the little maids called
for another supply. The caraffes of strong new Sicilian claret were
emptied too, until Tedeschi faces grew very red, and tongues more than
ever loud.

Peripatetica and Jane dared not meet each other’s eyes. Next to them sat
an elderly maiden lady from Hamburg “doing” Sicily without luggage,
prepared for any and every occasion in black silk bodice and cloth
skirt, which could be made short or long by one of the mysterious
arrangements of loops and strings the female German mind adores. With
maiden shyness but German persistence she firmly insisted on human
intercourse with the French commercial traveller across the table. He
clung manfully to the traditional gallantry of his race, though the
Hamburgian’s accent in his mother tongue threw him into wildest
confusion as to the lady’s meaning. When he confided his wife’s
confinement to bed with a cold, and his ineffectual struggles to get the
proper drugs for her in Taormina, the German lady announced the theory
that violent exercise followed by a bath was better cure for a cold than
any drugs, “the bath the main point,” she said. “The exercise and the
_transpiration_ without that being of no use.”

“A _bath_! with a _cold_! Not a complete wash all over?” protested the
startled Frenchman.

“Yes, indeed, one must wash one’s self entirely—though it might be done
a bit at a time—but completely, all over, with water and soap,” insisted
the German, which daring hygienic theory so convinced the Frenchman that
its propounder’s reason must be unhinged that stammering and trembling
he gulped down his wine and fled from the table without waiting for the
sweets.

All this time Peripatetica and Jane had caught no glimpse of their
friend, the Padrone. They wondered, but decided that his poetic nature
soared above the materialities of hotel keeping.

The meal had reached the sweet course—a pudding of delectableness no
words can describe. It inspired even the gorged Germans with emotion.
Thoroughly stuffed as they already were they still demanded more of its
ambrosia and the purple-frocked one flew back to the kitchen, leaving
the door open.... Alas! their philosopher of the garden, in cook’s
apron, was pouring sauce on more pudding for the waiting maid!

Ah, poor Philosopher! This the secret of his blighted being. The poet
driven to cooking-pots, the artistic temperament expending itself in
omelettes and puddings for hungry tourists. How wonder at the irony with
which he had watched the monkeys feed!

* * * * *

Maria and Vesuvius were not the only possessors of ardent temperaments
in the Villa. Another existed in a round soft ball of tan and white
fuzz.

The Puppy!

He of the innocent grey eyes, black nose with pink tongue-trimming, and
the most open and trusting heart in the world. On friends and strangers
alike his smiles and warm licks fell. He bounded into every room all
a-quiver of joy to be with such delightful people in such an altogether
charming world. And never could it enter his generous thoughts that
others might not equally yearn for his society; that Jane might object
to having a liberal donation of fleas and mud left on the tail of her
gown; that at 6 A.M. Peripatetica might not be enchanted to have a
friendly call and a boisterous worry of her slippers all over the stone
floor; or Fraulein might prefer the front of the stove entirely to
herself during sacredest rites of cooking. He could not be brought to
understand. He was cheerfully confident that every one loved him as much
as he loved them, and that nothing could possibly be accomplished in
that family without his valuable assistance. Many times a day loud wails
rose to heaven, announcing that he had come to grief in the course of
his labours; had encountered some one’s foot or hand, or had some door
shut in his face; but in the midst of grief he would see in the distance
something being accomplished without him—charcoal being carried in, the
hall swept, or the garden watered—and he would rise from his tears and
offer his enthusiastic assistance once more, all undaunted, and continue
to give encouraging chews to the worker’s ankles, and stimulating barks
of advice entirely undeterred by being called “an _injurienza_ puppy!”

Peripatetica claimed that his grey eyes showed that he was Norman
descent, as Jane insisted they did in all the grey-eyed children of
Taormina. But Fraulein, appealed to on that question, said he was of the
colley race, and she revealed the dark and dreadful destiny laid upon
him—that he was to grow up into a fierce and suspicious watch-dog; to
live chained on the upper terrace, a menace to all intruders, a terror
to frighten thieves from the garden plums!

And alas for natural bent of temperament when it must yield to contrary
training. The grey-eyed one’s fate soon overtook him. Wild and indignant
wails and shrieks woke Jane one sunny morning, and continued steadily in
mounting crescendo all the while she clothed herself in haste to go to
the rescue. Following the wails to the top of the garden she found the
Puppy, a red ribbon around his soft neck, and from that a string
attaching him to a pole. Nearby stood the Fraulein admonishing him that
it was time his duties in life should begin, and he must commence to
learn the routine of his profession without so much repining. In spite
of Jane’s protests she insisted on leaving him there; and in vain all
that quarter of Taormina rang with the wails of protesting indignation
that welled from the confined one’s heart in the bewilderment of being
left in loneliness, separated from all his friends and their doings.
Every day after that he had to undergo his hour or two of schooling in
the stern training of his grim profession. Soft-hearted Jane released
him whenever she could, but Fraulein inexorably put him back, and even
his playfellow Maria sternly held him to his duties. Between times he
mixed with the family again on the old footing, but it was pathetic to
see how soon nature was affected by the mould into which it was pressed,
how soon he acquired the mannerisms and habits of his profession—curbing
his exuberance of sociability, imposing on himself a post on the door
mat, when strangers appeared, confining all welcome to his tail end,
which would still wag friendlily though head did its duty in theatrical
staccato growls.

* * * * *

In Taormina everything happens in the street. Houses are merely dark
damp holes in which to take shelter at night, but life is lived outside
them. Food is prepared in the street, clothes are mended there, hair is
combed and arranged, neighbours gossiped with, lace and drawn-work made.
The cobbler soles his shoes in the street, the tinsmith does his
hammering and soldering there. It is the poultry run of hens and
turkeys, the pasture grounds for goats and kids, the dance hall for
light-footed children to tarantelle in, the old men’s club, the general
living-room of all Taormina. Peripatetica and Jane found endless
amusement there, though they seldom tarried in town. Like Demeter they
wandered all day in meadow and mountain seeking Persephone, and found
her not. Preparation for her beloved coming Mother Demeter seemed to be
making everywhere; grass springing green when once the cold rain ceased,
and carpets of opening blossoms spreading in orchards and fields for the
little white feet to press. Every night they said, “She will come
to-morrow,”—but still Demeter’s loneliness dissolved into cold tears
hiding the face of the sun, and the chill winds told of nothing but
Ætna’s snow, and the Lost One did not return.

But though they searched for her in vain in the setting of sunshine and
blossom their fancy had pictured, Peripatetica and Jane found much else
on their rambles—idyls of Theocritus still being lived, quaint little
adventures, bits of local colour, new friends and old acquaintances
among contadini, animals and flowers, and always and all about, the
Bones of the Past. Everywhere obscured under the work-a-day uses of the
Present, or rising out of them in beauty; half hidden among flowers in
lonely fields or a part of squalid modern huts, they stumbled upon those
remains of antiquity, debased and crumbled and inexplicable often, but
beautiful with a lost strange charm, sad and haunting.

Taormina prides herself more on scenery than antiquities, but they found
many of the latter in their scrambles on rough little mountain trails,
learning all sorts of charms and secrets undreamed of by luxurious
tourists rolling dustily in landaus along the one high road. Theirs was
an unhurried leisure to take each day as it came. Without plans or
guides they merely wandered wherever interest beckoned, until gradually
they learned all the town and its setting of mountain and shore by
heart.

