ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.
"We are going to follow the track of Ulysses," said Katy, with her eyes
fixed on the little travelling-map in her guide-book. "Do you realize
that, Polly dear? He and his companions sailed these very seas before
us, and we shall see the sights they saw,--Circe's Cape and the Isles of
the Sirens, and Polyphemus himself, perhaps, who knows?"
The "Marco Polo" had just cast off her moorings, and was slowly steaming
out of the crowded port of Genoa into the heart of a still rosy sunset.
The water was perfectly smooth; no motion could be felt but the engine's
throb. The trembling foam of the long wake showed glancing points of
phosphorescence here and there, while low on the eastern sky a great
silver planet burned like a signal lamp.
"Polyphemus was a horrible giant. I read about him once, and I don't
want to see him," observed Amy, from her safe protected perch in her
mother's lap.
"He may not be so bad now as he was in those old times. Some missionary
may have come across him and converted him. If he were good, you
wouldn't mind his being big, would you?" suggested Katy.
"N-o," replied Amy, doubtfully; "but it would take a great lot of
missionaries to make _him_ good, I should think. One all alone would be
afraid to speak to him. We shan't really see him, shall we?"
"I don't believe we shall; and if we stuff cotton in our ears and look
the other way, we need not hear the sirens sing," said Katy, who was in
the highest spirits.--"And oh, Polly dear, there is one delightful thing
I forgot to tell you about. The captain says he shall stay in Leghorn
all day to-morrow taking on freight, and we shall have plenty of time to
run up to Pisa and see the Cathedral and the Leaning Tower and
everything else. Now, that is something Ulysses didn't do! I am so glad
I didn't die of measles when I was little, as Rose Red used to say." She
gave her book a toss into the air as she spoke, and caught it again as
it fell, very much as the Katy Carr of twelve years ago might have done.
"What a child you are!" said Mrs. Ashe, approvingly; "you never seem out
of sorts or tired of things."
"Out of sorts? I should think not! And pray why should I be,
Polly dear?"
Katy had taken to calling her friend "Polly dear" of late,--a trick
picked up half unconsciously from Lieutenant Ned. Mrs. Ashe liked it;
it was sisterly and intimate, she said, and made her feel nearer
Katy's age.
"Does the tower really lean?" questioned Amy,--"far over, I mean, so
that we can see it?"
"We shall know to-morrow," replied Katy. "If it doesn't, I shall lose
all my confidence in human nature."
Katy's confidence in human nature was not doomed to be impaired. There
stood the famous tower, when they reached the Place del Duomo in Pisa,
next morning, looking all aslant, exactly as it does in the pictures and
the alabaster models, and seeming as if in another moment it must topple
over, from its own weight, upon their heads. Mrs. Ashe declared that it
was so unnatural that it made her flesh creep; and when she was coaxed
up the winding staircase to the top, she turned so giddy that they were
all thankful to get her safely down to firm ground again. She turned her
back upon the tower, as they crossed the grassy space to the majestic
old Cathedral, saying that if she thought about it any more, she should
become a disbeliever in the attraction of gravitation, which she had
always been told all respectable people _must_ believe in.
The guide showed them the lamp swinging by a long slender chain, before
which Galileo is said to have sat and pondered while he worked out his
theory of the pendulum. This lamp seemed a sort of own cousin to the
attraction of gravitation, and they gazed upon it with respect. Then
they went to the Baptistery to see Niccolo Pisano's magnificent pulpit
of creamy marble, a mass of sculpture supported on the backs of lions,
and the equally lovely font, and to admire the extraordinary sound
which their guide evoked from a mysterious echo, with which he seemed
to be on intimate terms, for he made it say whatever he would and
almost "answer back."
It was in coming out of the Baptistery that they met with an adventure
which Amy could never quite forget. Pisa is the mendicant city of Italy,
and her streets are infested with a band of religious beggars who call
themselves the Brethren of the Order of Mercy. They wear loose black
gowns, sandals laced over their bare feet, and black cambric masks with
holes, through which their eyes glare awfully; and they carry tin cups
for the reception of offerings, which they thrust into the faces of all
strangers visiting the city, whom they look upon as their lawful prey.
As our party emerged from the Baptistery, two of these Brethren espied
them, and like great human bats came swooping down upon them with long
strides, their black garments flying in the wind, their eyes rolling
strangely behind their masks, and brandishing their alms-cups, which had
"Pour les Pauvres" lettered upon them, and gave forth a clapping sound
like a watchman's rattle. There was something terrible in their
appearance and the rushing speed of their movements. Amy screamed and
ran behind her mother, who visibly shrank. Katy stood her ground; but
the bat-winged fiends in Doré's illustrations to Dante occurred to her,
and her fingers trembled as she dropped some money in the cups.
