Chapter 14

“Sicilia, Hic Jacet Aprilis. Miseranda PuellaUnicce Quælugens Occultipa Diem 18 OtobreXIII 1495.”

“Sicilia, Hic Jacet Aprilis. Miseranda Puella

Unicce Quælugens Occultipa Diem 18 Otobre

XIII 1495.”

Of course, the guide-books ignore her. Trust the guide-books to preserve a stony silence about anything of real human interest!...

Another court; a great basin where papyrus grows, where bananas wave silken banners amid the delicate plumes of tall bamboo, where are more purple wreaths of wistaria and snow-drifts of roses, and where the treasures are mostly Greek. Very notable among these a marble tripod draped with the supple folds of a python; the lax power of the great snake subtly contrasted with, and emphasized by, the rigid lines of the seat of the soothsayer. More notable still, in the Sala del Fauna, is an archaic statue of Athene from Selinunto—like some splendid sharded insect in her helmet and lion skin—rescued from that vast wreck of a city. They had travelled from Palermo a few days before to see that city, drawn by Crawford’s fine passages of description, and there they, too, had wondered at the astonishing remains of those astonishing Greeks.

... “There is nothing in Europe like the ruins of Selinunto. Side by side, not one stone upon another, as they fell at the earthquake shock, the remains of four temples lie in the dust within the city, and still more gigantic fragments of three others lie without the ruined walls. At first sight the confusion looks so terrific that the whole seems as if it might have fallen from the sky, from a destruction of the home of the gods—as if Zeus might have hurled a city at mankind, to fall upon Sicily in a wild wreck of senseless stone. Blocks that are Cyclopean lie like jackstraws one upon another; sections of columns twenty-eight feet round are tossed together upon the ground like leaves from a basket, and fragments of cornice fifteen feet long lie across them, or stand half upright, or lean against the enormous steps. No words can explain to the mind the involuntary shock which the senses feel at first sight of it all. One touches the stones in wonder, comparing one’s small human stature with their mass, and the intellect strains hopelessly to recall their original position; one climbs in and out among them, sometimes mounting, sometimes descending, as one might pick one’s way through an enormous quarry, scarcely understanding that the blocks one touches have all been hewn into shape by human hands, and that the hills from which men brought them are but an outline in the distance.”...

All that quiet falling day Jane and Peripatetica wandered in the transformed monastery, staring at the great metopes; lingering among the Saracenic carvings and jewelled windows, poring over Phœnician seals; over the amazing ecclesiastic needlework, the gold monstrances, the carved gems, and last and best of allsome delicious reliefs at sight of which they forgave at once and forever their old enemy, the Eighteenth Century, for all its disgusting crimes against beauty. They sought madly through the books for some mention of these tall, adorable nymphs in adorably impossible attitudes, these curled and winged and dimpled babies, fluttering like fat little wrens sweetly ignorant of the laws of gravitation; but as always on any subject of interest Baedeker and the rest frigidly refused to tell the name of the man out of whose head and hands had grown these enchanting figures.

“Oh, dear Unknown!” cries Jane regretfully, “why is your noble name buried in silence! I wish to make a pilgrimage to your tomb, to cover it with Sicilian roses, and breathe a prayer for the repose of your sweet and gracious soul.”

“Me too!” echoes Peripatetica, in tender scorn of the stodgy rules of English grammar.

The Paschal season is near.

Always, in all lands of all faiths, the coming of Spring, the yearly resurrection of life and nature, has been welcomed with gladness. The occultation of Osiris, of Baldur, of Persephone, of the Christ, is mourned; their coming again hailed with flowers and feasting.

Palermo is filling with visitors; with a glory of flowers and verdure in which the loveliest city in the world grows daily lovelier. The Conca d’Oro—the Shell of Gold—swims in a golden sea of sunshine.

On the Wednesday before Easter the whole population exchanges cakes. Cakes apotheosized by surprising splendours of icing; icing, gilded, silvered, snowilysculptured into Loves and angels and figures of national heroes. Icing wrought into elaborate garlands tinted rose, purple, and green; built into towers and ornate architectural devices. Structures of confectionery three feet high are borne on big platters between two men. Every child carries gay little cakes to be presented to grandparents and godparents, to cousins and playmates.

All Maundy Thursday the population moves from church to church. Masses moan incessant in every chapel. Before the Virgins on every street-shrine, draped in black, candles blaze and drip. Priests and monks hurry to and fro, bent upon preparations for the great spectacle of the morrow.

