Chapter II: A Nest of Eagles (3)

Little has been changed since the good monk really dozed there. The charm of his peaceful days still lingers in cloister and garden, and the conventual atmosphere still asserts itself in spite of the frivolous swarm of tourists, who leave innovation trunks in the stone-flagged corridors. But that same tourist sits in the monk’s painted wooden stalls, has a beflowered little shrine and altar perhaps opposite his own bedroom door; walks under saintly frescoes, hangs his hat on the Father’s carved towel-frame outside the Refectory door, and eats his dinner under pictures of martyrdoms. The chapel in the midst of the modern caravanserai is still the parish church, the vaulted stone corridors echo to the solemn boom of its organ many times a day—a wrong turn on the way to the dining-room and the tourist finds himself not in gas-lit, soup-redolent, salle-à-manger, but among the dim, carved stalls, taper-lit altars, and incense-sweet air of the chapel.

It was the one place which ever caused Peripatetica and Jane to think ungratefully of their villa. Whenever they wandered through either of the vine-draped old cloisters; looked up the delightfully twisted stone stairways, and along mysterious Gothic passages, they wished that they too might have had a “belonging” door in one of the arches of that quiet incense-perfumed corridor, such sense of unhurried calm reigned there; the frescoed saints over each cell door looked so peacefully benignant.

“Jane,” queried Peripatetica, “do you notice that these Saints are all women?—a gentle lady saint over every Brother’s door! even where no living woman was allowed to penetrate they still clung to some memory of the Eternal Feminine!”

Tea was seeming unusually good that afternoon after hours passed amid the excitements and wonderful finds and bargains of the beguiling antiquity shops of Taormina’s main street. Now, the pot drained to the last drop, the last crumb of bread and honey eaten, they sat tranquilly watching the shadows lengthen in the garden.

“This is the only really peaceful spot in Taormina,” said Jane. “What a relief to escape from all that old overwhelming Past for once and just be soothingly lulled in this placid monkish calm. I know nothing ever happened here more exciting than the scandal of some fat Brother’s unduly prolonging his siesta in a sheltered nook, and so missing Vespers.”

A boy appeared at her elbow; one of the little shy fauns of Von Gloëden’s photographs. He pulled a cactus leaf out of one pocket, a penknife out of another, and trimming off the cactus prickles tossed the leaf out into space in such deft way that in graceful curves and birdlike swoops it whirled slowly down to the far bottom of the cliff. Jane leaned over the gratefully substantial stone parapet and watched, fascinated, as he proceeded to send yet another and another after it in more elaborate curves each time. The boy’s shyness melted under her admiration of his trick and the coppers it was expressed in; he showed white teeth in much merriment when she too attempted to toss the green discs only to have them drop persistently without any whirling. He began to chatter.

“Yes, it was very high that cliff, and of much interest to pitch things over and watch them fall. In the old days they had pitched men over it—yes indeed, prigionieri; many hundreds of them.”

“Oh Peripatetica! black dramas even here! what can he mean?”

“The insurgent slaves of the Servile War, perhaps. Their whole garrison was hurled alive over some cliff here—native tradition may have it this one.”

Jane remembered. Eight hundred men thus treated by Publius Rupilius, Roman Consul in 132 B.C.

The dark flood of old cruelty surged back to her. Sicily was a country of great landowners holding estates of eighty miles round and more; working them by slave labour; owning slaves in thousands. Twenty thousand slaves was not an exaggerated number for a great noble to own, two hundred a fair allowance for an ordinary citizen. Two-thirds of Sicily’s population were then slaves.