Even mendicant friars are human. Katy ceased to tremble as she observed
that one of them, as he retreated, walked backward for some distance in
order to gaze longer at Mrs. Ashe, whose cheeks were flushed with bright
pink and who was looking particularly handsome. She began to laugh
instead, and Mrs. Ashe laughed too; but Amy could not get over the
impression of having been attacked by demons, and often afterward
recurred with a shudder to the time when those awful black _things_ flew
at her and she hid behind mamma. The ghastly pictures of the Triumph of
Death, which were presently exhibited to them on the walls of the Campo
Santo, did not tend to reassure her, and it was with quite a pale,
scared little face that she walked toward the hotel where they were to
lunch, and she held fast to Katy's hand.
Their way led them through a narrow street inhabited by the poorer
classes,--a dusty street with high shabby buildings on either side and
wide doorways giving glimpses of interior courtyards, where empty
hogsheads and barrels and rusty caldrons lay, and great wooden trays of
macaroni were spread out in the sun to dry. Some of the macaroni was
gray, some white, some yellow; none of it looked at all desirable to
eat, as it lay exposed to the dust, with long lines of ill-washed
clothes flapping above on wires stretched from one house to another. As
is usual in poor streets, there were swarms of children; and the
appearance of little Amy with her long bright hair falling over her
shoulders and Mabel clasped in her arms created a great sensation. The
children in the street shouted and exclaimed, and other children within
the houses heard the sounds and came trooping out, while mothers and
older sisters peeped from the doorways. The very air seemed full of
eager faces and little brown and curly heads bobbing up and down with
excitement, and black eyes all fixed upon big beautiful Mabel, who with
her thick wig of flaxen hair, her blue velvet dress and jacket,
feathered hat, and little muff, seemed to them like some strange small
marvel from another world. They could not decide whether she was a
living child or a make-believe one, and they dared not come near enough
to find out; so they clustered at a little distance, pointed with their
fingers, and whispered and giggled, while Amy, much pleased with the
admiration shown for her darling, lifted Mabel up to view.
At last one droll little girl with a white cap on her round head seemed
to make up _her_ mind, and darting indoors returned with her doll,--a
poor little image of wood, its only garment a coarse shirt of red
cotton. This she held out for Amy to see. Amy smiled for the first time
since her encounter with the bat-like friars; and Katy, taking Mabel
from her, made signs that the two dolls should kiss each other. But
though the little Italian screamed with laughter at the idea of a
_bacio_ between two dolls, she would by no means allow it, and hid her
treasure behind her back, blushing and giggling, and saying something
very fast which none of them understood, while she waved two fingers at
them with a curious gesture.
"I do believe she is afraid Mabel will cast the evil eye on her doll,"
said Katy at last, with a sudden understanding as to what this
pantomime meant.
"Why, you silly thing!" cried the outraged Amy; "do you suppose for one
moment that my child could hurt your dirty old dolly? You ought to be
glad to have her noticed at all by anybody that's clean."
The sound of the foreign tongue completed the discomfiture of the
little Italian. With a shriek she fled, and all the other children
after her; pausing at a distance to look back at the alarming creatures
who didn't speak the familiar language. Katy, wishing to leave a
pleasant impression, made Mabel kiss her waxen fingers toward them.
This sent the children off into another fit of laughter and chatter,
and they followed our friends for quite a distance as they proceeded on
their way to the hotel.
All that night, over a sea as smooth as glass, the "Marco Polo" slipped
along the coasts past which the ships of Ulysses sailed in those old
legendary days which wear so charmed a light to our modern eyes. Katy
roused at three in the morning, and looking from her cabin window had a
glimpse of an island, which her map showed her must be Elba, where that
war-eagle Napoleon was chained for a while. Then she fell asleep again,
and when she roused in full daylight the steamer was off the coast of
Ostia and nearing the mouth of the Tiber. Dreamy mountain-shapes rose
beyond the far-away Campagna, and every curve and indentation of the
coast bore a name which recalled some interesting thing.
About eleven a dim-drawn bubble appeared on the horizon, which the
captain assured them was the dome of St. Peter's, nearly thirty miles
distant. This was one of the "moments" which Clover had been fond of
speculating about; and Katy, contrasting the real with the imaginary
moment, could not help smiling. Neither she nor Clover had ever supposed
that her first glimpse of the great dome was to be so little impressive.
