Up the long smooth road that lay by the walls of the villa came toiling
a team of huge grayish oxen, with monstrous spreading horns tied with
blue ribbons. The cart that they drew was filled with baskets loaded
with grapes, and a whiff of their fragrance smote Daphne's nostrils as
she walked on the balcony in the morning air.
"Assunta, Assunta!" she cried, leaning over the gray, moss-coated
railing, "what is it?"
Assunta was squatting on the ground in the garden below, digging with a
blunt knife at the roots of a garden fern. There was a gray red cotton
shawl over her head, and a lilac apron upon her knees.
"It's the vintage, Signorina," she answered, "the wine makes itself."
"Everything does itself in this most lazy country," remarked Daphne.
"Dresses make themselves, boots repair themselves, food eats itself.
There's just one idiom, si fa,"--
"What?" asked Assunta.
"Reflections," answered the girl, smiling down on her. "Assunta, may I
go and help pick grapes?"
"Ma che!" screamed the peasant woman, losing her balance in her sudden
emotion and going down on her knees in the loosened soil.
"The Signorina, the sister of the Contessa, go to pick grapes in the
vineyard?"
"Si'" answered Daphne amiably. Her face was alive with laughter.
"But the Contessa would die of shame!" asserted Assunta, rising with
bits of dirt clinging to her apron, and gesticulating with the knife.
"It would be a scandal, and all the pickers would say, 'Behold the mad
English-Woman!'"
She looked up beseechingly at her mistress. She and Giacomo never
could tell beforehand which sentences the Signorina was going to
understand.
"Come with me!" coaxed the girl.
"But does the Signorina want to"--
"I want everything!" Daphne interrupted. "Grapes and flowers and wine
and air and sunshine. I want to see and feel and taste and touch and
smell everything there is. The days are too short to take it all in.
Hurry!"
As most of this outburst was in English, Assunta could do nothing but
look up with an air of deepened reproach. Daphne disappeared from the
railing, and a minute later was at Assunta's side.
"Come, come, come!" she cried, pulling her by the lilac apron. "Our
time is brief, and we must gather rosebuds while we may. I am young and
you are old, and neither of us has any time to lose."
Before she knew it, Assunta was trotting meekly down the road at the
young lady's heels, carrying a great flat basket for the Signorina's
use in picking grapes.
They were bound for the lower slopes; the grapes ripened earlier there,
the peasant woman explained, and the frosts came later. The loaded
wagons that they met were going to Arata, a wine press in the valley
beyond this nearest hill. Perhaps the Signorina would like to go there
to see the new wine foaming in the vat? Strangers often went to see
this.
Daphne's blood went singing through her veins with some new sense of
freedom and release, for the gospel of this heathen god was working in
her pulses. Wistfully her eyes wandered over the lovely slopes with
their clothing of olive and of vine, and up and down the curling long
white roads. At some turning of the way, or at some hilltop where the
road seemed to touch the blue sky, surely she would see him coming with
that look of divine content upon his face!
Suddenly she realized that they were inside the vineyard walls, for
fragrance assailed her nostrils, fragrance of ripened grapes, of grapes
crushed under foot as the swift pickers went snipping the full purple
bunches with their shears.
"I shall see Bacchus coming next," she said to herself, but hoping that
it would not be Bacchus. "He will go singing down the hill with the
Maenads behind him, with fluttering hair and draperies."
It was not nearly so picturesque as she had hoped, she confessed to
herself, as her thoughts came down to their customary level. The
vineyard of her dreams, with its long, trailing vines, was not found in
this country; there were only close-clipped plants trained to stakes.
But there was a sound of talking and of laughter, and the pickers,
moving among the even lines in their gay rags, lent motley color to the
picture. There was scarlet of waistcoat or of petticoat, blue and
saffron of jacket and apron, and a blending of all bright tints in the
kerchiefs above the hair. The rich dark soil made a background for it
all: the moving figures, the clumps of pale green vine leaves, the
great baskets of piled-up grapes.
