Chapter II: A Nest of Eagles (2)

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.”

“Oh, Peripatetica! how could a fairy, lovely and enchanting, ever have become associated with this!”

Peripatetica had a fine newborn theory on her tongue’s tip, but ere she could voice it, a nervous hen above them suddenly decided there was no room on that road for two to pass on foot, and took to her wings with wild squawk and a lunge straight at Peripatetica’s face in an attempt to pass overhead. Peripatetica ducked and safely dodged all the succeeding hens whom the first dame’s hysteria instantly infected to like behaviour. By the time she caught her breath again in safety at the street’s level, the theory was lost, but another more interesting one was born to her as they proceeded.

“‘Street of Apollo Archagates,’—Jane, do you see meaning in that? The Greeks always put their greatest temples _on the heights_—Athens, Girgenti, Eryx, wherever there were hills the Great Shrine was on the Acropolis. Taormina must have been the Acropolis of those Naxos people—they certainly never stayed on the unprotected shore below without mounting to these heights. I believe Apollo’s temple stood up here, not below. Here they built it, dominating the city, shining far out to sea, a mark for miles to all their ships and to the sailormen worshipping Apollo, Protector of Commerce.”

“No one has ever suggested that,” said Jane.

“What if they haven’t? It’s just as apt to be true, though even tradition has left no trace of it now but the name of this dirty little street. I for one am going to believe it, and that was why the statue survived until the time of the Romans.”

And so it was that every step they took stirred up wraiths of myth and history. Even on the Street in the midst of all its humming bustle, rotund German tourists and donkeys, all the modern life would suddenly melt away, and they would resurrect old St. Elio, attired only in chains and his drawers, kneeling in front of the Catania gate, exhorting the Byzantine soldiers to cleanse themselves from their sins before destruction came from the Saracens then raging like mad wolves outside the devoted town’s walls, in a fury that it alone—save Rometta—of all Christian Sicily should still hold out against them. Then the air would fill with the screaming and strugglings of those old fierce eagle fights, and the donkey boys’ cries of “A-ah-ee!” would change to the fierce triumphant shouts of “Allah Akbar!” with which Ibrahim’s cruel soldiery finally broke in to massacre garrison and townsfolk.

Although Taormina sat apart on her mountain eyrie with no epoch-making events finding room on her perch to happen, the stream of all Sicily’s history, from first Greek settlement to the revolts of modern days against King Bomba’s tyranny, have surged around and through her. An American living in Taormina did a kindness to her native cook, for which in grateful return the cook insisted on presenting her a quantity of old coins, which her husband had turned up through the years in their little garden. Showing them to the Curator of a Museum, “Madame,” he said to the fortunate recipient of the gift, “you have a complete epitome of all Sicilian history in these coins.”

All the different races and dynasties dominating Sicily from her beginning, all the great cities that rose into local power were represented in these treasure troves from the silt of the centuries, dug by a peasant from the soil of one little garden.

It was the Greek theatre which first revealed the Sicily of their dreams to Peripatetica and Jane; consoling for the vague disappointment of those first days of dust and rain by the glamour of its presentment of the loveliness of nature and the majesty of the past.

Greek that wonderful ruin still essentially is, for all its Roman remodelling and incrusting of brick. Only the Greeks could have so lovingly and instinctively combined with nature and seized so harmoniously all nature’s fairest to enhance their own creation. The place, the setting, the spirit of it is Greek; what matter if the actual material shape now is Roman, with the Greek form only glimmering through like a body of the old statuesque beauty cramped and hidden under distorting modern dress? Not that the theatre’s Roman clothing is ugly—the warm red brick, contrasting with the creamy marble fragments, has an undeniable charm, Greek and Roman together. It is an exquisite ruin of human conceivings, contrived to have blue sea and curving shore and Ætna’s snowy cone as the background of the open stage arches, and in the foyer, the arcaded walk back and behind the top tiers of the auditorium, all the differing panorama of beauty of the northern coast line.

Nature from the beginning did more than man for the building, and now she has taken it back to herself again, blending Greek and Roman in binding of vine and flower and moss; twining all the stone-seated tiers into an herb and flower garden, and putting the song of birds into the vaulted halls of the Greek Chorus.

An enchanting place, where the Past seems to reveal itself in all that it had most of beauty and splendour. Peripatetica and Jane thought themselves fortunate to live under its wings; actually in its shadow, and so be on intimate calling terms at any hour of the day, learning its beauty familiarly through every changing transformation of light, cool morning’s grey and glowing noon’s gold, fiery sunsets, blue twilights, and early moonrise—mountains and sea and wide-flung sky dissolving magically and mysteriously into ever different pictures.

They wandered through chorus halls and dressing-rooms, the obscure regions under the stage and the dizzy ones on top of it; strolled in the outside arcade on top of the auditorium, where the loveliness of the view was a fresh wonder every time it burst on them, sat in the top rows and the bottom ones on the flowery sod now covering all the seats, looking from every angle at that most charming of marble stage settings and most wonderful of all backgrounds, trying to imagine the times when the surrounding tiers had been filled with 4,000 eager spectators, and the walls had echoed to the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Looking wonderingly at the curious drains and holes and underground passages below the stage, they wondered if Æschylus, that eminent stage manager as well as poet, had not himself perhaps contrived some of them on his visit to Sicily, to introduce new thrills of stage effects into the performances of his tragedies here. Æschylus, who was inventor of stage realism, first to introduce rich costuming, accessories, and stage machinery, the mutter of stage thunder, shrieks, and sounds from behind the scenes suggestive of the deeds considered too shocking to happen in the audience’s sight—inventor of the “Deus ex Machina,” that obliging god popping from out his trap-door to divinely straighten out a situation snarled past natural conclusion.

