There is always a mild excitement about mounting donkeys in the morning here for an excursion among the hills. The warm sun pouring into the garden, the smell of oranges, the stimulating air, the general openness and freshness, promise a day of enjoyment. There is always a doubt as to who will go; generally a donkey wanting; somebody wishes to join the party at the last moment; there is no end of running up and downstairs, calling from balconies and terraces; some never ready, and some waiting below in the sun; the whole house in a tumult, drivers in a worry, and the sleepy animals now and then joining in the clatter with a vocal performance that is neither a trumpet-call nor a steam-whistle, but an indescribable noise, that begins in agony and abruptly breaks down in despair. It is difficult to get the train in motion. The lady who ordered Succarina has got a strange donkey, and Macaroni has on the wrong saddle. Succarina is a favorite, the kindest, easiest, and surest-footed of beasts,—a diminutive animal, not bigger than a Friesland sheep; old, in fact grizzly with years, and not unlike the aged, wizened little women who are so common here: for beauty in this region dries up; and these handsome Sorrento girls, if they live, and almost everybody does live, have the prospect, in their old age, of becoming mummies, with parchment skins. I have heard of climates that preserve female beauty; this embalms it, only the beauty escapes in the process. As I was saying, Succarina is little, old, and grizzly; but her head is large, and one might be contented to be as wise as she looks.
The party is at length mounted, and clatters away through the narrow streets. Donkey-riding is very good for people who think they cannot walk. It looks very much like riding, to a spectator; and it deceives the person undertaking it into an amount of exercise equal to walking. I have a great admiration for the donkey character. There never was such patience under wrong treatment, such return of devotion for injury. Their obstinacy, which is so much talked about, is only an exercise of the right of private judgment, and an intelligent exercise of it, no doubt, if we could take the donkey point of view, as so many of us are accused of doing in other things. I am certain of one thing: in any large excursion party there will be more obstinate people than obstinate donkeys; and yet the poor brutes get all the thwacks and thumps. We are bound to-day for the Punta della Campanella, the extreme point of the promontory, and ten miles away. The path lies up the steps from the new Massa carriage-road, now on the backbone of the ridge, and now in the recesses of the broken country. What an animated picture is the donkeycade, as it mounts the steeps, winding along the zigzags! Hear the little bridlebells jingling, the drivers groaning their "a-e-ugh, a-e-ugh," the riders making a merry din of laughter, and firing off a fusillade of ejaculations of delight and wonder.
The road is between high walls; round the sweep of curved terraces which rise above and below us, bearing the glistening olive; through glens and gullies; over and under arches, vine-grown,—how little we make use of the arch at home!—round sunny dells where orange orchards gleam; past shrines, little chapels perched on rocks, rude villas commanding most extensive sweeps of sea and shore. The almond trees are in full bloom, every twig a thickly-set spike of the pink and white blossoms; daisies and dandelions are out; the purple crocuses sprinkle the ground, the petals exquisitely varied on the reverse side, and the stamens of bright salmon color; the large double anemones have come forth, certain that it is spring; on the higher crags by the wayside the Mediterranean heather has shaken out its delicate flowers, which fill the air with a mild fragrance; while blue violets, sweet of scent like the English, make our path a perfumed one. And this is winter.
We have made a late start, owing to the fact that everybody is captain of the expedition, and to the Sorrento infirmity that no one is able to make up his mind about anything. It is one o'clock when we reach a high transverse ridge, and find the headlands of the peninsula rising before us, grim hills of limestone, one of them with the ruins of a convent on top, and no road apparent thither, and Capri ahead of us in the sea, the only bit of land that catches any light; for as we have journeyed the sky has thickened, the clouds of the sirocco have come up from the south; there has been first a mist, and then a fine rain; the ruins on the peak of Santa Costanza are now hid in mist. We halt for consultation. Shall we go on and brave a wetting, or ignominiously retreat? There are many opinions, but few decided ones. The drivers declare that it will be a bad time. One gentleman, with an air of decision, suggests that it is best to go on, or go back, if we do not stand here and wait. The deaf lady, from near Dublin, being appealed to, says that, perhaps, if it is more prudent, we had better go back if it is going to rain. It does rain. Waterproofs are put on, umbrellas spread, backs turned to the wind; and we look like a group of explorers under adverse circumstances, "silent on a peak in Darien," the donkeys especially downcast and dejected. Finally, as is usual in life, a, compromise prevails. We decide to continue for half an hour longer and see what the weather is. No sooner have we set forward over the brow of a hill than it grows lighter on the sea horizon in the southwest, the ruins on the peak become visible, Capri is in full sunlight. The clouds lift more and more, and still hanging overhead, but with no more rain, are like curtains gradually drawn up, opening to us a glorious vista of sunshine and promise, an illumined, sparkling, illimitable sea, and a bright foreground of slopes and picturesque rocks. Before the half hour is up, there is not one of the party who does not claim to have been the person who insisted upon going forward.