Friday morning early all Palermo is in the streets in its best attire. Small children dressed as little cardinals, as nuns, as priests, bishops, angels with gilded wings, as Virgins, as John the Baptist, are on their way to the churches from which the processions are to flow. Monks and friars gather from outlying country convents.

At ten o’clock a throbbing dirge begins. The first of the processions is under way. A band plays a funeral march, and is followed by acolytes swinging censers. Pious elderly citizens, perspiring in frock coats, carry tall, flaming candles that drop wax upon their clothes. A few priests, in black and purple, follow, bearing holy vessels. Behind these a row of men in mediæval armour and carrying halberds, surround a heavy, hand-borne bier hung with black velvet, on which rests a glass and gilt case containing an image of the Crucified—a life-sized image, brown with age. Presumably it has been taken from some ancient andrevered Spanish crucifix, for it is crowned with thorns, is emaciated, is writhed with pain, painted with the dark, faded red of streaming wounds—one of those agonised figures conceived by the pious realism of the older Spanish sculptors.

Immediately follows another hand-borne litter upon which is standing a tall Virgin clothed in black hood and mantle—a pallid, narrow-faced Virgin—also Spanish and realistic. The delicate clasped hands hold a lace handkerchief, her breast is hung with votive silver hearts. The features are distorted with grief, the lids, reddened with tears, are drooped over sunken, deep-shadowed eyes, and her countenance seamed and withered—a poignant figure of unutterable maternal woe! Burning candles alternate with mounds of roses about the edge of the platform on which she stands.

As the dead Son and the mourning Mother pass, hats come off and heads are bowed, signs of the cross are made. A few of the older peasant women fall to their knees upon the sidewalk and mutter an Agnus Dei, a Hail Mary, with streaming tears. A priest walks last of all, rattling a contribution box at the end of a long stick, looking anxiously at the balconies and windows from which the well-to-do spectators lean. For his is but a poor church; the velvet palls and cloaks are cotton, and frayed and faded, the bier and platform old, and so massive that the stalwart bearers must set them down often to wipe away the sweat, which is why it takes advantage of the unpre-empted morning hours and is early in the field.

Later in the day, in Gaspero’s cab and under his guidance, Jane and Peripatetica take up a coign of vantage in a square debouching upon the Corso VittorioEmanuele, along which the Jesuits are to parade at four o’clock. Here the crowd is solidly packed, the balconies and windows crowded with the aristocracy of Palermo. The Guarda Mobili in their splendid uniforms keep open the way for the marching fraternities and sodalities with their crucifixes and Virgin-embroidered banners, open a lane for the monks, for the crowds of tiny angels and cardinals who must patter for hours in the slow-moving procession. Priests and acolytes swarm; censers steam, hundreds of candles of all weights and heights flare and flame, and then slowly, slowly, to the wailing music, moves forward a splendid catafalque of crystal in which lies stretched upon a bed of white velvet, richly wrought with gold, a fair youth. A youth with white, naked limbs, relaxed and pure; not soiled by the grimy, bloody agonies of martyrdom, but poetised to a picture of Love too early dead—a charming image. And the beautiful tall Virgin is not the simple Mother of the Carpenter convulsed with despair. She is a stately, sorrowful Queen, crowned, hung with jewels, robed in superb royal weeds; proudly refusing to show the full depth of her bereavement, as she follows her dead Son amid the wax torches shining palely in the sunshine through the white and green of the sheaves of lilies that grow about her knees.

The emotional effect upon the crowd is intense; one can hear like an undertone the sound of indrawn, gulping breath. Gaspero passes his sleeve across the tears in his dark eyes.

This version of the tragedy is lifted above the realism of pain into a penetrating and lovely symbolism that swells the heart with poignant and tender emotions as the divine funeral train winds slowly away,with perfume, with lights, and with the slow sobbing of the muffled drums.

So had Sicilians two thousand years ago crowded every spring to see a similar spectacle of a weeping Queen of Love following an image of a lovely dead youth....

“Ah! and himself—Adonis—how beautiful to behold he lies on his silver couch, with the first down on his cheeks, the thrice beloved Adonis—Adonis beloved even among the dead.... O Queen, O Aphrodite, that playest with gold, lo, from the stream eternal of Acheron they have brought back to thee Adonis—even in the twelfth month they have brought him, the dainty-footed Hours.... Before him lie all that the tall tree-branches bear, and the delicate gardens, arrayed in baskets of silver; and the golden vessels are full of the incense of Syria. And all the dainty cakes that women fashion in the kneading-tray, mingling blossoms manifold with the white wheaten flour, all that is wrought of honey sweet, and in soft olive-oil, all cakes fashioned in semblance of things that fly, and of things that creep, lo, here they are set before him.