Of course the human live-stock possessed in such indistinguishable hordes, like cattle, had to be branded with the owner’s mark. They did their work in irons, to be safely under their overseer’s power; were lodged in holes under ground; their daily rations but one pound of barley or wheat, and a little salt and oil. Against atrocious cruelties they revolt at last. All over Sicily they rise, two hundred thousand men soon finding arms and power to mete to masters the same cruelties that had been shown them. For six years all the might of Rome cannot crush them, but eventually her iron claw closes in upon them—only impregnable Enna and Taormina still remain in the hands of the slave army. It is a struggle to test all Rome’s mettle. These slaves too are of the eagle’s blood. Men free-born and bred, most of them; Greeks and Franks from the mainland, prisoners of war or of debt. Fiercely, indomitably, they cling to their rocky eyries. But in Taormina starvation fights direfully against them. There was not one grain, one blade of grass even, left. Still the garrison clings and strikes back at the Romans. They devour their own children, next the women, then at last eat one another—but still hold out.

Commanus, the slave commander, weakens and tries to escape from the horrors. He creeps alone from the city, but is captured and brought before the Consul. He knows what methods will be tried to make him give information of the town’s condition—can his weakness hold out against torture? With apparent acquiescence he appears willing to answer all Roman questions, but bends his head and draws his cloak over it as if shielding his eyes to better collect his thoughts.... Under the cloak he grips his throat between his fingers and with the last remnant of once phenomenal physical strength crushes his own windpipe, and falls safely silent at the Consul’s feet.

But the horrors of Taormina in that siege are too much for another slave—a Syrian. He betrays the town to the Romans ... and Publius disposes of all the remaining garrison over the edge of the cliff.

* * * * *

Shopping is an important part of a stay in Taormina. Surely no other street of its length anywhere in the world has so many beguilements to part the tourist from his coin. The dark little shops spilling their goods out upon the pavement; things so bizarre, so good, so cheap, the lire of the forestieri flow away in torrents. Beautiful inlaid furniture; lovely old jewelry of flawed rubies and emeralds set amid the famous antique Sicilian pearl-work and enamelling. Old Spanish paste in delightful designs; red Catanian amber, little Roman intaglios, delicate old cameos, enamelled orders; necklaces, rings, pendants; earrings in odd and charming settings; delightful old trinkets in richer assortment of variety and quality here than any other place in Italy. Old Sicilian thread lace, coarse but effective, in shawls and scarfs of many charming old designs; old altar lace too in great abundance; better laces, as one may have luck to find them, or to be on the spot when gleanings from churches and convents in the interior are brought in—bundles containing varied treasures, from brocades and embroideries and splendid lace of priestly vestments, to drawn-work altar cloths and the lace cottas little choirboys’ restless arms have worn sad holes in. Churchly silver too, reliquaries and ornaments and old medals, abound in Taormina for scarcely more than the value of the silver’s weight. Old coins dug up in its gardens, the old porcelains bought from its impoverished nobles; old drawn-work, on heavy hand-woven linen, still firmly carrying its processions of marvellous beasts and birds and personages in wide lace-like bands. Beasts conceived by the same imagination that evolved the gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, such wonderful mixtures of animal and bird and human as Adam never named in Garden of Eden. These horned birds and winged animals processioning around churchly altar cloths are old, old pagan Siculian luck charms—protectors against the evil eye. Peripatetica and Jane instantly proceeded to combat their Hoodoo with valiant processions of fat little many-horned stags romping around throat and wrist—and of all the many exorcisms they had tried this truly seemed the most effective!

Taormina’s naïve native pottery, too, drapes the outside walls of shops and doorways in bright garlands of strange shapes of fishes and fruits and beasts, is stacked in shining heaps of colour, jugs and pots and platters of every possible form and design. Some of it reminiscent of Sevillian pottery in elaborate Renaissance decoration, but for the most part rough little shapes of clay, covered with hard bright glaze and no two ever exactly alike in either shape or tint. The favourite model being a gay Sicilian Lady Godiva, riding either a stag or a cock, attired proudly in a crown and a floating blue ribbon!

Day after day, all through March, the sun moped behind clouds, the wind lashed the sea against the rocks, and milky foam bands streaked the turbid green. Rain beat on the Villa windows, and even through them, to the great amusement of Maria, who appeared to consider mopping up the streaming floors a merry contest with the elements.

