Now, with regard to fountains, it is to be noted that Nepenthe, an
islet of volcanic stone rising out of the blue Mediterranean, has
never--for all its natural attractions--been renowned for cool springs
and bubbling streamlets. There is, to be sure, a charming couplet in
some old humanist about LYMPHA NEPENTHI; but modern scholars are
disposed to think either that the text is corrupt and that the writer
was picturing an imaginary NYMPHA--some laughing sea-lady--or else that
he merely indulged in one of those poetic flights which are a feature
of the literature of his period. For whatever the cause may be--whether
internal fires have scorched up the natural humours of the soil, or
whether the waters of Nepenthe are of such peculiar heaviness that,
instead of flowing upwards in the shape of fountains, they tumble
downwards into caverns below the sea--the fact remains: Nepenthe is a
waterless land. And this may well be the reason, as several thoughtful
observers have already pointed out, why its wines are so abundant in
quantity, so cheap in price, and of such super-excellent flavour. For
it is a fact conformable to that law of compensation which regulates
all earthly affairs, a fact borne out by the universal experience of
mankind, that God, when He takes away with one hand, gives with the
other. Lack of water, on the face of things, might be deemed a
considerable hardship. There are tracts in Africa where people have
been known to barter wives and children for a cupful of the liquid
element. Of the inhabitants of Nepenthe it must be said to their credit
that they endure their lot with equanimity, and even cheerfulness.
Their wine costs nothing. Why grumble at the inscrutable ways of
Providence? Why be thirsty, why be sober, when you can get as drunk as
a lord for the asking?
For the rest, there are indications to show that such was not the
original condition of affairs on the island. On the contrary, certain
legends still current among the country-folk lead one to suspect that
fountains once flowed on this arid rock. And more than legends.
Monsignor Perrelli, in his ANTIQUITIES OF NEPENTHE, has gone into the
subject with his usual thoroughness. The reader who takes the trouble
to consult that work will find, in the twenty-sixth chapter of the
third section dealing with the Natural Productions and Water-Supply of
the island, an enumeration of no less than twelve fountains still
flowing during the author's lifetime. Some of them issued high up, in
rocky clefts; others at the middle heights, among vineyards and
orchards; the majority at, or near, the seashore. All of these springs,
he tells us, had the following features in common: they were more or
less hot, unpleasant to the taste, of foetid odour and therefore unfit
for culinary or other common uses. "But let it not be supposed," he
hastens to add, "that they were worthless, inasmuch as there is no such
thing as a worthless gift of Providence. Whoever argues on such
fallacious lines," he says, "will stand convicted both of folly and of
irreverence, seeing that it is the business of mankind, when confronted
by a phenomenon which seems to mock their intelligence, humbly to
ponder the evidence--to investigate causes and ascertain results." In
the present case the utility of the waters, if not for cooking or
drinking then for other specific purposes, had been put to the proof
time out of mind, in an empirical fashion; though it was not till the
reign of the Good Duke Alfred that a series of classical experiments
placed our knowledge of their medicinal properties on a sound
scientific footing.
In a dissertation attached to this twenty-sixth chapter--a dissertation
larded with illustrative extracts from Galen Celsus, Avicenna, Antonius
Musa, Oribasius Salvus and about fifty others of the ancients who
professed the healing art--Monsignor Perrelli condenses for his readers
the results of these classical experiments; he hands down the names of
these springs and their manifold healing virtues.
The Fountain of Saint Calogero, described as one of the most famous,
was lukewarm, of ammoniacal and alkaline flavour; a glassful of it
produced the most violent retchings and vomitings. Properly applied,
however, the water had been found to relieve the gout, the discomforts
of child-bearing, leprosy, irritation of the mucous membrane of the
nose, impetigo, strabismus and ophthalmia. If the patient observed care
in his diet, avoiding articles of calorific nature such as fried fish
and boiled lentils, he would find himself greatly benefited by its use
in the case of cornucopic hydrocephalus, flatulence, tympanitis and
varicose veins. It was useful, furthermore, as a cure for the stings of
scorpions and other venomous beasts.
The so-called "Fountain of Paradise," of nitrous ingredients, spurted
forth with a prodigious hissing noise at a temperature of boiling lead,
from so inaccessible a fissure in the rocks that little had been done
to investigate its peculiar properties. It was held none the less to be
efficacious for the distemper known as PLICA POLONICA, and the peasant
folk, mixing its spray with the acorns on which their pigs were
fattened, had observed that these quadrupeds prospered vastly in health
and appearance.
