Chapter VI The Golden Shell
“Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen blüh’n?”
When Ulysses Grant had ended the Civil War in America and was made President, he turned from uttering his solemn oath of office before the cheering multitudes and said under his breath to his wife who stood beside him, in that tone of half-resentful, half-weary patience the American husband usually adopts in speaking to his mate, “Well, now, Julia, I hope you’re satisfied!”
There was the same exasperated patience in Jane’s voice as she climbed into the railway carriage for Palermo and, throwing herself back upon the cushions, exclaimed:
“Well, now, Peripatetica, I hope you’ve had enough of the Greeks! For my part I go on to the next course; something a little more modern. Tombs and goddesses and columns and myths cloy as a steady diet for months, and even the ridiculous pompous old Eighteenth Century would seem rather home-like and comfy as a change. I could find it in my heart to relish a bit of the odious decadence of l’art nouveau simply by way of contrast.”
Peripatetica treated this shameful outburst with all the stern contempt it so truly merited, as she was engaged in making the acquaintance of a descendant of that great race of Northmen who had made history all over Sicily and the rest of Europe. He too was a conqueror, though his weapon was a paint-brush and a modelling tool instead of a sword, and kings received him with all the honours due an acknowledged ruler of a realm. He dwelt by a great lake far to the north in that “nursery of kings” in a home built five hundred years ago of huge fir-trees; logs so sound and clean-fibred that the centuries had left the wood still as firm as stone. Making his play of resurrection of the old wild melodies of the North, of the old costumes and industries of the people from whose loins had sprung half the rulers of the continent. The Sea Rover’s blood was strong in him too, driving him to wander in a boat no bigger than those of his Viking ancestors along the stormy fjords and fierce coasts to the still more distant north.
For the adornment of the log-built home Sicily had yielded to his wise searching various relics of antiquity, Greek, Norman, Saracen, and Spanish, and in the ensuing days in which Jane and Peripatetica were permitted to tread the same path with the Northman and his beautiful wife, these treasures came out of pockets to be fitted with dates and history, and even, in the delightful instance of one small ghostly grotesque, to change owners.
While the two seekers of Persephone were gathering and savouring this refreshing tang of the cold salt of the northern seas, this large vista of the gay, poised strength of a mighty race—their train was looping and coiling through summer hills to the seat of summer—cherry and apple, peach and pear trees tossed wreaths of rose and white from amid the grey of olives and the green of citron, for this was the land of Mignon’s homesick dream—“das Land, wo die Citronen blüh’n.”
Miles and miles and miles of orange and lemon groves ran beside their path; climbing the hills and creeping down to the edge of the tideless sea. Trees that were nurtured like babies; each orchard gathered about old grey or rose-washed tanks holding the precious water which is the life-blood of all this golden culture during the rainless summer. Tanks moist and dripping and fringed with ferns, mirroring the overhanging yellow fruit, or the pink geraniums that peeped over the shoulders of the broad-bladed cacti to blush happily at their own reflections in the water.
An exquisite form of orcharding, this, as delicate and perfect as a hot-house, with every inch of the soil utilized for the vegetables set about the trees’ roots, and the trees themselves growing in unbelievable numbers to the acre. For not one superfluous leaf or branch was there—just the requisite number to carry and nourish the greatest possible quantity of fruit. In consequence of which the whole land was as if touched by some vegetable Midas and turned all to gold. Millions and millions of the yellow globes hung still unpicked, though already the trees were swelling the buds which within ten days were to break forth into a far-flung bridal wreath, and intoxicate all the land with honeyed perfumes.
And, mark you, how nations are influenced by their trees! In the bad old days of constant war and turmoil the isolated family was never secure, and the people clung to the towns, but modern careful culture of the orange has forced orchardists to live close by their charges, and the population is being slowly pushed back into rural life, with the result of better health, better morals, and a great decrease of homicides. One has really no convenient time for sticking knives into one’s friends when one is showing lemon-trees how to earn $400 an acre and orange-trees half as much....
“It is the most beautiful town in the whole world,” said Peripatetica in that tiresomely dogmatic way she has of expressing the most obvious fact.
They had wandered out of their hotel, and through a pair of stately iron gates crowned with armorial beasts. Beyond the gates lay a garden. But a garden! Acres of garden, laced by sweeping avenues, shadowed by cypress and stone pines, by ilex and laurel. From the avenues dipped paths which wound through boscoes, looped under bridges veiled with curtains of wisteria and yellow banksias, climbed again to pass through pleached walks; paths that tied themselves about shadowy pools where swans floated in the gloom of palm groves, or debouched across emerald lawns where clumps of forget-me-nots and cinerarias made splashes of bold colour in the grass.