As one sat there in the calm splendour of the setting of earth and sky, sun, and great winds streaming overhead, it became easier to understand the spirit of the old Greek plays; how the drama had been to them not mere amusement but almost a form of religion, and an expounding of their beliefs, an attempt to “justify the ways of God to man.” If perhaps such settings had not instinctively formed the differing tendencies of their great play-writers; Æschylus to represent suffering as the punishment of sin; Sophocles to justify the law of God against the presumption of man; and in these spacious open-air settings if the great rugged elementary simplicity of their plays had not been necessary and inevitable.

“In the Greek tragedy the general point of view predominates over particular persons. It is human nature that is represented in the broad, not this or that highly specialized variation.... To the realization of this general aim the whole form of the Greek drama was admirably adapted. It consisted very largely of conversations between two persons representing two opposed points of view, and giving occasion for an almost scientific discussion of every problem of action raised in the play; and between these conversations were inserted lyric odes in which the chorus commented on the situation, bestowed advice or warning, praise or blame, and finally summed up the moral of the whole.”

More akin to an opera than to a play in our modern sense, the Greek drama had as its basis music. The song and stately dance of its mimetic chorus being the binding cord of the whole, “bringing home in music to the passion of the heart the idea embodied in lyric verse, the verse transfigured by song, and song and verse reflecting as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of the limbs they stirred to consonance of motion.”

Sitting in the thyme-scented breeze Peripatetica and Jane read Euripides until they seemed to become a part of a breathless audience waiting for his tragedies to be performed before their eyes, waiting for the first gleam of the purple and saffron robes of the chorus, sweeping out from their halls in chanting procession. And it would all seem to take place once more on the stage in front of them, that feast for the eye and ear and intelligence at once. It became clear that across such great unroofed space the actors could not rely on “acting,” in our sense, for their results. It must be something bigger and simpler than any exact realism of petty actions; play of facial expression, subtle changes of voice and gesture would be ineffectually lost there. So, though at first the stage conventions of a different age seemed strange to these modern spectators, the actors raised above their natural height on stilted boots, their faces covered by masks, their voices mechanically magnified; yet in wonderful effects of statuesque posings the meaning came clear to the eye, and the chanting intonation brought out every beautiful measure of the rolling majestic verse which a realistic conversational delivery would have obscured. So the representation became “moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music between the intenser intervals of the chorus,” and the spectators found themselves “without being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm of impassioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actor on the scene,” receiving all the beautiful lucid thought and sentiment of the text, heightened by the accompanying appeal to the senses of perfect groupings of forms and colours, of swaying dance, and song and recitative, until it all blended into one perfect satisfying whole—perhaps the most wonderful form of art production that has ever existed.

And then some German tourist would scream, “Ach Minna, komm mal her! ’s doch famos hier oben!” and they would be waked from their day dream of old harmonies into the shrill bustling present again.

“It is like all really great fresco painting,” said Peripatetica on one of these comings back, “kept in the flat. Anything huge has to be treated so as to make its meaning tell; it has to be done in flat outline to stay in the picture, to make the whole effective. All the great imposing frescoes are like that; when the seventeenth century tried to heighten its effects by moulding out arms and legs in the round, its pictures dropped to pieces; any idea it was trying to express became lost. One is conscious of nothing but the nearest sprawling realistic limb thrusting out at one. Oh, those delicious marvellous Greeks! everything that is beautiful and perfect they did first, and anything good that has ever been done since is only copying them.”

Jane had a deep respect for the Greeks herself, but she sometimes turned against too much laudation of them.

“Do you suppose the æsthetic effect of their tragedies was really greater than that of a Wagner opera, well given? That the lament for Iphigenia could be more deeply thrilling than Siegfried’s funeral march?”

Peripatetica almost bounded from her seat.

“But that’s just it!” she cried. “Wagner operas are a revival of the Greek ideal! the only modern analogy of their drama! He had the same idea of painting on a huge canvas great heroic figures in the flat, keeping them in the picture without rounding out into petty realism. And he has attempted exactly what they did, to present his dramatic theme in a mingling of music, poetry, picture, and dance, every branch of art combined!”

“That’s interesting, and perhaps true, my dear, but if you discourse on about King Charles’ head, we shall get caught by that shower racing down the coast. There is just time to beat it to home and Vesuvius!”

Vesuvius was, after Domenica, their greatest acquisition, and the one that most soothingly spread about an atmosphere of home comfort. Until he came life had been a thing of shivers and sneezes, of days spent in ceaseless trampings to keep their chilled blood in circulation, and of evenings sitting swathed in fur coats and steamer rugs, with feet raised high above the cold drafts of the floor.