The Fountain of Hercules, laxative and tartaric, had proved its
efficacy in cases of enlarged spleen, hare-lip, vertigo, apoplexy,
cachexia, cacodoria, cacochymia senilis and chilblains. It was also
considered to be a sovereign remedy for that distressing and almost
universal complaint, the piles.
The Fountain known as "La Salina," of arsenical nature, was frequented
chiefly by women who found in its waters an alleviation for troubles
which Monsignor Perrelli does not specify. It was recommended,
moreover, as a sheep-dip.
The Fountain of the Virgin, purgative and blastopeptic, had given
relief to sufferers from the quartan fever, herpes, elephantiasis, and
to all persons of atrobiliary and lunatick temperament.
The so-called "Old Fountain," of sub-acidulate and vitriolique flavour,
chalybeate and cataplastic, was renowned for removing stains from
household linen. Taken in minute doses, under medical advice, it gave
relief to patients afflicted with the wolfe, NOLI ME TANGERE,
crudities, Bablyonian itch, globular pemphlegema, fantastical visions,
koliks, asthma and affections of the heart. It also "fortifies the
stomach, comforts the bowels, reduces the gallstone to sand, the sand
to mud, the mud to water--water which can be passed out of the system by
the usual channels."
The Fountain of Saint Vulcan, anti-blepharous and amygdaloidal, was
charged with such potent minerals that a single spoonful produced a
diarrhoea more distressing to witness than cholera. None the less,
applied externally, it was a wondrous remedy in cases of jaundice,
toothache and open wounds.
The Fountain of the Capon, sedative and scorbutic, was indicated for
rheumatisms of every kind, not excluding sprained limbs, hydrophobia,
lycanthropy, black choler, oppilations and procrastinating catapepsia.
The Fountain known as "Spina Santa" was resorted to by all persons
suffering from maladies of the alimentary canal, such as dysentery,
cloven palate, follicular hepatitis, and trabulated hyperaemia of the
Bivonian passage.
The Fountain of Saint Feto had, by virtue of its smell alone, applied
to her nose as she lay in her coffin, raised from the dead a certain
Anna da Pasto.
The Fountain popularly called "La Pisciarella" was peculiarly adapted
to those ailments which are incidental to childhood and youth--to wit:
chlorosis, St. Vitus' Dance, constipation, ringworm, otootitis and
other perimingeal disturbances, urticaria, moon-sickness, scrofula and
incontinence of urine.
Lastly, the Fountain of Saint Elias, sulphurous and saponaceous, was
renowned for its calming influence upon all who suffered from abuse of
lechery or alcohol, or from ingrowing toe-nails.
This concludes the list.
"Whence we may safely infer," says Monsignor Perrelli at the
termination of this chapter, "that our island is second to no part of
the globe in this divine gift of salutary waters. And if some should
ask why certain of these springs have recently undergone a marked
diminution in volume we can but answer, simply and truthfully, that
their virtues are no longer in as great demand as formerly. For is it
not a fact that distempers like leprosy and PLICA POLONICA are now
almost unknown on Nepenthe? It follows that the waters adapted to
maladies such as these have performed their appointed task, so far as
this island is concerned. They are doubtless flowing elsewhere, through
mysterious channels of the earth, to carry their health-giving virtues
into fresh regions for the saving of men's lives, to the glory of their
Creator."
Thus far the learned and ingenious Monsignor Perrelli....
It stands to reason that so remarkable a chapter should not have
escaped the notice of the bibliographer who, as already observed, had
been engaged for the last quarter of a century in elucidating the text
of the old historian and enriching it with footnotes for the better
understanding of modern students. In the interval of three and a half
centuries many changes had taken place in the physical aspect of
Nepenthe; among other things, these twelve streams of pestilential
odour had ceased to flow, all save the fountain of Saint Elias; their
very sites had been forgotten, though traditions of their former
existence still lingered among the populace.
Searching among the archives for whatever might bear on the ancient
history of these springs, Mr. Eames had accumulated abundant material
for footnotes geological, hydrographical and balneo-therapic.
Furthermore, his personal explorations on the island had enabled him to
locate the site of at least four of these old fountains, and to prove
that if some of them had been covered up under the debris of
landslides, the majority had disappeared in consequence of a general
desiccation of the province.