But when the rare sun burst out and revealed a fresh-washed sky, a land shimmering through thinnest gauze of mist, or the moon could escape from the clouds and rise behind the theatre ruins to hang, hugely bright over the gleaming sea floor so far, far below, it seemed a fair world all prepared to greet its radiant returning goddess.

On such days no shop could beguile. Even the old dames weaving towels on hand looms by their open doors, always so ready for friendly chat with these forestieri, would be passed with only a smile, for the breath of the fields called loudly to hillside and orchard, “where all fair herbs bloom, red goat-wort and endive, and fragrant bees-wort”; the only sound breaking the sunny calm being the notes of a shepherd boy on a neighbouring hill, piping as if his reed flute held the very spirit of youth, the bubbling notes sparkling like a little fountain of joy flinging its spray on the spring breeze. Or on a day like this to wander far afield; or else in the high hillside orchards where the birds sang “Sicily! Sicily! Sicily!” or called mockingly “Who are you? Who are you?”

On such a day they adventured to Mola and the heights of Monte Venere’s peak in the company of those brave _asinelli_ Giovanino and Francesco, and in the charge of Domenico, Sheik of guides, whose particular exploitation they had long ago become.

Loafing in the fountain square, watching the women filling jars at the fountain, and speculating as usual over the history of its presiding deity (who as St. Taypotem is the local genius and emblem of the town, a saint utterly unknown to churchly calendar)—a lady centaur, and a two-legged one at that, uprearing her plump person on two neat little hoofed heels raised high above the four archaic beasts spouting water—Peripatetica and Jane fell a prey to a genial Arab, a beguiling smile wrinkling his dark hawk-like face. Wouldn’t they like a donkey ride? The best donkeys in all Sicily were his—Domenico’s—guide No. 5, beloved of all tourists, as they could see by reading his book. A dingy little worn note-book was fluttered under their noses, an eager brown finger pointed to this and that page of English writing, all singing the praises of Domenico and his beasts on many an expedition. More influenced by the smile than the testimonials they promised that he should conduct them to Mola. From that instant Domenico’s wing was spread over them in brooding solicitude. Yes, the weather was too threatening to ride out anywhere that afternoon, but did they know all the sights of the town? he inquired. Had they seen the Bagni Saraceni? No, they admitted. Oh, that was _molto interessante_ and close at hand; he would show them! Hypnotized by the smile they followed meekly, though the Bagni turned out to be the Norman Moorish ruins of the San Stefano Palace with which they were already familiar. But not as it was shown by Domenico. The surly old contadina in charge, bullied into offering the choicest of the oranges and flowers growing among the ruins, the smile gilding all the dark corners of antiquity and lighting up the vaulted cellar in which by graphic pantomime of jumps into its biggest holes they were shown exactly how the Saracens had once bathed, much as more modern folk did, it seemed.

After that days came and went of such greyness and cold wind or rain, that Domenico and his donkeys attended in vain at the pink gateway to take Peripatetica and Jane excursioning. But not for that did they lose the sunniness of the smile. Like a benevolent spider, Domenico was to be always lying in wait to pounce around any corner with friendly greeting, to give them the news of the town in his patois of mixed Italian, English, and pantomime; to suggest carrying home their bundles for them if they were on a shopping tour, to point out an antiquity or garden to inspect if they seemed planless, or a lift home on the painted cart whose driver he had been enlivening with merry quips, when met on the high road outside town. And once, oh blessed time, when he encountered Jane at the Catania gate, her tongue hanging out with thirst and fatigue after a long mountain climb, he haled her straightway into a friend’s garden to refresh herself with juicy oranges from the trees.

