The Project Gutenberg eBook, Seekers in Sicily, by Elizabeth Bisland and Anne Hoyt

SEEKERS IN SICILY

“Demeter’s Well-Beloved Children”

SEEKERS IN SICILY

BEING A QUEST FOR PERSEPHONE

BY JANE AND PERIPATETICA

Done into the Vernacular

By

Elizabeth Bisland and Anne Hoyt

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMIX

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

Copyright, 1909

By JOHN LANE COMPANY

To

ANDERS AND FRAU ZORN

from the North, in memory

of the Sun and the South,

this book is inscribed

BY

A Pair of “Word Braiders”

NOTE

THE designs upon the cover of this book, and at the heads of the chapters, are the tribe signs or totems of the original inhabitants of the island of Sicily, which have survived all conquests and races and are still considered as tokens of good luck and defenders from the Evil-eye.

PREFACE

When this book was written—in the spring of the year—the Land of the Older Gods was unmarred by the terrible seismic convulsions which wrought such ruin in the last days of 1908.

Very sad to each of us it is when time and the sorrows of “this unintelligible world” carve furrows upon our own countenances, but when the visage of the globe shrivels and wrinkles with the lapse of ages then the greatness of the disaster touches the whole race. Sicily, whose history is so full of blood and tears, has been the victim of the greatest natural tragedy that man’s chronicles record because of this line drawn by Time upon our planet’s face—yet it leaves her still so fair, so poignantly lovely, that pilgrims of beauty will—forgetting this slight blemish—still journey to see the sweetest remnant of the world’s youth. Happily Messina, the one city injured, was the one city where travellers rarely paused. All the others remain unmarred and are still exactly as they were when this chronicle of their ancient beauty and charm was set down.

E. B. and A. H.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SEEKERS IN SICILY

CHAPTER I
On the Road to the Land of the Gods

“He ne’er is crown’d with immortality

Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.”

“Oh, Persephone, Persephone!... Surely Koré is in Hell.”

This is a discouraged voice from the window.

“Peripatetica, that sounds both insane and improper. Would it fatigue you too much to explain in the vernacular what you are trying, in your roundabout way, to suggest?”

Thus Jane, a mere diaphanous mauve cloud, from which the glimmering fire picked out glittering points here and there. When Jane takes to teagowns she is really very dressy.

Peripatetica strolled up and down the dusky drawing-room two or three times, without answering. Outside a raging wind drove furiously before it in the darkness the snow that flew upward in long spirals, like desperate hunted ghosts. Finally she took up a book from the table, and kneeling, to get the light from the logs on the page, began to read aloud.

These two were on such kindly terms that either one could read aloud without arousing the other to open violence.

“Persephone, sometimes called Koré—” read Peripatetica, “having been seized by Pluto, as she gathered narcissus, and wild thyme, and mint, and the violet into her green kirtle—was carried, weeping very bitterly, into his dark hell. And Demeter, her mother, missing her fair and sweet-curled daughter, sought her through all the world with tears and ravings; the bitter sound and moisture of her grief making a noise as of winter wind and rain. And her warm heart being so cold with pain the blossoms died on her bosom, and her vernal hair was shredded abroad into the air, and all growing things drooped and perished, and her brown benignant face became white as the face of the dead are white——”

Peripatetica closed the book, put it back on the table, and drew a hassock under her for a seat.

“I see,” said Jane. “Demeter is certainly passing this way to-night, poor dear! It’s a pity she can’t realize Persephone, that sweet soul of Spring, will come back. She always does come back.”

“Yes; but Demeter, the mother-earth, always fears that this time she may not; that Pluto will keep her in hell always. And every time she makes the same outcry about it.”

“I suppose she always finds her first in Enna,” Jane hazarded. “Isn’t Enna in Sicily?”

“Yes, I think so; but I don’t know much about Sicily, though everybody goes there nowadays. Let’s go there, Jane, and help Demeter find Persephone.”

“Let’s!” agreed Jane, with sympathetic enthusiasm, and they went.

Now, being Americans, and therefore accustomed to the most obliging behaviour on the part of the male sex, it never occurred to them that Pluto might be ungallant enough to object to their taking a hand in. But he did—as they might have foreseen would be likely in a person so unmannerly as to snatch lovely daughters from devoted mothers.

It began on the ocean. On quite a calm evening a wave, passing from under the side of the ship, threw its crest back—perhaps to look at the stars—and fell head over heels into their open port. Certainly as much as two tons of green and icy Atlantic entered impulsively, and by the time they were dried out and comforted by the tight-corseted, rosy, sympathetic Lemon every object they possessed was a mere bunch of depressed rumples. Throughout the rest of the voyage they presented the unfortunate appearance of having slept in their clothes, including their hats. These last, which they had believed refreshingly picturesque, or coquettish, at starting, had that defiantly wretched aspect displayed by the broody hen after she has been dipped in the rain-barrel to check her too exuberant aversion to race-suicide.

That was how Pluto began, and it swiftly went from bad to worse.

Three large tourist ships discharged bursting cargoes of humanity upon Naples on one and the same day, and the hotel-keepers rose to their opportunity and dealt guilefully with the horde clamouring as with one voice for food and shelter. That one’s hard-won shelter was numbered 12 bis (an artful concealment of the unlucky number 13) was apparently an unimportant detail. It was shelter, though even a sea-sodden mind should have seen something suspicious in those egregious frescoes of fat ladies sitting on the knife edge of crescent moons with which Room 13 endeavoured to conceal its real banefulness. Even such a mind should have distrusted that flamingly splendid fire-screen in front of a walled-up fireplace; should have scented danger in that flamboyant black and gold and blue satin furniture of the vintage of 1870. There was plainly, to an observant eye, something sinister and meretricious in so much dressiness, but Jane and Peripatetica yielded themselves up to that serpent lodging without the smallest precaution, and lived to rue their impulsive confidence.

To begin with, Naples, instead of showing herself all flowers and sunshine, tinkling mandolins, and moonlight and jasper seas, was as merry and pleasing as an iced sponge. Loud winds howled through the streets, driving before them cold deluges of rain, and in these chilling downpours the street troubadours stood one foot in the puddles snuffling songs of “Bella Napoli” to untuned guitars, with water dripping from the ends of their noses. Peripatetica—whose eyes even under her low-spirited hat had been all through the voyage full of dreamful memories of Neapolitan tea-roses and blue blandness—curled up like a disappointed worm and retired to a fit of neuralgia and a hot-water bottle. There was something almost uncanny in the scornful irony of her expression as she hugged her steaming comforter to her cheek, and paced the floor in time to those melancholy damp wails from the street. Instead of tea-roses she was prating all day of American comforts, as she clasped the three tepid coils of the chilly steam-heater to her homesick bosom, while Jane paddled about under an umbrella in search of the traditional ideal Italian maid, who would be willing to contribute to the party all the virtues and a cheerful disposition, for sixty francs a month.

Minna, when she did appear, proved to be Swiss instead of Italian, but she carried an atmosphere of happy comfort about her, could spin the threads of three languages with her gifted tongue, while sixty francs seemed to satisfy her wildest dreams of avarice. So the two depressed pilgrims, soothed by Minna’s promise to assume their burdens the next day, fell asleep dreaming that the weather might moderate or even clear.

Eight o’clock of the following morning came, but Minna didn’t. Jane interviewed the concierge, who had recommended her. The concierge interviewed the heavens and the earth, and the circumambient air, but spite of outflung fingers and polyglot cries, the elements had nothing to say about the matter, and for twenty-four hours they declined to let the secret leak out that other Americans in the same hotel had ravished their Minna from them with the glittering lure of twenty francs more.

Finally it dawned upon two damp and depressed minds that some unknown enemy had put a comether on them—though at that time they had no inkling of his identity. Large-eyed horror ensued. First aid to the hoodooed must be sought. Peripatetica tied a strip of red flannel around her left ankle.

“In all these very old countries,” she said oracularly, “secret malign influences from the multitudes of wicked dead rise up like vapours from the soil where they have been buried.”

Jane listened and, pale but resolute, went forth and purchased a coral jettatura.

“Let us pass on at once from this moist Sodom,” she said.

Visions of sun and Sicily dawned upon their mildewed imaginations.

Now there is really but one way to approach Sicily satisfactorily. Of course a boat leaves Naples every evening for Palermo, but the Mediterranean is a treacherous element in February. It had broken night after night in thunderous shocks upon the sea wall, making the heavy stone-built hotel quiver beneath their beds, and in the darkness of each night they had seen the water squadron charge again and again, the foremost spinning up tall and white to fling itself in frenzied futile spray across the black street. So that the thought of trusting insides jaded by two weeks of the Atlantic to such a foe as this was far from their most reckless dreams. The none too solid earth was none too good for such as they, and a motor eats up dull miles by magic. Motors are to be had in Naples even when fair skies lack, and with a big Berliet packed with luggage, and with the concierge’s tender, rueful smile shedding blessings, at last they slid southward.

—Pale clouds of almond blossoms were spread against grey terraces.... Less pale smells rose in gusty whiffs.... Narrow yellow streets crooked before them, where they picked a cautious hooting way amid Italy’s rising population complicated with goats and asses.... Then flat, muddy roads, and Berliet bumping, splashing between fields of green artichokes.... The clouds held up; thinned, and parted, showing rifts of blue.... Vesuvius pushed the mists from her brow, and purple shadows dappled her shining, dripping flanks.... Orange groves rose along the way. Flocks of brown goats tinkled past. More almond boughs leaned over walls washed a faded rose. Church bells clanked sweetly through the moist air from far-away hills. Runnels chattered out from secret channels fringed with fern. Grey olive orchards hung like clouds along the steep.... The sun was fairly out, and Italy assuming her old traditional air of professional beauty among the nations of the earth....

The Berliet climbed as nimbly as a goat toward Sorrento. The light deepened; the sea began to peacock. More and more the landscape assumed the appearance of the impossibly chromatic back drop of an opera, and as the turn was made under the orange avenue of the hotel at Sorrento everything was ready for the chorus of merry villagers, and for the prima donna to begin plucking song out of her bosom with stereotyped gestures.

It was there they began to offer the light wines of the country, as sweetly perfumed and innocent as spring violets; no more like to the astringent red inks masquerading in straw bottles in America under the same names, than they to Hercules. The seekers of Persephone drank deeply—as much as a wine-glass full—and warmed by this sweet ichor of Bacchus they bid defiance to hoodoos and pushed on to Amalfi.