Lastly and chiefly, his investigations had brought him in contact with
that manuscript, already mentioned, of the Dominican monk Father
Capocchio-a manuscript in which he alighted upon a curious but
troublesome literary discovery anent these very fountains. The author,
a contemporary of Monsignor Perrelli, a hater of Nepenthe, a cleric of
lascivious and lecherous temperament, has in this parchment preserved
what he calls a "popular joke"--a saying which he declares to have been
"common property of the whole country" on the subject of Nepenthe and
its evil-smelling waters. It was one of those scholarly, ponderous and
yet helplessly straightforward jokes of the late Renaissance; a joke to
which Monsignor Perrelli does not allude, both for reasons of local
patriotism and of general decorum; some vulgar dictum, in short,
connected with the name of the patron saint of Nepenthe who, he urged,
was simply a local nature-god, christianized.
When the bibliographer's eagle eye first fell upon this passage he was
staggered. Then, on reflection, he found himself in an awkward
predicament--his natural modesty as a man contending with a no less
natural and legitimate pride and desire as historian that the fruits of
his labours should not be lost.
"These," he said, "are the dilemmas which confront the conscientious
annotator."
What position was he to take up? Should he exclude the miserable joke
altogether from his amended and enlarged edition of Perrelli? He did
not feel himself justified in this line of conduct. Some future
investigator would be sure to unearth it and get the credit for his
industry. Should he re-state it in such terms as to make it palatable
to refined readers, diluting its primary pungency without impairing its
essential signification? He was disposed to adopt that course, but,
unfortunately, all attempts at verbal manipulation failed. Good scholar
as Mr. Eames was, the joke proved to be obdurate, uncompromising;
vainly he wrestled with it; try as he would, it stood out naked and
unashamed, refusing to be either cajoled or bullied into
respectability. There was no circumventing that joke, he decided.
Should he reproduce it there fore IN EXTENSO? Such, after mature
deliberation and not without certain moral misgivings, he conceived to
be his duty towards posterity. Veiled in the obscurity of a learned
tongue, the joke was surreptitiously introduced into the company of a
thousand chaste footnotes that could dispense with such covering
devices.
Of the subsequent history of the Saint Elias Fountain, which alone
still continued to flow, the bibliographer also learned much--how its
fame had grown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries till it
attracted invalids from the most distant provinces, necessitating the
erection of a palatial pump-room for the better accommodations of
visitors; how latterly again the waters had unaccountably fallen into
disfavour with the public. And this, notwithstanding the fact that in
1872 the celebrated Privy Councillor Dr. Saponaro, Director of the
Montecitorio Home for Incurables, had written, at the urgent
solicitation of the Nepenthe Town Authorities (who were alarmed at the
decrease in their bathing-tax revenue) a pamphlet--a pamphlet which, by
the way, cost them a mint of money in view of the author's deserved
reputation as an incorruptible scientist--a pamphlet extolling the
virtue of the spring; proving, by elaborate chemical analysis, that its
ingredients had not only not changed a white since the days of
Monsignor Perrelli but actually improved in quality; and concluding
with the warm recommendation that they were as well adapted as ever for
curing those ailments to which the island population was peculiarly
liable--namely, the consequences of excessive lechery and alcohol, and
the discomfort caused by ingrowing toe-nails.
The local deputy, Don Guistino Morena, had often promised his
Nepenthean constituents to look into the matter and see that something
was done. But he was a busy man. Up to the present he had apparently
not moved a finger.
And now this fountain, the last survivor of the twelve health-giving
springs, had suddenly run dry....
The bad news spread like wild-fire. It was regarded--for reasons which
will presently appear--as a portent of gravest significance. The clergy
met in unofficial but well-attended conclave to deliberate as to what
attitude should be adopted towards the phenomenon, and what measures
taken to allay popular apprehensions.
There was gossip, too, at the Club. Most of its members were of the
LAISSEZ FAIRE or even rationalistic type, and one of them--an
unobtrusive Hindu who was suspected of wearing stays--went so far in his
indifference as to declare that the only result of the drying-up of the
fountain would be "one smell less on Nepenthe." A small but compact
minority, however, thought otherwise. Obsessed by vague forebodings,
they found an able and eloquent interpreter of their fears in the
Commissioner who, rather redder in the face than usual, strode fussily
up and down the premises, tugging at his disreputable briar pipe,
drinking the whisky with anybody who cared to pay for it, and declaring
to all and sundry that something must be done. It was his panacea--his
unvarying formula for every emergency, scandalous or otherwise.