Fireplaces, or any means of artificial heating were unknown to the villa. They had waited patiently for the Southern sun to come and do his duty, but he didn’t; and a day came when Jane took to bed as the only hope of warmth, when even Domenica sneezed and said it was “_molto freddo_,” and then Peripatetica sallied forth determined to find some warmth nearer than Ætna. “Vesuvius” was the result of her quest. Not much was he to look at outwardly. Small was his round black form; oh, pitifully small he seemed at first view to those whose only hope he was. A mere rusty tin lantern on three little feet, he looked—but when his warm heart began to glow and to send delicious hot rays percolating through the holes of his sides and pointed lid, the charms of his fiery nature won respect at once. He made his small presence felt incredibly, from stone floor to high ceiling. Shawls and coats could be shed, feet lowered and at once frozen spines relaxed into long-forgotten comfort.

His breath was not pleasant to be sure, his charcoal fumes troubled at first, but when a Sicilian oracle had recommended the laying of sliced lemons on his head, all fumes were absorbed, he breathed only refreshing incense and became altogether a joy. Every day, except on rainy ones, when his company was called for earlier, he made his appearance at six of the evening—and how eagerly the sight of Maria bearing him in used to be waited for! Then with feet toasting and backs relaxing in delightful warmth, Peripatetica and Jane sat over his little glowing holes with quite the thrill and comfort of a real hearthstone.

Ardent fire worshippers they found themselves becoming in this supposedly Southern land. If Persephone had ever been as cold as they, they doubted if that _enlèvement_ to Pluto’s warm, furnace-heated realm could have been so distasteful after all!

* * * * *

Paddling out in the rain to hotels for meals was at first a drawback to life in the Villa Schuler. To sit with damp ankles through the endless procession of table d’hôte meals, and afterwards have the odoriferous bespatterings of the Scesa Morgana as dessert, was not an enjoyable feature of local colour. Frau Schuler was implored to feed her lodgers.

“But we are simple people; our plain cooking would not satisfy the ladies,” she protested, distressed. But the ladies felt that a crust and an egg in their own sitting-room would be more satisfying than all the triumphs of hotel chefs out in the wet. And to bread and eggs they resigned themselves. Instead came a five-course banquet, served by beaming Butler Maria in a dazzling new grass-green bodice—soup and macaroni, meat and vegetables, perfect in seasoning and succulence, crisp salad from the garden, and with it the demanded poached eggs which were to have constituted the whole dinner, almond pudding with a wondrous sauce; dates, oranges, sugary figs beaded on slivers of bamboo, mellow red wine. It seemed a very elastic two lire which could cover all that, as Frau Schuler said it did! Truly the Fraulein Niece was an artist. Peripatetica and Jane thereafter dined at home in tea gowns and luxury—and the pudding sauces grew more bland and wonderful every night. Also eggs continued to give originality by the vagaries of their appearance. As Peripatetica said, “they just ran along anyhow, and jumped on at any course they took a fancy to!” And to see where they were going to land—in the soup, the vegetables, the salad, the stewed fruit of dessert—or what still other and stranger companionships they might form, lent a sort of prize-packet excitement to each succeeding course. Dinner at the Villa Schuler, with little Vesuvius glowing warmingly through all his fiery eyes and steaming out spicy incense of lemon and mandarin peel, the soft low lamplight, the gleam of Maria’s smile and green bodice, the blessed remoteness from all tourist gabble, was truly a cosy function. They took to making elaborate toilets in honour of it, adding their Taormina acquisitions of old lace and jewels to Maria’s round-eyed amazement. When Jane burst out in an Empire diadem, and Peripatetica not to be outdone donned a ravishing lace cap, their status as good republicans was forever lost in the villa. Maria spread the tale of this splendour abroad, firmly convinced that these lodgers were incognito members of the most exalted nobility of distant “Nuova Yorka.” The tongues which could not pronounce their harsh foreign names insisted on labelling them the “Big and Little Princess”—and no protests could bring their rank down lower than “the most gentle Countesses,” upon their washing-bills.

It amused them in fine weather to try the various hotels for lunch. In mid-town was the Hotel Victoria, the haunt of artists and gourmets, famous for its food and for its garden, which climbed the hillside in blooming terraces and loggias, all stairways, springing bridges, and queer little passages leading to buildings and courts on different levels. Peripatetica and Jane wandered into it almost by accident. They noticed the name over a dingy door as they were strolling aimlessly one day, and Peripatetica remembered having heard of a picturesque garden within. Penetrating through empty hall and up various winding stairways they came to a charming garden court. There appeared the proprietor, and in Parisian French treated their curiosity as a boon and a pleasure. A little man, the Padrone, with nothing large about him but the checks of his trousers and the soft black eyes which turned upon the gay colour about him with gentle melancholy. He did the honours of the place with all the courtesy and dignity of Louis XIV showing Versailles. When they admired the aviary of Sicilian and tropical birds, the budding roses clambering everywhere, the strange feathery-fringed irises like gaudy little cockatoos, the delicate bits of Moorish carving and arches built into the hotel walls, he accepted all their enthusiasm for the charms of his property with no sign of pride, but rather with the pensive melancholy of one whose soul was above such things, as of one who knew the hollowness of earthly delights. Courteously he exhibited everything, taking them to still higher and more glowing terraces where his laden orange trees were burnished green and gold, and his violets sheets of deepest, royalest purple underneath.