They sallied forth untrammelled of fixed destination, ready to take up
with the first adventure that offered—and one always did offer to
adventurers of such receptive natures. They made plans only to break
them; for inevitably they were distracted by something of interest more
vital than the thing they had set out to see.

They might start, staff in hand, on a pilgrimage to the Madonna of Rocca
Bella, whose brown shrine nestled dizzily on one of the strange peaks
shooting their distorted summits threateningly above their own Villa,
those peaks so vividly described by another Idle Woman in Sicily:
“Behind, wildly flinging themselves upwards, rise three tall peaks, as
of mountains altogether gone mad and raving.... The nearest peak of a
yellow-grey, splintered and cleft like a lump of spar, and so upright
that it becomes a question how it supports itself, is divided into two
heads—one thrusting itself forward headlong over the town and crowned
with the battlements of a ruined Saracenic-Norman castle; the other in
the rear carrying the outline of a little church, and the vague vestige
of a house or two; Saracenic-Norman castle and church (Madonna della
Rocca) both so precisely the tint of the rock that it requires time and
patience to disentangle each, and not to put the whole down as a further
evidence of mountain insanity.”...

When Jane sat herself, muffled in furs and rugs, to read or sew in one
of the quaint tile-encrusted arbours of the garden, those jagged peaks
fell out of the sky overhead so menacingly, coming ever nearer and
nearer to her shrinking head, that for all the sweetness of the flowers
and birds she never could stay there long, but always, panic-struck,
fled to the bare sea-terrace, and the prospect of calm and distant Ætna.

But to go back to Our Lady of Rocca Bella, which Peripatetica and Jane
never managed to see, there were so many distractions on that path! Did
they start with the firmest of pilgrim intentions, a new garden opened
unexplored paths of sweetness, or a brown old sea-dog, Phrygian-capped,
smiled a “buon giorno” on his bare-footed way up from the shore, showed
them the strange sea creatures gleaming under the seaweed in his basket,
and enticed them down to the shore. There on the golden beach of
Theocles’ landing place, they embarked in a heavy boat pulled by their
friend, and another old gold-earringed mariner, to the “_grotte molto
interessante_” in the Isola Bella. They poked their heads between waves
into coral caves where the light filtering through the bright water was
dyed almost as intense an azure as in the famous Capri Blue Grotto, and
the whole coast line of mountains came to them in a new revelation of
beauty from the level of wide-stretching sea. And beside the queer bits
of coral presented by the sea-dogs as souvenirs, they carried away
salt-water whetted appetites of wonderful keenness, and pictures,
bestowed safely behind their eyes, of deliciously moulded mountain sides
rising straight from clear green seas, of wave-carved fantasies in
sun-bathed coral rocks, of red nets being stretched on yellow sands by
bare-legged, graceful fisher folk; memories they would not have
exchanged for any wide map-like vista the Madonna could have given them
from her high-perched eyrie.

It was the same story with the Fontana Vecchia. If they had persisted in
reaching its clear spring they might have heard the nightingales singing
in the wooded dell, but they would never have known Carmela and her
sunny mountain meadow.

It was a day of shifting clouds and cold winds. Peripatetica was
depressed. Her energies wilted in the cold, and she had only gone forth
to walk because the salon was too icily vaultlike for habitation. Jane
tried to cheer her with prospect of hot tea at the Fontana, but her
spirit refused to respond to any material comforting. She complained of
what had been troubling her for some time, a sense of feeling a mere
ghost herself in these Past-pervaded spots; a cold and shivering ghost
aimlessly blown about in the wind, pressed upon by all the thronging
crowds of other ghosts haunting these places where through the centuries
each succeeding throng of beings had struggled and laboured, laughed and
suffered. Living among ghosts in these days of idleness, her own
existence cut off from the real living and doing of the world, from the
duties and responsibilities of her own place in life, from the warm
clutching hands of the people dependent on her, she had come to seem to
herself entirely vague and ineffectual. She felt a mere errant,
disembodied spirit, she said, and it was a bleak and dreary feeling.

Jane said she thought a disembodied spirit, able to soar over the sharp
cobbles of that road, an exceedingly enviable thing to be at that
moment; but she quite understood, and was herself affected by the same
sense of chill aloofness from actual, vital human living.

And then they saw Carmela—a little old Sibyl twirling her distaff at an
open gate that looked out on the quiet road. Sitting in the sun with
cotton kerchief, bodice, and apron all faded into soft harmonies of
colour, she made such a picture through the arch of the gate’s break in
the dull stone wall, with the green of the garden behind her, that they
stopped a moment to look.

“Buon giorno”—the picture smiled, her little round face breaking into
friendly wrinkles. She rose to her bare feet, and with graceful gesture
invited them in—wouldn’t they like to see the farm? she asked. There was
a _molto bella vista_ beyond. Always welcoming the unexpected they at
once accepted, and found themselves passing through olive and orange
groves. The property was not hers, their hostess explained; she was
merely a servant; it all belonged to a _molto vecchia_ lady, Donna
Teresa by name. Though owning no part of it, Carmela pointed out the old
vines, the thriving newly planted young vineyard, the grafts on the
almond trees, with proud proprietorship.

Donna Teresa made her appearance; a tiny bent crone, bare-footed like
her maid and dressed in cottons as faded if not as patched, but showing
traces of a refined type of beauty in the delicate features of her old
face and the soft fine white hair curling still like grape tendrils
about her well-shaped head. She accepted her maid’s explanation of the
strangers’ presence, and proceeded to outdo her in hospitality. They
must do more than see the vista—must pick some flowers too. With cordial
toothless chatter, of which the friendly meaning was the only thing they
could entirely understand, she led through the farmyard court where blue
and white doves cooed on the carved stone well-head, and a solemn white
goat, his shaggy neck hung about with charms and amulets, attached
himself to the party and followed down the stone stairs to a lower
terrace. There was a view entrancing indeed, also a strange little old
round building resembling a Roman tomb. Carmela could tell no more than
that it was _cosa di molto antichita_ and very useful to store roots in.
Under a sheltering wall was a purple bank of violets to which the old
Donna led them with much pride, inviting them to pick for themselves.
When they did so too modestly to suit her, she fell on her knees and
gathered great handfuls, thrusting on them besides all the oranges and
mandarins they could carry, until her lavishments became an
embarrassment. For all her bare feet and poor rags there was that in the
grace of her hospitality they felt they could not offer money to. All
they could do was to press francs into the maid’s hand, offer the Donna,
as curiosities from distant America, the maple sugar drops Jane had
filled her pocket with before starting, and try to make smiles fill the
gaps in thanks of their halting Italian.

Carmela showed redoubled friendliness from the moment America was
mentioned. She still clung to them after her mistress bade them goodby
at the gate, and offered to show them another vista still more
beautiful. They would rather have continued their interrupted way, but
the little round face falling sadly changed their protestations into
thanks, and she trotted happily beside them, smiling at their
compliments on the even thread she spun as she walked, confiding how
much it brought her a hank, what she could spin in a day, and that Donna
Teresa was a good mistress, but a little weakened in her head by age.

She pattered along, her bare feet skimming carelessly over the
sharp-cobbled road, spindle steadily whirling, past the Campo Santo,
where at the top of a sudden ravine the road forked and strings of
panniered donkeys and straight, graceful girls with piles of linen on
their heads were going down to a hidden stream tinkling below. They
longed to follow, but Carmela took them on around a curve, through a
door in a high wall, past a deserted barn, along a grassy path under
almond trees, and they found themselves in a spot that made them catch
breath with delight.