We halt for a moment to look at Capri, that enormous, irregular rock, raising its huge back out of the sea, its back broken in the middle, with the little village for a saddle. On the farther summit, above Anacapri, a precipice of two thousand feet sheer down to the water on the other side, hangs a light cloud. The east elevation, whence the playful Tiberius used to amuse his green old age by casting his prisoners eight hundred feet down into the sea, has the strong sunlight on it; and below, the row of tooth-like rocks, which are the extreme eastern point, shine in a warm glow. We descend through a village, twisting about in its crooked streets. The inhabitants, who do not see strangers every day, make free to stare at and comment on us, and even laugh at something that seems very comical in our appearance; which shows how ridiculous are the costumes of Paris and New York in some places. Stalwart girls, with only an apology for clothes, with bare legs, brown faces, and beautiful eyes, stop in their spinning, holding the distaff suspended, while they examine us at leisure. At our left, as we turn from the church and its sunny piazza, where old women sit and gabble, down the ravine, is a snug village under the mountain by the shore, with a great square medieval tower. On the right, upon rocky points, are remains of round towers, and temples perhaps.
We sweep away to the left round the base of the hill, over a difficult and stony path. Soon the last dilapidated villa is passed, the last terrace and olive-tree are left behind; and we emerge upon a wild, rocky slope, barren of vegetation, except little tufts of grass and a sort of lentil; a wide sweep of limestone strata set on edge, and crumbling in the beat of centuries, rising to a considerable height on the left. Our path descends toward the sea, still creeping round the end of the promontory. Scattered here and there over the rocks, like conies, are peasants, tending a few lean cattle, and digging grasses from the crevices. The women and children are wild in attire and manner, and set up a clamor of begging as we pass. A group of old hags begin beating a poor child as we approach, to excite our compassion for the abused little object, and draw out centimes.
Walking ahead of the procession, which gets slowly down the rugged path, I lose sight of my companions, and have the solitude, the sun on the rocks, the glistening sea, all to myself. Soon I espy a man below me sauntering down among the rocks. He sees me and moves away, a solitary figure. I say solitary; and so it is in effect, although he is leading a little boy, and calling to his dog, which runs back to bark at me. Is this the brigand of whom I have read, and is he luring me to his haunt? Probably. I follow. He throws his cloak about his shoulders, exactly as brigands do in the opera, and loiters on. At last there is the point in sight, a gray wall with blind arches. The man disappears through a narrow archway, and I follow. Within is an enormous square tower. I think it was built in Spanish days, as an outlook for Barbary pirates. A bell hung in it, which was set clanging when the white sails of the robbers appeared to the southward; and the alarm was repeated up the coast, the towers were manned, and the brown-cheeked girls flew away to the hills, I doubt not, for the touch of the sirocco was not half so much to be dreaded as the rough importunity of a Saracen lover. The bell is gone now, and no Moslem rovers are in sight. The maidens we had just passed would be safe if there were. My brigand disappears round the tower; and I follow down steps, by a white wall, and lo! a house,—a red stucco, Egyptian-looking building,—on the very edge of the rocks. The man unlocks a door and goes in. I consider this an invitation, and enter. On one side of the passage a sleeping-room, on the other a kitchen,—not sumptuous quarters; and we come then upon a pretty circular terrace; and there, in its glass case, is the lantern of the point. My brigand is a lighthouse-keeper, and welcomes me in a quiet way, glad, evidently, to see the face of a civilized being. It is very solitary, he says. I should think so. It is the end of everything. The Mediterranean waves beat with a dull thud on the worn crags below. The rocks rise up to the sky behind. There is nothing there but the sun, an occasional sail, and quiet, petrified Capri, three miles distant across the strait. It is an excellent place for a misanthrope to spend a week, and get cured. There must be a very dispiriting influence prevailing here; the keeper refused to take any money, the solitary Italian we have seen so affected.
We returned late. The young moon, lying in the lap of the old one, was superintending the brilliant sunset over Capri, as we passed the last point commanding it; and the light, fading away, left us stumbling over the rough path among the hills, darkened by the high walls. We were not sorry to emerge upon the crest above the Massa road. For there lay the sea, and the plain of Sorrento, with its darkening groves and hundreds of twinkling lights. As we went down the last descent, the bells of the town were all ringing, for it was the eve of the fete of St. Antonino.
"CAP, signor? Good day for Grott." Thus spoke a mariner, touching his Phrygian cap. The people here abbreviate all names. With them Massa is Mas, Meta is Met, Capri becomes Cap, the Grotta Azzurra is reduced familiarly to Grott, and they even curtail musical Sorrento into Serent.
Shall we go to Capri? Should we dare return to the great Republic, and own that we had not been into the Blue Grotto? We like to climb the steeps here, especially towards Massa, and look at Capri. I have read in some book that it used to be always visible from Sorrento. But now the promontory has risen, the Capo di Sorrento has thrust out its rocky spur with its ancient Roman masonry, and the island itself has moved so far round to the south that Sorrento, which fronts north, has lost sight of it.