A pair of monkeys lived in cage up there, and while the Signor deftly fed them for the amusement of his visitors he warmed up into caustic philosophic comment upon human and monkey nature, comment not unspiced with wit. Peripatetica, always ready for philosophy, immediately plunged into the depths of her French vocabulary and responded in kind. The discussion grew warm and fluent, and the little Padrone became a new man. With kindling eye and a pathetic eagerness he kept the ball rolling in polished Voltairian periods, intoxicated apparently with the joy of mental intercourse. He snatched and clung to it, inventing new pretexts to detain them, new things to exhibit, while the talk rolled on.

But Peripatetica, whose next passion to Philosophy is Floriculture, broke off to exclaim at the violets as they passed a bed of purple marvels. Emperors they were among violets. The Padrone immediately proffered some, setting two contadini to picking more. Peripatetica contemplating gluttonously the wonderful spread of the deep purple calyx, the long firm stems of those in her hand, and at the profusion of others sweetening the air, cried from her heart, “Oh, Monsieur, what luxury to have such a garden! You should be one of the happiest creatures in the world to be able to grow such flowers as these!”

The Padrone, from his knees, picking more violets, glanced up, and gloom fell over him again.

“Madame,” he inquired bitterly, “does happiness ever consist in what one possesses of material things? Contentment, perhaps—but happiness? Not the most beautiful garden in the world can grow that,” and with dark Byronic mystery, “Ah, one can live amid brightness and yet be very miserable.”

They parted with much friendliness, the Padrone hoping the ladies would do his hotel the honour of visiting it again. Surely, yes, they said; they would give themselves the pleasure of lunching there some day.... Upon that it seemed as if his gloom grew darker, but he implied courteously that that would do him too much honour, but if they did venture as much he would do his best to content them. His was but a rough little place, but it had been wont to be the haunt of artists and “they, you know, are always ‘_un peu gourmet!_’”

“What do you suppose is the story of that man?” they asked each other; and amused themselves inventing romantic pretexts to explain his air of blighted hopes and poetic pain.

Before long their curiosity impelled them to try the Victoria’s cuisine. They were a half hour before the time. No guests had yet gathered. They stood again in front of the aviary, but no polite philosopher made his appearance. A little yellow-haired maid in a frock as brightly purple as the violets, carrying decanters into the empty dining-room, was the only creature about. The sitting room offered them shelter from the wind, and for entertainment heaps of German novels and innumerable sketches of Sicilian scenery and types, which they hoped the Victoria’s artist patrons had not given in settlement of their hotel bills. A bell rang, and people streamed in until every seat in the clean, bare dining-room had its occupant. Not the artists Peripatetica and Jane were looking for, but types fixed and amusing, such as they had never before encountered in such numbers and contrasts. Rosy, bland English curates and their meek little wives; flashy fat Austrians, with powdered ladies of unappetizing look; limp English spinsters of the primmest propriety; seedy old men with dyed moustaches and loud clothes, diffusing an aroma of shady gambling-rooms. Scholarly old English professors; and Germans, Germans, Germans of all varying degrees of fatness, shininess, and loud-voicedness, but all united in double-action feeding power of knife and fork.

An expectant hush held them all for a while before empty plates. Then the little purple-gowned maid, and a sister one in ultramarine blue, with the same brilliant yellow hair knotted on top of her head, appeared with omelettes. Omelettes of such melting perfection as to explain the solemn expectancy of the waiting faces.

Followed a meal in which every course—fish, vegetables, meat, and salad, in a land where the tourist expects to subsist alone on oranges and scenery—was of a deliciousness to have made a Parisian epicure compliment the chef of his pet restaurant.

The Germans were explained; lovers of feeding and of thrift, of course, they had come in their hordes to this modest Inn. And how they made the most of it! Back they called the little maids for two and three helpings of each delicious platter. Food was piled upon plates in mountains, but before Peripatetica and Jane could more than nibble at their own share, the German plates would be polished clean, and the little maids called for another supply. The caraffes of strong new Sicilian claret were emptied too, until Tedeschi faces grew very red, and tongues more than ever loud.

Peripatetica and Jane dared not meet each other’s eyes. Next to them sat an elderly maiden lady from Hamburg “doing” Sicily without luggage, prepared for any and every occasion in black silk bodice and cloth skirt, which could be made short or long by one of the mysterious arrangements of loops and strings the female German mind adores. With maiden shyness but German persistence she firmly insisted on human intercourse with the French commercial traveller across the table. He clung manfully to the traditional gallantry of his race, though the Hamburgian’s accent in his mother tongue threw him into wildest confusion as to the lady’s meaning. When he confided his wife’s confinement to bed with a cold, and his ineffectual struggles to get the proper drugs for her in Taormina, the German lady announced the theory that violent exercise followed by a bath was better cure for a cold than any drugs, “the bath the main point,” she said. “The exercise and the _transpiration_ without that being of no use.”

“A _bath_! with a _cold_! Not a complete wash all over?” protested the startled Frenchman.