The crown of a mountain spur dropped in terraced orchards and gardens to
the sea below. Taormina was hidden behind intervening heights. Below, an
opal sea divided Sicily from wraiths of the Calabrian mountains drifting
along the horizon, and curves of yellow sand and white, surf-frothed
rocks outlined the far indentations of the Island’s mountainous coast
spreading blue and rosy-purple on their left. Fringed with blossoming
plum and yellow gorse, the spur on which they stood dropped sheer to the
river ravine, and above still towered Mola and Monte Venere.

It was a world of sun and colour and sweet silence. The cold, moaning
wind was shut off by the heights behind them, and turned full to the
glowing South, a real warmth of sun bathed the sheltered spot and had
spread a carpet of flowers of more brilliant and harmonious arabesques
than any of Oriental weaving. Of purple and puce and gold, coral and
white and orange, of blues faint and deep, of rose and sharp crimson, it
was woven exquisitely through the warp of young spring green. Even
without the view, nothing so sweet and really springlike as that bit of
mountain meadow had Peripatetica and Jane yet seen. They cried out in
joy and sat them down among all the unknown bewitching flowers.

Carmela’s face lit up at their appreciation. She too sat down, let her
spindle fall, and gazed about as if her eyes loved what they rested
upon; then looking from one strange face to the other:

“You are really from America?” she asked, and let her pathetic little
story pour out. Nine children she had borne, and all but one dead. She
told how that one, a splendid youth, had gone to America three years ago
to make a fortune for himself and her, and at first had written to her
that he was doing well; but for two years she had spent her hard
earnings to have letters written to him, and had prayed with tears at
the Madonna’s shrine, but for two long years now—no answer.

Her round little old, yet childlike, face fell into tragic lines. With
work-scarred hands clasping her knees across her patched apron she sat,
a creature of simple and dignified pathos, opening her heart in brief
and poignant words to the response in Peripatetica’s eyes. Among the
blossoms and the bees the three women of such different lives and
experiences, with the barrier of a strange tongue between them, came
into close touch for a moment in the elementary humanity of that pain
known to all women—Goddess Demeter and ragged peasant alike—when their
dearest has gone forth from the longing shelter of their arms and theirs
is the part of passive loneliness and waiting.

“Yes, life was _brutta_,” said Carmela simply, “but one had always one’s
work.”

Picking up the spindle, winding again her even thread, smilingly she
bade these strange friends “_a rivedercela_,” and departed, a certain
tragic dignity clinging to the square little figure going sturdily, yet
with head drooping, back to her life of hard and lonely labour. Whether
that moment of sympathetic intercourse had meant anything to her or not,
to the two idle ones that trusting touch of the life about them meant
much. It pulled them out of the world of ghosts, from the empty sense of
being outside of any connection with other lives, and by that contact of
living, pitiful drama they came back into realities.

* * * * *

For all the tiny extent of Taormina’s boundaries, the discoveries of its
antiquities seemed never ending; the cella of a Greek temple hidden in
San Pancrazio’s church; the tiny Roman theatre, a section of its pit and
auditorium with seats still in perfect rows sticking out from another
old church whose greediness had only succeeded in half swallowing it;
the enormous Roman baths whose old pools and conduits a thriving lemon
orchard is now enjoying; the Roman pavement next to the Hotel Victoria;
that bit of Greek inscription hospitably let into church walls, exciting
imagination with its record that the “people of Tauromenium accord these
honours to Olympis, son of Olympis” for having gained the prize in horse
racing at the Pythian games.

The wall of the loveliest garden in Taormina is honeycombed with ancient
tombs. The slender cypresses, like exclamation points emphasizing its
rhythms of colour, have their roots among the very bones of antiquity.
In this garden Protestant worship has succeeded Catholic in the old
Chapel of the delicious little Twelfth Century Convent whose cloisters
are now an English lady’s villa—and who knows in how many earlier
shrines man’s groping faith has prayed in this very spot?

All over Taormina fragments of old marbles and carvings and columns
appear in the most unlikely places; a marble mask from the theatre over
the door of a modest little “Sarta” in a back alleyway, bits of porphyry
columns supporting the steps of a peasant’s hovel. The traces of Norman
and Saracen embellishment are, of course, even more numerous, almost
every house on the street breaking out into some odd and delicate bit.
The façade of the palace in which dwelt the Frau Schuler’s antiquity
shop is freaked with charming old lava inlays and queer forked
“merluzzi” battlements. Forcing one’s way through the chickens into its
courtyard, one finds a vivid Fourteenth Century relief of the story of
Eve’s creation, temptation, and punishment climbing up the stone
stairway, and an inscription “_Est mihi i locu refugii_,” which
tradition says was placed by John of Aragon taking refuge here once in
the days when it was a Palace of the Aragonese Kings. Beyond that
inscription with its legend, and some few Spanish-looking iron
balconies, the Spaniard has left no trace of his dominion in Taormina.
The Norman printed himself on churches and convents, but it is the
Greeks and Romans, and above all the Saracens, who have stamped
themselves indelibly upon Taormina. Moorish workmen must have been
employed by their conquerors for centuries to build them palaces and
convents, baths and even churches. And the Arab blood still shows
strongly in hawk-like, keen-eyed faces passing through Taormina’s
streets as haughtily as in the days when their progenitors ruled there
with hand of iron upon the dogs of Christians.

In those Moslem days much liberty in the practice of religion was
allowed to such of the Christians as did not show the cross in public,
read the gospel loud enough to penetrate to Moslem ears, or ring their
church bells “furiously.” How often in Sicily one wishes that last
regulation were still in force! They might go on worshipping freely in
all existing churches and convents, though to build new ones was not
allowed. In matters of religion the Arab was strangely liberal, but in
civil matters he reduced the conquered people to a sort of serfdom.
Christians were not allowed to carry arms, to ride on horseback, or even
donkeyback, to build houses as high as the Mussulman’s, to drink wine in
public, to accompany their dead to burial with any pomp or mourning.
Christian women might not enter the public baths when Moslem women were
there, nor remain if they came in. Christians must give way to Moslems
on the street; indoors they must rise whenever a man of the conquering
race came in or went out. “And that they might never forget their
inferiority, they had to have a mark on the doors of their houses and
one on their clothes.” They were bid wear turbans of different fashion
and colour from Moslems, and particular girdles of leather.

Yet many good gifts these Eastern conquerors brought—introduction of
silkworms and the mulberry, of sugar-cane and new kinds of olives and
vines; new ways of preserving and salting fish; new processes of
agriculture and commerce; their wonderful methods of irrigation; the
clear Arabic numeration; advance in medicine, astronomy, mathematics,
all sciences; and even “the slaves in Sicily under the Moslem rule were
better off than the Italian populations of the mainland under the
Lombards and Franks.”

* * * * *

Jane and Peripatetica were taking tea in the San Domenico gardens—a
flowery terrace dizzily flung out to sea, and almost as high as their
own. There is nothing prettier in Taormina than that garden; tile-paved,
mossy stone pergolas of dense shade still breathing of quiet monkish
meditations; open, yet sheltered, nooks to bask in the sun, and the
loveliness of the outlook on Ætna and his sweeping foothills, and the
milky-streaked green sea; mats of fragrant sweetness, purple and ivory,
of violets and freesias; royal splash of bougainvilla against the buff
stucco of old convent walls; coast steamers, white yachts, and tiny
black fishing boats far, far below, the only hint of the world’s bustle;
here in the garden was only slumberous quiet and fragrant peace.