Assunta was chattering eagerly with a young man who smiled, and took
off his hat to the Signorina, and said something polite, with a show of
white teeth. Daphne did not know what it was, but she took the pair of
scissors that were given her, and began to cut bunch after bunch of
grapes. If she had realized that the peasant woman, her heart full of
shame, had confessed to the overseer her young lady's whim, and had won
permission for her to join the ranks of the pickers, she might have
been less happy. As it was, she noticed nothing, but diligently cut her
grapes, piling them, misty with bloom, flecked with gold sunlights, in
her basket. Then she found a flat stone and sat on it, watching the
workers and slowly eating a great bunch of grapes. She had woven green
leaves into the cord of her red felt hat; the peasants as they passed
smiled back to her in swift recognition of her friendliness and charm.
Her thoughts flamed up within her with sudden anger at herself. This
vivid joy in the encompassing beauty had but one meaning: it was her
sense of the glad presence of this new creature, man or god, who seemed
continually with her, were he near or far.
"I'm as foolish as a sixteen-year-old girl," she murmured, fingering
the grapes in the basket with their setting of green leaves, "and yet,
and yet he isn't a man, really; he is only a state of mind!"
She sat, with the cool air of autumn on her cheeks, watching the
pickers, who went with even motion up the great slope. Sometimes there
was silence on the hillside; now and then there was a fragment of song.
One gay, tripping air, started by three women who stood idle with arms
akimbo for a moment on the hillside, was caught up and echoed back by
invisible singers on the other side of the hill. And once the
red-cheeked Italian lads who were carrying loaded baskets down toward
the vineyard gates burst into responsive singing that made her think
that she had found, on the Roman hills, some remnant of the old Bacchic
music, of the alternate strains that marked the festival of the god of
wine. It was something like this:--
Carlo.
"Of all the gifts of all the gods
I choose the ruddy wine.
The brimming glass shall be my lot"--
Giovanni (interrupting).
"Carlotta shall be mine!
Take you the grape, I only ask
The shadow of the vine
To screen Carlotta's golden head"--
Carlo (interrupting).
"Give me the ruddy wine."
Together.
G. "Carlotta shall be mine!"
C. "Give me the ruddy wine!"
Assunta was visibly happy when the Signorina signified her willingness
to go home. The pride of the house servant was touched by being
compelled to come too closely in contact with the workers in the
fields, and where is there pride like that of a peasant? But her joy
was short-lived. Outside the great iron gates stood a team of
beautiful fawn-colored oxen, with spotless flanks, and great, blue,
patient eyes looking out from under broad foreheads. They were
starting, with huge muscles quivering under their white skin, to carry
a load of grapes to the wine press, the yield of this year being too
great for the usual transportation on donkey back.
"Assunta, I go too," cried Daphne.
Five minutes later the Signorina, with her unwilling handmaid at her
side, rode in triumph up the broad highway with the measured motion of
slow oxen feet. Place had been made for them among the grape baskets,
and they sat on folded blankets, Assunta's face wearing the expression
of one who was a captive indeed, the Signorina's shining with simple
happiness and somewhat stained by grapes.
The wine press was nothing after all but a machine, and though a
certain interest attached to the great vats, hollowed out in the tufa
rock, into which the new-made wine trickled, Daphne soon signified her
willingness to depart. Before she left they brought her a great glass
of rich red grape juice fresh from the newly crushed grapes. She
touched her lips to it, then looked about her. Assunta was talking to
the workman who had given it to her, and he was looking the other way.
She feasted her eyes on the color of the thing she held in her hand.
It was a rough glass whose shallow bowl had the old Etruscan curves of
beauty, and the crimson wine caught the sunlight in a thousand ways.
Bending over, she poured it out slowly on the green grass.
"A libation to Apollo," she said, not without reverence.