“Yes, indeed, one must wash one’s self entirely—though it might be done a bit at a time—but completely, all over, with water and soap,” insisted the German, which daring hygienic theory so convinced the Frenchman that its propounder’s reason must be unhinged that stammering and trembling he gulped down his wine and fled from the table without waiting for the sweets.

All this time Peripatetica and Jane had caught no glimpse of their friend, the Padrone. They wondered, but decided that his poetic nature soared above the materialities of hotel keeping.

The meal had reached the sweet course—a pudding of delectableness no words can describe. It inspired even the gorged Germans with emotion. Thoroughly stuffed as they already were they still demanded more of its ambrosia and the purple-frocked one flew back to the kitchen, leaving the door open.... Alas! their philosopher of the garden, in cook’s apron, was pouring sauce on more pudding for the waiting maid!

Ah, poor Philosopher! This the secret of his blighted being. The poet driven to cooking-pots, the artistic temperament expending itself in omelettes and puddings for hungry tourists. How wonder at the irony with which he had watched the monkeys feed!

* * * * *

Maria and Vesuvius were not the only possessors of ardent temperaments in the Villa. Another existed in a round soft ball of tan and white fuzz.

The Puppy!

He of the innocent grey eyes, black nose with pink tongue-trimming, and the most open and trusting heart in the world. On friends and strangers alike his smiles and warm licks fell. He bounded into every room all a-quiver of joy to be with such delightful people in such an altogether charming world. And never could it enter his generous thoughts that others might not equally yearn for his society; that Jane might object to having a liberal donation of fleas and mud left on the tail of her gown; that at 6 A.M. Peripatetica might not be enchanted to have a friendly call and a boisterous worry of her slippers all over the stone floor; or Fraulein might prefer the front of the stove entirely to herself during sacredest rites of cooking. He could not be brought to understand. He was cheerfully confident that every one loved him as much as he loved them, and that nothing could possibly be accomplished in that family without his valuable assistance. Many times a day loud wails rose to heaven, announcing that he had come to grief in the course of his labours; had encountered some one’s foot or hand, or had some door shut in his face; but in the midst of grief he would see in the distance something being accomplished without him—charcoal being carried in, the hall swept, or the garden watered—and he would rise from his tears and offer his enthusiastic assistance once more, all undaunted, and continue to give encouraging chews to the worker’s ankles, and stimulating barks of advice entirely undeterred by being called “an _injurienza_ puppy!”

Peripatetica claimed that his grey eyes showed that he was Norman descent, as Jane insisted they did in all the grey-eyed children of Taormina. But Fraulein, appealed to on that question, said he was of the colley race, and she revealed the dark and dreadful destiny laid upon him—that he was to grow up into a fierce and suspicious watch-dog; to live chained on the upper terrace, a menace to all intruders, a terror to frighten thieves from the garden plums!

And alas for natural bent of temperament when it must yield to contrary training. The grey-eyed one’s fate soon overtook him. Wild and indignant wails and shrieks woke Jane one sunny morning, and continued steadily in mounting crescendo all the while she clothed herself in haste to go to the rescue. Following the wails to the top of the garden she found the Puppy, a red ribbon around his soft neck, and from that a string attaching him to a pole. Nearby stood the Fraulein admonishing him that it was time his duties in life should begin, and he must commence to learn the routine of his profession without so much repining. In spite of Jane’s protests she insisted on leaving him there; and in vain all that quarter of Taormina rang with the wails of protesting indignation that welled from the confined one’s heart in the bewilderment of being left in loneliness, separated from all his friends and their doings. Every day after that he had to undergo his hour or two of schooling in the stern training of his grim profession. Soft-hearted Jane released him whenever she could, but Fraulein inexorably put him back, and even his playfellow Maria sternly held him to his duties. Between times he mixed with the family again on the old footing, but it was pathetic to see how soon nature was affected by the mould into which it was pressed, how soon he acquired the mannerisms and habits of his profession—curbing his exuberance of sociability, imposing on himself a post on the door mat, when strangers appeared, confining all welcome to his tail end, which would still wag friendlily though head did its duty in theatrical staccato growls.

* * * * *

In Taormina everything happens in the street. Houses are merely dark damp holes in which to take shelter at night, but life is lived outside them. Food is prepared in the street, clothes are mended there, hair is combed and arranged, neighbours gossiped with, lace and drawn-work made. The cobbler soles his shoes in the street, the tinsmith does his hammering and soldering there. It is the poultry run of hens and turkeys, the pasture grounds for goats and kids, the dance hall for light-footed children to tarantelle in, the old men’s club, the general living-room of all Taormina. Peripatetica and Jane found endless amusement there, though they seldom tarried in town. Like Demeter they wandered all day in meadow and mountain seeking Persephone, and found her not. Preparation for her beloved coming Mother Demeter seemed to be making everywhere; grass springing green when once the cold rain ceased, and carpets of opening blossoms spreading in orchards and fields for the little white feet to press. Every night they said, “She will come to-morrow,”—but still Demeter’s loneliness dissolved into cold tears hiding the face of the sun, and the chill winds told of nothing but Ætna’s snow, and the Lost One did not return.

