Among the Olive Groves
Quite by accident as it seemed, the Sorority of the Camellia Buds had
turned itself from a society instituted for mutual protection and fun
into a Crusaders' Union, pledged, like Spenser's Red Cross Knight, to
avenge the wrongs of distressed damsels in the junior forms. The ring of
battle certainly added a spice of excitement to their secret. It was
much more interesting to interfere personally on behalf of their
protégées than to place debatable matters before the prefects. If war
were involved with another sorority it could not be helped. And war
there undoubtedly was. Bertha and Mabel, too clever to court open
ignominy, desisted for the present from biscuit-snatching, but sought
other means of retaliation. It was unfortunate for Irene and Lorna that
Mabel had been apportioned to them as a roommate. Both she and Elsie
were members of the rival sorority, so there was division in No. 3
dormitory. Sometimes the opposing factions would not speak to one
another at all. Elsie was more stand-off than actively disagreeable and
kept herself to her own cubicle, but Mabel was openly annoying. She
transgressed every rule of dormitory etiquette, dashed for the bathroom
instead of waiting her due turn, dumped her belongings on to other
people's chairs, spread the center table with her papers, fidgeted
during study hours, and in various ways made herself objectionable.
Irene and Lorna, as sworn buddies, cemented yet more firmly the bond
between them, and supported one another on every possible occasion.
Irene was really growing fond of Lorna. Though the latter might be
reserved it was something to find a ready listener and sympathizer. As a
rule we can't deliberately choose our soul-friends. Fate just seems to
send them along and we must accept them with all their faults or go
without. It certainly does not do to be too particular, or we may soon
find ourselves chumless in the world. Irene was rather lovelorn for
Peachy, but that bright little American, besides being in an upper
dormitory, was before-appropriated by other "heart-to-hearties," and,
though she held out the palm of good fellowship, was too staunch a
character to desert old friends for new.
"She's just sweet to me, but I don't count first," decided Irene. "Well,
it's no use being jealous. If you can't have the moon you must be
content with a star, that's all. It's a vast amount better than
nothing."
Lorna might more aptly be described as a planet than a star, for her
thoughts had started to revolve round Irene in a fixed orbit. As regards
her half of the bargain she was absolutely content. She adored her
buddy, and blessed the lot that had coupled their names together. She
had not before made a real friend, and Irene's happy-go-lucky,
affectionate, confiding disposition appealed to her. She began to try to
protect her and look after her. It was really something of the mother
instinct cropping out. She had never possessed a sister or anything
little of her own to love, and it was a new experience to find a girl,
rather small and younger than herself, who clung to her and seemed
actually fond of her. Life, which had hitherto been chilly and
self-centered, suddenly grew warm. She had been used to pose as one who
disliked school, but with this fresh interest her views on the subject
underwent a change.
Any girl must indeed have been hard to please who was not satisfied
with the Villa Camellia and its beautiful Italian garden. All through
the month of February flowers were in bloom there which in England only
peep out timidly in April or May, and often will not brave a northern
climate at all. The front of the house was covered with a glorious
purple bougainvillea, violets bloomed under the orange and lemon trees,
and the camellias, from which the villa took its name, flourished in
profusion, growing as great trees ten or twelve feet high and covered
with rose-colored, white, or scarlet blossoms. Iris, freesias,
narcissus, red salvias, marguerites, pansies, pink peonies, wallflowers,
polyanthus, petunias, stocks, genistas, arbutula, cinerarias, begonias,
and belladonna-lilies kept up a brave display in the border, and, though
they would be more beautiful and luxuriant later on in the season, they
nevertheless dispelled the idea of winter. The general temperature at
Fossato resembled an English April, the sunshine was warm, but the wind
was apt to be chilly, and at night-time it was quite cold, though never
frosty. The central heating apparatus was kept going in the school, and
the girls, though they might run about without coats in the sunshine,
were always required to have a warm jersey at hand, for the wind at this
season could be treacherous, and those unused to the climate, deceived
by its brightness and wealth of flowers, were very liable to catch
chills and to be laid up with feverish colds as the result of their own
imprudence. Sometimes indeed a bitter sirocco wind would blow, and bring
torrents of rain to turn the blue sea and sky to a leaden gray and to
blot out the view of Naples and Vesuvius, but it seldom lasted more than
a few days, and in a land of drought was welcomed to refresh the gardens
and to fill the cisterns and water-tanks.