“Here are built for him shadowy bowers of green, all laden with tender anise, and children flit overhead—the little Loves—as the young nightingales perched upon the trees fly forth and try their wings from bough to bough....

“But lo, in the morning we will all of us gather with the dew, and carry him forth among the waves that break upon the beach, and with locks unloosed, and ungirt raiment falling to the ankles, and bosoms bare we will begin our shrill sweet song.

“Thou only, dear Adonis, so men tell, thou only ofthe demigods, dost visit both this world and the stream of Acheron.... Dear has thine advent been, Adonis, and dear shall it be when thou comest again.”

Gaspero never permitted Jane and Peripatetica to lose anything. Doubling through narrow, black streets where lofty buildings nearly met above their heads and where they snatched hurried, delighted glimpses of intricate old grilles, of arched and wheeled windows, of splendid hatchments and fine carved portals—he brought them out at admirable view points for all the many similar parades in widely separated parts of the city.

As the purple dusk came down they found themselves in the Marina, watching the last of the processions moving slowly down the broad avenue to the sea-street. The crowd had thinned. The small angels and John the Baptists went wearily upon dusty little feet, their crowns of now wilted roses canted at dissipated angles over their flushed and tearful faces, the heavy, half-burned wax torches wabbling dangerously near the draggled veils and drooping gilt wings.

The bearers of the images paused often to set down their heavy burdens. The balconies began to blossom with tinted lights. Here and there the Virgin with her twinkling candles was turned toward a balcony filled with some specially faithful children of the church, and stood facing them a moment, tall, ghostly, tragical, in the gathering darkness, before passing onward in her long pilgrimage of mourning that was to end within the church doors as night came down.

“It is enough, Gaspero,” they cried, as the flickeringtrain passed away down the water avenue into the blue blackness of the shadowy evening, and then they went homewards full of that strange mingled sense of languor and refreshment—that “cleansing of the soul with pity and terror” which is the gift of the heroic tragedies....

Every hour of that night the bells rang and masses sang throughout the city. All day Saturday the churches swarmed, and the purple veils, hung before the altar pictures throughout Lent, were rent from top to bottom to the sound of the wailing De Profundis. Sunday the religious world seemed to exhale itself in music and flowers and triumphant masses. Easter Monday morning the populace hurried through the necessary domestic duties at the earliest possible moment, for the Pasqua Flora is the day of villegiatura for all Palermo. Every one wears new clothes. Even the humble asinelli are, for once in the year at least, brushed and combed, and decorated with fresh red tassels if the master is too poor to afford more elaboration of the always elaborate harness. Those asses who have the luck to be the property of rich contadini appear resplendent in new caparison; with towering brass collars heavy with scarlet chenille, flashing with mirrors and inlays of mother-of-pearl, glittering from head to tail with brass buckles, with bells and red tags innumerable, drawing new carts carved and painted with all the myths and legends and history of Sicily in crude chromatic vivacity.

Whole families stream countrywards in these carts to-day; babies clean and starched for once, grandmothers in purple kerchiefs tied under the chin and yellow kerchiefs crossed upon the breast, with goldhoops in their ears; daughters in flowered cottons, their uncovered heads wrought with fearful and wonderful pompadours, sleek and jet black.

Along the seashore, up the sides of Pellegrino, in all the open country about Palermo, they spread and sun themselves, eat, sleep, make love, gossip, dance, and sing in the golden air.

Gaspero drives slowly through the wide-spread picnic, pausing wherever a characteristic group attracts.

Here lies a whole family asleep; gorged with endless coils of macaroni, saturated with sun—a mere heap of crude-coloured clothes, of brown open-mouthed faces, of lax limbs that to-morrow must be gathered up again for a hand-to-hand struggle for bread for another twelve-month.

Under this tree a long table is spread with loaves, with meats, with iced cakes, and straw-covered flasks. A rich confrère of Gaspero celebrates the betrothal of his only daughter, a plump and solid heiress, who beneath an inky and mighty pompadour simpers at the broad jokes of her pursey, elderly fiancé. A solid fiancé, financially and physically. Altogether a solid match, says Gaspero. A dashing guest thrums his guitar and sings throatily of the joys of love and of money in the stocking.