We never tire of watching it, thinking that it could not be spared from the landscape. It lies only three miles from the curving end of the promontory, and is about twenty miles due south of Naples. In this atmosphere distances dwindle. The nearest land, to the northwest, is the larger island of Ischia, distant nearly as far as Naples; yet Capri has the effect of being anchored off the bay to guard the entrance. It is really a rock, three miles and a half long, rising straight out of the water, eight hundred feet high at one end, and eighteen hundred feet at the other, with a depression between. If it had been chiseled by hand and set there, it could not be more sharply defined. So precipitous are its sides of rock, that there are only two fit boat-landings, the marina on the north side, and a smaller place opposite. One of those light-haired and freckled Englishmen, whose pluck exceeds their discretion, rowed round the island alone in rough water, last summer, against the advice of the boatman, and unable to make a landing, and weary with the strife of the waves, was in considerable peril.
Sharp and clear as Capri is in outline, its contour is still most graceful and poetic. This wonderful atmosphere softens even its ruggedness, and drapes it with hues of enchanting beauty. Sometimes the haze plays fantastic tricks with it,—a cloud-cap hangs on Monte Solaro, or a mist obscures the base, and the massive summits of rock seem to float in the air, baseless fabrics of a vision that the rising wind will carry away perhaps. I know now what Homer means by "wandering islands." Shall we take a boat and sail over there, and so destroy forever another island of the imagination? The bane of travel is the destruction of illusions.
We like to talk about Capri, and to talk of going there. The Sorrento people have no end of gossip about the wild island; and, simple and primitive as they are, Capri is still more out of the world. I do not know what enchantment there is on the island; but —whoever sets foot there, they say, goes insane or dies a drunkard. I fancy the reason of this is found in the fact that the Capri girls are raving beauties. I am not sure but the monotony of being anchored off there in the bay, the monotony of rocks and precipices that goats alone can climb, the monotony of a temperature that scarcely ever, winter and summer, is below 55 or above 75 Fahrenheit indoors, might drive one into lunacy. But I incline to think it is due to the handsome Capri girls.
There are beautiful girls in Sorrento, with a beauty more than skin deep, a glowing, hidden fire, a ripeness like that of the grape and the peach which grows in the soft air and the sun. And they wither, like grapes that hang upon the stem. I have never seen a handsome, scarcely a decent-looking, old woman here. They are lank and dry, and their bones are covered with parchment. One of these brown-cheeked girls, with large, longing eyes, gives the stranger a start, now and then, when he meets her in a narrow way with a basket of oranges on her head. I hope he has the grace to go right by. Let him meditate what this vision of beauty will be like in twenty ears.
The Capri girls are famed as magnificent beauties, but they fade like their mainland sisters. The Saracens used to descend on their island, and carry them off to their harems. The English, a very adventurous people, who have no harems, have followed the Saracens. The young lords and gentlemen have a great fondness for Capri. I hear gossip enough about elopements, and not seldom marriages, with the island girls,—bright girls, with the Greek mother-wit, and surpassingly handsome; but they do not bear transportation to civilized life (any more than some of the native wines do): they accept no intellectual culture; and they lose their beauty as they grow old. What then? The young English blade, who was intoxicated by beauty into an injudicious match and might, as the proverb says, have gone insane if he could not have made it, takes to drink now, and so fulfills the other alternative. Alas! the fatal gift of beauty.
But I do not think Capri is so dangerous as it is represented. For (of course we went to Capri) neither at the marina, where a crowd of bare-legged, vociferous maidens with donkeys assailed us, nor in the village above, did I see many girls for whom and one little isle a person would forswear the world. But I can believe that they grow here. One of our donkey girls was a handsome, dark-skinned, black-eyed girl; but her little sister, a mite of a being of six years, who could scarcely step over the small stones in the road, and was forced to lead the donkey by her sister in order to establish another lien on us for buona mano, was a dirty little angel in rags, and her great soft black eyes will look somebody into the asylum or the drunkard's grave in time, I have no doubt. There was a stout, manly, handsome little fellow of five years, who established himself as the guide and friend of the tallest of our party. His hat was nearly gone; he was sadly out of repair in the rear; his short legs made the act of walking absurd; but he trudged up the hill with a certain dignity. And there was nothing mercenary about his attachment: he and his friend got upon very cordial terms: they exchanged gifts of shells and copper coin, but nothing was said about pay.
Nearly all the inhabitants, young and old, joined us in lively procession, up the winding road of three quarters of a mile, to the town. At the deep gate, entering between thick walls, we stopped to look at the sea. The crowd and clamor at our landing had been so great that we enjoyed the sight of the quiet old woman sitting here in the sun, and the few beggars almost too lazy to stretch out their hands. Within the gate is a large paved square, with the government offices and the tobacco-shop on one side, and the church opposite; between them, up a flight of broad stone steps, is the Hotel Tiberio. Our donkeys walk up them and into the hotel. The church and hotel are six hundred years old; the hotel was a villa belonging to Joanna II. of Naples. We climb to the roof of the quaint old building, and sit there to drink in the strange oriental scene. The landlord says it is like Jaffa or Jerusalem. The landlady, an Irish woman from Devonshire, says it is six francs a day. In what friendly intercourse the neighbors can sit on these flat roofs! How sightly this is, and yet how sheltered! To the east is the height where Augustus, and after him Tiberius, built palaces. To the west, up that vertical wall, by means of five hundred steps cut in the face of the rock, we go to reach the tableland of Anacapri, the primitive village of that name, hidden from view here; the medieval castle of Barbarossa, which hangs over a frightful precipice; and the height of Monte Solaro. The island is everywhere strewn with Roman ruins, and with faint traces of the Greeks.
