Ardent fire worshippers they found themselves becoming in this supposedly Southern land. If Persephone had ever been as cold as they, they doubted if thatenlèvementto 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 oftable 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 spicyincense 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 checksof 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 asthey 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 theorythat 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 thetranspirationwithout that being of no use.”
“Abath! with acold! 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 ofardent 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 6A.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 “aninjurienzapuppy!”
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 timeshe 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, andthe 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 shrinenestled 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, showedthem 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 amolto bella vistabeyond. Always welcoming theunexpected 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 amolto vecchialady, 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 wascosa di molto antichitaand 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 orangesand 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 terracedorchards 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, andat 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 wasbrutta,” 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 oddand 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 strangelyliberal, 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 breathingof 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 airNothing doth the good monk careFor such worldly themes as these.From the garden just belowLittle puffs of perfume blow,And a sound is in his earsOf the murmur of the beesIn the shimmering chestnut trees.Nothing else he heeds or hears.All the landscape seems to swoonIn the happy afternoon.”
“On his terrace high in airNothing doth the good monk careFor such worldly themes as these.From the garden just belowLittle puffs of perfume blow,And a sound is in his earsOf the murmur of the beesIn the shimmering chestnut trees.Nothing else he heeds or hears.All the landscape seems to swoonIn the happy afternoon.”
“On his terrace high in airNothing doth the good monk careFor such worldly themes as these.From the garden just belowLittle puffs of perfume blow,And a sound is in his earsOf the murmur of the beesIn the shimmering chestnut trees.Nothing else he heeds or hears.All the landscape seems to swoonIn the happy afternoon.”
“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 stonecorridors 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 ofsome 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 132B.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 agreat 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, butbends 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 embroideriesand 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 behindclouds, 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 braveasinelliGiovanino 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 wasmolto interessanteand 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 andlighting 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 solong 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 fellowasinellowas 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 upthat!” 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 goeson, 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 littletratoria. 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—withreeling 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 anotherasinelloladen 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 toofar 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, herfigliaAdalina, 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 beexpected 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.
“Whatisthe 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 amanciatoo. 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.