Here a group of very old men watch about a boiling pot hung above a little fire, and twitter reminiscences of youth, catching one last pale gleam of the fast sinking sun of their meagre, toilsome lives.

Everywhere music and laughter and the smell of flowers and food and wine.

A big piano-organ is playing a rouladed waltz to a ring of young spectators, crowding to watch the elaboratesteps of dancers swinging about singly with grace-steps, with high prancings, with tarantella flourishes. Male dancers, all. Gaspero explains that no respectable girl would be allowed to join them, the Sicilian girl’s diversions being distressingly limited.

One of the boyish dancers, with the keen, bold face and square head of a mediæval Condottiere, flourishes his light cane in fencing passes as he swings, which challenge inspires a spectator to leap into the ring with his own cane drawn. The newcomer, an obvious dandy in pointed patent-leather shoes, blue-ribboned hat, and light suit of cheap smartness, crosses canes dashingly with the would-be fencer, and the rest of the dancers drop back to see the fun.

The Condottiere finds in a few passes that he has met his master and craftily begins a waiting game. Lithe and quick as a cat, he circles and gives way, his opponent driving him round and round the ring, lunging daringly and playing to the gallery. He flourishes unnecessarily, pursues recklessly, assumes a contemptuous carelessness of the boy, always circling, always on guard, always coolly thrifty of breath and strength.

The dandy grows tired and angry, rushes furiously to make an end of his nimble evasive antagonist, who at last turns with cold courage and by a twist of his weapon sends the dandy’s cane flying clean over the ring of spectators, who scream with delight. But the Condottiere is a generous as well as a wily foe. He offers an embrace. The dandy reluctantly allows himself to be kissed on both cheeks, but the victor catches him about the waist and waltzes him around madly amid the laughter and bravas of the crowd.

It is Jane’s and Peripatetica’s last day in Sicily. Gaspero has taken them to Santa Maria di Gesu, the Minorite Monastery, but has paused by the way for a look at San Giovanni degli Eremiti, whose little red domes float clear against the burning azure sky like coral-tinted bubbles, so airily do they rise from the green of the high hill-garden with its tiny cloisters of miniature columns and miniscule grey arches heavy with yellow roses. And yet from this rosy, arch little fane rang the Sicilian Vespers which gave the signal for one of the bloodiest butcheries in history. It was Pasqua Flora, and all Palermo, as it did yesterday, was feasting and dancing out of doors. One of the French soldiers—then in occupation, upholding the hated House of Anjou—insulted a Sicilian girl and was stabbed. Just then the Vesper bells rang from San Giovanni degli Eremiti, and at the signal the conspiracy, long festering, broke into open flame, and Palermo rose and massacred the French till the streets ran with blood.

The Gesu Monastery has no such sanguinary associations. The plain little building, high on the hillside, stands buried among enormous cypresses and clouds of roses, and surrounded by the massive marble tombs and mortuary chapels of Palermo’s nobility and Sicily’s magnates. It is a place of great peace and silence. A place of unutterable beauty of outlook upon gorges feathered with pines, upon stern violet mountains melting into more distant heights of amethyst, into outlines of hyacinth, into silhouettes of mauve, into high ghostly shadows that vanish into floods of aerial blue. A place which looks on sea and shore and city, and where the chemistry of sun and airtransmutes the multitudinous tones of the landscape to an incredible witchery of tint, to living hues like those of the colours of jewels, of flowers, of the little burning feathers of the butterflies’ wings.

“Doubtless God might have made a more beautiful view than this from the Gesu, but doubtless God never did,” sighed Jane.

But still Gaspero is not satisfied. He can never rest content with anything less than perfection. Yes; he admits the Gesu is admirable, but he knows a still more “molto bella vista.”

“There is nothing better than the best,” says Jane sententiously. “I am drenched and satiated with all the loveliness that I can bear. Any other ‘vista’ would be an anticlimax.”

“Dear Jane,” remonstrated Peripatetica, “haven’t you yet guessed that Gaspero is a wizard? I suspected it the very first day. Of course, you can see that he’s no ordinary guide and cab-driver, and, as a matter of fact, I don’t believe thereareany such sights as the ones we think he has showed us. You’ve been on Broadway? Well, can you lay your hand on your heart, and honestly affirm that when you are there again you won’t at once realize that there never were such beauties as these we’ve been seeing? Won’t you know then that this is all a glamour—a hypnotic suggestion of Gaspero’s mind upon ours?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” snapped Jane. “What is all this rhodomontade leading to?”