Capri turns out not to be a barren rock. Broken and picturesque as it is, it is yet covered with vegetation. There is not a foot, one might say a point, of soil that does not bear something; and there is not a niche in the rock, where a scrap of dirt will stay, that is not made useful. The whole island is terraced. The most wonderful thing about it, after all, is its masonry. You come to think, after a time, that the island is not natural rock, but a mass of masonry. If the labor that has been expended here, only to erect platforms for the soil to rest on, had been given to our country, it would have built half a dozen Pacific railways, and cut a canal through the Isthmus.
But the Blue Grotto? Oh, yes! Is it so blue? That depends upon the time of day, the sun, the clouds, and something upon the person who enters it. It is frightfully blue to some. We bend down in our rowboat, slide into the narrow opening which is three feet high, and passing into the spacious cavern, remain there for half an hour. It is, to be sure, forty feet high, and a hundred by a hundred and fifty in extent, with an arched roof, and clear water for a floor. The water appears to be as deep as the roof is high, and is of a light, beautiful blue, in contrast with the deep blue of the bay. At the entrance the water is illuminated, and there is a pleasant, mild light within: one has there a novel subterranean sensation; but it did not remind me of anything I have seen in the "Arabian Nights." I have seen pictures of it that were much finer.
As we rowed close to the precipice in returning, I saw many similar openings, not so deep, and perhaps only sham openings; and the water-line was fretted to honeycomb by the eating waves. Beneath the water-line, and revealed here and there when the waves receded, was a line of bright red coral.
At vespers on the fete of St. Antonino, and in his church, I saw the Signorina Fiammetta. I stood leaning against a marble pillar near the altar-steps, during the service, when I saw the young girl kneeling on the pavement in act of prayer. Her black lace veil had fallen a little back from her head; and there was something in her modest attitude and graceful figure that made her conspicuous among all her kneeling companions, with their gay kerchiefs and bright gowns. When she rose and sat down, with folded hands and eyes downcast, there was something so pensive in her subdued mien that I could not take my eyes from her. To say that she had the rich olive complexion, with the gold struggling through, large, lustrous black eyes, and harmonious features, is only to make a weak photograph, when I should paint a picture in colors and infuse it with the sweet loveliness of a maiden on the way to sainthood. I was sure that I had seen her before, looking down from the balcony of a villa just beyond the Roman wall, for the face was not one that even the most unimpressible idler would forget. I was sure that, young as she was, she had already a history; had lived her life, and now walked amid these groves and old streets in a dream. The story which I heard is not long.
In the drawing-room of the Villa Nardi was shown, and offered for sale, an enormous counterpane, crocheted in white cotton. Loop by loop, it must have been an immense labor to knit it; for it was fashioned in pretty devices, and when spread out was rich and showy enough for the royal bed of a princess. It had been crocheted by Fiammetta for her marriage, the only portion the poor child could bring to that sacrament. Alas! the wedding was never to be; and the rich work, into which her delicate fingers had knit so many maiden dreams and hopes and fears, was offered for sale in the resort of strangers. It could not have been want only that induced her to put this piece of work in the market, but the feeling, also, that the time never again could return when she would have need of it. I had no desire to purchase such a melancholy coverlet, but I could well enough fancy why she would wish to part with what must be rather a pall than a decoration in her little chamber.
Fiammetta lived with her mother in a little villa, the roof of which is in sight from my sunny terrace in the Villa Nardi, just to the left of the square old convent tower, rising there out of the silver olive-boughs,—a tumble-down sort of villa, with a flat roof and odd angles and parapets, in the midst of a thrifty but small grove of lemons and oranges. They were poor enough, or would be in any country where physical wants are greater than here, and yet did not belong to that lowest class, the young girls of which are little more than beasts of burden, accustomed to act as porters, bearing about on their heads great loads of stone, wood, water, and baskets of oranges in the shipping season. She could not have been forced to such labor, or she never would have had the time to work that wonderful coverlet.
Giuseppe was an honest and rather handsome young fellow of Sorrento, industrious and good-natured, who did not bother his head much about learning. He was, however, a skillful workman in the celebrated inlaid and mosaic woodwork of the place, and, it is said, had even invented some new figures for the inlaid pictures in colored woods. He had a little fancy for the sea as well, and liked to pull an oar over to Capri on occasion, by which he could earn a few francs easier than he could saw them out of the orangewood. For the stupid fellow, who could not read a word in his prayer-book, had an idea of thrift in his head, and already, I suspect, was laying up liras with an object. There are one or two dandies in Sorrento who attempt to dress as they do in Naples. Giuseppe was not one of these; but there was not a gayer or handsomer gallant than he on Sunday, or one more looked at by the Sorrento girls, when he had on his clean suit and his fresh red Phrygian cap. At least the good Fiammetta thought so, when she met him at church, though I feel sure she did not allow even his handsome figure to come between her and the Virgin. At any rate, there can be no doubt of her sentiments after church, when she and her mother used to walk with him along the winding Massa road above the sea, and stroll down to the shore to sit on the greensward over the Temple of Hercules, or the Roman Baths, or the remains of the villa of C. Fulvius Cunctatus Cocles, or whatever those ruins subterranean are, there on the Capo di Sorrento. Of course, this is mere conjecture of mine. They may have gone on the hills behind the town instead, or they may have stood leaning over the garden-wall of her mother's little villa, looking at the passers-by in the deep lane, thinking about nothing in the world, and talking about it all the sunny afternoon, until Ischia was purple with the last light, and the olive terraces behind them began to lose their gray bloom. All I do know is, that they were in love, blossoming out in it as the almond-trees do here in February; and that all the town knew it, and saw a wedding in the future, just as plain as you can see Capri from the heights above the town.