“On his terrace high in air
Nothing doth the good monk care
For such worldly themes as these.
From the garden just below
Little puffs of perfume blow,
And a sound is in his ears
Of the murmur of the bees
In the shimmering chestnut trees.
Nothing else he heeds or hears.
All the landscape seems to swoon
In the happy afternoon.”

Little has been changed since the good monk really dozed there. The
charm of his peaceful days still lingers in cloister and garden, and the
conventual atmosphere still asserts itself in spite of the frivolous
swarm of tourists, who leave innovation trunks in the stone-flagged
corridors. But that same tourist sits in the monk’s painted wooden
stalls, has a beflowered little shrine and altar perhaps opposite his
own bedroom door; walks under saintly frescoes, hangs his hat on the
Father’s carved towel-frame outside the Refectory door, and eats his
dinner under pictures of martyrdoms. The chapel in the midst of the
modern caravanserai is still the parish church, the vaulted stone
corridors echo to the solemn boom of its organ many times a day—a wrong
turn on the way to the dining-room and the tourist finds himself not in
gas-lit, soup-redolent, salle-à-manger, but among the dim, carved
stalls, taper-lit altars, and incense-sweet air of the chapel.

It was the one place which ever caused Peripatetica and Jane to think
ungratefully of their villa. Whenever they wandered through either of
the vine-draped old cloisters; looked up the delightfully twisted stone
stairways, and along mysterious Gothic passages, they wished that they
too might have had a “belonging” door in one of the arches of that quiet
incense-perfumed corridor, such sense of unhurried calm reigned there;
the frescoed saints over each cell door looked so peacefully benignant.

“Jane,” queried Peripatetica, “do you notice that these Saints are all
women?—a gentle lady saint over every Brother’s door! even where no
living woman was allowed to penetrate they still clung to some memory of
the Eternal Feminine!”

Tea was seeming unusually good that afternoon after hours passed amid
the excitements and wonderful finds and bargains of the beguiling
antiquity shops of Taormina’s main street. Now, the pot drained to the
last drop, the last crumb of bread and honey eaten, they sat tranquilly
watching the shadows lengthen in the garden.

“This is the only really peaceful spot in Taormina,” said Jane. “What a
relief to escape from all that old overwhelming Past for once and just
be soothingly lulled in this placid monkish calm. I know nothing ever
happened here more exciting than the scandal of some fat Brother’s
unduly prolonging his siesta in a sheltered nook, and so missing
Vespers.”

A boy appeared at her elbow; one of the little shy fauns of Von
Gloëden’s photographs. He pulled a cactus leaf out of one pocket, a
penknife out of another, and trimming off the cactus prickles tossed the
leaf out into space in such deft way that in graceful curves and
birdlike swoops it whirled slowly down to the far bottom of the cliff.
Jane leaned over the gratefully substantial stone parapet and watched,
fascinated, as he proceeded to send yet another and another after it in
more elaborate curves each time. The boy’s shyness melted under her
admiration of his trick and the coppers it was expressed in; he showed
white teeth in much merriment when she too attempted to toss the green
discs only to have them drop persistently without any whirling. He began
to chatter.

“Yes, it was very high that cliff, and of much interest to pitch things
over and watch them fall. In the old days they had pitched men over
it—yes indeed, prigionieri; many hundreds of them.”

“Oh Peripatetica! black dramas even here! what can he mean?”

“The insurgent slaves of the Servile War, perhaps. Their whole garrison
was hurled alive over some cliff here—native tradition may have it this
one.”

Jane remembered. Eight hundred men thus treated by Publius Rupilius,
Roman Consul in 132 B.C.

The dark flood of old cruelty surged back to her. Sicily was a country
of great landowners holding estates of eighty miles round and more;
working them by slave labour; owning slaves in thousands. Twenty
thousand slaves was not an exaggerated number for a great noble to own,
two hundred a fair allowance for an ordinary citizen. Two-thirds of
Sicily’s population were then slaves.

Of course the human live-stock possessed in such indistinguishable
hordes, like cattle, had to be branded with the owner’s mark. They did
their work in irons, to be safely under their overseer’s power; were
lodged in holes under ground; their daily rations but one pound of
barley or wheat, and a little salt and oil. Against atrocious cruelties
they revolt at last. All over Sicily they rise, two hundred thousand men
soon finding arms and power to mete to masters the same cruelties that
had been shown them. For six years all the might of Rome cannot crush
them, but eventually her iron claw closes in upon them—only impregnable
Enna and Taormina still remain in the hands of the slave army. It is a
struggle to test all Rome’s mettle. These slaves too are of the eagle’s
blood. Men free-born and bred, most of them; Greeks and Franks from the
mainland, prisoners of war or of debt. Fiercely, indomitably, they cling
to their rocky eyries. But in Taormina starvation fights direfully
against them. There was not one grain, one blade of grass even, left.
Still the garrison clings and strikes back at the Romans. They devour
their own children, next the women, then at last eat one another—but
still hold out.

Commanus, the slave commander, weakens and tries to escape from the
horrors. He creeps alone from the city, but is captured and brought
before the Consul. He knows what methods will be tried to make him give
information of the town’s condition—can his weakness hold out against
torture? With apparent acquiescence he appears willing to answer all
Roman questions, but bends his head and draws his cloak over it as if
shielding his eyes to better collect his thoughts.... Under the cloak he
grips his throat between his fingers and with the last remnant of once
phenomenal physical strength crushes his own windpipe, and falls safely
silent at the Consul’s feet.

But the horrors of Taormina in that siege are too much for another
slave—a Syrian. He betrays the town to the Romans ... and Publius
disposes of all the remaining garrison over the edge of the cliff.

* * * * *

Shopping is an important part of a stay in Taormina. Surely no other
street of its length anywhere in the world has so many beguilements to
part the tourist from his coin. The dark little shops spilling their
goods out upon the pavement; things so bizarre, so good, so cheap, the
lire of the forestieri flow away in torrents. Beautiful inlaid
furniture; lovely old jewelry of flawed rubies and emeralds set amid the
famous antique Sicilian pearl-work and enamelling. Old Spanish paste in
delightful designs; red Catanian amber, little Roman intaglios, delicate
old cameos, enamelled orders; necklaces, rings, pendants; earrings in
odd and charming settings; delightful old trinkets in richer assortment
of variety and quality here than any other place in Italy. Old Sicilian
thread lace, coarse but effective, in shawls and scarfs of many charming
old designs; old altar lace too in great abundance; better laces, as one
may have luck to find them, or to be on the spot when gleanings from
churches and convents in the interior are brought in—bundles containing
varied treasures, from brocades and embroideries and splendid lace of
priestly vestments, to drawn-work altar cloths and the lace cottas
little choirboys’ restless arms have worn sad holes in. Churchly silver
too, reliquaries and ornaments and old medals, abound in Taormina for
scarcely more than the value of the silver’s weight. Old coins dug up in
its gardens, the old porcelains bought from its impoverished nobles; old
drawn-work, on heavy hand-woven linen, still firmly carrying its
processions of marvellous beasts and birds and personages in wide
lace-like bands. Beasts conceived by the same imagination that evolved
the gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, such wonderful mixtures of animal
and bird and human as Adam never named in Garden of Eden. These horned
birds and winged animals processioning around churchly altar cloths are
old, old pagan Siculian luck charms—protectors against the evil eye.
Peripatetica and Jane instantly proceeded to combat their Hoodoo with
valiant processions of fat little many-horned stags romping around
throat and wrist—and of all the many exorcisms they had tried this truly
seemed the most effective!