Berliet swam along the Calabrian shore, lifting them lightly up the steeps, swooping purringly down the slopes,—swinging about the bold curves of the coast; rounding the tall spurs, where the sea shone, green and purple as a dove’s neck, five hundred feet below, and where orange, lemon, and olive groves climbed the narrow terraces five hundred feet above. They were following the old, old way, where the Greeks had gone, where the Romans went, where Normans rode, where Spaniards and Saracens marched; the line of the drums and tramplings of not three, but of three hundred conquests! They were following—in a motor car—the passageway of three thousand years of European history that was to lead them back beyond history itself to the old, old gods.

The way was broad and smooth, looping itself like a white ribbon along the declivity, and even Peripatetica admitted it was lovely, though she has an ineradicable tendency to swagger about the unapproachable superiority of Venezuelan scenery; probably because so few are in a position to contradict her, or because she enjoys showing off her knowledge of out-of-the-way places which most of us don’t go to. She had always sniffed at the Mediterranean as overrated in the matter of colour, and declared it pale and dull beside the green and blue fire of Biscayne Bay in Florida, but it was a nice day, and a nice sight, and Peripatetica handsomely acknowledged that after Venezuela this was the very best scenery she knew.

At Amalfi

“Where amid her mulberry trees

Sits Amalfi in the heat,

Bathing ever her white feet

In the tideless summer seas,”

they climbed 175 steps to the Cappucini convent which hangs like a swallow’s nest in a niche of the cliffs, flanked by that famous terrace the artists paint again and again, from every angle, at every season of the year, at every hour of the day. There they imbibed a very superior tea, while sea and sky did their handsomest, listening meanwhile to a fellow tourist brag of having climbed to Ravello in his motor car.

If one cranes one’s neck from the Cappucini terrace, on a small peak will be seen what purports to be a town, but the conclusion will be irresistible that the only way to reach such a dizzy eminence is by goat’s feet, or hawk’s wings, and the natural inference is that the fellow tourist is fibbing. Nevertheless one hates to be outdone, and one abandons all desire to sleep in one of those coldly clean little monk-cells of the convent, and climbs resolutely down the 175 steps again and interviews Berliet. Berliet thinks his chassis is too long for the sharp turns. Thinks that the road is bad; that it is also unsafe; that the hotel in Ravello is not possible; that he suspects his off fore tire; that there’s not time to do it before dark; that his owner forbids his going to Ravello at all; that he has an appointment that evening with a good-looking lady in Amalfi; that he is tired with his long run, and doesn’t want to any way. All of which eleven reasons appeared so irrefutable, collectively and individually, that Jane and Peripatetica climbed into their seats and announced that they would go to Ravello, and go immediately.

Berliet muttered unpleasant things in his native tongue as to signori being reckless, obstinate, and inconsiderate; wound them up sulkily and took them.

Peripatetica admitted in a whisper that up to that very day she had never even heard of Ravello, which proved to be a really degrading piece of ignorance, for every human being they met for the next three months knew all about the place—or said they did. Further experience taught them to know that Italy is crowded with little crumbling towns one has never heard of before, which when examined prove to be the very particular spots in which took place about a half of all the history that ever happened. History being a thing one must be pretty skilful if one means to evade it in Italy, for the truth is that whenever history took a notion to be, it promptly went on a trip to Italy and was.

They hooted slowly again through narrow streets, pushed more goats and children out their way, and then Berliet swung round on one wheel and began to mount. Began to climb like the foreseen goat, to soar like the imagined hawk, up sharp zigzags that lifted them by almost exact parallels. Everything that puts on power and speed, and makes noises like bomb explosions in a saw-factory, was pushed forward or pulled back. They rushed noisily round and round the peak at locomotive speed, and finally half way up into the very top of the sky they pulled up sharply in a cobble-paved square. Berliet leaped nimbly out, unscrewed a hot lid—with the tail of his linen duster—from which lid liquids and steam and smells boiled as from an angry geyser, and they found themselves in the wild eyrie of Ravello. That ubiquituosity—(with the name of a hotel on his cap)—who springs out from every stone in Italy like a spider upon the foolish swarming tourist fly, was waiting for them in the square as if by appointment, and before they could draw the first gasp of relief he had their possessions loaded upon the backs of the floating population, and they were climbing in the dusk a stone stairway that called itself a street—meekly and weakly unwitting of their possible destination. The destination proved to be a vaulted courtyard, opening behind a doorway which was built of a choice assortment of loot from four periods of architecture and sculpture; proved to be a reckless jumble of winding steps, of crooked passages, of terraces, balconies, and loggias, and the whole of this destination went by the name of the Hotel Bellevue. And once there, then suddenly, after all the noise and odours, the confusion and human clatter of the last three weeks, they stepped quietly out upon a revetment of Paradise.

Below—a thousand feet below—in the blue darkness little sparks of light were Amalfi. In the blue darkness above, hardly farther away it seemed, were the larger sparks of the rolling planets. The cool, lonely darkness bathed their spirits as with a blessed chrism. The place was, for the night, theirs alone, and for one holy moment the swarming tourist failed to swarm.

“In the Highlands! In the country places!”—

murmured Jane, gratefully declining upon a broad balustrade, and Peripatetica echoed softly—declining in her turn—

... “Oh, to dream; oh, to awake and wander

There, and with delight to take and render

Through the trance of silence

Quiet breath.”...

And Jane took it up again—

... “Where essential silence cheers and blesses,

And forever in the hill recesses

Her more lovely music broods and dies.”

Just then essential silence was broken by the last protesting squawk of a virtuous hen, who seemed to be about to die that they might live. Peripatetica recognized that plaintive cry. Hens were kept handy in fattening-coops on the Plantation, against the sudden inroads of unexpected guests.

“When the big-gate slams chickens begin to squawk,” was a well-remembered Plantation proverb.

“How tough she will be, though,” Jane gently moaned, “and we shan’t be able to eat her, and she will have died in vain.”

Little did she reck of Signor Pantaleone Caruso’s beautiful art, for when they had dressed by the dim, soothing flicker of candles in big clean bed-rooms that were warmed by smouldering olive-wood fires, they were sweetly fed on a dozen lovely dishes; dishes foamy and yellow, with hot brown crusts, made seemingly of varied combinings of meal and cheese, and called by strange Italian cognomens. And the late—so very late—pullet appeared in her due course amid maiden strewments of crisp salads; proving, by some Pantaleonic magic, to be all that a hen could or should be. And they drank gratefully to her manes in Signor Caruso’s own wine, as mellow and as golden as his famous cousin’s voice. After which they ate small, scented yellow apples which might well have grown in Hesperidian gardens, and drowsed contentedly by the musky olive-wood blaze, among bowls of freesias and violets, until the almost weird hour of half past eight, when inward blessedness and a day of mountain air would no longer be denied their toll.

Yet all through the hours of sleep “old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago” stirred like an undertone of dreams within dreams. The clank of armed feet moved in the street. Ghostly bells rang whispered tocsins of alarm, and shadowy life swept back and forth in the broken, deserted town. The “Brass Hats” glimmered in the darkness. Goths set alight long extinguished fires. Curved Saracen swords glittered faintly, and Normans grasped the heights with mailed hands. The Rufolis, the d’Affliti, the Confalones, and della Maras married, feasted, and warred again in dumb show, and up and down the stairs of this very house rustled the silk robes and soft shod feet of sleek prelates.

Even the sea below—where the new moon floated at the western rim like a golden canoe—was astir with the myriad sails of revenants. First the white wings of that—

“Grave Syrian trader ...

Who snatched his rudder and shook out his sail ...

Between the Syrtes and soft Sicily.”

After him followed hard the small ghostly sails of the Greeks.

“They were very perfect men, and could do all and bear all that could be done and borne by human flesh and blood. Taking them all together they were the most faultlessly constructed human beings that ever lived, and they knew it, for they worshipped bodily health and strength, and spent the lives of generations in the cultivation of both. They were fighting men, trained to use every weapon they knew, they were boxers and wrestlers, athletes, runners and jumpers, and drivers of chariots; but above all they were seamen, skilled at the helm, quick at handling the sails, masters of the oar, and fearless navigators when half of all navigation led sooner or later to certain death. For though they loved life, as only the strong and the beautiful can love it, and though they looked forward to no condition of perpetual bliss beyond, but only to the shadowy place where regretful phantoms flitted in the gloom as in the twilight of the Hebrew Sheol, yet they faced dying as fighters always have and always will, with desperate hands and a quiet heart.”

The golden canoe of the young moon filled and sank behind the sea’s rim, but through the darkness came the many-oared beat of ponderous Roman galleys carrying the dominion of the earth within their great sides, and as they vanished like a fog-wreath along the horizon, followed fast the hawk-winged craft of the keen-bladed, keen-faced Saracen, whose sickle-like crescent would never here on this coast round to the full. For, far away on the grey French coast of Coutance was a Norman gentleman named Tancred, very strong of heart, and very stout of his hands. There was no rumour of him here, as he rode to the hunt and spitted the wild boar upon his terrible length of steel. What should the Moslems know of a simple Norman gentleman, or care?—and yet in those lion loins lay the seeds of a dozen mighty whelps who were to rend their Christian prey from the Moslem and rule this warm coloured South as kings and dukes and counts, and whose blood was to be claimed by every crown in Europe for a thousand years. Very few among the shadowy sails were those of the de Hautevilles, but quality, not quantity, counts most among men, and those ships carried a strange, potent race. Anna Comnena thus describes one of them:

“This Robert de Hauteville was of Norman origin—he united a marvellous astuteness with immense ambition, and his bodily strength was prodigious. His whole desire was to attain to the wealth and power of the greatest living men; he was extremely tenacious of his designs and most wise in finding means to attain his ends. In stature he was taller than the tallest; of a ruddy hue and fair-haired, he was broad-shouldered, and his eyes sparkled with fire; the perfect proportion of all his limbs made him a model of beauty from head to heel, as I have often heard people tell. Homer says of Achilles that those who heard his voice seemed to hear the thundering shout of a great multitude, but it used to be said of the de Hautevilles that their battle cry would turn back tens of thousands. Such a man, one in such a position, of such a nature, and of such spirit, naturally hated the idea of service, and would not be subject to any man; for such are those natures which are born too great for their surrounding.”

When morning dawned all spirits of the past had vanished, and only the noisy play of the young hopes of the Caruso family disturbed the peace of the echoing court. Jane insisted upon calling these innocent infants Knickerbockers, because, she said, they were only short Pantaleones—which is the sort of mild pleasantry Jane affects. Peripatetica doesn’t lend herself to these gentler forms of jest. It was she who put in all that history and poetry. (See above.)