Finally the long waited-for day came, when not a cloud threatened and the mountains beckoned through crystalline, sunny air. So Francesco and Giovanino laden with Peripatetica and Jane, Domenico and a brown young hawkling of the Domenican brood laden with lunch, they climbed upwards. Ætna stood out in glistening, freshly renewed snow mantle, icy sharp against the most perfect of blue skies. Taormina dropped far below, a tiny huddled human nest of brown among the green, green hilltops. Mola, which for so long had loomed far over their heads on its beetling crags, now too sank below. The pink mountain villa where Hichens had written “The Call of the Blood,” the vineyards and the orchards, all dropped away. Only Ætna, high and white, soared against the sky, remote and inaccessible. The trail grew steeper and steeper, but Francesco and Giovanino, noble pair, with unbroken wind and gloomy energy picked their way unfalteringly among the rolling stones, and both Domenicos, like two-legged flies, seemed to take to the perpendicular as easily as the horizontal.

Francesco, tall and grey and of a loquacious turn of mind, made all the mountains echo to his voice whenever a fellow _asinello_ was encountered on the trail. Giovanino, small and brown, attended strictly to the business of finding secure places for his tiny hoofs among the stones, but developed two idiosyncrasies rather dismaying to his rider. Whenever the path led along a precipice’s edge, on the very outside edge of it would his four obstinate little feet go, with Jane’s feet dangling horribly over empty space; whenever it skirted a stone wall his furry sides insisted upon rubbing it clingingly, sternly regardless of his rider’s toes. The path ceased being a path. It became a stairway climbing up the mountains’ bare marble side in rough stone steps a foot or more in height.

“But we can’t ride up _that_!” cries the appalled Peripatetica in the lead. In vain Domenico assures her that she can, that people do it every day. She looks at its dizzy turns and insists on taking to her own feet. Jane, having acquired a reverential confidence in Giovanino’s powers after their mutual tussles, puts more faith in his head and knees than in her own, and goes on, clutchingly. Young Domenico, hanging like a balance weight to Giovanino’s tail, keeps up a chorus of “Ah-ees” and assurances that the Signorina need have no fear, he is there to guide her! In reality he knows that his small person could no more interfere with the orbit of Giovanino’s movements than with those of the planets, but also that there is no more need that he should—Giovanino’s grey head holds a perfect chart of the way, with the safest hoof-placings plainly marked out on it, and he follows it imperturbably.

Travellers to Monte Venere do not know much of what they are passing the last forty minutes. They are too busy wondering whether each minute will not be their last—on those daunting stairs of living rock and rolling stones. Breathless, dizzy, speechless, they at last realize a firm level terrace is under foot, and reel against the comforting solid walls of the little _tratoria_. The donkeys are quite unruffled and unheated, less dejected than when they started. The young Domenico, who has pulled himself on shuffling small bare feet thrust in his father’s heavy boots all up that mountain wall, is as unflushed of face, unshortened of breath, as if he had come on wings! Old Domenico, escorting an exhausted Peripatetica, is bubbling faster than ever with vehement chatter. He cannot understand why his charges insist on rest, on holding fast to the solid house. It fills him with surprised distress that they will not go on to the top. “The view over all Sicily awaits them there, and it is such a clear day. Corragio! only one-half hour more!”...

But Peripatetica and Jane plant their feet on that little level platform with more than donkey obstinacy—with reeling heads they look out into the great blue gulfs of air and over the green ripples of mountain tops. This is high enough for them, they pant, feeling like quivering earth-worms clinging to the top of a telegraph pole and invited to go out along the wires. Shivering in the wind which, in spite of sun, is icy keen at this height, they proceed to eat their cold lunch; the tratoria offering only tables and crockery, wine, goat’s milk, and coffee to its patrons. Between two infants of the house begging for tidbits, three skeleton dogs so long unacquainted with food they snatched greedily even at egg shells, a starved cat, and the two Domenicos, who, it seems, also expect to lunch on their leavings, Peripatetica and Jane have themselves no heart to eat. Wishing they had brought another _asinello_ laden only with food, that all the inhabitants of this hungry height might for once be filled, they divide their own meal as evenly as possible among all its aspirants and try to sustain themselves on the view. Peripatetica looked on the far expanse of hills and sea below, sourly asserting her fixed lowlander’s conviction that mountains are only beautiful looked up to, and that a bird’s-eye-view is no view. But when a comforting concoction of hot goat’s milk and something called coffee had been swallowed, and numbed fingers thawed out over the tiny fire of grapevine prunings in the tratoria kitchen, they succumbed to Domenico’s insistence about the view it is their duty to see, and climbed higher.