Taormina’s naïve native pottery, too, drapes the outside walls of shops
and doorways in bright garlands of strange shapes of fishes and fruits
and beasts, is stacked in shining heaps of colour, jugs and pots and
platters of every possible form and design. Some of it reminiscent of
Sevillian pottery in elaborate Renaissance decoration, but for the most
part rough little shapes of clay, covered with hard bright glaze and no
two ever exactly alike in either shape or tint. The favourite model
being a gay Sicilian Lady Godiva, riding either a stag or a cock,
attired proudly in a crown and a floating blue ribbon!

Day after day, all through March, the sun moped behind clouds, the wind
lashed the sea against the rocks, and milky foam bands streaked the
turbid green. Rain beat on the Villa windows, and even through them, to
the great amusement of Maria, who appeared to consider mopping up the
streaming floors a merry contest with the elements.

But when the rare sun burst out and revealed a fresh-washed sky, a land
shimmering through thinnest gauze of mist, or the moon could escape from
the clouds and rise behind the theatre ruins to hang, hugely bright over
the gleaming sea floor so far, far below, it seemed a fair world all
prepared to greet its radiant returning goddess.

On such days no shop could beguile. Even the old dames weaving towels on
hand looms by their open doors, always so ready for friendly chat with
these forestieri, would be passed with only a smile, for the breath of
the fields called loudly to hillside and orchard, “where all fair herbs
bloom, red goat-wort and endive, and fragrant bees-wort”; the only sound
breaking the sunny calm being the notes of a shepherd boy on a
neighbouring hill, piping as if his reed flute held the very spirit of
youth, the bubbling notes sparkling like a little fountain of joy
flinging its spray on the spring breeze. Or on a day like this to wander
far afield; or else in the high hillside orchards where the birds sang
“Sicily! Sicily! Sicily!” or called mockingly “Who are you? Who are
you?”

On such a day they adventured to Mola and the heights of Monte Venere’s
peak in the company of those brave _asinelli_ Giovanino and Francesco,
and in the charge of Domenico, Sheik of guides, whose particular
exploitation they had long ago become.

Loafing in the fountain square, watching the women filling jars at the
fountain, and speculating as usual over the history of its presiding
deity (who as St. Taypotem is the local genius and emblem of the town, a
saint utterly unknown to churchly calendar)—a lady centaur, and a
two-legged one at that, uprearing her plump person on two neat little
hoofed heels raised high above the four archaic beasts spouting
water—Peripatetica and Jane fell a prey to a genial Arab, a beguiling
smile wrinkling his dark hawk-like face. Wouldn’t they like a donkey
ride? The best donkeys in all Sicily were his—Domenico’s—guide No. 5,
beloved of all tourists, as they could see by reading his book. A dingy
little worn note-book was fluttered under their noses, an eager brown
finger pointed to this and that page of English writing, all singing the
praises of Domenico and his beasts on many an expedition. More
influenced by the smile than the testimonials they promised that he
should conduct them to Mola. From that instant Domenico’s wing was
spread over them in brooding solicitude. Yes, the weather was too
threatening to ride out anywhere that afternoon, but did they know all
the sights of the town? he inquired. Had they seen the Bagni Saraceni?
No, they admitted. Oh, that was _molto interessante_ and close at hand;
he would show them! Hypnotized by the smile they followed meekly, though
the Bagni turned out to be the Norman Moorish ruins of the San Stefano
Palace with which they were already familiar. But not as it was shown by
Domenico. The surly old contadina in charge, bullied into offering the
choicest of the oranges and flowers growing among the ruins, the smile
gilding all the dark corners of antiquity and lighting up the vaulted
cellar in which by graphic pantomime of jumps into its biggest holes
they were shown exactly how the Saracens had once bathed, much as more
modern folk did, it seemed.

After that days came and went of such greyness and cold wind or rain,
that Domenico and his donkeys attended in vain at the pink gateway to
take Peripatetica and Jane excursioning. But not for that did they lose
the sunniness of the smile. Like a benevolent spider, Domenico was to be
always lying in wait to pounce around any corner with friendly greeting,
to give them the news of the town in his patois of mixed Italian,
English, and pantomime; to suggest carrying home their bundles for them
if they were on a shopping tour, to point out an antiquity or garden to
inspect if they seemed planless, or a lift home on the painted cart
whose driver he had been enlivening with merry quips, when met on the
high road outside town. And once, oh blessed time, when he encountered
Jane at the Catania gate, her tongue hanging out with thirst and fatigue
after a long mountain climb, he haled her straightway into a friend’s
garden to refresh herself with juicy oranges from the trees.

Finally the long waited-for day came, when not a cloud threatened and
the mountains beckoned through crystalline, sunny air. So Francesco and
Giovanino laden with Peripatetica and Jane, Domenico and a brown young
hawkling of the Domenican brood laden with lunch, they climbed upwards.
Ætna stood out in glistening, freshly renewed snow mantle, icy sharp
against the most perfect of blue skies. Taormina dropped far below, a
tiny huddled human nest of brown among the green, green hilltops. Mola,
which for so long had loomed far over their heads on its beetling crags,
now too sank below. The pink mountain villa where Hichens had written
“The Call of the Blood,” the vineyards and the orchards, all dropped
away. Only Ætna, high and white, soared against the sky, remote and
inaccessible. The trail grew steeper and steeper, but Francesco and
Giovanino, noble pair, with unbroken wind and gloomy energy picked their
way unfalteringly among the rolling stones, and both Domenicos, like
two-legged flies, seemed to take to the perpendicular as easily as the
horizontal.

Francesco, tall and grey and of a loquacious turn of mind, made all the
mountains echo to his voice whenever a fellow _asinello_ was encountered
on the trail. Giovanino, small and brown, attended strictly to the
business of finding secure places for his tiny hoofs among the stones,
but developed two idiosyncrasies rather dismaying to his rider. Whenever
the path led along a precipice’s edge, on the very outside edge of it
would his four obstinate little feet go, with Jane’s feet dangling
horribly over empty space; whenever it skirted a stone wall his furry
sides insisted upon rubbing it clingingly, sternly regardless of his
rider’s toes. The path ceased being a path. It became a stairway
climbing up the mountains’ bare marble side in rough stone steps a foot
or more in height.

“But we can’t ride up _that_!” cries the appalled Peripatetica in the
lead. In vain Domenico assures her that she can, that people do it every
day. She looks at its dizzy turns and insists on taking to her own feet.
Jane, having acquired a reverential confidence in Giovanino’s powers
after their mutual tussles, puts more faith in his head and knees than
in her own, and goes on, clutchingly. Young Domenico, hanging like a
balance weight to Giovanino’s tail, keeps up a chorus of “Ah-ees” and
assurances that the Signorina need have no fear, he is there to guide
her! In reality he knows that his small person could no more interfere
with the orbit of Giovanino’s movements than with those of the planets,
but also that there is no more need that he should—Giovanino’s grey head
holds a perfect chart of the way, with the safest hoof-placings plainly
marked out on it, and he follows it imperturbably.