It was at this time that the wonderful counterpane began to grow, to the continual astonishment of Giuseppe, to whom it seemed a marvel of skill and patience, and who saw what love and sweet hope Fiammetta was knitting into it with her deft fingers. I declare, as I think of it, the white cotton spread out on her knees, in such contrast to the rich olive of her complexion and her black shiny hair, while she knits away so merrily, glancing up occasionally with those liquid, laughing eyes to Giuseppe, who is watching her as if she were an angel right out of the blue sky, I am tempted not to tell this story further, but to leave the happy two there at the open gate of life, and to believe that they entered in.
This was about the time of the change of government, after this region had come to be a part of the Kingdom of Italy. After the first excitement was over, and the simple people found they were not all made rich, nor raised to a condition in which they could live without work, there began to be some dissatisfaction. Why the convents need have been suppressed, and especially the poor nuns packed off, they couldn't see; and then the taxes were heavier than ever before; instead of being supported by the government, they had to support it; and, worst of all, the able young fellows must still go for soldiers. Just as one was learning his trade, or perhaps had acquired it, and was ready to earn his living and begin to make a home for his wife, he must pass the three best years of his life in the army. The conscription was relentless.
The time came to Giuseppe, as it did to the others. I never heard but he was brave enough; there was no storm on the Mediterranean that he dare not face in his little boat; and he would not have objected to a campaign with the red shirts of Garibaldi. But to be torn away from his occupations by which he was daily laying aside a little for himself and Fiammetta, and to leave her for three years,—that seemed dreadful to him. Three years is a longtime; and though he had no doubt of the pretty Fiammetta, yet women are women, said the shrewd fellow to himself, and who knows what might happen, if a gallant came along who could read and write, as Fiammetta could, and, besides, could play the guitar?
The result was, that Giuseppe did not appear at the mustering-office on the day set; and, when the file of soldiers came for him, he was nowhere to be found. He had fled to the mountains. I scarcely know what his plan was, but he probably trusted to some good luck to escape the conscription altogether, if he could shun it now; and, at least, I know that he had many comrades who did the same, so that at times the mountains were full of young fellows who were lurking in them to escape the soldiers. And they fared very roughly usually, and sometimes nearly perished from hunger; for though the sympathies of the peasants were undoubtedly with the quasi-outlaws rather than with the carbineers, yet the latter were at every hamlet in the hills, and liable to visit every hut, so that any relief extended to the fugitives was attended with great danger; and, besides, the hunted men did not dare to venture from their retreats. Thus outlawed and driven to desperation by hunger, these fugitives, whom nobody can defend for running away from their duties as citizens, became brigands. A cynical German, who was taken by them some years ago on the road to Castellamare, a few miles above here, and held for ransom, declared that they were the most honest fellows he had seen in Italy; but I never could see that he intended the remark as any compliment to them. It is certain that the inhabitants of all these towns held very loose ideas on the subject of brigandage: the poor fellows, they used to say, only robbed because they were hungry, and they must live somehow.
What Fiammetta thought, down in her heart, is not told: but I presume she shared the feelings of those about her concerning the brigands, and, when she heard that Giuseppe had joined them, was more anxious for the safety of his body than of his soul; though I warrant she did not forget either, in her prayers to the Virgin and St. Antonino. And yet those must have been days, weeks, months, of terrible anxiety to the poor child; and if she worked away at the counterpane, netting in that elaborate border, as I have no doubt she did, it must have been with a sad heart and doubtful fingers. I think that one of the psychological sensitives could distinguish the parts of the bedspread that were knit in the sunny days from those knit in the long hours of care and deepening anxiety.
It was rarely that she received any message from him and it was then only verbal and of the briefest; he was in the mountains above Amalfi; one day he had come so far round as the top of the Great St. Angelo, from which he could look down upon the piano of Sorrento, where the little Fiammetta was; or he had been on the hills near Salerno, hunted and hungry; or his company had descended upon some travelers going to Paestum, made a successful haul, and escaped into the steep mountains beyond. He didn't intend to become a regular bandit, not at all. He hoped that something might happen so that he could steal back into Sorrento, unmarked by the government; or, at least, that he could escape away to some other country or island, where Fiammetta could join him. Did she love him yet, as in the old happy days? As for him, she was now everything to him; and he would willingly serve three or thirty years in the army, if the government could forget he had been a brigand, and permit him to have a little home with Fiammetta at the end of the probation. There was not much comfort in all this, but the simple fellow could not send anything more cheerful; and I think it used to feed the little maiden's heart to hear from him, even in this downcast mood, for his love for her was a dear certainty, and his absence and wild life did not dim it.