But though they searched for her in vain in the setting of sunshine and blossom their fancy had pictured, Peripatetica and Jane found much else on their rambles—idyls of Theocritus still being lived, quaint little adventures, bits of local colour, new friends and old acquaintances among contadini, animals and flowers, and always and all about, the Bones of the Past. Everywhere obscured under the work-a-day uses of the Present, or rising out of them in beauty; half hidden among flowers in lonely fields or a part of squalid modern huts, they stumbled upon those remains of antiquity, debased and crumbled and inexplicable often, but beautiful with a lost strange charm, sad and haunting.

Taormina prides herself more on scenery than antiquities, but they found many of the latter in their scrambles on rough little mountain trails, learning all sorts of charms and secrets undreamed of by luxurious tourists rolling dustily in landaus along the one high road. Theirs was an unhurried leisure to take each day as it came. Without plans or guides they merely wandered wherever interest beckoned, until gradually they learned all the town and its setting of mountain and shore by heart.

They sallied forth untrammelled of fixed destination, ready to take up with the first adventure that offered—and one always did offer to adventurers of such receptive natures. They made plans only to break them; for inevitably they were distracted by something of interest more vital than the thing they had set out to see.

They might start, staff in hand, on a pilgrimage to the Madonna of Rocca Bella, whose brown shrine nestled dizzily on one of the strange peaks shooting their distorted summits threateningly above their own Villa, those peaks so vividly described by another Idle Woman in Sicily: “Behind, wildly flinging themselves upwards, rise three tall peaks, as of mountains altogether gone mad and raving.... The nearest peak of a yellow-grey, splintered and cleft like a lump of spar, and so upright that it becomes a question how it supports itself, is divided into two heads—one thrusting itself forward headlong over the town and crowned with the battlements of a ruined Saracenic-Norman castle; the other in the rear carrying the outline of a little church, and the vague vestige of a house or two; Saracenic-Norman castle and church (Madonna della Rocca) both so precisely the tint of the rock that it requires time and patience to disentangle each, and not to put the whole down as a further evidence of mountain insanity.”...

When Jane sat herself, muffled in furs and rugs, to read or sew in one of the quaint tile-encrusted arbours of the garden, those jagged peaks fell out of the sky overhead so menacingly, coming ever nearer and nearer to her shrinking head, that for all the sweetness of the flowers and birds she never could stay there long, but always, panic-struck, fled to the bare sea-terrace, and the prospect of calm and distant Ætna.

But to go back to Our Lady of Rocca Bella, which Peripatetica and Jane never managed to see, there were so many distractions on that path! Did they start with the firmest of pilgrim intentions, a new garden opened unexplored paths of sweetness, or a brown old sea-dog, Phrygian-capped, smiled a “buon giorno” on his bare-footed way up from the shore, showed them the strange sea creatures gleaming under the seaweed in his basket, and enticed them down to the shore. There on the golden beach of Theocles’ landing place, they embarked in a heavy boat pulled by their friend, and another old gold-earringed mariner, to the “_grotte molto interessante_” in the Isola Bella. They poked their heads between waves into coral caves where the light filtering through the bright water was dyed almost as intense an azure as in the famous Capri Blue Grotto, and the whole coast line of mountains came to them in a new revelation of beauty from the level of wide-stretching sea. And beside the queer bits of coral presented by the sea-dogs as souvenirs, they carried away salt-water whetted appetites of wonderful keenness, and pictures, bestowed safely behind their eyes, of deliciously moulded mountain sides rising straight from clear green seas, of wave-carved fantasies in sun-bathed coral rocks, of red nets being stretched on yellow sands by bare-legged, graceful fisher folk; memories they would not have exchanged for any wide map-like vista the Madonna could have given them from her high-perched eyrie.

It was the same story with the Fontana Vecchia. If they had persisted in reaching its clear spring they might have heard the nightingales singing in the wooded dell, but they would never have known Carmela and her sunny mountain meadow.

It was a day of shifting clouds and cold winds. Peripatetica was depressed. Her energies wilted in the cold, and she had only gone forth to walk because the salon was too icily vaultlike for habitation. Jane tried to cheer her with prospect of hot tea at the Fontana, but her spirit refused to respond to any material comforting. She complained of what had been troubling her for some time, a sense of feeling a mere ghost herself in these Past-pervaded spots; a cold and shivering ghost aimlessly blown about in the wind, pressed upon by all the thronging crowds of other ghosts haunting these places where through the centuries each succeeding throng of beings had struggled and laboured, laughed and suffered. Living among ghosts in these days of idleness, her own existence cut off from the real living and doing of the world, from the duties and responsibilities of her own place in life, from the warm clutching hands of the people dependent on her, she had come to seem to herself entirely vague and ineffectual. She felt a mere errant, disembodied spirit, she said, and it was a bleak and dreary feeling.

Jane said she thought a disembodied spirit, able to soar over the sharp cobbles of that road, an exceedingly enviable thing to be at that moment; but she quite understood, and was herself affected by the same sense of chill aloofness from actual, vital human living.

And then they saw Carmela—a little old Sibyl twirling her distaff at an open gate that looked out on the quiet road. Sitting in the sun with cotton kerchief, bodice, and apron all faded into soft harmonies of colour, she made such a picture through the arch of the gate’s break in the dull stone wall, with the green of the garden behind her, that they stopped a moment to look.