On and on they went till the air-hung bubble disappeared; and Amy, grown
very tired of scenery with which she had no associations, and grown-up
raptures which she did not comprehend, squeezed herself into the end of
the long wooden settee on which Katy sat, and began to beg for another
story concerning Violet and Emma.
"Just a little tiny chapter, you know, Miss Katy, about what they did on
New Year's Day or something. It's so dull to keep sailing and sailing
all day and have nothing to do, and it's ever so long since you told me
anything about them, really and truly it is!"
Now, Violet and Emma, if the truth is to be told, had grown to be the
bane of Katy's existence. She had rung the changes on their uneventful
adventures, and racked her brains to invent more and more details, till
her imagination felt like a dry sponge from which every possible drop of
moisture had been squeezed. Amy was insatiable. Her interest in the tale
never flagged; and when her exhausted friend explained that she really
could not think of another word to say on the subject, she would turn
the tables by asking, "Then, Miss Katy, mayn't I tell _you_ a chapter?"
whereupon she would proceed somewhat in this fashion:--
"It was the day before Christmas--no, we won't have it the day before
Christmas; it shall be three days before Thanksgiving. Violet and Emma
got up in the morning, and--well, they didn't do anything in particular
that day. They just had their breakfasts and dinners, and played and
studied a little, and went to bed early, you know, and the next morning
--well, there didn't much happen that day, either; they just had their
breakfasts and dinners, and played."
Listening to Amy's stories was so much worse than telling them to her,
that Katy in self-defence was driven to recommence her narrations, but
she had grown to hate Violet and Emma with a deadly hatred. So when Amy
made this appeal on the steamer's deck, a sudden resolution took
possession of her, and she decided to put an end to these dreadful
children once for all.
"Yes, Amy," she said, "I will tell you one more story about Violet and
Emma; but this is positively the last."
So Amy cuddled close to her friend, and listened with rapt attention as
Katy told how on a certain day just before the New Year, Violet and Emma
started by themselves in a little sleigh drawn by a pony, to carry to a
poor woman who lived in a lonely house high up on a mountain slope a
basket containing a turkey, a mould of cranberry jelly, a bunch of
celery, and a mince-pie.
"They were so pleased at having all these nice things to take to poor
widow Simpson and in thinking how glad she would be to see them,"
proceeded the naughty Katy, "that they never noticed how black the sky
was getting to be, or how the wind howled through the bare boughs of the
trees. They had to go slowly, for the road was up hill all the way, and
it was hard work for the poor pony. But he was a stout little fellow,
and tugged away up the slippery track, and Violet and Emma talked and
laughed, and never thought what was going to happen. Just half-way up
the mountain there was a rocky cliff which overhung the road, and on
this cliff grew an enormous hemlock tree. The branches were loaded with
snow, which made them much heavier than usual. Just as the sleigh passed
slowly underneath the cliff, a violent blast of wind blew up from the
ravine, struck the hemlock and tore it out of the ground, roots and all.
It fell directly across the sleigh, and Violet and Emma and the pony and
the basket with the turkey and the other things in it were all crushed
as flat as pancakes!"
"Well," said Amy, as Katy stopped, "go on! what happened then?"
"Nothing happened then," replied Katy, in a tone of awful solemnity;
"nothing could happen! Violet and Emma were dead, the pony was dead, the
things in the basket were broken all to little bits, and a great
snowstorm began and covered them up, and no one knew where they were or
what had become of them till the snow melted in the spring."
With a loud shriek Amy jumped up from the bench.
"No! no! no!" she cried; "they aren't dead! I won't let them be dead!"
Then she burst into tears, ran down the stairs, locked herself into her
mother's stateroom, and did not appear again for several hours.
Katy laughed heartily at first over this outburst, but presently she
began to repent and to think that she had treated her pet unkindly. She
went down and knocked at the stateroom door; but Amy would not answer.
She called her softly through the key-hole, and coaxed and pleaded, but
it was all in vain. Amy remained invisible till late in the afternoon;
and when she finally crept up again to the deck, her eyes were red with
crying, and her little face as pale and miserable as if she had been
attending the funeral of her dearest friend.
Katy's heart smote her.
"Come here, my darling," she said, holding out her hand; "come and sit
in my lap and forgive me. Violet and Emma shall not be dead. They shall
go on living, since you care so much for them, and I will tell stories
about them to the end of the chapter."
"No," said Amy, shaking her head mournfully; "you can't. They're dead,
and they won't come to life again ever. It's all over, and I'm so
so-o-rry."