“To a desire to follow the wizard,” answered Peripatetica recklessly. “Whither Gaspero goeth I go! I am fully prepared to wallow in glamours, and besides we’ve luncheon in our basket, so don’t be tiresome,Jane. Let’s abandon the commonplace and ‘follow the Gleam.’”

“Very well,” laughed Jane, climbing into the carriage. “Gaspero and ‘gleam’ if you like.”

Whether the molto bella vista ever existed remains still a subject of dispute. Peripatetica insists that it was only a pretext for leading them to a place where Gaspero intended they should lunch, but Jane, who always kicks against the philosophic pricks of the determinists, contends that she exercised a certain measure of free will in the matter. However that may be, they wound among mountain roads, by caves Gaspero said were once the dwellings of giants, by little outlying villages where old women span and wove in the doorways and young women made lace; where copper-workers sat in the street and with musical clang of little hammers beat out glittering vessels of rosy metal. They scattered flocks of goats from their path, the shaggy white bucks leaping nimbly upon the wall and staring at them with curious ironic, satyr-like glances; and far, very far up, they came upon a mountain meadow mistily shadowed by enormous gnarled olive trees—a meadow knee-deep in flowers. A meadow that was a sea of flowers, orange, golden and lemon, rippling and dimpling in the light and shade, breathed upon by the faint flying airs of those high spaces:

“In Arcady, in Arcady!Where all the leaves are merry—”

“In Arcady, in Arcady!

Where all the leaves are merry—”

cried Peripatetica joyously.

“Of course it’s Arcady,” said Jane, with conviction. “And we have come upon it in the Age—or perhaps the moment—of Gold. Gaspero,” she announced firmly, “we will lunch right here.”

“But Signorina—the Vista!” protested the Wizard with a quizzical smile.

It was really (Peripatetica is convinced) Gaspero’s subtle understanding of Jane’s character which led him to offer just sufficient opposition to fix her determination to stay at the very spot where he could best work his magic, for a flowing world of shadowy purple swam about them in a thousand suave folds down to a shining sea, and he could not have showed them any vista more beautiful. But why attempt to shake Jane’s pleased conviction it was really owing to her that for a few hours she and Peripatetica could truly say, “I too have lived in Arcadia.” That it was owing to her they cheerfully fed there, and lay cradled for long warm hours in that perfumed flood of flowers in happy thoughtless silence, wrapped in a fold of the Earth Mother’s—the great Demeter’s—mantle; a fold embroidered by the fine fingers of her daughter Persephone, the Opener of Flowers.

That night, when the full moon rose over the silky sea, far down the horizon behind them slowly faded into the distance the ghostly silver peaks of the enchanted Land of the Older Gods.

THE END

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“We must now all read all of Anatole France. The offer is too good to be shirked. He is just Anatole France, the greatest living writer of French.—Daily Chronicle.”

Complete Limited Edition in English

Under the general editorship of Frederic Chapman. 8vo., special light-weight paper, wide margins, Caslon type, bound in red and gold, gilt top, and papers from designs by Beardsley, initials by Ospovat.$2.00 per volume(except Joan of Arc),postpaid.

The Red Lily. Translated byWinifred Stephens.

The Well of Saint Clare. Translated byAlfred Allinson.

Mother of Pearl. Translated byFrederic Chapman,

Containing:

The Procurator of JudeaOur Lady’s JugglerAmycus and CelestineMadam de Luzy, etc.

The Procurator of Judea

Our Lady’s Juggler

Amycus and Celestine

Madam de Luzy, etc.

The Garden of Epicurus. Translated byAlfred R. Allinson, Containing:

In the Elysian FieldsCard HousesCareers for WomenThe Priory, etc.

In the Elysian Fields

Card Houses

Careers for Women

The Priory, etc.

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. Translated byLafcadio Hearn.

This novel was “crowned” by the French Academy in 1881, the author being received into membership in 1896.

“The highest presentation of France’s many qualities and gifts is to be found in this exquisite book.”

Joan of Arc. Translated byWinifred Stephens. 2 volumes.$8.00 net per set. Postage extra.

“This is an epoch-making book.... Beneath the simplicity of the mediæval narrative there may still be discerned the delicious irony and the delicate subtle humor of the novels.” Stephensin “French Novelists of Today.”

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