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.
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[Illustration: Decoration]