My informant does not know how long this painful life went on, nor does it matter much. There came a day when the government was shamed into new vigor against the brigands. Some English people of consequence (the German of whom I have spoken was with them) had been captured, and it had cost them a heavy ransom. The number of the carbineers was quadrupled in the infested districts, soldiers penetrated the fastnesses of the hills, there were daily fights with the banditti; and, to show that this was no sham, some of them were actually shot, and others were taken and thrown into prison. Among those who were not afraid to stand and fight, and who would not be captured, was our Giuseppe. One day the Italia newspaper of Naples had an account of a fight with brigands; and in the list of those who fell was the name of Giuseppe—-, of Sorrento, shot through the head, as he ought to have been, and buried without funeral among the rocks.
This was all. But when the news was read in the little post office in Sorrento, it seemed a great deal more than it does as I write it; for, if Giuseppe had an enemy in the village, it was not among the people; and not one who heard the news did not think at once of the poor girl to whom it would be more than a bullet through the heart. And so it was. The slender hope of her life then went out. I am told that there was little change outwardly, and that she was as lovely as before; but a great cloud of sadness came over her, in which she was always enveloped, whether she sat at home, or walked abroad in the places where she and Giuseppe used to wander. The simple people respected her grief, and always made a tender-hearted stillness when the bereft little maiden went through the streets,—a stillness which she never noticed, for she never noticed anything apparently. The bishop himself when he walked abroad could not be treated with more respect.
This was all the story of the sweet Fiammetta that was confided to me. And afterwards, as I recalled her pensive face that evening as she kneeled at vespers, I could not say whether, after all, she was altogether to be pitied, in the holy isolation of her grief, which I am sure sanctified her, and, in some sort, made her life complete. For I take it that life, even in this sunny Sorrento, is not alone a matter of time.
The Great St. Angelo and that region are supposed to be the haunts of brigands. From those heights they spy out the land, and from thence have, more than once, descended upon the sea-road between Castellamare and Sorrento, and caught up English and German travelers. This elevation commands, also, the Paestum way. We have no faith in brigands in these days; for in all our remote and lonely explorations of this promontory we have never met any but the most simple-hearted and good-natured people, who were quite as much afraid of us as we were of them. But there are not wanting stories, every day, to keep alive the imagination of tourists.
We are waiting in the garden this sunny, enticing morning-just the day for a tramp among the purple hills—for our friend, the long Englishman, who promised, over night, to go with us. This excellent, good-natured giant, whose head rubs the ceiling of any room in the house, has a wife who is fond of him, and in great dread of the brigands. He comes down with a sheepish air, at length, and informs us that his wife won't let him go.
"Of course I can go, if I like," he adds. "But the fact is, I have n't slept much all night: she kept asking me if I was going!" On the whole, the giant don't care to go. There are things more to be feared than brigands.
The expedition is, therefore, reduced to two unarmed persons. In the piazza we pick up a donkey and his driver for use in case of accident; and, mounting the driver on the donkey,—an arrangement that seems entirely satisfactory to him,—we set forward. If anything can bring back youth, it is a day of certain sunshine and a bit of unexplored country ahead, with a whole day in which to wander in it without a care or a responsibility. We walk briskly up the walled road of the piano, striking at the overhanging golden fruit with our staves; greeting the orange-girls who come down the side lanes; chaffing with the drivers, the beggars, the old women who sit in the sun; looking into the open doors of houses and shops upon women weaving, boys and girls slicing up heaps of oranges, upon the makers of macaroni, the sellers of sour wine, the merry shoemakers, whose little dens are centers of gossip here, as in all the East: the whole life of these people is open and social; to be on the street is to be at home.
We wind up the steep hill behind Meta, every foot of which is terraced for olive-trees, getting, at length, views over the wayside wall of the plain and bay and rising into the purer air and the scent of flowers and other signs of coming spring, to the little village of Arola, with its church and bell, its beggars and idlers,—just a little street of houses jammed in between the hills of Camaldoli and Pergola, both of which we know well.
Upon the cliff by Pergola is a stone house, in front of which I like to lie, looking straight down a thousand or two feet upon the roofs of Meta, the map of the plain, and the always fascinating bay. I went down the backbone of the limestone ridge towards the sea the other afternoon, before sunset, and unexpectedly came upon a group of little stone cottages on a ledge, which are quite hidden from below. The inhabitants were as much surprised to see a foreigner break through their seclusion as I was to come upon them. However, they soon recovered presence of mind to ask for a little money. Half a dozen old hags with the parchment also sat upon the rocks in the sun, spinning from distaffs, exactly as their ancestors did in Greece two thousand years ago, I doubt not. I do not know that it is true, as Tasso wrote, that this climate is so temperate and serene that one almost becomes immortal in it. Since two thousand years all these coasts have changed more or less, risen and sunk, and the temples and palaces of two civilizations have tumbled into the sea. Yet I do not know but these tranquil old women have been sitting here on the rocks all the while, high above change and worry and decay, gossiping and spinning, like Fates. Their yarn must be uncanny.
