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

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

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

"Grave Syrian trader ... Who snatched his rudder and shook out his sail ... Between the Syrtes and soft Sicily."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The merry Grecian coaster came Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine--"

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

"Hung his sea-drenched garments on the wall,"

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

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

A NEST OF EAGLES

"So underneath the surface of To-day Lies yesterday and what we call the Past, The only thing which never can decay."

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

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

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

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

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

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