Ravello used to be famous for her dye stuffs, and for the complete thorough-goingness of her attacks of plague, but her principal industries to-day are pulpits, and fondness for the Prophet Jonah. Her population in the day of dyes and plague was 36,000, and is now, by generous computation, about thirty-six—which does not include the Knickers. Just opposite the Hotel Bellevue is one of these pulpits, in the church of St. John of the Bull; a church which about a thousand years ago was a very superior place indeed; but worse than Goths or Vandals, or Saracens, or plague, was the pernicious activity of the Eighteenth Century. Hardly a church in Italy has escaped unscathed from its busy rage. No sanctuary was too reverend or too beautiful to be ravaged in the name of Palladio, or of “the classic style.” Marbles were broken, mosaics torn out, dim aisles despoiled, brass and bronze melted, carvings chopped and burned, rich glass shattered, old tapestries flung on the dust heap. All the treasures of centuries—sweet with incense, softened and tinted by time, sanctified by a thousand prayers, and beautified by the tenderest emotions—were bundled out of the way of those benighted savages, and tons of lime were had into the poor gaunt and ruined fanes to transform them into whited sepulchres of beauty. Blank plaster walls hid the sweetest of frescoes; clustered grey columns were limed into ghastly imitations of the Doric; soaring arches—flowered like forest boughs—vanished in stodgy vaultings; Corinthian pilasters shoved lacelike rood-screens out of the way, and fat sprawling cherubs shouldered bleeding, shadowy Christs from the altars.

The spirit which inspired this stupid ruthlessness was perfectly expressed by Addison, who, commenting upon the great Cathedral of Siena, said pragmatically:

“When a man sees the prodigious pains that our forefathers have been at in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy what miracles of architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed in the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than it is at present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic churches as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings than have been raised before or since that time. Than these Gothic churches nothing can make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity”—of dull plaster!

Much has been said of the irreverence of the Nineteenth Century. The Eighteenth respected nothing their forefathers had wrought; not even in this little far-away mountain town, and St. John of the Bull is now—poor Saint!—housed drearily in a dull, dusty, echoing white cavern, with not one point of beauty to hold the protesting eye save the splendid marble pulpit—escaped by some miracle of ruth to stand out in that dull waste upon delicate twisted alabaster columns, which stand in their turn upon crawling marble lions. Its four sides, and its baldachino, show beautiful patterns of precious mosaics, wrought with lapis lazuli, with verd antique, and with sanguine Egyptian marbles. The carefullest and richest of these mosaics, of course—along the side of the pulpit’s stair—is devoted to picturing that extremely qualmish archaic whale who in all Ravello’s churches unswallows the Prophet Jonah with every evidence of emotion and relief.

Recently, in the process of removing some of the acres of Eighteenth Century plaster, there was brought to light in a little chapel in the crypt a life-sized relief of St. Catherine and her wheel.

Such a lovely lady!—so fair, so pure, so saint-like; with faint memories of old tinting on her small lips, on her close-folded hair, and her downcast eyes—that even the most frivolous of tourists might be moved to tears by the thought that she alone is the one sweet ghost escaped from all that brutal destruction of mediæval beauty; resurrected by the merest chance from her plaster tomb.

Jane at the thought of it became quite dangerously violent. She insisted upon digging up the Eighteenth Century and beating it to death again with its own dusty old wig, and was soothed and calmed only by being taken outside to look once more by daylight at the delicious marble mince of fragments which the Hotel Bellevue has built into its portals—Greek and Roman capitals upside down; marble lambs and crosses, gargoyles, and corbels adorning the sides and lintels in a charming confusion of styles, periods, and purposes.

Ravello, as are all these arid ancient towns from which the tides of life have drained away, is as dry and empty as an old last year’s nut; a mere hollow shell, ridged and parched, out of which the kernel of existence has vanished.

A tattered, rosy-cheeked child runs up the uncertain footway—the stair-streets—with feet as light and sure as a goat’s. An old, old man, with head and jaws bound in a dirty red kerchief, and with the keen hawk-like profile of some far-off Saracen ancestry, crouches in a doorway with an outstretched hand. He makes no appeal, but his apparent confidence that his age and helplessness will touch them, does touch them, and they search their pockets hastily for coppers, with a faint anguished sense of the thin shadow of a dial-finger which for them too creeps round and round, as for this old derelict man, for this old skeleton city....

A donkey heaped with brushwood patters up the steep narrow way; so narrow that they must flatten themselves against the wall to admit of his stolidly sorrowful passage. They may come and go, as all the others have come and gone, but our brother, the ass, is always there, recking not of Greek or Roman, of American or Tedeschi; for all of them he bears burdens with the same sorrowful stolidity, and from none does he receive any gratitude....

These are the only inhabitants of Ravello they see until they reach the Piazza and the Cathedral of Saint Pantaleone. They know beforehand that the Cathedral too has been spoiled and desecrated, but there still remain the fine bronze doors by the same Barisanus who made the famous ones in the church at Monreale in Sicily, and here they find the most beautiful of the pulpits, and the very biggest Jonah and the very biggest whale in all Ravello.

Before that accursed Bishop Tafuri turned it into a white-washed cavern the old chroniclers exhausted their adjectives in describing the glories of Saint Pantaleone’s Cathedral. The richness of its sixteen enormous columns of verd antique; its raised choir with fifty-two stalls of walnut-wood, carved with incredible richness; its high altar of alabaster under a marble baldachino glowing with mosaics and supported upon huge red Egyptian Syenite columns—its purple and gold Episcopal throne; its frescoed walls, its silver lamps and rich tombs, its pictures and shrines and hangings—all pitched into the scrap heap by that abominable prelate, save only this fine pulpit, and the Ambo. The Ambo gives itself wholly to the chronicles of the prophet Jonah. On one stairside he leaps nimbly and eagerly down the wide throat which looks so reluctant to receive him, as if suspecting already the discomfort to be caused by the uneasy guest. But Jonah’s aspect is all of a careless gaiety; he is not taking this lodging for more than a day or two, and is aware that after his brief occultation his reappearance will be dramatic and a portent. On the opposite stair it happens as he had prophetically foreseen, the mosaic monster disgorging him with an air of mingled violence and exhausted relief.

No one can tell us why Jonah is so favourite a topic in Ravello. “Chi lo sara” everyone says, with that air of weary patience Italy so persistently assumes before the eccentric curiosity of Forestieri.

Rosina Vokes once travelled about with a funny little playlet called “The Pantomime Rehearsal,” which concerned itself with the sufferings of the author and stage manager of an English house-party’s efforts at amateur theatricals. The enthusiastic conductor used to say dramatically:

“Now, Lord Arthur, you enter as the Chief of the fairies!”

To which the blond guardsman replies with puzzled heaviness: “Yes; but why fairies?”

Producing in the wretched author a sort of paralysis of bafflement. The same look comes so often into these big Italian eyes. The thing just is. Why clamour for reasons? It is as if these curious wandering folk, always staring and chattering and rushing about, and paying good money that would buy bread and wine, merely to look at old stones, should ask why the sun, or why the moon, or why anything at all?...

So they abandon Jonah and take on the pulpit instead, the most famous of all the mosaic pulpits in a region celebrated for mosaic pulpits. It is done after the same pattern as that of St. John of the Bull, but the pattern raised to the nth power. More and bigger lions; more and taller columns; richer scrolls of mosaics; the bits of stone more deeply coloured; the marble warmed by time to a sweeter and creamier blond. The whole being crowned, moreover, by an adorable bust of Sigelgaita Rufolo, wife of the founder of the Cathedral and giver of the pulpit. A pompous Latin inscription under the bust records the virtues of this magnificent patron of religion. The inscription including the names of all the long string of stalwart sons Sigelgaita brought forth, and it calls in dignified Latinity the attention of the heavenly powers to the eminent deserts of this generous Rufolo, this mediæval Carnegie.

Sigelgaita’s bust is an almost unique example of the marble portraiture of the Thirteenth Century—if indeed it truly be a work of that time, for so noble, so lifelike is this head with its rolled hair, its princely coronet and long earrings, so like is it to the head of the Capuan Juno, that one half suspects it of being from a Roman hand—those masters of marmoral records of character—and that it was seized upon by Sigelgaita to serve as a memorial of herself.

Bernardo Battinelli, a notary of Ravello, writing in 1540 relates an anecdote which shows what esteem was inspired by this marble portrait long after its original was dust:

“I remember in the aforesaid month and year, the Spanish Viceroy Don Pietro di Toledo sent for the marble bust, which is placed in the Cathedral and much honest resistance was made, so that the first time he that came returned empty-handed, but shortly after he came back, and it was necessary to send it to Naples in his keeping, and having sent the magnifico Giovanni Frezza, who was in Naples, and Ambrose Flomano from this place to his Excellency, after much ado, by the favour of the glorious Virgin Mary, and by virtue of these messengers from thence after a few days the head was returned.”

In the year 1851 the palace of these splendid Rufoli, which in the time of Roger of Sicily had housed ninety knights with their men at arms, had fallen to tragical decay. A great landslide in the Fifteenth Century destroyed the harbour of Amalfi; hid its great quays and warehouses, its broad streets and roaring markets beneath the sea, and reduced it from a powerful Republic, the rival of Venice and Genoa, to a mere fishing village. A little later the plague followed, and decimated the now poverty-stricken inhabitants of Ravello, and then the great nobles began to drift away to Naples, came more and more rarely to visit their Calabrian seats, and these gradually sank in the course of time into ruin and decay. Fortunately in the year before mentioned a rich English traveller, making the still fashionable “grand tour,” happened into Ravello, saw the possibilities of this crumbling castle set upon one of the most beautiful sites in the world, and promptly purchased it from its indifferent Neapolitan owner. He, much absorbed in the opera dancers and the small intrigues of the city, was secretly and scornfully amused that a mad Englishman should be willing to part with so much good hard money in exchange for ivied towers and gaping arches in a remote country town.

The Englishman mended the arches, strengthened the towers, gathered up from among the weeds the delicate sculptures and twisted columns, destroyed nothing, preserved and restored with a reverent hand, and made for himself one of the loveliest homes in all Italy. It was in that charming garden, swung high upon a spur of the glorious coast, that Jane and Peripatetica contracted that passion for Ravello which haunted them with a homesickness for it all through Sicily. For never again did they find anywhere such views, such shadowed green ways of ilex and cypress, such ivy-mantled towers, such roses, such sheets of daffodils and blue hyacinths. They dreamed there through the long day, regretting that their luggage had been sent on to Sicily by water, and—forgetting quite their quest of Persephone—that they were therefore unable to linger in the sweet precincts of the Pantaleone wines and cooking, devoting weeks to exploring the neighbouring hills, and to unearthing more pulpits and more Jonahs in the nearby churches.

In the dusk they lingered by the Fountain of Strange Beasts, in the dusk they wandered afoot down the cork-screwed paths up which they had so furiously and smellily mounted. Berliet hooted contemptuously behind them as he crawled after, jeering as at “scare-cats,” who dared mount, but shrank from descending these abrupt curves and tiptilted inclines except in the safety of their own low-heeled shoes.