Travellers to Monte Venere do not know much of what they are passing the
last forty minutes. They are too busy wondering whether each minute will
not be their last—on those daunting stairs of living rock and rolling
stones. Breathless, dizzy, speechless, they at last realize a firm level
terrace is under foot, and reel against the comforting solid walls of
the little _tratoria_. The donkeys are quite unruffled and unheated,
less dejected than when they started. The young Domenico, who has pulled
himself on shuffling small bare feet thrust in his father’s heavy boots
all up that mountain wall, is as unflushed of face, unshortened of
breath, as if he had come on wings! Old Domenico, escorting an exhausted
Peripatetica, is bubbling faster than ever with vehement chatter. He
cannot understand why his charges insist on rest, on holding fast to the
solid house. It fills him with surprised distress that they will not go
on to the top. “The view over all Sicily awaits them there, and it is
such a clear day. Corragio! only one-half hour more!”...

But Peripatetica and Jane plant their feet on that little level platform
with more than donkey obstinacy—with reeling heads they look out into
the great blue gulfs of air and over the green ripples of mountain tops.
This is high enough for them, they pant, feeling like quivering
earth-worms clinging to the top of a telegraph pole and invited to go
out along the wires. Shivering in the wind which, in spite of sun, is
icy keen at this height, they proceed to eat their cold lunch; the
tratoria offering only tables and crockery, wine, goat’s milk, and
coffee to its patrons. Between two infants of the house begging for
tidbits, three skeleton dogs so long unacquainted with food they
snatched greedily even at egg shells, a starved cat, and the two
Domenicos, who, it seems, also expect to lunch on their leavings,
Peripatetica and Jane have themselves no heart to eat. Wishing they had
brought another _asinello_ laden only with food, that all the
inhabitants of this hungry height might for once be filled, they divide
their own meal as evenly as possible among all its aspirants and try to
sustain themselves on the view. Peripatetica looked on the far expanse
of hills and sea below, sourly asserting her fixed lowlander’s
conviction that mountains are only beautiful looked up to, and that a
bird’s-eye-view is no view. But when a comforting concoction of hot
goat’s milk and something called coffee had been swallowed, and numbed
fingers thawed out over the tiny fire of grapevine prunings in the
tratoria kitchen, they succumbed to Domenico’s insistence about the view
it is their duty to see, and climbed higher.

The crest of Monte Venere is a green knoll rising above rock walls.
Around and below it enough mountains to fill a whole world roll
confusedly on every side. They felt more than ever like earth-worms too
far removed from friendly earth, and stayed only to listen to the
pipings of a curly-headed goatherd flinging trills out into space; while
Domenico, pained at their indifference to his vaunted coup d’état of
“bella vistas,” but benevolent still, clambered about like a goat
himself, gathering for them the “mountain violets” as he called the
delicate mauve flowers starring the sod.

So soon they were back at the tratoria that Francesco and Giovanino had
not half chewed their little handfuls of hay, and young Domenico’s red
tongue was still delightedly polishing off the interior of their tin of
potted chicken, while the lean dogs watched enviously, waiting for their
chance at this queer bone. Another personage was lunching luxuriously,
stretched at his ease on the steep hillside, a large sleek white goat,
munching solemnly at grass and blossom, wagging his beard and rolling
watery pink-rimmed eyes with such evangelical air of pious complacence
Peripatetica and Jane instantly recognized him as an incarnation of a
New England country deacon, and sat down respectfully to pass the time
of day with him.

Going down even Jane takes to her own feet. Slipping, sliding, jumping,
the worst is somehow past with bones still unbroken. The mountainside is
yet like the wall of a house, but Domenico, with more cries of
“corragio,” and proverbs as to those who “Va piano, va sano,” urges them
to mount, and Jane, quite confident that four legs have more clinging
power than two, is glad to lie back along Giovanino’s tail while he
balances himself on his nose, with young Domenico serving as a brake on
his tail, and so slides and hitches calmly down hill.

Mola is a climb again, the narrow path twisting up the one accessible
ledge to its sharp peak. One wonders why human beings ever first climbed
there to build, and even more why they still live in its cramped
buildings, and with what toil they can find ways to squeeze daily bread
out of the bleak rocks. Yet before the first Greek colonists landed at
Naxos, Mola was already a town. It looked down on infant Taormina when
the Naxos refugees fled to its heights. It loomed above, still Siculian
and intact, on its bare unassailable crags, through all the squabbles
and screamings below of the different eagle broods taking possession of
Taormina’s nest. The conqueror who tried to take Mola had usually only
his trouble for his pains. Even Dionysius, with all Sicily clutched in
his cruel hand, failed in his snatch at Mola. His attempt to steal into
it by surprise one dark winter’s night ended in an ignominious,
breakneck, hurling repulse of tyrant and all his victory-wonted
veterans. And Mola still lives to-day. All its huddled houses seem to be
inhabited, though only bent old men, palsied crones, black pigs, and
babies are to be met with in its steep narrow alleys. Domenico said
scornfully that there was nothing to be seen in it, but led the way to
the tiny town-square terrace beside the church, and had a brown finger
ready to emphasize all points of interest in the spread of country and
sea stretching below its parapet. Once Mola had a sister town, he told,
on another crag across the valley; but Ætna opened a sudden mouth and
lava rivers pouring down to the sea flowed over it and swallowed it
completely. Whether this is actual history or Domenican invention
remains in doubt. No other historian mentions the lost town. But then,
as Domenico said, there is Ætna, and there the lava mound still black
and ugly, as proof!

* * * * *

Again it rained, and Ætna sulked behind a cloudy mantle. Vesuvius worked
all day long, yet fur coats were a necessary house dress. The poor Demon
took the influenza and coughed, and shivered in spite of her hot
energies; turned livid yellow and feverish, and had to be sent to a
doctor. Scarcely able to hold her head up, but protesting to the end,
she gave in to going home to bed and staying there. But first she
reappeared, pale but proud, with a fashionably dressed young lady of
fourteen, her _figlia_ Adalina, to whom she had shown and told
everything, and who could do all the ladies’ service quite as well as
herself.

Adalina was very high as to pompadour and equally high as to the French
heels on the tight boots which finished off the plump legs emerging from
her smart kilted skirt—but height of intelligence was not in her; none
of her mother’s quickness and energy seemed to have passed into the head
under the high rolling thatch of hair. Feet were Adalina’s strong point,
and she knew it. There was probably not another such grand pair of real
French boots as hers in all Taormina! So her life consisted in showing
them off. She arranged Peripatetica’s and Jane’s belongings, and brushed
their clothes, as Mother had shown her, but with pirouettings and side
steps—one, two, three, all the best dancing positions—between every
touch of brush or laying out of garment. It absorbed so much time to
keep her feet arranged in the most perfect placings to exhibit pointed
toes that very little else could be expected of her in the course of the
day. She opened her mouth wide at Peripatetica’s and Jane’s broken
babblings, but no sense from them ever penetrated her intelligence.
Maria had to be called to interpret everything, and usually to do it
too. A charm seemed to have departed from the villa with no Demon to
keep them comfortable and uncomfortable at once.

“Why should we wait and shiver here any longer?” asked Peripatetica.
“Persephone is surely coming first on the other side of Ætna.”

“Why should we? Let us start on,” said Jane.