The crest of Monte Venere is a green knoll rising above rock walls. Around and below it enough mountains to fill a whole world roll confusedly on every side. They felt more than ever like earth-worms too far removed from friendly earth, and stayed only to listen to the pipings of a curly-headed goatherd flinging trills out into space; while Domenico, pained at their indifference to his vaunted coup d’état of “bella vistas,” but benevolent still, clambered about like a goat himself, gathering for them the “mountain violets” as he called the delicate mauve flowers starring the sod.

So soon they were back at the tratoria that Francesco and Giovanino had not half chewed their little handfuls of hay, and young Domenico’s red tongue was still delightedly polishing off the interior of their tin of potted chicken, while the lean dogs watched enviously, waiting for their chance at this queer bone. Another personage was lunching luxuriously, stretched at his ease on the steep hillside, a large sleek white goat, munching solemnly at grass and blossom, wagging his beard and rolling watery pink-rimmed eyes with such evangelical air of pious complacence Peripatetica and Jane instantly recognized him as an incarnation of a New England country deacon, and sat down respectfully to pass the time of day with him.

Going down even Jane takes to her own feet. Slipping, sliding, jumping, the worst is somehow past with bones still unbroken. The mountainside is yet like the wall of a house, but Domenico, with more cries of “corragio,” and proverbs as to those who “Va piano, va sano,” urges them to mount, and Jane, quite confident that four legs have more clinging power than two, is glad to lie back along Giovanino’s tail while he balances himself on his nose, with young Domenico serving as a brake on his tail, and so slides and hitches calmly down hill.

Mola is a climb again, the narrow path twisting up the one accessible ledge to its sharp peak. One wonders why human beings ever first climbed there to build, and even more why they still live in its cramped buildings, and with what toil they can find ways to squeeze daily bread out of the bleak rocks. Yet before the first Greek colonists landed at Naxos, Mola was already a town. It looked down on infant Taormina when the Naxos refugees fled to its heights. It loomed above, still Siculian and intact, on its bare unassailable crags, through all the squabbles and screamings below of the different eagle broods taking possession of Taormina’s nest. The conqueror who tried to take Mola had usually only his trouble for his pains. Even Dionysius, with all Sicily clutched in his cruel hand, failed in his snatch at Mola. His attempt to steal into it by surprise one dark winter’s night ended in an ignominious, breakneck, hurling repulse of tyrant and all his victory-wonted veterans. And Mola still lives to-day. All its huddled houses seem to be inhabited, though only bent old men, palsied crones, black pigs, and babies are to be met with in its steep narrow alleys. Domenico said scornfully that there was nothing to be seen in it, but led the way to the tiny town-square terrace beside the church, and had a brown finger ready to emphasize all points of interest in the spread of country and sea stretching below its parapet. Once Mola had a sister town, he told, on another crag across the valley; but Ætna opened a sudden mouth and lava rivers pouring down to the sea flowed over it and swallowed it completely. Whether this is actual history or Domenican invention remains in doubt. No other historian mentions the lost town. But then, as Domenico said, there is Ætna, and there the lava mound still black and ugly, as proof!

* * * * *

Again it rained, and Ætna sulked behind a cloudy mantle. Vesuvius worked all day long, yet fur coats were a necessary house dress. The poor Demon took the influenza and coughed, and shivered in spite of her hot energies; turned livid yellow and feverish, and had to be sent to a doctor. Scarcely able to hold her head up, but protesting to the end, she gave in to going home to bed and staying there. But first she reappeared, pale but proud, with a fashionably dressed young lady of fourteen, her _figlia_ Adalina, to whom she had shown and told everything, and who could do all the ladies’ service quite as well as herself.