At Amalfi they plunged once again into the noisy tourist belt—the va et vient, the chatter, the screaming flutter of the passenger pigeons of the Italian spring. And yet there was peace in the tiny white cells in which they hung over the sheer steep, while the light died nacreously along the West. There was quiet in certain tiny hidden courts and terraces under the icy moonlight, and Jane said in one of these—her utterance somewhat interrupted by the chattering of her teeth, for Italian spring nights are as cold as Italian spring days are warm—Jane said:

“What idiotic assertions are made in our time about ancient Europe having no love for, no eye for, Nature’s beauty! Did you ever come across a mediæval monastery, a Greek or Roman temple that was not placed with an unerring perception of just the one point at which it would look best, just at the one point at which everything would look best from it?”

“Of course I never did,” Peripatetica admitted with sympathetic conviction. “We get that absurd impression of their indifference from the fact that our forebears were not nearly so fond of talking about their emotions as we. They had a trust in their fellow man’s comprehension that we have lost. We always imagine that no one can know things unless we tell them, and tell them with all our t’s carefully crossed and our i’s elaborately dotted. The old literatures are always illustrating that same confidence in other people’s imaginations, stating facts with what to our modern diffuseness appears the baldest simplicity, and yet somehow conveying all their subtlest meanings. Our ancestors happily were not ‘inebriated with the exuberance of their own verbosity.’... And now, Jane, bring that congealed nose of yours in out of the open air. The moon isn’t going on a vacation. She will be doing her old romance and beauty business at the same old stand long after we are dead and buried, not to mention to-morrow night.”

Berliet was all his old self the next day, and they swooped and soared, slid and climbed toward Pæstum, every turn around every spur showing some new beauty, some new effect. Gradually the coast sank and sank toward the sea; the snow-caps moved further back into the horizon; grew more and more mere white clouds above, more and more mere vapoury amethyst below, and at last they shot at a right angle into a wide level plain, and commenced to experience thrills. For the guide-books were full, one and all, of weird tales of Pæstum which lay, so they said, far back in a country as cursed and horrible as the dreadful land of the Dark Tower. About it, they declared, stretched leprous marshes of stagnant ooze choked with fat reeds, where fierce buffalo wallowed in the slime. The contadini passed through its deadly miasma in shuddering haste, gazing large-eyed upon a dare-devil Englishman who had once had the courage to pass a night there in order to gratify a bold, fantastic desire to see the temples by moonlight. It was such a strange, tremendous story, that of the Greek Poseidonia, later the Roman Pæstum.

Long ago those adventuring mariners from Greece had seized the fertile plain which at that time was covered with forests of great oak and watered by two clear and shining rivers. They drove the Italian natives back into the distant hills, for the white man’s burden even then included the taking of all the desirable things that were being wasted by incompetent natives, and they brought over colonists—whom the philosophers and moralists at home maligned, no doubt, in the same pleasant fashion of our own day. And the colonists cut down the oaks, and ploughed the land, and built cities, and made harbours, and finally dusted their busy hands and busy souls of the grime of labour and wrought splendid temples in honour of the benign gods who had given them the possessions of the Italians and filled them with power and fatness. Every once in so often the natives looked lustfully down from the hills upon this fatness, made an armed snatch at it, were driven back with bloody contumely, and the heaping of riches upon riches went on. And more and more the oaks were cut down—mark that! for the stories of nations are so inextricably bound up with the stories of trees—until all the plain was cleared and tilled; and then the foothills were denuded, and the wave of destruction crept up the mountain sides and they too were left naked to the sun and the rains.

At first these rains, sweeping down torrentially, unhindered by the lost forests, only enriched the plain with the long hoarded sweetness of the trees, but by and by the living rivers grew heavy and thick, vomiting mud into the ever-shallowing harbours, and the lands soured with the undrained stagnant water. Commerce turned more and more to deeper ports, and mosquitoes began to breed in the brackish soil that was making fast between the city and the sea. Who of all those powerful land-owners and rich merchants could ever have dreamed that little buzzing insects could sting a great city to death? But they did. Fevers grew more and more prevalent. The malaria-haunted population went more and more languidly about their business. The natives, hardy and vigorous in the hills, were but feebly repulsed. Carthage demanded tribute, and Rome took it, and changed the city’s name from Poseidonia to Pæstum. After Rome grew weak Saracen corsairs came in by sea and grasped the slackly defended riches, and the little winged poisoners of the night struck again and again, until grass grew in the streets, and the wharves crumbled where they stood. Finally the wretched remnant of a great people wandered away into the more wholesome hills, the marshes rotted in the heat and grew up in coarse reeds where corn and vine had flourished, and the city melted back into the wasted earth. So wicked a name had the miasmatic, fever-haunted plain that age after age rolled away and only birds and serpents and wild beasts dared dwell there, or some outlaw chose to face its sickly terrors rather than the revenge of the law.

“Think,” said Jane, “of the sensations of the man who came first upon those huge temples standing lonely in the naked plain! So lonely that their very existence had been long forgotten. Imagine the awe and surprise of such a discovery——”

They were spinning—had been spinning for half an hour—along a rather bad highway, and Peripatetica found it hard to call up the proper emotions in answer to Jane’s suggestion, so occupied was she in looking for the relishing grimness insisted upon by the guide-books. There were reeds; there were a very few innocuous-looking buffalo, but for the most part there were nice cultivated fields of grain and vines on either hand, and occasionally half a mile or so of neglected shrubby heath.

“Why, half of Long Island is wilder than this!” grumbled Peripatetica. “Where’s the Dark Tower country? Childe Roland would think this a formal garden. I insist upon Berliet taking us somewhere that will thick our blood with horror.”

As it turned out, a wise government had drained the accursed land, planted eucalyptus trees, and was slowly reclaiming the plain to its old fertility, but the guide-books feel that the story is too good to be spoiled by modern facts, and cling to the old version of 1860.

Just then—by way of compensation, Berliet having fortunately slowed down over a bad bit—an old altar-piece of a Holy Family stepped down out its frame and came wandering toward them in the broad light of day. On the large mild gray ass—a real altar-piece ass—sat St. Anna wrapped in a faded blue mantle, carrying on her arm a sleeping child. At her right walked the child’s mother, whose thin olive cheek and wide, timid eyes seemed half ghostly under the white linen held together with one hand under her chin. Young St. John led the ass. A wreath of golden-brown curls blew about his golden-red cheeks, and he wore goat-hide shoes, and had cross-gartered legs.

Jane now says they never saw them at all. That it was just a mirage, or a bit of glamourie, and that there is nothing remaining in new Italy which could look so like the typical old Italy—but if Jane is right then how did the two happen to have exactly the same glamour at exactly the same moment? How could they both imagine the benign smile of that strayed altar picture? Is it likely that a motor car would lend itself to sacred visions? I ask you that!

There was certainly some illusion—not sacred—about the dare-devilishness of that Englishman who once spent a moonlit night at the temples, for a little farming village lies close to the enclosure that shuts off the temples from the highway, the inhabitants of which village seemed as meek as sheep and anything but foolhardy, and there was reason to believe that they spend every night there, whether the moon shines or not.

But the Temples were no illusion, standing in stately splendour in the midst of that wide shining green plain, by a sea of milky chalcedony, and in a semicircle behind them a garland of purple mountains crowned with snow. Great-pillared Neptune was all of dull, burned gold, its serried columns marching before the blue background with a curious effect of perfect vigour in repose, of power pausing in solid ease. No picture or replica gives the sense of this energy and power. Doric temples tend to look lumpish and heavy in reproductions, but the real thing at its very best (and this shrine of Neptune is the perfectest of Greek temples outside of Athens) has a mighty grace, a prodigious suggestion of latent force, of contained, available strength that wakes an awed delight, as by the visible, material expression of an ineffable, glorious, all-powerful god.

“Well, certainly those Greeks——!” gasped Jane when the full meaning of it all began to dawn upon her, and Peripatetica, who usually suffers from chronic palpitation of the tongue, simply sat still staring with shining eyes. Greeks to her are as was King Charles’ head to Mr. Dick. She is convinced the Greeks knew everything worth knowing, and did everything worth doing, and any further proof of their ability only fills her with a gratified sense of “I-told-you-so-ness.” So she lent a benign ear to a young American architect there, who pointed out many constructive details, which, under an appearance of great simplicity, proved consummate grasp of the art, and of the subtlest secrets of architectural harmonics.

Before the land made out into the harbour Poseidon’s temple stood almost on the sea’s edge. The old pavement of the street before its portals being disinterred shows the ruts made by the chariot wheels still deep-scored upon it, and it was here

“The merry Grecian coaster came

Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine,

Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine—”

anchoring almost under the shadow of the great fane of the Lord of the Waters; and here, when his cargo was discharged, he went up to offer sacrifices and thanks to the Sea-god of Poseidonia, and

“Hung his sea-drenched garments on the wall,”

and prayed for skill to outwit his fellows in trade; for fair winds to blow him once more to Greece.

Besides the temple of Neptune there was, of course, the enormous Basilica, and a so-called temple of Ceres, and some Roman fragments, but these were so much less interesting than the golden-pillared shrine of the Trident God, that the rest of the time was spent in looking vainly and wistfully for Pæstum’s famous rose gardens, of which not even the smallest bud remained, and then Berliet gathered them up, and went in search of the Station of La Cava.

CHAPTER II
A Nest of Eagles

“So underneath the surface of To-day

Lies yesterday and what we call the Past,

The only thing which never can decay.”

Trustfully and sleepily Jane and Peripatetica, in the icy starlight of La Cava, boarded the express of European de Luxe. Drowsy with the long day’s rush through the wind, they believed that the train’s clatter would be a mere lullaby to dreams of golden temples and iris seas and “the glory that was Greece.” No robbers or barbarians nearer than defunct corsairs crossed their imaginings; the hoodoo had faded from mind, shaken off by the glorious swoop of Berliet, and they supposed it left behind at Naples, clinging bat-like under the gaudy frescoes of Room 13 to descend on other unwary travellers.

Half of their substance had been paid to the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits for this night’s rolling lodging, and they begrudged it not, remembering that it entitled their fatigue to the comforts of a room to themselves in all the vaunted superior civilization and decencies of a European compartment car. Presenting their tickets in trusting calm they prepared to follow the porter to a small but cosy room where two waiting white beds lay ready for their weary heads. But the Hoodoo had come on from Naples in that very train. Compartments and beds there were, but not for them. The porter led on, and in a toy imitation of an American Pullman, showed them to a Lilliputian blue plush seat and a ridiculous wooden shelf two feet above that pretended it could unfold itself into an upper berth. This baby section in the midst of a shrieking babble of tongues, a suffocation of unaired Latin and Teutonic humanity, was their compartment room, “à vous seules, Mesdames!” telegraphed for to Rome and made over to them with such flourish by the polite agent at Naples!