Domenica returned to them, a pale yellow Demon, but bustling as ever,
too late to affect their decision. Trunks were packed, towering
packing-cases stuffed with their Taormina acquisitions. Fraulein’s last
wonderful pudding eaten, Ætna seen looming vapory white above the
terrace for the last time, Old Nina had carried down through the garden
from the well, in a Greek jar on her grey head, the water for their last
tub, Maria had peeped her last “Questo,” Frau Schuler and her polite
son, the Fraulein, Maria, and Carola, had all presented fragrant
nosegays, Adalina, too, with pompadour more aggressive than ever,
appeared to offer them violets and hint a receptivity to a parting
douceur herself. Every one was bidding them regretful farewells.
Touched, and themselves regretful to leave so much kindness and charm,
with melting heart the last goodby of all was said to Domenica, and her
wages for the last two weeks pressed into her palm.

“You have served us so well, we have made no deduction for the days you
were first ill, and we had no one; nor for the days when we had your
little girl instead,” said Jane.

Oh! had Ætna burst into eruption? The whole smiling morning landscape
was darkened by the wild black figure pouring down shrill volleys of
wrathful Italian on their devoted heads. This Fury threatening with
flashing eyes and wild gesture was their gentle Domenica—now a demon
indeed!

They shrank aghast unable to catch a word in the rapid torrent.

“What _is_ the matter?” they cried to Frau Schuler.

With Teuton phlegm she dropped a word into the flood.

“You have not paid her for the hour she has been here this morning.”

“No, because we have paid her just the same for the days on which we had
no one and the ten days on which we had only that stupid child—and have
given the precious Adalina a _mancia_ too. But good gracious, we will
pay her more if she feels that way!”

“Indeed, you must not!” said the Frau briskly. “It is an abominable
imposition. She has been much overpaid now, that is the trouble, she
thinks you easy game. Listen, my woman, and shame yourself,” she turned
to Domenica, “you disgrace your town to these good Signorine, who have
acted so generously to you!”

The raging demon looked into her calm face and at the two astounded
American ones, and the storm quieted as quickly as it had come ... in an
instant’s metamorphosis she was again the amiable little person of all
the weeks of service, saying:

“Many, many thanks to the ladies, and a pleasant journey, and might they
come back again soon to Taormina!”

She snatched Peripatetica’s coat away from Maria, and Jane’s kodak from
out her hand, and bore them off to the carriage with all her usual
assiduous energy.

One last pat to the puppy, graduated this very morning to real collar
and chain attaching him to new huge kennel, the warring friendliness of
his heart and the conscientious effort to live up to his
responsibilities struggling more pathetically than ever in his grey
eyes, and they passed up the pergola for the last time, and out of the
pink gate to continue their quest.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Illustration: Decoration]

CHAPTER III

ONE DEAD IN THE FIELDS

“Where he fell there he lay down and died.”

SIR JOHN LUBBOCK tells a story—and this story teaches an obvious
lesson—of certain red warrior ants, who capture black fellow pismires,
and hold them as slaves; an outrage which must certainly shock all true
pismitarian ants. The captors become in time so dependent upon their
negro servants that, when deprived of their attendants, they are unable
to feed or clean themselves, and lie helplessly upon their backs, feebly
waving their paws in the air!...

Peripatetica, having but recently suffered the loss of a maiden slave of
a dozen years’ standing, had suffered a like moral disintegration, and
she violently lost her taste for travel whenever it became necessary to
move from one place to another, attempting to deal with her packing by a
mere series of helpless paw-wavings, most picturesque to observe, but
which for all practical purposes were highly inefficient. So when she
and Jane dropped down and down the zigzags to Giardini—each of those
famous views self-consciously presenting itself in turn for the last
time—the light figure which hurled itself boldly down the steeps by a
short cut, springing along the daring descent with the sure-footed
confidence of a goat, proved to be not a wing-heeled Mercury conveying
an affectionate message from the gods, but merely a boy from the villa
fetching Peripatetica’s left-behind nail brush, hot-water bottle, and
umbrella....

From Giardini a spacious plain curves all the way to Syracuse. This
broken level is built upon a foundation of inky lava cast out from
Hephæstos’ forge in Ætna, in whose wrinkled crevices of black and broken
stone has been caught and held all the stored richness of the denuded
mountains so long ago stripped of trees; and in this plain grain and
flowers and trees innumerable find food and footing. Peripatetica, bred
in deep-soiled, fertile fields with wide horizons, drew, as they passed
into the open vistas, deep breaths of refreshment and joy. The fierce,
soaring aridity of Taormina had oppressed her with a restless sense of
imprisonment. Her elbows were as passionate lovers of liberty as the
Spartans, and she demanded proper space in which to move them. What she
called a view was a _view_, not merely more mountains climbing, blind
and obstinate, between the eye and the landscape. Being, too, of a race
always worshippers of Demeter—a race which had spent generations in her
service, which considered the cultivation of the soil the only possible
occupation of a gentleman, and all other businesses the mere wretched
astonishing fate of the unfortunate—she rejoiced loudly and fatiguingly
over the blessedness of a return to a sweet land of farms.

“I don’t call that Taormina window-box-gardening on tiny stone ledges a
thousand feet up in the air _farming_,” she scoffed.

“If your tongue was a spade what crops you would raise!” sniffed Jane.

“Well, I raise big harvests of diversion in my own spirit,” retorted the
unsuppressed chatterer. “Besides, it’s now my turn to talk. You have
done a lot of elaborate speechifying about Taormina. I made you a
present of the whole jaggèd, attitudinizing old place, and for the
moment I mean to flow unchecked! You needn’t listen if you don’t like. I
enjoy hearing myself speak, whether anyone pays the smallest attention
or not.”

Which was why, while Jane settled down comfortably to a copy of
Theocritus, Peripatetica continued to entertain her own soul with spoken
and unspoken comments as to a certain restful letting down of tension
which resulted from sliding away from the dazzling, lofty Olympianism of
Taormina into a region Cyclopean, perhaps, but with a dawning suggestion
of coming humanity. For here, in this plain, succeeding those bright
presences that were the elementary forces of nature—forces of the earth
and sea and sun, of fire and dew, of thunder, wind, and rain, of the
shining day, and the night with its changing moon—first came the
primitive earth-spirits, rude and rugged, or delicate and vapourous.
Creatures not gods—no longer immutable and immortal, but stronger,
older, greater than man, who was yet to come. Creatures partaking
somewhat of the nature of both gods and men, but subject to
transformation into stream and fountain, into tree and flower; very near
to the earth, yet swayed by human passions, by human sorrows and joys.

This plain was the home of nymph and oread, of dryad and faun. Here had
the Cyclops and the Titans wrought—first of the great race of Armourers
and Smiths—under the tutelage of Vulcan, shaping the beams of the
heavens, and the ribs of the earth; arming the gods and forging the
lightning.

Ulysses, the earliest of impassioned tourists, had had dealings on this
very spot with the last of the Cyclops. A degenerate scion of the great
old race, as the last of a great race is apt to be, Polyphemus had sunk
to the mere keeping of sheep, and according to Ulysses’ own story he got
the better of Polyphemus, and related, upon returning home, the triumph
of his superior cunning, with the same naïve relish with which the
modern Cookie retails his supposed outwitting of the native curio
dealer. Very near to the train, as it ran by the sea’s edge, lay the
huge fragments of lava which the blinded Cyclop had cast in futile rage
after the escaping Greeks. He was a great stone-thrower, was Polyphemus,
for further along the coast lay the boulders he had flung at Acis, the
beautiful young shepherd. Polyphemus having still an eye in those days,
his aim was truer, and the shepherd was killed, but who may baffle true
love? The dead boy melted away beneath the stones and was transformed to
the bright and racing river Acis (which they crossed just then), and the
river, flowing round the stones, runs still across the plain to fling
itself into the arms of the sea-nymph Galatea. So the two still meet as
of old, and play laughingly together in and out among the huge rocks,
which certainly might have been flung there by Ætna in one of her
volcanic furies, but which, if one may believe the Greek story, were
really the gigantic weapons of a cruel jealousy.