All Katy's apologies and efforts to resuscitate the story were useless.
Violet and Emma were dead to Amy's imagination, and she could not make
herself believe in them any more.
She was too woe-begone to care for the fables of Circe and her swine
which Katy told as they rounded the magnificent Cape Circello, and the
isles where the sirens used to sing appealed to her in vain. The sun
set, the stars came out; and under the beams of their countless lamps
and the beckonings of a slender new moon, the "Marco Polo" sailed into
the Bay of Naples, past Vesuvius, whose dusky curl of smoke could be
seen outlined against the luminous sky, and brought her passengers to
their landing-place.
They woke next morning to a summer atmosphere full of yellow sunshine
and true July warmth. Flower-vendors stood on every corner, and pursued
each newcomer with their fragrant wares. Katy could not stop exclaiming
over the cheapness of the flowers, which were thrust in at the carriage
windows as they drove slowly up and down the streets. They were tied
into flat nosegays, whose centre was a white camellia, encircled with
concentric rows of pink tea rosebuds, ring after ring, till the whole
was the size of an ordinary milk-pan; all to be had for the sum of ten
cents! But after they had bought two or three of these enormous
bouquets, and had discovered that not a single rose boasted an inch of
stem, and that all were pierced with long wires through their very
hearts, she ceased to care for them.
"I would rather have one Souvenir or General Jacqueminot, with a long
stem and plenty of leaves, than a dozen of these stiff platters of
bouquets," Katy told Mrs. Ashe. But when they drove beyond the city
gates, and the coachman came to anchor beneath walls overhung with the
same roses, and she found that she might stand on the seat and pull down
as many branches of the lovely flowers as she desired, and gather
wallflowers for herself out of the clefts in the masonry, she was
entirely satisfied.
"This is the Italy of my dreams," she said.
With all its beauty there was an underlying sense of danger about
Naples, which interfered with their enjoyment of it. Evil smells came
in at the windows, or confronted them as they went about the city.
There seemed something deadly in the air. Whispered reports met their
ears of cases of fever, which the landlords of the hotels were doing
their best to hush up. An American gentleman was said to be lying very
ill at one house. A lady had died the week before at another. Mrs. Ashe
grew nervous.
"We will just take a rapid look at a few of the principal things," she
told Katy, "and then get away as fast as we can. Amy is so on my mind
that I have no peace of my life. I keep feeling her pulse and imagining
that she does not look right; and though I know it is all my fancy, I am
impatient to be off. You won't mind, will you, Katy?"
After that everything they did was done in a hurry. Katy felt as if she
were being driven about by a cyclone, as they rushed from one sight to
another, filling up all the chinks between with shopping, which was
irresistible where everything was so pretty and so wonderfully cheap.
She herself purchased a tortoise-shell fan and chain for Rose Red, and
had her monogram carved upon it; a coral locket for Elsie; some studs
for Dorry; and for her father a small, beautiful vase of bronze, copied
from one of the Pompeian antiques.
"How charming it is to have money to spend in such a place as this!" she
said to herself with a sigh of satisfaction as she surveyed these
delightful buyings. "I only wish I could get ten times as many things
and take them to ten times as many people. Papa was so wise about it. I
can't think how it is that he always knows beforehand exactly how people
are going to feel, and what they will want!"
Mrs. Ashe also bought a great many things for herself and Amy, and to
take home as presents; and it was all very pleasant and satisfactory
except for that subtle sense of danger from which they could not escape
and which made them glad to go. "See Naples and die," says the old
adage; and the saying has proved sadly true in the case of many an
American traveller.
Beside the talk of fever there was also a good deal of gossip about
brigands going about, as is generally the case in Naples and its
vicinity. Something was said to have happened to a party on one of the
heights above Sorrento; and though nobody knew exactly what the
something was, or was willing to vouch for the story, Mrs. Ashe and
Katy felt a good deal of trepidation as they entered the carriage which
was to take them to the neighborhood where the mysterious "something"
had occurred.
The drive between Castellamare and Sorrento is in reality as safe as
that between Boston and Brookline; but as our party did not know this
fact till afterward, it did them no good. It is also one of the most
beautiful drives in the world, following the windings of the exquisite
coast mile after mile, in long links of perfectly made road, carved on
the face of sharp cliffs, with groves of oranges and lemons and olive
orchards above, and the Bay of Naples beneath, stretching away like a
solid sheet of lapis-lazuli, and gemmed with islands of the most
picturesque form.