“Buon giorno”—the picture smiled, her little round face breaking into friendly wrinkles. She rose to her bare feet, and with graceful gesture invited them in—wouldn’t they like to see the farm? she asked. There was a _molto bella vista_ beyond. Always welcoming the unexpected they at once accepted, and found themselves passing through olive and orange groves. The property was not hers, their hostess explained; she was merely a servant; it all belonged to a _molto vecchia_ lady, Donna Teresa by name. Though owning no part of it, Carmela pointed out the old vines, the thriving newly planted young vineyard, the grafts on the almond trees, with proud proprietorship.

Donna Teresa made her appearance; a tiny bent crone, bare-footed like her maid and dressed in cottons as faded if not as patched, but showing traces of a refined type of beauty in the delicate features of her old face and the soft fine white hair curling still like grape tendrils about her well-shaped head. She accepted her maid’s explanation of the strangers’ presence, and proceeded to outdo her in hospitality. They must do more than see the vista—must pick some flowers too. With cordial toothless chatter, of which the friendly meaning was the only thing they could entirely understand, she led through the farmyard court where blue and white doves cooed on the carved stone well-head, and a solemn white goat, his shaggy neck hung about with charms and amulets, attached himself to the party and followed down the stone stairs to a lower terrace. There was a view entrancing indeed, also a strange little old round building resembling a Roman tomb. Carmela could tell no more than that it was _cosa di molto antichita_ and very useful to store roots in. Under a sheltering wall was a purple bank of violets to which the old Donna led them with much pride, inviting them to pick for themselves. When they did so too modestly to suit her, she fell on her knees and gathered great handfuls, thrusting on them besides all the oranges and mandarins they could carry, until her lavishments became an embarrassment. For all her bare feet and poor rags there was that in the grace of her hospitality they felt they could not offer money to. All they could do was to press francs into the maid’s hand, offer the Donna, as curiosities from distant America, the maple sugar drops Jane had filled her pocket with before starting, and try to make smiles fill the gaps in thanks of their halting Italian.

Carmela showed redoubled friendliness from the moment America was mentioned. She still clung to them after her mistress bade them goodby at the gate, and offered to show them another vista still more beautiful. They would rather have continued their interrupted way, but the little round face falling sadly changed their protestations into thanks, and she trotted happily beside them, smiling at their compliments on the even thread she spun as she walked, confiding how much it brought her a hank, what she could spin in a day, and that Donna Teresa was a good mistress, but a little weakened in her head by age.

She pattered along, her bare feet skimming carelessly over the sharp-cobbled road, spindle steadily whirling, past the Campo Santo, where at the top of a sudden ravine the road forked and strings of panniered donkeys and straight, graceful girls with piles of linen on their heads were going down to a hidden stream tinkling below. They longed to follow, but Carmela took them on around a curve, through a door in a high wall, past a deserted barn, along a grassy path under almond trees, and they found themselves in a spot that made them catch breath with delight.

The crown of a mountain spur dropped in terraced orchards and gardens to the sea below. Taormina was hidden behind intervening heights. Below, an opal sea divided Sicily from wraiths of the Calabrian mountains drifting along the horizon, and curves of yellow sand and white, surf-frothed rocks outlined the far indentations of the Island’s mountainous coast spreading blue and rosy-purple on their left. Fringed with blossoming plum and yellow gorse, the spur on which they stood dropped sheer to the river ravine, and above still towered Mola and Monte Venere.

It was a world of sun and colour and sweet silence. The cold, moaning wind was shut off by the heights behind them, and turned full to the glowing South, a real warmth of sun bathed the sheltered spot and had spread a carpet of flowers of more brilliant and harmonious arabesques than any of Oriental weaving. Of purple and puce and gold, coral and white and orange, of blues faint and deep, of rose and sharp crimson, it was woven exquisitely through the warp of young spring green. Even without the view, nothing so sweet and really springlike as that bit of mountain meadow had Peripatetica and Jane yet seen. They cried out in joy and sat them down among all the unknown bewitching flowers.

Carmela’s face lit up at their appreciation. She too sat down, let her spindle fall, and gazed about as if her eyes loved what they rested upon; then looking from one strange face to the other:

“You are really from America?” she asked, and let her pathetic little story pour out. Nine children she had borne, and all but one dead. She told how that one, a splendid youth, had gone to America three years ago to make a fortune for himself and her, and at first had written to her that he was doing well; but for two years she had spent her hard earnings to have letters written to him, and had prayed with tears at the Madonna’s shrine, but for two long years now—no answer.

Her round little old, yet childlike, face fell into tragic lines. With work-scarred hands clasping her knees across her patched apron she sat, a creature of simple and dignified pathos, opening her heart in brief and poignant words to the response in Peripatetica’s eyes. Among the blossoms and the bees the three women of such different lives and experiences, with the barrier of a strange tongue between them, came into close touch for a moment in the elementary humanity of that pain known to all women—Goddess Demeter and ragged peasant alike—when their dearest has gone forth from the longing shelter of their arms and theirs is the part of passive loneliness and waiting.

“Yes, life was _brutta_,” said Carmela simply, “but one had always one’s work.”