But we wander. It is difficult to go to any particular place here; impossible to write of it in a direct manner. Our mulepath continues most delightful, by slopes of green orchards nestled in sheltered places, winding round gorges, deep and ragged with loose stones, and groups of rocks standing on the edge of precipices, like medieval towers, and through village after village tucked away in the hills. The abundance of population is a constant surprise. As we proceed, the people are wilder and much more curious about us, having, it is evident, seen few strangers lately. Women and children, half-dressed in dirty rags which do not hide the form, come out from their low stone huts upon the windy terraces, and stand, arms akimbo, staring at us, and not seldom hailing us in harsh voices. Their sole dress is often a single split and torn gown, not reaching to the bare knees, evidently the original of those in the Naples ballet (it will, no doubt, be different when those creatures exchange the ballet for the ballot); and, with their tangled locks and dirty faces, they seem rather beasts than women. Are their husbands brigands, and are they in wait for us in the chestnut-grove yonder?
The grove is charming; and the men we meet there gathering sticks are not so surly as the women. They point the way; and when we emerge from the wood, St. Maria a Castello is before us on a height, its white and red church shining in the sun. We climb up to it. In front is a broad, flagged terrace; and on the edge are deep wells in the rock, from which we draw cool water. Plentifully victualed, one could stand a siege here, and perhaps did in the gamey Middle Ages. Monk or soldier need not wish a pleasanter place to lounge. Adjoining the church, but lower, is a long, low building with three rooms, at once house and stable, the stable in the center, though all of them have hay in the lofts. The rooms do not communicate. That is the whole of the town of St. Maria a Castello.
In one of the apartments some rough-looking peasants are eating dinner, a frugal meal: a dish of unclean polenta, a plate of grated cheese, a basket of wormy figs, and some sour red wine; no bread, no meat. They looked at us askance, and with no sign of hospitality. We made friends, however, with the ragged children, one of whom took great delight in exhibiting his litter of puppies; and we at length so far worked into the good graces of the family that the mother was prevailed upon to get us some milk and eggs. I followed the woman into one of the apartments to superintend the cooking of the eggs. It was a mere den, with an earth floor. A fire of twigs was kindled against the farther wall, and a little girl, half-naked, carrying a baby still more economically clad, was stooping down to blow the smudge into a flame. The smoke, some of it, went over our heads out at the door. We boiled the eggs. We desired salt; and the woman brought us pepper in the berry. We insisted on salt, and at length got the rock variety, which we pounded on the rocks. We ate our eggs and drank our milk on the terrace, with the entire family interested spectators. The men were the hardest-looking ruffians we had met yet: they were making a bit of road near by, but they seemed capable of turning their hands to easier money-getting; and there couldn't be a more convenient place than this.
When our repast was over, and I had drunk a glass of wine with the proprietor, I offered to pay him, tendering what I knew was a fair price in this region. With some indignation of gesture, he refused it, intimating that it was too little. He seemed to be seeking an excuse for a quarrel with us; so I pocketed the affront, money and all, and turned away. He appeared to be surprised, and going indoors presently came out with a bottle of wine and glasses, and followed us down upon the rocks, pressing us to drink. Most singular conduct; no doubt drugged wine; travelers put into deep sleep; robbed; thrown over precipice; diplomatic correspondence, flattering, but no compensation to them. Either this, or a case of hospitality. We declined to drink, and the brigand went away.
We sat down upon the jutting ledge of a precipice, the like of which is not in the world: on our left, the rocky, bare side of St. Angelo, against which the sunshine dashes in waves; below us, sheer down two thousand feet, the city of Positano, a nest of brown houses, thickly clustered on a conical spur, and lying along the shore, the home of three thousand people,—with a running jump I think I could land in the midst of it,—a pygmy city, inhabited by mites, as we look down upon it; a little beach of white sand, a sailboat lying on it, and some fishermen just embarking; a long hotel on the beach; beyond, by the green shore, a country seat charmingly situated amid trees and vines; higher up, the ravine-seamed hill, little stone huts, bits of ruin, towers, arches. How still it is! All the stiller that I can, now and then, catch the sound of an axe, and hear the shouts of some children in a garden below. How still the sea is! How many ages has it been so? Does the purple mist always hang there upon the waters of Salerno Bay, forever hiding from the gaze Paestum and its temples, and all that shore which is so much more Grecian than Roman?
After all, it is a satisfaction to turn to the towering rock of St. Angelo; not a tree, not a shrub, not a spire of grass, on its perpendicular side. We try to analyze the satisfaction there is in such a bald, treeless, verdureless mass. We can grasp it intellectually, in its sharp solidity, which is undisturbed by any ornament: it is, to the mind, like some complete intellectual performance; the mind rests on it, like a demonstration in Euclid. And yet what a color of beauty it takes on in the distance!
When we return, the bandits have all gone to their road-making: the suspicious landlord is nowhere to be seen. We call the woman from the field, and give her money, which she seemed not to expect, and for which she shows no gratitude. Life appears to be indifferent to these people. But, if these be brigands, we prefer them to those of Naples, and even to the innkeepers of England. As we saunter home in the pleasant afternoon, the vesper-bells are calling to each other, making the sweetest echoes of peace everywhere in the hills, and all the piano is jubilant with them, as we come down the steeps at sunset.
