Read Ebook: Seekers in Sicily: Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica by Bisland Elizabeth Hoyt Anne

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Ebook has 797 lines and 83153 words, and 16 pages

PAGE

"A Place Where the Past Reveals Itself" 68

"Pan's Goatherd" 132

"AEtna, The Salient Fact of Sicily" 186

"The Saffron Mass of Concordia" 198

"Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of 218 Flowers"

"Sicily's Picture-book, The Painted 234 Cart"

"The Last Resting Place of Queen 248 Constance"

SEEKERS IN SICILY

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 Kor? is in Hell."

This is a discouraged voice from the window.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

"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.

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.

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.

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