If the car was Lilliputian its passengers were not. Mammoth French dowagers and barrel-like Germans overflowed all its tiny blue seats, and the few slim Americans more than made good by their generous excess of luggage. It was a very sardine box.

In a fury too deep for words or tears Peripatetica and Jane sank into the few narrow inches the porter managed to clear for them, and resigned themselves to leaving their own dear bags in the corridor.

“They will, of course, be stolen, but then we may never need them again. We can’t undress, and shall probably be suffocated long before morning,” remarked Peripatetica bitterly, with a hopeless glare at the imitation ventilators not made to open. Their fury deepened at the slow struggles of the porter to adjust the inadequate little partitions, at the grimy blankets and pillows on the little shelves, at the curtains which didn’t conceal them, the wash-room without water or towels and the cattle-train-like burden of grunts and groans and smells floating on the unbreathable atmosphere.

Morning dawned golden on the flying hills at last, and then deepest fury of all was Peripatetica’s, that passionate lover of fresh air, to find that in spite of everything she had slept, and was still breathing!

Calabria, lovely as ever, melted down to her glowing seas; one last swooping turn of the rails, and another line of faint hills rose opposite—and that was Sicily!

The train itself coiled like a weary serpent into a waiting steamer, which slipt smoothly by the ancient perils of Scylla and Charybdis; and nearer and nearer it rose, that gold and amethyst mountain-home of the Old Gods. The white curve of Messina, “the Sickle,” showed clear at the base of the cloud-flecked hills. Kronos, father of Demeter, enthroned on those very mountain peaks, had dropped his scythe at the sea’s edge, cutting space there for the little homes of men, and leaving them the name of his shining blade, “Zancle,” the sickle, through all Greek days. It was there, really there in actual vision, land of fire and myths; the place of the beginnings of gods and men.

Peripatetica and Jane burst from the car and climbed to the narrow deck above to get clearer view. The sea wind swept the dust from their eyes and all fatigue and discomfort from their memories. Their spirits rose to meet that Spirit Land where Immortals had battled and labored; had breathed themselves into man,—the divine spirit stirring his little passing life with revelation of that which passeth not; that soul of beauty and wisdom, and of poetry which should move through the ages. Their eyes were wide to see the land where man’s imaginings had brought the divine into all surroundings of his life, until every tree and spring and rock and mountain grew into semblance of a god. Oh, was it all a “creed outworn”? Here might not one perchance still see

“Proteus rising from the sea,

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn”?

In these very mountains before them had man himself been shaped; hammered out by Vulcan upon his forge in Ætna. Here, in this land he had been taught by Demeter to nourish himself from the friendly earth, taught how to shelter himself from the inclement elements by Orion, Hunter and Architect—a god before he was a star. There Zeus, all-conquering wisdom, had prevailed against his opponents and placed his high and fiery seat, this very Ætna, upon the bound body of the last rebellious Titan, making even the power of ignorance the pediment of his throne. There the fair maiden goddesses, Artemis and Minerva and Persephone, had played in flowery fields. There had Pluto stolen the fairest away from among the blossoms, the entrance to his dark underworld gaping suddenly among the sunny meadows. There had the desolate mother Demeter lit at Ætna the torch for her long and desperate search. There had demi-gods and heroes lived and loved and struggled. Its very rivers were transformed nymphs, its islands rocks tossed in Cyclop’s battles. There Ulysses had wandered and suffered; there Pythagoras had taught, Theocritus had sung. There—but man nor woman either is yet entirely spirit; and though it was in truth the actual land of their pilgrimage, of the birthplace of myth, of beauty and wonder, Persephone had not yet returned. The icy wind was turning all sentiment into shivers and they fled back to the Twentieth Century and its Pullman car.

Messina looked still more enticing when close at hand; both prosperous and imposing with its lines of stone quays and palaces on the sea front. Beyond these there were famous fountains they knew, and colourful marketplaces, and baroque churches with spires like fluted seashells, and interiors gleaming like sea caverns with all the rich colour and glow of Sicilian mosaics. In one of the churches was the shrine of a miracle-working letter from the Madonna, said to have been written by her own hand. There was besides an old Norman Cathedral, built of Greek ruins and Roman remains; much surviving Spanish quaintness, but to two unbreakfasted Wagon Lit passengers all this was but ashes in the mouth. They felt that the attractions of Messina could safely remain in the guide-books. They were impelled on to Taormina.... No prophetic vision warned them that in their haste they were losing the chance of ever seeing that doomed Sickle-City at all. In that placid, modern port, where travellers for pleasure rarely paused, there seemed nothing to stay them. No ominous shadow lay upon it to tell that it was marked for destruction by “the Earth-Shaker,” or that before the year had gone it would be echoing the bitter cry of lost Berytus:

“Here am I, that unhappy city—no more a city—lying in ruins, my citizens dead men, alas! most ill-fated of all! The Fire-god destroyed me after the shock of the Earth-Shaker. Ah me! From so much loveliness I am become ashes. Yet do ye who pass me by bewail my fate, and shed a tear in my honour who am no more. A tomb of tombless men is the city, under whose ashes we lie.”

Taormina, the little mountain town, crouched under Ætna’s southern side, not far from those meadows of Enna from which Persephone had been ravished away. There she would surely first return to the upper world, and Demeter’s joy burst into flowers and sunshine. So there they decided to seek her, and turned their grimy faces straight to the train. The only sight-seeing that appealed to them now was a vision of the San Domenico Hotel with quiet white monkish cells like to Amalfi’s to rest their weariness in, peaceful pergolas, large bathtubs, and a hearty table d’hôte luncheon.

So they stayed not for sights, and stopped not for stone—nor breakfast, nor washing, nor even for their trunks, which had not materialized, but sat in a dusty railway carriage impatient for the train to start.

“It was beautiful,” remarked Jane, thinking of the harbour approach to the city.

“Yes,” said Peripatetica, jumping at her unexpressed meaning as usual. “Messina has always been a famous beauty, and always will be. But she is, and always has been, an incorrigible cocotte,—submitting without a struggle to every invader of Sicily in turn. And she certainly doesn’t in the least look her enormous age in spite of having led a vie orageuse. Whenever the traces of her past become too obvious she goes and takes an earthquake shock, they say, and rises fresh and rejuvenated from the ruins, ready to coquette again with a new master and be enticing and treacherous all over again.”[^[1]]

[1]. Messina suffered a terrific earthquake shock in 1783 and has had in her history serious damage from seismic convulsions no less than nine times.

It was hard to imagine on her modern boulevards the armies of the past—all those many conquerors that Messina had herself called in, causing half the wars and troubles of Sicily by her invitations to new powers to come and take possession, and to do the fighting for her that she never would do for herself; betraying in turn every master, good or bad, for the excitement of getting a new one....

Greeks, Carthagenians, Mamertines, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards—where were the ways of their tramplings now? On that modern light-house point there was not even a trace of the Golden Temple in which Neptune sat on a crystal altar “begirt with smooth-necked shells, sea-weeds, and coral, looking out eastward to the morning sun?”

“If it were near the 15th of August I would stay here in spite of everything,” ventured Peripatetica, looking up from her book. “The Procession of the Virgin is the only thing really worth seeing left in Messina.” And in answer to Jane’s enquiring eyebrows Peripatetica began to read aloud of that extraordinary pageant of the Madonna della Lettera and her car, that immense float, dragged through Messina’s streets by hundreds of men and women; of its tower fifty feet high, on which are ranged tiers over tiers of symbolically dressed children standing upon all its different stories; poor babies with painted wings made to fly around on iron orbits up to the very top of the erection; of the great blue globe upon which stands a girl dressed in spangled gauze, representing the Saviour, holding upon her right hand—luckily supported by iron machinery—another child representing the Soul of the Blessed Virgin.

“Not real children—not live babies!” protested Jane.

“Yes, indeed, just listen to Hughes’ account of it.” Peripatetica read: “At an appointed signal this well-freighted car begins to move, when it is welcomed with reiterated shouts and vivas by the infatuated populace; drums and trumpets play; the Dutch concert in the machine commences, and thousands of pateraroes fired off by a train of gunpowder make the shores of Calabria re-echo with the sound; then angels, cherubim, seraphim, and ‘animated intelligences,’ all begin to revolve in such implicated orbits as to make even the spectators giddy with the sight; but alas for the unfortunate little actors in the pantomime; they in spite of their heavenly characters are soon doomed to experience the infirmities of mortality; angels droop, cherubim are scared out of their wits, seraphim set up outrageous cries, ‘souls of the universe’ faint away, and ‘moving intelligences’ are moved by the most terrible inversion of the peristaltic nerves; then thrice happy are those to whom an upper station has been allotted. Some of the young brats, in spite of the fracas, seem highly delighted with their ride, and eat their ginger-bread with the utmost composure as they perform their evolutions; but it not unfrequently happens that one or more of these poor innocents fall victims to this revolutionary system and earn the crown of martyrdom.”

Jane seized the book to make sure it was actually so written and not just one of Peripatetica’s flights of fancy, and plunged into an account of another part of the pageant—the giant figures of Saturn and Cybele fraternizing amiably with the Madonna; Cybele “seated on a large horse clothed like a warrior. Her hair is tied back with a crown of leaves and flowers with a star in front, and the three towers of Messina. She wears a collar and a large blue mantle covered with stars, which lies on the back of the horse. A mace of flowers in her right hand and a lance in her left. The horse is barded, and covered with rich trappings of red, with arabesques of flowers and ribbons.”...[^[2]]

[2]. All this, along with every treasure of her past, has now disappeared.

“What curious folk the Sicilians are! They accept new creeds and ceremonies, but the old never quite lose their place. Where else would the Madonna allow a Pagan goddess to figure in her train? And did you notice in this very procession they still carry the identical skin of the camel on which Roger entered the city when he began his conquest of Sicily? I wish it were near the 15th of August!”

“I wish it were near the time this train starts, if it ever does,” replied Peripatetica crossly.

And, as if but waiting the expression of her wish, the train did begin to stream swiftly along the deeply indented coast beside whose margin came that wild Norman raid upon Messina of the dauntless young hawks of de Hauteville. Roger, the youngest and greatest of the twelve sons, accompanied by but sixty knights and their squires, two hundred men in all, pouncing daringly upon a kingdom. A half dozen galleys slipped over from Reggio by night, and the morning sun flashed upon the dew-wet armour as they galloped through the dawn to Messina’s walls. The great fortified city was in front of them, a hostile country around them, and a navy on the watch to cut them off from reinforcements or return by sea. That they should succeed was visibly impossible. But determined faces were under the steel visors, the spirit of conquering adventure shining in their grey eyes. Every man of the host was confessed and absolved for this fight of the Cross against the Crescent and their young Commander was dedicated to a life pure and exemplary, if to him was entrusted the great task of winning Sicily to Christian dominion.

