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.