Jane and Peripatetica could put their heads out of the windows and study
history and legend at their ease, the train ambling amiably and not too
rapidly through the lovely land, where the near return of Persephone was
foreshadowed in the delicate rosy clouds of the Judas trees drifting
across the black green of dense carobs. It was foretold, too, by the
broad yellow mustard fields blooming under the shadow of silver-grey
olive orchards; Fields-of-the-Cloth-of-Gold they were, about which
Spring was pitching white tents of plum flowers in which to sign royal
alliance with Summer. They saw old Sicilian farm-steadings here and
there crowning the rising ground on either hand, freaked and lichened
with years, and showing among their spiring cypresses the square towers
to which the inhabitants had fled for safety in the old days of
Levantine piracy. Many of these houses were very old, six or eight
hundred years old, it was said. Orange and lemon groves on either side
the way still hung heavy with fruit, plainly feeling it a duty laid upon
them to look like the trees in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes; like the
trees of all the Old Masters’ backgrounds. Invariably being round, close
clumps of green set thick with golden balls, quite unlike the orange
trees in America, which have never had proper decorative and artistic
models set for their copying, and therefore grow carelessly and less
beautifully.

As far as the eye could reach the whole land was furred with the tender
green of sprouting corn. For this was once Europe’s granary, and the
place of Rome’s bread; here Demeter first taught man to sow and reap,
and despite Ætna’s fires, despite the destruction and ravaging of a
thousand wars, and thousands of years of careless unrestorative use of
the soil, corn still grows on this plain, so hard, so perfect, and so
nourishing of grain that no Sicilian can afford to eat it, selling his
own crop to macaroni manufacturers, and contenting himself with a poorer
imported wheat for his dark daily bread.

In these rich meadows, too, replacing the frigid little
Evangelical-looking goat of Taormina, browsed fat flocks in snowy silken
fleeces, and with long wavy horns. Flocks that were tended by shepherds
draped in faded blue or brown hooded cloaks, wearing sheep’s wool bound
about their cross-gartered legs, their feet shod with hairy goat-skin
shoes. They leaned in contemplative attitudes on long staves—as every
right-minded shepherd should—so old a picture, so unchanged from
far-off, pastoral days! Just so had they shown themselves to Theocritus,
when that sweet young singer of the early time had wandered here among
the herdsmen, the fishers, and the delvers in the good brown earth, in
the days when the Greeks still lived and ruled here, so long and long
ago.

“I wish they would pipe,” said Peripatetica. “It only needs to complete
the picture that innocent sweet trilling of the shepherd’s reed that is
like the voices of the birds and of the cicalas.”

“Oh, they daren’t do it here in high noon,” remonstrated Jane. “For fear
of Pan, you know.” And she turned back the pages of her little book to
read aloud the sweetest and perfectest of the Idyls....

THYRSIS. Sweet, meseems, is the whispering sound of yonder pine tree,
goatherd, that murmureth by the wells of water; and sweet are thy
pipings. After Pan the second prize shalt thou bear away, and if he take
the horned goat, the she-goat shalt thou win; but if he choose the
she-goat for his meed, the kid falls to thee, and dainty is the flesh of
kids ere the age when thou milkest them.

THE GOATHERD. Sweeter, O shepherd, is thy song than the music of yonder
water that is poured from the high face of the rock! Yea, if the Muses
take the young ewe for their gift, a stall-fed lamb shalt thou receive
for thy meed; but if it please them to take the lamb, thou shalt lead
away the ewe for the second prize.

THYRSIS. Wilt thou, goatherd, in the nymphs’ name, wilt thou sit thee
down here, among the tamarisks, on this sloping knoll, and pipe while in
this place I watch thy flocks?

[Illustration: “PAN’S GOAT HERD”]

GOATHERD. Nay, shepherd, it may not be; we may not pipe in the noontide.
’Tis Pan we dread, who truly at this hour rests weary from the chase;
and bitter of mood is he, the keen wrath sitting ever at his nostrils.
But, Thyrsis, for that thou surely wert wont to sing _The Affliction of
Daphnis_, and hast most deeply meditated the pastoral muse, come hither,
and beneath yonder elm let us sit down, in face of Priapus and the
fountain fairies, where is that resting-place of the shepherds, and
where the oak trees are. Ah! if thou wilt but sing as on that day thou
sangest in thy match with Chromis out of Libya, I will let thee milk,
ay, three times, a goat that is the mother of twins, and even when she
has suckled her kids her milk doth fill two pails. A deep bowl of
ivy-wood, too, I will give thee, rubbed with sweet bees’-wax, a
two-eared bowl newly wrought, smacking still of the knife of the graver.
Round its upper edges goes the ivy winding, ivy besprent with golden
flowers; and about it is a tendril twisted that joys in its saffron
fruit. Within is designed a maiden, as fair a thing as the gods could
fashion, arrayed in a sweeping robe, and a snood on her head. Beside her
two youths with fair love-locks are contending from either side, with
alternate speech, but her heart thereby is all untouched. And now on one
she glances, smiling, and anon she lightly flings the other a thought,
while by reason of the long vigils of love their eyes are heavy, but
their labour is all in vain.

Beyond these an ancient fisherman and a rock are fashioned, a rugged
rock, whereon with might and main the old man drags a great net for his
cast, as one that labours stoutly. Thou wouldst say that he is fishing
with all the might of his limbs, so big the sinews swell all about his
neck, grey-haired though he be, but his strength is as the strength of
youth. Now divided but a little space from the sea-worn old man is a
vineyard laden well with fire-red clusters, and on the rough wall a
little lad watches the vineyard, sitting there. Round him two she-foxes
are skulking, and one goes along the vine-rows to devour the ripe
grapes, and the other brings all her cunning to bear against the scrip,
and vows she will never leave the lad, till she strand him bare and
breakfastless. But the boy is plaiting a pretty locust-cage with stalks
of asphodel, and fitting it with reeds, and less care of his scrip has
he, and of the vines, than delight in his plaiting.

All about the cup is spread the soft acanthus, a miracle of varied work,
a thing for thee to marvel on. For this bowl I paid to a Calydonian
ferryman a goat and a great white cream cheese. Never has its lip
touched mine, but it still lies maiden for me. Gladly with this cup
would I gain thee to my desire, if thou, my friend, wilt sing me that
delightful song. Nay, I grudge it thee not at all. Begin, my friend, for
be sure thou canst in no wise carry thy song with thee to Hades, that
puts all things out of mind!

_The Song of Thyrsis._

_Begin, ye Muses dear, begin the pastoral song!_ Thyrsis of Ætna am I,
and this is the voice of Thyrsis. Where, ah! where were ye when Daphnis
was languishing; ye Nymphs, where were ye? By Peneus’ beautiful dells,
or by dells of Pindus? for surely ye dwelt not by the great stream of
the river Anapus, nor on the watch-tower of Ætna, nor by the sacred
water of Acis.