Something must be done, he avowed. And from the card-table came two
approving echoes--the voices of Mr. Muhlen and Signor Malipizzo, who did
not care tuppence about the fountain but never lost an opportunity of
expressing their public approval of Mr. Parker's words and actions.
Something must be done and that soon, for in a few brief hours an
atmosphere of gloom, a sense of impending calamity, had begun to hover
over the sunny island. The natives called to mind, with consternation,
that only once within the memory of their ancestors had the fountain
behaved after this fashion. It was on the eve of that great volcanic
outbreak on the mainland which, by a deadly shower of ashes, destroyed
their crops and impoverished them to such an extent that for three
consecutive months they could barely afford the most unnecessary
luxuries of life. They opined with some show of reason that the little
streamlet had been tempted by ancient and obscure bonds to sympathy to
forsake its old home and creep away, under leagues of shimmering sea,
towards the fiery heart of the volcano; there to undergo some alchemic
process of readjustment, some ordeal, some torrid nuptial rite which
would result in the birth of a flaming monster and the ruin of mankind.
The terrace was crowded with folk; all eyes were turned toward the
distant fire-mountain. But the volcano had never looked so placid, so
harmless, so attractive; its shapely flanks suffused with the crimson
light of evening, while wreaths of violent vapour ascended, in lazy
intermittent spirals, from the cone. They rose into the zenith
playfully, one after the other, as though the volcano were desirous of
drawing attention to its pretty manners, and were wafted onwards, in
delicate wisps of smoke by the persistent South wind. The clergy now
began to appear in goodly numbers upon the scene. They were in the best
of humours and more ready than usual, it seemed, to take part in any
conversation which might be going on. It had been decided, during their
informal gathering, that the apprehensions of the faithful could not be
better allayed at this preliminary stage than by a mild demonstration
of this kind. Appearances were everything; so they had concluded, not
for the first time. And it was precisely then that the simple-minded
PARROCO, surrounded by a knot of devout believers, pointed to the
playful cloudlets of smoke as they issued from the mouth of the crater
and apposite, but calculated to calm the minds of his hearers. He said
that no rosy schoolboy, smoking his first cigarette, ever looked more
innocent. An ominous, fateful speech! Yet such was his holy simplicity
that he failed to realize its import. He failed to perceive how
inauspicious the metaphor had been till Don Francesco, in a whisper,
pointed out that appearances are apt to be deceptive and, alluding to
certain experiences of his own at the tender age of six years, affirmed
that the smoking of a first cigarette, for all its seeming
harmlessness, is liable to be followed by something in the nature of a
cataclysm.
There was worse to come. For while the sun yet lingered on the horizon
news of further portents came thick and fast. A plum tree belonging to
a farmer of good standing had unaccountably lost all its leaves. The
Duchess arrived in a state of unusual trepidation, declaring that the
tortoise-shell of her lorgnette gave forth a crackling sound. She
appealed to Don Francesco to explain the meaning of this extraordinary
circumstance; it crackled most distinctly, she declared. Not far from
the little bay where only yesterday the streamlet of Saint Elias still
trickled into the sea, a fisherman had caught a one-eyed lamprey--a
beast, unquestionably, of ill repute. The bibliographer, strolling
about with Denis, recollected that his fox-terrier that very morning
had been violently sick. He seemed to attach no great importance to the
affair; all the same, he said, it was rather queer; dogs are not like
that; now, if it had been Keith.... The baby of the principal grocer
had tumbled downstairs and thereupon proceeded to swallow eight of its
elder brother's marbles which had been carelessly left on the
floor--without experiencing, so far as could be ascertained, any
appreciable injury. A mysterious disease, known as the scabies, had
broken out among the Russian apostles. The yacht of the American
millionaire, Mr. van Koppen, arrived that day; there was nothing
startling in this since he visited the island year after year at the
same season; but why should she collide with a fishing-boat at the
moment of anchoring?
And from the Old Town came news of a portentous fowl which had suddenly
assumed the plumage of the male sex. It was a hen renowned, hitherto,
for her temperate and normal habits and, as it happened, known by sight
to the local parish priest, who, horrified at the transformation of the
feathered monster and mindful of the Papal Bull NE NIMIS NOCEANT NOBIS
which enjoins upon Christians the duty of destroying all unnatural
productions however generated, incontinently ordered it to be put out
of the way. But the destruction of this androgyne proved an arduous
task. It was reported that the creature fought for its life with the
energy of a demon, crowing vigorously the while and laying, in the very
act of death, an egg--an egg of spheroidal form, bluish in colour, and
apparently hard-boiled--an egg which the Chief Medical Officer of Health
had no great difficulty in recognizing as that of a cockatrice.