Adalina was very high as to pompadour and equally high as to the French heels on the tight boots which finished off the plump legs emerging from her smart kilted skirt—but height of intelligence was not in her; none of her mother’s quickness and energy seemed to have passed into the head under the high rolling thatch of hair. Feet were Adalina’s strong point, and she knew it. There was probably not another such grand pair of real French boots as hers in all Taormina! So her life consisted in showing them off. She arranged Peripatetica’s and Jane’s belongings, and brushed their clothes, as Mother had shown her, but with pirouettings and side steps—one, two, three, all the best dancing positions—between every touch of brush or laying out of garment. It absorbed so much time to keep her feet arranged in the most perfect placings to exhibit pointed toes that very little else could be expected of her in the course of the day. She opened her mouth wide at Peripatetica’s and Jane’s broken babblings, but no sense from them ever penetrated her intelligence. Maria had to be called to interpret everything, and usually to do it too. A charm seemed to have departed from the villa with no Demon to keep them comfortable and uncomfortable at once.

“Why should we wait and shiver here any longer?” asked Peripatetica. “Persephone is surely coming first on the other side of Ætna.”

“Why should we? Let us start on,” said Jane.

Domenica returned to them, a pale yellow Demon, but bustling as ever, too late to affect their decision. Trunks were packed, towering packing-cases stuffed with their Taormina acquisitions. Fraulein’s last wonderful pudding eaten, Ætna seen looming vapory white above the terrace for the last time, Old Nina had carried down through the garden from the well, in a Greek jar on her grey head, the water for their last tub, Maria had peeped her last “Questo,” Frau Schuler and her polite son, the Fraulein, Maria, and Carola, had all presented fragrant nosegays, Adalina, too, with pompadour more aggressive than ever, appeared to offer them violets and hint a receptivity to a parting douceur herself. Every one was bidding them regretful farewells. Touched, and themselves regretful to leave so much kindness and charm, with melting heart the last goodby of all was said to Domenica, and her wages for the last two weeks pressed into her palm.

“You have served us so well, we have made no deduction for the days you were first ill, and we had no one; nor for the days when we had your little girl instead,” said Jane.

Oh! had Ætna burst into eruption? The whole smiling morning landscape was darkened by the wild black figure pouring down shrill volleys of wrathful Italian on their devoted heads. This Fury threatening with flashing eyes and wild gesture was their gentle Domenica—now a demon indeed!

They shrank aghast unable to catch a word in the rapid torrent.

“What _is_ the matter?” they cried to Frau Schuler.

With Teuton phlegm she dropped a word into the flood.

“You have not paid her for the hour she has been here this morning.”

“No, because we have paid her just the same for the days on which we had no one and the ten days on which we had only that stupid child—and have given the precious Adalina a _mancia_ too. But good gracious, we will pay her more if she feels that way!”

“Indeed, you must not!” said the Frau briskly. “It is an abominable imposition. She has been much overpaid now, that is the trouble, she thinks you easy game. Listen, my woman, and shame yourself,” she turned to Domenica, “you disgrace your town to these good Signorine, who have acted so generously to you!”

The raging demon looked into her calm face and at the two astounded American ones, and the storm quieted as quickly as it had come ... in an instant’s metamorphosis she was again the amiable little person of all the weeks of service, saying:

“Many, many thanks to the ladies, and a pleasant journey, and might they come back again soon to Taormina!”

She snatched Peripatetica’s coat away from Maria, and Jane’s kodak from out her hand, and bore them off to the carriage with all her usual assiduous energy.

One last pat to the puppy, graduated this very morning to real collar and chain attaching him to new huge kennel, the warring friendliness of his heart and the conscientious effort to live up to his responsibilities struggling more pathetically than ever in his grey eyes, and they passed up the pergola for the last time, and out of the pink gate to continue their quest.

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