It is a pity that so much beauty should have been wasted on Mrs. Ashe
and Katy, but they were too frightened to half enjoy it. Their carriage
was driven by a shaggy young savage, who looked quite wild enough to be
a bandit himself. He cracked his whip loudly as they rolled along, and
every now and then gave a long shrill whistle. Mrs. Ashe was sure that
these were signals to his band, who were lurking somewhere on the
olive-hung hillsides. She thought she detected him once or twice making
signs to certain questionable-looking characters as they passed; and she
fancied that the people they met gazed at them with an air of
commiseration, as upon victims who were being carried to execution. Her
fears affected Katy; so, though they talked and laughed, and made jokes
to amuse Amy, who must not be scared or led to suppose that anything was
amiss, and to the outward view seemed a very merry party, they were
privately quaking in their shoes all the way, and enjoying a deal of
highly superfluous misery. And after all they reached Sorrento in
perfect safety; and the driver, who looked so dangerous, turned out to
be a respectable young man enough, with a wife and family to support,
who considered a plateful of macaroni and a glass of sour red wine as
the height of luxury, and was grateful for a small gratuity of thirty
cents or so, which would enable him to purchase these dainties. Mrs.
Ashe had a very bad headache next day, to pay for her fright; but she
and Katy agreed that they had been very foolish, and resolved to pay no
more attention to unaccredited rumors or allow them to spoil their
enjoyment, which was a sensible resolution to make.
Their hotel was perched directly over the sea. From the balcony of their
sitting-room they looked down a sheer cliff some sixty feet high, into
the water; their bedrooms opened on a garden of roses, with an orange
grove beyond. Not far from them was the great gorge which cuts the
little town of Sorrento almost in two, and whose seaward end makes the
harbor of the place. Katy was never tired of peering down into this
strange and beautiful cleft, whose sides, two hundred feet in depth, are
hung with vines and trailing growths of all sorts, and seem all
a-tremble with the fairy fronds of maiden-hair ferns growing out of
every chink and crevice. She and Amy took walks along the coast toward
Massa, to look off at the lovely island shapes in the bay, and admire
the great clumps of cactus and Spanish bayonet which grew by the
roadside; and they always came back loaded with orange-flowers, which
could be picked as freely as apple-blossoms from New England orchards in
the spring. The oranges themselves at that time of the year were very
sour, but they answered as well for a romantic date, "From an orange
grove," as if they had been the sweetest in the world.
They made two different excursions to Pompeii, which is within easy
distance of Sorrento. They scrambled on donkeys over the hills, and had
glimpses of the far-away Calabrian shore, of the natural arch, and the
temples of Pæstum shining in the sun many miles distant. On Katy's
birthday, which fell toward the end of January, Mrs. Ashe let her have
her choice of a treat; and she elected to go to the Island of Capri,
which none of them had seen. It turned out a perfect day, with sea and
wind exactly right for the sail, and to allow of getting into the famous
"Blue Grotto," which can only be entered under particular conditions of
tide and weather. And they climbed the great cliff-rise at the island's
end, and saw the ruins of the villa built by the wicked emperor
Tiberius, and the awful place known as his "Leap," down which, it is
said, he made his victims throw themselves; and they lunched at a hotel
which bore his name, and just at sunset pushed off again for the row
home over the charmed sea. This return voyage was almost the pleasantest
thing of all the day. The water was smooth, the moon at its full. It was
larger and more brilliant than American moons are, and seemed to possess
an actual warmth and color. The boatmen timed their oar-strokes to the
cadence of Neapolitan _barcaroles_ and folk-songs, full of rhythmic
movement, which seemed caught from the pulsing tides. And when at last
the bow grated on the sands of the Sorrento landing-place, Katy drew a
long, regretful breath, and declared that this was her best
birthday-gift of all, better than Amy's flowers, or the pretty
tortoise-shell locket that Mrs. Ashe had given her, better even than the
letter from home, which, timed by happy accident, had arrived by the
morning's post to make a bright opening for the day.
All pleasant things must come to an ending.
"Katy," said Mrs. Ashe, one afternoon in early February, "I heard some
ladies talking just now in the _salon_, and they said that Rome is
filling up very fast. The Carnival begins in less than two weeks, and
everybody wants to be there then. If we don't make haste, we shall not
be able to get any rooms."
"Oh dear!" said Katy, "it is very trying not to be able to be in two
places at once. I want to see Rome dreadfully, and yet I cannot bear to
leave Sorrento. We have been very happy here, haven't we?"
So they took up their wandering staves again, and departed for Rome,
like the Apostle, "not knowing what should befall them there."