They did it because they thought they could do it; as in the old Greek games success was to the man who believed in his success. The Saracens fell into a panic at the sight of that intrepid handful at their gates, thinking from the very smallness of the band that it must be the advance pickets of a great army already past their guarding navy and advancing upon the city.

“So the Saracens gave up in panic, and Roger and his two hundred took all the town with much gold and many slaves, as was a conquering warrior’s due.”

The key of Messina was sent to Brother Robert in Calabria with the proud message that the city was his to come and take possession of. And the Normans went on with the same bold confidence; and always their belief was as a magic buckler to them as over all the island they extended their conquest. Seven hundred Normans routed an army of 15,000 Saracens, killing 10,000. And young Serbo, nephew of Roger, conquered 30,000 Arabs, attacking them with only one hundred knights.

It was one of Jane’s pet romances, the career of this landless youngest son of a small French noble carving out with sword and brain “the most brilliant of European Kingdoms,” leaving a dominion to his successors with power stretching far beyond Sicily as long as they governed upon his principles. The young conqueror, unspoiled by his dazzling success, ruled with justice, mercy, and genius, making Sicily united and prosperous; the freest country in the world at that time; the only one where all religions were tolerated, where men of different creeds and tongues could live side by side, each in his own way; each governed justly and liberally according to his own laws—French statutes for Normans, the Koran for Mussulmen, the Lombard laws for Italians, and the old Roman Code for the natives.

“Peripatetica,” Jane burst out. “Roger must have been a delightful person—‘so good, so dear, so great a king!’ Don’t you think there is something very appealing in a king’s being called ‘so dear’? It is much easier for them to be ‘great.’”

“Normans are too modern for me now,” said Peripatetica, whose own enthusiasm was commencing to catch fire. “We are coming to the spot of all the Greek beginnings, where their very first settlement began—do you realize that?”

And Jane, who had been hard at work with her histories, could see it clearly. The little narrow viking-like boats of Theocles, the Greek merchant, driven before the sudden northeast storm they could not beat up against nor lie to, straight upon the coast of this dread land. It had always been a land awesome and mysterious to the Greeks. They had imagined half the dramas of their mythology as happening there. It was sacred ground, too sacred to be explored by profane foot; and was besides the home of fierce cannibals, as they believed the Sikilians to be, and of all manner of monstrous and half divine beings. But, desperately choosing before certain destruction at sea the unknown perils of the shore, Theocles had rounded the point and beached his boats safely on that strip of yellow sand that still fringes the cove below Taormina.

He and his companions, who feared to adventure no perils of the treacherous Mediterranean in their tiny crafts, but feared very much the monsters of their imagination in this haunted country, built to Apollo an altar of the sea-worn rocks, and sacrificed on it their last meal and wine, praying him for protection and help to save them from the Læstrygones, from Polyphemus, and Hephæstos at his nearby smoking forge. And Apollo must have found it good, the savour of that his first sacrifice on Sicilian land, for straightway succour came. The natives, drawn down from the hillsides in curiosity at that strange fire on the shore, were not raging cannibals but peaceful and friendly farmer folk, who looked kindly on the shipwrecked merchants, and gladly bartered food and rich dark wine for Greek goods. And through the days of the storm the Greeks lived unmolested on the shore, impressed by all that met their eyes; the goodness of that “fairest place in the world.” When at last came favourable winds and the Greeks could set sail again, Theocles vowed to return to that fertile shore, and if Apollo, protector of colonists and giver of victory, should favour his enterprise, to build there a shrine in his honour.

But in Athens none would believe his accounts of the rich land and the mild natives. They said that even so it would be unwise to disturb Polyphemus, or to run the risk of angering Hephæstos, and that it was no proper site for a colony any way! Theocles did not falter at discouragement; he took his tale to other cities and over in Eubœa the Chalcydians were won to him. After the oracle of Apollo had promised them his protection and all good fortune, more Ionians and some Dorians joined them; and in the spring they set forth, a great fleet of vessels laden with all necessary things to found a colony. Theocles piloted them to the spot of his first sheltering; and there on the red rock horns of the point above the beach they founded Naxos, and built the great shrine of Apollo Archagates, founder and beginner, with that wonderful statue which is spoken of as still existing in the time of Augustus, 36 B.C.

Naxos itself had no such length of life. It knew prosperous centuries of growth and importance, of busy commerce and smiling wealth. Then came Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse, subdued the mother city to his jealous power and absolutely exterminated it, killing or carrying off into slavery all its population. “The buildings were swept away, and the site of Naxos given back to the native Sikilians. They never returned, and for twenty-two centuries no man has dwelt there.” Of all the shrines and palaces of Naxos not one stone remains upon another, not one surviving trace to identify now the exact site even of the Mother of all Greek cities in Sicily. But from her sprang Taormina.

Such of her population as managed to escape from Dionysius, climbed up to those steep rocks above and there, sheltering with the Sikilians, out of tyrants’ reach in that inaccessible mountain nest, Greek and Sikilian mingling produced a breed of eagles that with fierce strugglings has held fast its own on those peaks through all the centuries.

But these shipwrecks and temples and sieges grew dim behind the gritty cloud of railroad cinders. Jane felt the past melt away from her and fade entirely into the cold discomfort of the present. She subsided into limp weariness in a corner of the carriage, incapable of interest in anything, while Peripatetica’s spirits revived, approaching the tracks of her adored Greeks, and her imagination took fire and burst into words.

“Oh those wonderful days!” she cried. “If one could only have seen that civilization, that beauty, with actual eyes. Jane, wouldn’t you give anything to get back into the Past even for a moment?”

“No, I’d rather get somewhere in the now—and to breakfast,” grumbled Jane with hopeless materialism as she vainly tried to stay her hunger on stale chocolate. So Peripatetica saw visions alone, Jane only knowing dimly that miles and miles of orange groves, and of a sea a little paled and faded from its Calabrian blue, were slipping by.

A box of a station announced itself as Giardini-Taormina. A red-cheeked porter bore the legend “Hotel San Domenico” on his cap; and much luggage and two travellers fell upon him. But, ah, that hoodoo!

“Desolated, but the hotel was full. Yes, their letter had been received, but it had been impossible to reserve rooms,” said the cheerful porter heartlessly; “no doubt other hotels could accommodate them.” He didn’t seem to feel his cheerfulness in the least diminished by the dismay pictured in the dusty faces before him.

“Oh, well,” said Jane bravely, “picturesque monasteries are all very well, but modern comfort does count in the end. We will probably like the Castel-a-Mare, and if we don’t, there is the Timeo.”

A small man buzzing “Metropole, Metropole! Come with me, Ladies—beautiful rooms—my omnibus is just going!” hung upon their skirts, but they brushed him sternly aside, and permitted the rosy-cheeked porter to pile them and the mountains of their motoring-luggage into a dusty cab, and sing “Castel-a-Mare” cheerily to its driver.

“We will go there first as it’s nearest,” they agreed, “but if the rooms aren’t very nice, then the Timeo—the royalties all prefer the Timeo.”

The road was twisting up and up a bare hillside. They roused themselves to think that they were approaching Taormina, the crown of Sicily’s beauty, the climax of all earthly loveliness, the spot apostrophised alike with dying breath by German poets and English statesmen, as being the fairest of all that their eyes had beheld on earth, place of “glories far worthier seraph’s eyes” than anything sinful man ought to expect in this blighted world according to Cardinal Newman.

But where was it, that glamour of beauty? Underneath was a leaden stretch of sea, overhead a cold, clouded sky, jagged into by forbidding peaks. The grey road wound up and folded back upon itself, and slowly—oh dear departed Berliet, how slowly!—up they crawled. It was all grey, receding sea and rocky hillside, grey dust thick on parched bushes and plants, greyer still on grey olives and cactus, and what—those other dingy trees—could they be almonds!—those shrivelled and pallid ghosts of rosy bloom shivering in the icy wind? Was it all but a chill shadow, that for which they had left home and roaring fires and good steam heat?

A furry grey head surmounted a dust wave, a donkey and a small square cart emerged behind him, following a line of others even greyer and dustier. Jane looked listlessly at the forlorn procession until her eyes discerned colour and figures dim beneath the dirt on the cart’s sides, and underneath fantastic mud gobs what appeared to be carvings. Could these be the famous Painted Carts, the “walking picture books” of a romance and colour loving people, the pride of a Sicilian peasant, frescoed and wrought, though the owner lived in a cave—the asses hung with velvet and glittering bits of mirrors though he himself walked in rags? Was everything hoped for in Sicily to prove a delusion?

Up whirled the San Domenico porter in a cloud of dust, his empty carriage passing their laden one.

“You might try the ‘Pension Bellevue,’ ladies—beautiful outlook—opposite the Castel-a-Mare, if you are not suited there,” he called out as he rolled by.

They thanked him coldly, with spines stiffening in spite of fatigue.

A pension? Never! If they could not have ascetic cells at San Domenico or the flowery loggias of the Castel-a-Mare, then at least the chambers that had sheltered a German Empress!

Gardens and flowers began to appear behind the dust; a wave-fretted promontory ran into the sea below, a towering peak crowned with a brown rim loomed overhead. In a few more dusty twists of road the Castel-a-Mare was reached, and two large rooms with the best view carelessly demanded.

The Concierge looked troubled and sent for a bland proprietor. Rooms? He had none! wouldn’t have for a month—could give one room just for that very night—that was all!

To the Timeo then.

More dusty road, a quaint gateway, a narrow street with all the town’s population walking in the middle of it, a stop in front of a delightful bit of garden. A stern and decided concierge this time—No rooms!

In the mile and a half from the Castel-a-Mare at the end of one promontory, to the Internationale at the extreme end of the other, that dusty cab stopped at every hotel and, oh lost pride! at every pension in the town and out. The same stern refusal everywhere; no one wanted the weary freight. They felt their faces taking on the meek wistfulness of lost puppies vainly trying to ingratiate themselves into homes with bones.

“Does no one in the world want us?” wailed Peripatetica. “Can’t any one see how nice we really are and give us a mat and a crust?”

“The Metropole man did want us,” reminded Jane hopefully. “He even begged for us. Let’s go there!”

That had been the one and only place passed by, the Domenico porter had seemed so scornful of its claim at the station, but now they would condescend to any roof, and thought gratefully of that only welcome offered them in all Taormina.

How pleased the little porter would be to have them coming to his beautiful rooms after all! Their meek faces became proud again. They looked with approving proprietorship on the waving palm in front of the Metropole, and the old bell tower rising above it.