It has been mentioned in a previous chapter that the Villa Camellia was
of necessity run somewhat on convent lines. In Italy young girls do not
walk about unchaperoned as in England and America, but are always very
closely escorted by older people, and it was advisable to keep to the
customs of the country. The pupils obtained most of their exercise
inside their own garden. On Sundays they paraded to the British church,
but otherwise they did not very often go into Fossato. Once a week, if
the weather were fine, a limited number were taken for an expedition,
but Irene had been at school for some weeks before this good fortune
fell to her lot. One lucky Wednesday, however, she found her name and
Lorna's written on the list of "exeats" on the notice-board, and flew to
announce the glad tidings to her chum.
"Twelve of us, with Miss Bickford and Miss Parr as leaders. Won't it be
ripping? It says Monte Pellegrino. Where's that? The big hill over
there? Oh, great! I love a climb! I'm just dancing to go! I feel as if I
had been boxed up inside these big walls for years and years. I only
wish Peachy and Delia had been on the list too."
"But we are!" exclaimed Delia's excited voice behind her. "Stella and
Marjorie both have colds, so we've swapped places with them, and they'll
go next time instead. Isn't it fine!"
"I'm tingling right down to my toes," agreed Peachy, her jolly little
freckled face one wide grin. "It's going to be an afternoon of
afternoons."
"If it doesn't rain," said Lorna, eyeing the sky suspiciously.
"Oh, don't be a wet blanket! It's no use courting trouble, honey, as
Willy Shakespeare says somewhere. Oh, well, if it wasn't Willy
Shakespeare it was somebody else who said it, and it's just as true
anyway. Take your umbrella and wait till the rain comes down before you
grumble. I've got an exeat and I didn't expect it, and I'm going off my
head a little. That's all! Don't worry yourselves about me. I'm sane at
the bottom."
With Peachy and Delia prancing about and hardly able to regulate their
satisfaction the expedition promised to be a lively one, though the
harum-scarum pair calmed down in the presence of Miss Bickford, and
assumed a deportment of due decorum. The favored twelve were half
seniors and half Transition, the remaining pair of the latter consisting
of Bertha Ford and Mabel Hughes. The Camellia Buds exchanged eloquent
glances at the sight of their arch-enemies, but wisely forbore to make
any provocative remarks; Delia indeed even murmured something pleasant
about the excursion to which Bertha grunted a reply, so the party
started off in apparent harmony.
Antonio, with his big key, unlocked the great gate, they filed through
into the eucalyptus-shaded road, and in ten minutes they had left the
quiet school behind them, and were down in the gay little town of
Fossato. It was new and wonderful to Irene. The wide main street with
its intense brilliant sunshine contrasting with the deep shade of the
narrow side streets, the open shop-fronts with their displays of
picturesque wares, the stalls of fruit and vegetables sold by quaint
country vendors, the balconies full of flowers, the kindly, dark-eyed,
smiling people, the pretty peasant children clattering about in heelless
wooden shoes, the brightly painted carts and the horses decorated with
flowers and feathers as if for a perpetual May Day, all made up a scene
that was more like a portion of a play than a piece of real life, and
made her almost able to imagine herself upon the stage of a theater.
They had reached a great square, where leafless trees were covered with
a beautiful purple blossom, something like mezereon. From a marble
fountain bareheaded women, with exquisitely arranged dark tresses and
bright handkerchiefs folded shawl-wise round their shoulders, were
drawing water in brass pitchers, and chattering the soft southern
dialect with the pretty tuneful Neapolitan voices that speak like
singing and sing like opera. An equestrian statue of Garibaldi stood on
a pedestal in the midst of a flowerbed of gay geraniums, and below, in
the shadow, a military officer, with a gorgeous pale blue cloak draped
over one shoulder, was talking to two Italian soldiers whose plumed hats
were adorned with shining cocks' feathers.
Miss Bickford, in the van of the Villa Camellia queue, strode on,
taking no notice, beyond a firm shake of the head, of the various
interruptions that met her path--the drivers who offered their carriages
for hire, the smiling women who thrust forward baskets of oranges for
sale, the beguiling children who held out little brown hands and begged
for _soldi_ (halfpennies), and the post-card vendors who spread out sets
of colored views of the neighborhood. It was a good thing that Miss Parr
was at the rear of the procession to keep order, or the girls would have
succumbed to some of these temptations and have broken rank, an
unpardonable offense in the eyes of the school authorities, who wished
to keep up the prestige of their establishment in the estimation of the
town, and to emulate the convent school on the hill, whose pupils
marched along the high street as demurely as young nuns.