"You see there was no danger," said the giant to his wife that evening at the supper-table.
"You would have found there was danger, if you had gone," returned the wife of the giant significantly.
I like to walk upon the encircling ridge behind Sorrento, which commands both bays. From there I can look down upon the Isles of the Sirens. The top is a broad, windy strip of pasture, which falls off abruptly to the Bay of Salerno on the south: a regular embankment of earth runs along the side of the precipitous steeps, towards Sorrento. It appears to be a line of defence for musketry, such as our armies used to throw up: whether the French, who conducted siege operations from this promontory on Capri, under Murat, had anything to do with it, does not appear.
Walking there yesterday, we met a woman shepherdess, cowherd, or siren—standing guard over three steers while they fed; a scantily-clad, brown woman, who had a distaff in her hand, and spun the flax as she watched the straying cattle, an example of double industry which the men who tend herds never imitate. Very likely her ancestors so spun and tended cattle on the plains of Thessaly. We gave the rigid woman good-morning, but she did not heed or reply; we made some inquiries as to paths, but she ignored us; we bade her good-day, and she scowled at us: she only spun. She was so out of tune with the people, and the gentle influences of this region, that we could only regard her as an anomaly,—the representative of some perversity and evil genius, which, no doubt, lurks here as it does elsewhere in the world. She could not have descended from either of the groups of the Sirens; for she was not fascinating enough to be fatal.
I like to look upon these islets or rocks of the Sirens, barren and desolate, with a few ruins of the Roman time and remains of the Middle-Age prisons of the doges of Amalfi; but I do not care to dissipate any illusions by going to them. I remember how the Sirens sat on flowery meads by the shore and sang, and are vulgarly supposed to have allured passing mariners to a life of ignoble pleasure, and then let them perish, hungry with all unsatisfied longings. The bones of these unfortunates, whitening on the rocks, of which Virgil speaks, I could not see. Indeed, I think any one who lingers long in this region will doubt if they were ever there, and will come to believe that the characters of the Sirens are popularly misconceived. Allowing Ulysses to be only another name for the sun-god, who appears in myths as Indra, Apollo, William Tell, the sure-hitter, the great archer, whose arrows are sunbeams, it is a degrading conception of him that he was obliged to lash himself to the mast when he went into action with the Sirens, like Farragut at Mobile, though for a very different reason. We should be forced to believe that Ulysses was not free from the basest mortal longings, and that he had not strength of mind to resist them, but must put himself in durance; as our moderns who cannot control their desires go into inebriate asylums.
Mr. Ruskin says that "the Sirens are the great constant desires, the infinite sicknesses of heart, which, rightly placed, give life, and, wrongly placed, waste it away; so that there are two groups of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other is fatal." Unfortunately we are all, as were the Greeks, ministered unto by both these groups, but can fortunately, on the other hand, choose which group we will listen to the singing of, though the strains are somewhat mingled; as, for instance, in the modern opera, where the music quite as often wastes life away, as gives to it the energy of pure desire. Yet, if I were to locate the Sirens geographically, I should place the beneficent desires on this coast, and the dangerous ones on that of wicked Baiae; to which group the founder of Naples no doubt belonged.
Nowhere, perhaps, can one come nearer to the beautiful myths of Greece, the springlike freshness of the idyllic and heroic age, than on this Sorrentine promontory. It was no chance that made these coasts the home of the kind old monarch Eolus, inventor of sails and storm-signals. On the Telegrafo di Mare Cuccola is a rude signal-apparatus for communication with Capri,—to ascertain if wind and wave are propitious for entrance to the Blue Grotto,—which probably was not erected by Eolus, although he doubtless used this sightly spot as one of his stations. That he dwelt here, in great content, with his six sons and six daughters, the Months, is nearly certain; and I feel as sure that the Sirens, whose islands were close at hand, were elevators and not destroyers of the primitive races living here.
It seems to me this must be so; because the pilgrim who surrenders himself to the influences of these peaceful and sun-inundated coasts, under this sky which the bright Athena loved and loves, loses, by and by, those longings and heart-sicknesses which waste away his life, and comes under the dominion, more and more, of those constant desires after that which is peaceful and enduring and has the saving quality of purity. I know, indeed, that it is not always so; and that, as Boreas is a better nurse of rugged virtue than Zephyr, so the soft influences of this clime only minister to the fatal desires of some: and such are likely to sail speedily back to Naples.
The Sirens, indeed, are everywhere; and I do not know that we can go anywhere that we shall escape the infinite longings, or satisfy them. Here, in the purple twilight of history, they offered men the choice of good and evil. I have a fancy, that, in stepping out of the whirl of modern life upon a quiet headland, so blessed of two powers, the air and the sea, we are able to come to a truer perception of the drift of the eternal desires within us. But I cannot say whether it is a subtle fascination, linked with these mythic and moral influences, or only the physical loveliness of this promontory, that lures travelers hither, and detains them on flowery meads.