Picking up the spindle, winding again her even thread, smilingly she bade these strange friends “_a rivedercela_,” and departed, a certain tragic dignity clinging to the square little figure going sturdily, yet with head drooping, back to her life of hard and lonely labour. Whether that moment of sympathetic intercourse had meant anything to her or not, to the two idle ones that trusting touch of the life about them meant much. It pulled them out of the world of ghosts, from the empty sense of being outside of any connection with other lives, and by that contact of living, pitiful drama they came back into realities.

* * * * *

For all the tiny extent of Taormina’s boundaries, the discoveries of its antiquities seemed never ending; the cella of a Greek temple hidden in San Pancrazio’s church; the tiny Roman theatre, a section of its pit and auditorium with seats still in perfect rows sticking out from another old church whose greediness had only succeeded in half swallowing it; the enormous Roman baths whose old pools and conduits a thriving lemon orchard is now enjoying; the Roman pavement next to the Hotel Victoria; that bit of Greek inscription hospitably let into church walls, exciting imagination with its record that the “people of Tauromenium accord these honours to Olympis, son of Olympis” for having gained the prize in horse racing at the Pythian games.

The wall of the loveliest garden in Taormina is honeycombed with ancient tombs. The slender cypresses, like exclamation points emphasizing its rhythms of colour, have their roots among the very bones of antiquity. In this garden Protestant worship has succeeded Catholic in the old Chapel of the delicious little Twelfth Century Convent whose cloisters are now an English lady’s villa—and who knows in how many earlier shrines man’s groping faith has prayed in this very spot?

All over Taormina fragments of old marbles and carvings and columns appear in the most unlikely places; a marble mask from the theatre over the door of a modest little “Sarta” in a back alleyway, bits of porphyry columns supporting the steps of a peasant’s hovel. The traces of Norman and Saracen embellishment are, of course, even more numerous, almost every house on the street breaking out into some odd and delicate bit. The façade of the palace in which dwelt the Frau Schuler’s antiquity shop is freaked with charming old lava inlays and queer forked “merluzzi” battlements. Forcing one’s way through the chickens into its courtyard, one finds a vivid Fourteenth Century relief of the story of Eve’s creation, temptation, and punishment climbing up the stone stairway, and an inscription “_Est mihi i locu refugii_,” which tradition says was placed by John of Aragon taking refuge here once in the days when it was a Palace of the Aragonese Kings. Beyond that inscription with its legend, and some few Spanish-looking iron balconies, the Spaniard has left no trace of his dominion in Taormina. The Norman printed himself on churches and convents, but it is the Greeks and Romans, and above all the Saracens, who have stamped themselves indelibly upon Taormina. Moorish workmen must have been employed by their conquerors for centuries to build them palaces and convents, baths and even churches. And the Arab blood still shows strongly in hawk-like, keen-eyed faces passing through Taormina’s streets as haughtily as in the days when their progenitors ruled there with hand of iron upon the dogs of Christians.

In those Moslem days much liberty in the practice of religion was allowed to such of the Christians as did not show the cross in public, read the gospel loud enough to penetrate to Moslem ears, or ring their church bells “furiously.” How often in Sicily one wishes that last regulation were still in force! They might go on worshipping freely in all existing churches and convents, though to build new ones was not allowed. In matters of religion the Arab was strangely liberal, but in civil matters he reduced the conquered people to a sort of serfdom. Christians were not allowed to carry arms, to ride on horseback, or even donkeyback, to build houses as high as the Mussulman’s, to drink wine in public, to accompany their dead to burial with any pomp or mourning. Christian women might not enter the public baths when Moslem women were there, nor remain if they came in. Christians must give way to Moslems on the street; indoors they must rise whenever a man of the conquering race came in or went out. “And that they might never forget their inferiority, they had to have a mark on the doors of their houses and one on their clothes.” They were bid wear turbans of different fashion and colour from Moslems, and particular girdles of leather.

Yet many good gifts these Eastern conquerors brought—introduction of silkworms and the mulberry, of sugar-cane and new kinds of olives and vines; new ways of preserving and salting fish; new processes of agriculture and commerce; their wonderful methods of irrigation; the clear Arabic numeration; advance in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, all sciences; and even “the slaves in Sicily under the Moslem rule were better off than the Italian populations of the mainland under the Lombards and Franks.”

* * * * *

Jane and Peripatetica were taking tea in the San Domenico gardens—a flowery terrace dizzily flung out to sea, and almost as high as their own. There is nothing prettier in Taormina than that garden; tile-paved, mossy stone pergolas of dense shade still breathing of quiet monkish meditations; open, yet sheltered, nooks to bask in the sun, and the loveliness of the outlook on Ætna and his sweeping foothills, and the milky-streaked green sea; mats of fragrant sweetness, purple and ivory, of violets and freesias; royal splash of bougainvilla against the buff stucco of old convent walls; coast steamers, white yachts, and tiny black fishing boats far, far below, the only hint of the world’s bustle; here in the garden was only slumberous quiet and fragrant peace.

“On his terrace high in air
Nothing doth the good monk care
For such worldly themes as these.
From the garden just below
Little puffs of perfume blow,
And a sound is in his ears
Of the murmur of the bees
In the shimmering chestnut trees.
Nothing else he heeds or hears.
All the landscape seems to swoon
In the happy afternoon.”