Turning out of the piazza they walked alongside a deep natural gorge
which divided Fossato from the open country. This immense ravine was a
fearsome place, with a sheer descent of many hundreds of feet; its
jagged rocks were clothed with bushes and creepers, and clefts and the
openings of caves could be seen amongst the greenery. The girls leaned
on the low wall and shuddered as they gazed down the precipice.
"Antonio and Dominica say that dwarfs live in the caves down there,"
remarked Peachy. "Half the people in the town believe in them, but
they're too afraid to go and see because the dwarfs have 'the evil eye,'
and would bring them bad luck."
"What superstitious nonsense!" laughed Rachel. "How _can_ they make up
such stuff?"
"Not altogether such nonsense as you think," corrected Miss Bickford,
who was a student of archæology; "indeed _I_ find it intensely
interesting. It's a case of survival of tradition. A few thousand years
ago no doubt a race of little short dark Stone Age men actually lived in
those caves, and took good care to avenge themselves on any of the
taller, stronger tribes who interfered with them and tried to push them
out of their territory. The remembrance of them would be handed down
long after they had become extinct, and, of course their doings were
exaggerated, and their cunning tricks were set down to magic. Just as
the prehistoric monsters lingered as dragons and firedrakes, so the
small early inhabitants of Europe have passed into dwarfs and brownies
and pixies. If anybody cared to dig in those caves I dare say flint
weapons might be found. It's a chance for the local antiquarian society
if they'd only take it."
Leaving the gorge the party turned up a steep and very narrow alley
between walls nine or ten feet high. At the tops of these walls were
raised gardens planted with orange and lemon trees, whose fruit, in all
stages of green, gold, and yellow, overshadowed the path. Across some of
them were erected shelters of reeds or plaited grass, to prevent too
quick ripening, but in some of the orchards the crop was ready, and
workers were busy with ladders and baskets gathering their early
harvests. It was a picturesque route, for the sides of the deep walls
were covered with beautiful maidenhair ferns, and over the tops hung
geraniums or clumps of white iris or purple stocks or clusters of little
red roses. Here and there, at a corner, was a wayside shrine with a
faded picture of the Madonna, and a quaint brass lamp in front, and
perhaps some flowers laid there by loving hands; dark-eyed smiling
little children were playing about and giving each other rides in
home-made hand-carts, and at one point the girls stood aside to let pass
a donkey so loaded with tiny bamboo trees that it looked a mere moving
mass of green.
At length the deep alley between the orange orchards gave way to a
different scene. They had been climbing steadily uphill, and now found
themselves above the fruit zone and among the olive groves. The high
walls had disappeared, and the path ascended by a series of steps. Gray
olive trees were on either side, and on the bordering banks grew lovely
wild flowers, starry purple anemones, jack-in-the-pulpit lilies, yellow
oxalis, moon-daisies, and the beautiful genista which we treasure as a
conservatory plant in England. As it was country the girls were allowed
to break rank, and keenly enjoyed gathering bouquets; they scrambled up
the banks, vying with one another in getting the best specimens. The
view from the heights was glorious: below them stretched the gray-green
of the olive groves, broken here and there by the bright pink blossoms
of a peach tree; the white houses of Fossato gleamed among the dark
glossy foliage of its orange orchards, and beyond stretched the
beautiful bay of Naples, with its sea a blaze of blue, and old Vesuvius
smoking in the distance like a warning of trouble to come.
It was at this point of the walk that Irene, foolish, luckless Irene,
made a fatal mistake, and, as Miss Bickford afterwards told her,
"wrecked the whole excursion and spoiled everybody's pleasure." She
beckoned Lorna and ran up a hill to obtain a higher vantage ground,
then, instead of descending by the route she had come, she insisted upon
taking a short cut to rejoin the path and catch up with the rest of the
party. Now neither Lorna nor Irene was aware that the mountain was a
network of many paths leading to little vineyards and gardens, and that
when they ran down the opposite side of the slope they were striking a
fresh alley, altogether different from the one along which Miss Bickford
was leading her flock. For quite a long way the two girls walked on,
thinking they were in advance of the others and had stolen a march upon
them. Then they sat down and waited, but nobody came. It was a
considerable time before it dawned upon them that they were separated
from the rest of the party.