In view of these and other sinister occurrences it is not surprising
that a sense of insecurity should have fallen upon the more credulous
section of the natives. Even sceptical persons thought it rather
provoking on the part of Providence, or whoever managed these things,
that the disquieting of men's minds should take place during this
particular fortnight, the most important of the whole year, midway
between the great feasts of Saint Dodekanus and Saint Eulalia when the
island was crammed with visitors.
And there followed late at night yet another surprise. Mr. Parker had
been called away from his duties at the Club in hot haste by the news
that his lady was seriously ill. A few days earlier she had been stung
on the lip by a mosquito; no further attention was paid to the
incident, though the disagreeable south wind provoked a rise in
temperature and some discomfort. On this afternoon, however, her face
had suddenly begun to assume strange tints and to swell in wondrous
fashion. It was no already enlarged to twice its natural size and
altogether--in the words of the physician who had been summoned to her
villa--"a thing to see."
It had always been a thing to see. So, at least, said those who were
privileged to know. There were tropical strains in her blood-strains
from some flowery land in the Caribbean Sea-strains which refused to
mingle in harmonious fashion with the white elements in her ancestry.
She was neither lovely nor lovable, and it was regarded as a kindly
dispensation of Heaven that some malformation of the lower limbs kept
her confined to her boudoir, where no visitors ever called save a few
misguided newcomers to the island who were unaware of her
idiosyncrasies. These idiosyncrasies, due to the enforced inactivity of
her feet, took the form of a grotesque activity of the tongue. Her
infirmity preventing her from learning how things really stood, she let
her phantasy run riot on the occasional reports which reached the
villa; and that phantasy, nourished by lack of physical exercise,
indulged in a love of scandal-mongering which bordered, and sometimes
trespassed, on the pathological. She distilled scandal from every pore,
and in such liberal quantities that even the smiling and good-natured
Don Francesco once spoke of her as "the serpent in the Paradise." But
perhaps he only said that because Madame Parker was not over-fond of
him--his rival the PARROCO being her friend and confessor.
Such being the case, the prospect of her possible demise was received
with unconcern and even relief by all save a notable number of
tradesmen who prayed fervently for her health because the lady,
presuming on her connection with the official representative of the
friendly state of Nicaragua, had contrived to owe them considerable
sums of money. Knowing the Commissioner as they did, these victims
feared that they would never be able to collect their due in the event
of her death. Hence their prayers for her speedy recovery.
What would that gentleman do without her? For it was his redeeming
feature that he felt, or professed to feel, affection for this
graceless harridan who was the only person on earth that believed, or
professed to believe, in the integrity of his motives. It is to be
presumed that they saw through each other perfectly; she, at least, may
well have appraised him at his true value. She must have known him for
a dishonest fool. Yet this principle of mutual attachment was never
relinquished. Wiser than her stepbrother, she knew that a house divided
against itself must fall; she therefore approved, forcefully if without
conviction, of his every word and deed. Such approval did him good. It
created a fictitious self-esteem. And this was really rather
unfortunate, since self-esteem, by giving him a sense of importance and
consequence in the world, rendered him a good deal more objectionable
to his fellow-creatures than he need have been.
Meanwhile she lingered on, and a small group of enquirers were gathered
round the physician who was returning late at night from his third
visit. The moralists among them saw the finger of God in the fact that
her mouth, out of which had proceeded so much harm to strong men and
women, should now be sealed by one of the frailest of His creatures.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders at this kind of talk. He was no
moralizer; he was a true Southerner, an aesthete--one of those who could
appreciate the subtlest beauty of a skin disease. He waxed discursive
on the subject; said that the lady's face reminded him of the rainbow
in a certain picture by a local genius; avowed that there were moments
when even a doctor's hard life had its compensations, and that this was
one of them.
His enthusiasm carried the audience off their feet. It converted the
sternest preachers into artists. They forgot to talk about moral
lessons. All congratulated the good Aesculapius on his choice of the
medical profession as a career and his luck in beholding a spectacle
such as this; especially when he added, with glowing eloquence, that it
was astonishing how so small an insect, a mere mosquito, should be able
to produce an eruption of this magnitude and in colours, moreover,
which would have made Titian or Peter Paul Rubens burst with envy.