Peripatetica’s foot was on the carriage step ready to alight and Jane was gathering up wraps and beloved Kodak when out came a languid concierge and the usual words knelled in their ears—“No rooms!”

They refused to believe. “But your porter said you had.”

“Yes, an hour ago, but now they are taken.”

A merciful daze fell upon Peripatetica and Jane....

How they returned to the “Castel-a-Mare” and got themselves and their mountain of luggage into the one room in all Taormina they might call theirs for as much as a night, they never knew; when consciousness came back they were sitting in front of food in a bright dining-room, and knew by each other’s faces that hot water and soap must have happened in the interval.

Speech came back to Peripatetica, and she announced that she was never going to travel more, except to reach some place where she might stay on and on forever. Jane might tour through Sicily if she liked, but as for her, Syracuse and Girgenti and all could remain mere words on the map, and Cook keep her tickets—if she had to move on again on the morrow, she would go straight to Palermo and there stay!

Jane admitted to congenial feelings, and resigned all intervening Sicily without a pang. There would be no place in inhospitable Taormina for Persephone to squeeze into any way!

They went to question the Concierge of trains to Palermo. He took it as a personal grief that they must leave Taormina so soon. “The air of Palermo is not like ours.” They hoped it was not, as they shivered in a cold blast from the open door, and put it to him that they could hardly live on air alone, and that Taormina offered them nothing more. But he had something to suggest—furnished rooms that he had heard that a German shop-keeper wished to let. Peripatetica did not take to the suggestion kindly, in fact her aristocratic nose quite curled up at it. But she assented dejectedly that they might as well walk there as anywhere, and give the place a look.

Through the dust and shrivelled almond blossoms they trailed back into town. The sun was still behind grey clouds and an icy wind whipped up the dust.

“Too late for the almond bloom, too early for warmth. What is the right moment for Sicily?” murmured Peripatetica.

The mountains with their sweeping curves into the sea were undeniably beautiful; the narrow town street they entered through the battlemented gate was full of gay colour, but it left them cold and homesick for Calabria. A little old Saracen palace, with some delicate Moorish windows and mouldings still undefaced, held the antiquity shop of the Frau Schuler. Brisk and rosy she seemed indeed the “trustable person” of the Concierge’s description.

Yes, indeed, she had rooms and hoped they might please the ladies. Her niece would show them. A white-haired loafer was beckoned from the Square, and Peripatetica and Jane turned over to his guidance. Behind his faded blue linen back they threaded their way between the swarming tourists, children, panniered donkeys, and painted carts.

Suddenly the old man vanished into a crack between two houses, which turned out to be an alley, half stair, half gutter, dropping down to lower levels. Everything no longer needed in the kitchen economy of the houses on either side had been cast into the alley—the bones of yesterday’s dinners, vegetable parings of to-day’s, the baby’s bath, the father’s old shoes lay in a rich ooze through which chickens clucked and squabbled. At the bottom of the crack a high wall and a pink gateway ... they were in a delicious garden, descending a pergola of roses and grapes. Violets and freesias, geraniums and heliotrope spread in a dazzle of colour and sweetness under gnarled olives and almonds and blossoming plums; stone benches, bits of old marbles, a violet-fringed pool and a terrace leading down to a square white house, a smiling young German girl inviting them in, and then a view—dazzling to even their fatigued, dulled eyes.

In front a terrace, and then nothing but the sea, 700 feet below, the surf-rimmed coast line melting on and off indefinitely to the right in great soft curves of up-springing mountains, a deep ravine, then the San Domenico point with the old convent and church rising out of its gardens. On the left the ruins of the Greek theatre hanging over their heads; and on the very edge of the terrace an old almond-tree with chairs and a table under it, all waiting for tea.

Fortunately the villa’s interior showed comfortable rooms, clean, airy, and spacious. But the terrace settled it. They would have slept anywhere to belong to that. No longer outcast tramps but semi-proprietors of a villa, a terrace, a garden, and a balcony, they returned beaming to the friendly Concierge.

And all Taormina looked different now. The brocades and laces waved enticingly at the “antichita’s” doors, old jewels and enamels gleamed temptingly; mountains rose more majestic, the sea seemed less disappointingly lacking in Calabrian colour.... And as for the tourists, so disgustingly superior in the morning with their clean faces and unrumpled clothes, assured beds and table d’hôtes; now, how the balance had changed! They were mere tourists. What a superior thing to be an inhabitant, with a terrace all one’s own!

Life at the Villa Schuler was inaugurated in a pouring rain. But even that did not dim its charm; though to descend the Scesa Morgana—as the gutter-alley called itself—was like shooting a polluted Niagara, and the stone floors of the villa itself were damply chill, and American bones ached for once despised steam heat. Yet smiling little Sicilian maids, serving with an ardour of willingness that never American maid knew, with radiant smiles staggered through the rain bearing big pieces of luggage, carried in huge pitchers of that acqua calda the forestieri had such a strange passion for, and then, as if it were the merriest play in the world, pulled about heavy pieces of furniture to rearrange the rooms according to American ideas, which demanded that dressing-tables should have light on their mirrors, and sofas not be barriered behind the immemorial German tables.

Maria of the beaming smile, and Carola of the gentle eyes, what genius was yours? Two dumb forestieri, who had never learned your beautiful tongue, found that they had no more need of words to express their wants than a baby has to tell his to knowing mother and nurses. Did they have a wish, all they had to do was to call “Maria!”—smile and stutter, look into her sympathetic face, and somehow from the depths of their eyes she drew out their desire....

“Si, si, Signora!”

She was off and back again with a smile still more beaming.

“Questo?”

Yes, “questo” was always the desired article!

At first they did make efforts at articulate speech, and with many turnings over of dictionary and phrase-book attempted to translate their meaning. But that was fatal. Compilers of phrase-books may be able to converse with each other, but theirs is a language apart—of their own, apparently—known to no other living Italians. They soar in cloudy regions of politeness, those phrase-books, all flourishes and unnecessary compliments; but when it comes to the solid substantials of existence they are nowhere! Towels are not towels to them, nor butter, butter.

At first two trusting forestieri loyally believed in them, and book in hand read out confidently to Maria their yearnings for a clean table cloth, or a spoon. But a dictionary spoon never was a spoon to Maria—dazed for once she would look at them blankly until meaning dawned on her from their eyes; then “ah!” and she would exclaim an entirely different word from the dictionary’s, and produce the article at last.

But then according to Maria’s vocabulary “questo?” “qui!” were the only really vital and necessary words in all the Italian language. It merely depended upon how you inflected these to make them express any human need or emotion. “Questo” meant everything from mosquito-bars to vegetables; and the combination of the two words with a sprinkling of “si’s” and “non’s” were all one needed to define any shade of feeling—pride, surprise, delight, regret, apology, sadness. From the time Maria brought in the breakfast trays in the mornings to the hot-water bottles at night it rang through the villa all day long; for the intricacies of her duties, the demands of the lodgers, scoldings from the Fraulein, chatter with other maids, “questo! qui!” sounded near and echoed from the distance like a repeated birdnote.

No nurse ever showed more pride in a precocious infant’s lispings than did Maria when they caught up her phrases and repeated them to her—when the right words to express the arrangement of tub and dinner table were remembered and stammered out. She seemed to feel that there might be hope of her charges eventually developing into rational articulate beings, and “questo-ed” every article about to them, with all the enthusiasm of a kindergartner.

Next morning the sun had come out, and so had Ætna. There it suddenly was, towering over the terrace, a great looming presence dominating everything; incredibly high and white, its glittering cone clear cut as steel against the blue morning sky, rising far above the clouds which still clung in tatters of drapery about the immense purple flanks. Enceladus for once lay quiet upon his fiery bed; no tortured breathings of steam floated about the icy clearness of the summit. It was a vision all of frozen majestic peace, yet awesomely full of menace, of the times when the prisoned Titan turned and groaned and shook the earth with his struggles, and poured out tears of blood in floods of burning destruction over all the smiling orchards and vineyards and soft green valleys.

Suddenly, Germans armed with easels and palettes sprang up fully equipped at every vantage viewpoint. The terrace produced a fertile crop of them, solemnly reducing the wonderful vision to mathematical dabs of purple and mauve and grey upon yellow canvas. One felt it comforting to know that even if Ætna never pierced the clouds again all Germany might feast its eyes on the colored snap shots then being made of that morning’s aspect of the Great Presence amid a patronising chorus of “Kolossals” and “achs reizends.” But once seen, it remained impressed on sense and spirit, that vision—whether visible or not. It was always with one, dominating all imaginings as it did every actual circumstance of life at Taormina, the weather, the temperature, the colour of every prospect. Though the sky behind San Domenico might be a blank and empty grey, one knew it was there, that mysterious and wonderful presence. And when it stood out, a Pillar of Heaven indeed, all clear and fair in white garment of fresh-fallen snow, it was still a menace to the blossoming land below, whether from its summit were sent down icy winds and grey mists or shrivelling fire and black pall of lava.

“A Place Where the Past Reveals Itself”

Equal in importance with this vision of Ætna was the appearance of Domenica—both events happening in the same day. Domenica too began as a bland outline. Small, middle-aged, and primly shawled; a smooth black head, gold earrings, and a bearing and nose of such Roman dignity and ability that two weary forestieri yearned at once to put themselves and their undarned stockings into the charge of her capable little hands. She respectfully asserted her willingness to serve them; they could make that out—but how tell her their requirements and the routine of the service they wished? It was seen to be beyond the powers of any phrase-book or even of Maria, presiding over the interview with beaming interest, and carefully repeating with louder tone and hopeful smile all Domenica’s words. No mutual understanding could be reached. They gave it up, and regretfully saw the shining black head bow itself out. But Domenica had to be. Their fancy clamoured for her, and all their poor clothes, full of the dust of travel and the rents of ruthless washerwoman, demanded her insistently. A more competent interpreter was found, and their needs explained at length. Domenica’s eyes sparkled with willing intelligence; she professed herself capable of doing anything and everything they asked of her; and mutual delight gilded the scene until the question of terms came up. What would the ladies pay? They mentioned a little more than the Frau Schuler had told them would be expected, and waited for the pleased response to their generosity—but what was happening? The grey shawl was tossed from shoulders that suddenly shrugged, and arms that flew about wildly; fierce lightnings flashed from the black eyes, a torrent of ever faster and shriller words rose almost into shrieks.

Peripatetica and Jane shrank aghast, expecting to see a stiletto plunged into the stolid form of their interpreter, bravely breasting the fury.

“What is the matter?” they cried.

“Oh nothing,” smiled the interpreter, “she is saying it isn’t enough; that the ladies at the hotels pay their maids more, and her husband wouldn’t permit her to take so little.”