"We've come wrong somehow," said Lorna, in much consternation.
"What had we better do?"
"I don't know."
"Perhaps they're not far off. I'll try if I can make them hear."
"I wouldn't shout," objected Lorna, but she was too late, for Irene
was already letting off her full lung power in a gigantic coo-e-e. It
had a totally different effect from what she anticipated. No schoolgirls
with Villa Camellia hats made their appearance, but some rough looking
Italian youths scrambled over a fence and came sniggering towards them.
Their manner was so objectionable and offensive that the girls turned
and ran. They pelted down the path anywhere, quite oblivious of the
direction they were taking, and, as a matter of fact, branching yet
farther away from their original route. They could hear footsteps and
giggling laughter behind, and they were growing extremely terrified when
to their immense relief they saw in front of them an elderly peasant
woman coming from the town. She had a bright yellow handkerchief round
her neck and carried on her head a big basket containing flasks of oil,
loaves of bread, and some vegetables. She stopped in some astonishment
as Lorna and Irene rushed panting up to her, then glimpsing the lads she
seemed to grasp the situation, and called out angrily to them in
Italian, whereupon they promptly and rapidly disappeared. As she had
reached the gateway of her own garden she motioned the girls to enter,
and they gladly availed themselves of the opportunity to seek sanctuary.
A large archway led into a paved courtyard, on one side of which was a
little brown house, and on the other a small chapel, quite a picture
with its quaint half-Moorish tower and two large bells. Their new friend
seemed to be the caretaker, for she escorted them inside to show them,
with much pride, an altar-piece attributed to Perugino and some ancient
faded frescoes of haloed saints. She gave them a peep into her house
too, and they were deeply interested to see the unfamiliar foreign home,
not comfortable according to British or American ideas of comfort, but
with a certain charm of its own. There was a big dark room on the ground
floor with an orange press, various agricultural implements, and
numberless baskets for gathering fruit; there was a bare kitchen with a
wood fire and a table spread with cups and dishes; then up a winding
stair was a bedroom with walls colored sky blue, and a veranda that
looked down over a glorious orange orchard.
"Oh, I'd adore to go out there!" said Irene, pointing to the path that
led between the fruit-laden trees, and their hostess evidently divined
her meaning, for she not only led her guests into the garden, but
fetched a ladder, climbed a tree, and plucked each of them a whole
cluster of oranges surrounded by a bunch of leaves.
The girls were so delighted with their entertainment in this Italian
cottage that they hardly wished to tear themselves away, yet a vision of
Miss Bickford's reproachful face began to hover before their eyes, and
Lorna at last suggested that they must be moving.
"I hope those abominable boys aren't waiting about anywhere outside,"
shivered Irene.
The same thought seemed to have struck their hostess, for she called an
elderly man, evidently her husband, who was pruning vines, and began a
catechism as to where her visitors lived. Lorna replied as well as her
knowledge of Italian allowed, and at the mention of the Villa Camellia
the pair nodded in comprehension. After a brief conversation with his
wife in an undertone the old man offered himself as guide, and undertook
to escort the truants safely back to school again, a proposal which they
thankfully accepted. It would indeed have been difficult for them to
find their own way among the various interlacing paths, and they were
particularly glad to have his protection against possible _ragazzi_.
There was tremendous trouble waiting for them at the Villa Camellia.
Poor Miss Parr had collapsed almost into hysterics, and Miss Bickford
with two other teachers had returned to the hillside on a further
search, while Miss Rodgers was communicating by telephone with the
Fossato police station, and offering a reward for any news of their
whereabouts. Irene had thought the principal could be stern, but she
never knew how her eyes could flash before that interview in the study.
Both girls came out quaking like jellies and weeping for all to hear.
"Did you catch it hot?" inquired Peachy, sympathetically linking arms
with the truants.
"Rather! It isn't the punishments so much, it's that she made us so
_ashamed_."
"Our parole won't be trusted till after half-term."
"We didn't _mean_ to run away."
"It was really quite an accident."
"Cheer up!" consoled Peachy. "Miss Rodgers cuts like a steel knife, but
she doesn't bear grudges. I will say that for her. With some teachers
you'd never hear the last of it, but once you've worked off your
impositions you'll be quite in favor again. Whatever possessed you to go
and do it though?"
"Just our wretched bad luck, I suppose," said Irene, rubbing her eyes
as she turned up the passage and deposited her confiscated cluster of
oranges, as directed, in the pantry.