Dear me, she need not! they certainly would not want such a fury.

The fury had subsided into tragic melancholy, and subdued after-mutterings of the storm rumbled up from the reshawled bosom.

“She says she will talk it over with her husband to-night,” said the gentle interpreter with a meaning wink. “She is really good and able; the ladies will find her a brave woman.”

They didn’t exactly feel that bravery was needed on her side as much as on theirs after that storm, but they had liked no other applicant, and again the imposing nose and capable appearance asserted their charm, and they remembered their stockings. Their offer still stood, they said, but it must be accepted or declined at once; they wanted a maid that very evening. Renewed flashes—she dared not accept such a pittance without consulting her husband.... Very well, other maids had applied, expecting less. A change of aspect dawned—she would like to serve the ladies, would they not give half of what she asked for? Consultation with the interpreter—ten cents more a day offered only—instant breaking out of smiles and such delighted bobbings and bowings as she departed that it seemed impossible to believe that furious transformation had ever really happened.

They felt a little uneasy. Had they caught a Tartar? Remembering all the tales of Sicilian temper it seemed scarcely comfortable to have a maid who might draw a stiletto should one give her an unpleasing order. They awaited the beginning of her service a bit doubtfully. But when that grey shawl was hung inside the villa door, the only fierceness its owner showed was in her energy for work. The black eyes never flashed again, until ... but that comes later. They beamed almost as happy and instant a comprehension of all needs as Maria’s. And her capacity for work was appalling. At first they watched its effects with mutual congratulations; such an accumulation of the dilapidations of travel as was theirs had seemed to them quite hopeless ever to catch up with, but now the great heaps of tattered stockings turned into neat-folded pairs in their drawers, under-linen coquetted into ribbons again, and all their abused belongings straightened into freshness and neatness once more. Domenica’s energy was as fiery as Ætna’s during an eruption, only unlike the mountains it never seemed to know a surcease. Dust departed from skirts instantly at the fierce onslaught of her brushings; things flew into their places; sewing seemed to get itself done as if at the wave of a magician’s wand. Accustomed to the dilatoriness of Irish Abigails at home, Peripatetica and Jane were quite dazzled with delight at first—but then incredibly soon came the time when there was nothing left undone; when the little personal waiting on they needed could not possibly fill Domenica’s days, and it became a menace, the sight of that little grey-clad figure asking with empty hands, “what next, Signora?”

“The Demon,” they began calling her instead of Domenica, and felt that like Michael Scott and his demon servant, they would be obliged to set her to weaving ropes of sand, the keeping her supplied with normal tasks seemed so impossible. It became almost a pleasure to find a gown too loose or too tight, that she might alter it, or to spot or tear one, and as for ripped skirt bindings or torn petticoat ruffles, they looked at each other in delight and cried exultantly, “a job for the Demon!” Tea-basket kettles to scour they gave her, silver to clean, errands to do, fine things to wash, their entire wardrobes to press out; yet still the little figure sat in her corner reproachfully idle, looking at them questioningly, and sighing like a furnace until some new task was procured her. Desperately they took to giving her afternoons off, and invariably dismissed her before the bargained time in the evening. But still to find grist for the mill of her industry kept them racking their brains unsuccessfully through all their Taormina days.

Home comforts and maid once secured they could turn to Taormina itself with open minds, and plunge into a flood of beauty and queernesses and history. Of the guide-books some say that Taormina was the acropolis of Naxos, an off-shoot of that first Greek town, others that it, like Mola, was a Sikilian stronghold long before the days of the Greeks. Jane’s private theory was that neither Greeks nor Sikilians had been its founders, that eagles alone would ever first have built on that dizzy windy perch!

On the very ridge of a mountain spine with higher peaks overhanging, Taormina twists its one real street, houses climbing up or slipping down hill as best they may, all clinging tight, and holding hands fast along the street to balance themselves there at all. Dark stairway cracks between lead up or down, and overhead flying arches or linked stories keep the clasp unbroken. Here and there a little street manages to twist off and find a few curves for itself on another level, or the street widens into a wee square, or a terrace beside an old church is edged with a stone-benched balustrade where ancient loafers may sun themselves and look down at the tiny busy specks of fishing boats in the sea far below.

Every hour of the day the Street is a variety show with the mixed life passing through it, and acting its dramas there. Flocks of goats squeezing through on their way to pasture; donkeys carrying distorted wine skins or gay glazed pottery protruding from their panniers; women going to the fountain, balancing slender Greekish water jars on their heads; the painted carts carrying up the tourists’ luggage; the tourists themselves in veils and goggles bargaining at enticing shop doorways, or peering into the windowless room of Taormina’s kindergarten, where a dozen or more infants are primly ranged, every mother’s daughter with knitting pins in hand and silky brown curls knotted on top of head like little old women, sitting solemnly in the scant light of the open door, acquiring from a gentle old crone the art of creating their own stockings. There the barber strums his guitar on a stool outside the “Salone” door while he waits for custom; the Polichinello man obstructs traffic with the delighted crowds of boys collected by Punch’s nasal chantings and the shrill squeaks of “Il Diavolo.” There come the golden loads of oranges and lemons; green glistening lettuces and feathery finochi; bread hot from the bakers in queer twists and rings; live chickens borne squawking from market, and poor little kids going to the butchers. The busy tide of every-day life never ebbed its colourful flow from the beginning of the street at the arch of one old gateway until its end at the arch of the other. Buying and selling, learning, working, and idling, the Present surged there, but a step aside into any of the backways, and one was instantly in the Past. Old women spinning in doorways with the very same twirling spindles as those of two thousand years ago. The very same old women, one had almost said, their hawk-like dried faces were so unimaginably far removed from youth, from all modernness.

The very names of the streets spell history and drama. History rises up and becomes alive.

In the Street of Timoleon one hears the clank of armour—the Great Leader and his Corinthians swing down the road. Only a few days ago they had landed at the beach of ruined Naxos in answer to the call of Andromachus, Taormenium’s ruler. They have been warmly entertained at his palace, have there rested, learning from him of the lay of the land and state of affairs; now they set out to begin the campaign. The staring people stand watching the march of these strong new friends, murmuring among themselves in awestruck whispers of the portents attending the setting forth of these allies. How great Demeter and Persephone herself had appeared to the servitors of their temple, promising divine assistance and protection to this expedition for the succour of their island—a rumour too that Apollo had dropped the laurel wreath of victory from his statue at Delphi upon Timoleon’s head; a marvel, not a rumour, for it was beheld with very eyes by some amongst themselves. How the ships bringing these deliverers had come in through the night to the harbour below with mysterious unearthly fires hovering in front of them and hanging in balls at the masthead, to light them on the way!

In the midst of the soldiers is a taller figure—or one that seems so—a face like Jupiter’s own, of such majesty and sternness and calm. The crowd surges and thrills and shouts with all its heart and soul and stout Sicilian lungs.

“Who is that?” ask the children.

“Timoleon! Timoleon, the Freer!” they are answered when the shouting is over. “Remember all your life long that you have seen him.”

And when years later those boys, grown to manhood in a free prosperous Sicily, hear of the almost divine honours that grateful Syracuse is paying to her adored deliverer, of the impassioned crowds thronging the theatre, mad with excitement at every appearance of the great old blind man, they too thrill to know that their eyes too have seen “The Liberator,” greatest and simplest of men.

It is the Street of the Pro-Consulo Romano. Here comes Verres, cruelest of tyrants, most rapacious of robbers. The people shrink out of the way, out of sight as fast as may be, at the first gleam of the helmets of the Pro-Consul’s guard, when “carried by eight stalwart slaves in a litter, lying upon cushions stuffed with rose leaves, clad in transparent gauze and Maltese lace, with garlands of roses on his head and round his neck, and delicately sniffing at a little net filled with roses lest any other odour should offend his nostrils,” the sybarite tyrant is borne along, passing the statue of himself he has just had erected in the Forum, on his way to the theatre.

The Street of Cicero; it is only necessary to close one’s eyes to see that lean, long-nosed Roman lawyer. A fixed, silent sleuth-hound on this same Verres’ track; following, following close, nose fixed to the trail, for all the cunning doublings and roundings of the fox, questing all over Sicily, gathering everywhere evidence, building up his case, silently, inexorably; until at last his quarry is cornered, no squirming tricks of further avail. Verres is caught by the throat, exposed, denounced; so passionately, that as long as man’s appreciation of logic and eloquence endures the great lawyer’s pleading of that case is remembered and quoted.

Children are playing in the Via Sextus Pompeius, but one sees instead a gleam of golden armour, of white kilts swinging from polished limbs—the proud figure of Pompey; splendid perfumed young dandy who, the fair naughty ladies say, is the “sweetest-smelling man in Rome.”

Here, with instinctive climb to the heights, he is desperately watching the surge of that great new power flooding, foaming, submerging all the world; rising up to him even here, the bubbling wave started by that other Roman dandy, the young man Julius Cæsar, who knotted his girdle so exquisitely....

The street from which the Villa Schuler’s pink door opened was that of the Bastiones, where the town’s fortified wall had once been. Corkscrewing dizzily down the sheer hillside among the cacti and rocks ran a narrow little trail. Jane had settled it to her own satisfaction that this was the scene of Roger’s adventure when besieging Taormina, then Saracen Muezza—last stronghold on the East coast to hold out against him; as it had two hundred years ago been one of the last in succumbing to the Moslems.

Roger had completely surrounded the strong place with works outside its walls, and was slowly reducing it by starvation. Going the rounds one day, with his usual reckless courage almost unaccompanied, he is caught in a narrow way by a strong party of the enemy. The odds are overwhelming, even to Normans, on that steep hillside. Roger must retreat or be cut down. For attackers and pursued the only foothold is the one narrow path. Evisand, devoted follower of Roger, is quick to see the advantage of that—one man alone may delay a whole host for a few important minutes there, and he offers up his life to cover his master’s escape. Alone, on the narrow way he makes a stand against all the Moslem swarm, with such mighty wielding of sword that it is five minutes before the crooked Moslem blades can clear that impediment from their way. Roger, who has had time to reach safety before the brave heart succumbs to innumerable wounds, dashes back with reinforcements, wins the day, recovers his loyal servitor’s body, buries it with royal honours, and afterwards builds a church in memory of this preservation, and for the soul of his preserver. And Taormina, yielding to Roger and starvation, regains her name and the Cross....

Picking their way one morning up through the puddles and hens of their own alleyway, Peripatetica, raising her eyes an instant from the slime to look at the label on the house corner, said:

“Who could have been the Morgana this scandal of a street ever stole its name from? ... you don’t suppose....”

“What?”

“Why, that it could have been the Fata Morgana? Her island first appeared somewhere off the Sicilian coast.”