“They do these things so well in Europe,” remarked Peripatetica approvingly, as a splendid functionary, in a long blue coat and carrying a silver-headed staff, lifted his cockaded hat to them as they entered the gates. “Now where at home would one find one of our park guardians with such a manner, and looking so like a nobleman’s servant? This,” she went on, in an instructive tone, being newly arisen from a guide-book, “is the Giardino Inglese; one of the public parks, and it has exactly the air of loved and carefully tended private possession.”
They lounged over the parapets of the carved bridges, with their elbows set among roses, to look down into the little ravines where small runnels flowed among the soft pink-purple clouds of Judas-trees. They were tempted into allées bordered their whole length with the white fountains of blossoming spireas, or hedged on both sides by pink hermosas. They strolled past clumps of feathery bamboos to gaze along the shadowy vistas of four broad avenues meeting at a bright circle where a sculptured fountain tossed its waters in the sun. They lingered in paths where tea-roses were garlanded from tree to tree, or by walls curtained by Maréchale Niels. They inspected the nurseries and admired the greenhouse. They came with delight upon a double ring of giant cypresses lifting dark spires into the dazzling blue of the sky, and sat to rest happily upon a great curved marble seat whose back had lettered upon it a reminder to the “Shadowed Soul” that wisdom comes only in shade and peace.
“E La Sagezza Vieni Solo
Nel’ Ombra E Pace.”
And finally they mounted the little tiled and columned belvedere hanging at the corner of the garden’s lofty wall to gaze upon a view unrivalled of this most beautifully placed city.
Palermo lay stretched before them in its plain of the Conca d’Oro—the golden shell. Round it as a garland rose a semicircle of vapoury mountains like rosy-purple clouds, bending on beyond the plain on either side to clasp a bay of dazzling violet whose waters glowed at the city’s feet; the city itself warmly cream-tinted and roofed with dull red tiles. A city towered, columned, arched; with here the ruddy bubbles of San Giovanni degli Eremiti’s domes, there the tall spires and fretted crest of the Cathedral; and flowing through it all, or resting here and there in pools, the green of orange groves, the flushing mist of Judas-trees, the long stream of verdant parks and gardens.
“Not only is this the loveliest city in the whole world,” said Jane, “but this is also the sweetest of all gardens, and a curious thing is that we seem to have it quite to ourselves. You’d suppose all Palermo would want to come here for at least half of every day, but not a soul have we met except those two dear, queer old gardeners sitting on the tank’s edge playing a game with orange seeds.”
“Well, if the Palermians haven’t intelligence enough to use such a garden, we have,” announced Peripatetica. “And we will come here every day.”
Which they did for a while; bringing their fountain pens to write letters in the bosco, or resting after sight-seeing in the cool shade of the cypress ring. And it might have served them to the end as their intimate joy had it not been for Peripatetica’s insane passion for gardening.
All about the edge of the long tapis vert which lay before the handsome building at the end of the garden—a building which they supposed housed some lucky park official—stood at intervals fine standard roses. Now one unlucky day Peripatetica descried aphides upon the delicate shoots and young buds of these standards. That was sufficient. An aphis, to her rose-growing mind, is a noxious wild beast, and promptly stripping off her gloves she ravened among them.
“Perhaps you’d better leave them alone,” warned Jane in a whisper. “The gardeners look so surprised.”
“By no means!” objected Peripatetica in lofty obstinacy, with a backward glance of contempt at the visibly astonished attendants. “The city no doubt pays them well to grow roses, and I mean to shame them for this indecent neglect of their duties. Besides, I am enjoying it immensely; I’ve been hungering and thirsting for a little gardening.”
That very day it was conveyed to their intelligence—or their lack of it—that they had not been enjoying the Giardino Inglese, a dull park which lay almost opposite, but had been calmly annexing the private grounds of Prince Travia. He, however, being a model of princely courtesy, was glad to have the foreign ladies amuse themselves there as much as they liked. Only once more did they see it; on the day of departure, when they blushingly left a tip in the hands of the handsome old silver-staffed portiere, who had truly looked like a nobleman’s servant, and behaved like one as he saluted them with unprotesting dignity each time they had passed in and out of that beauteous spot in which they had no right to be.
There were many other gardens in Palermo, but none so fair. The green world was so enchanting in this glowing spring that a day of villegiatura was necessary between every two days of sight-seeing, and having been banished from the Travia garden by their own innate sense of decency, they took lunch in their pockets and set out for the famous Villa Giulia which had aroused such enthusiasm in Goethe.
The Villa Giulia, as they might have foreseen, was just the sort of thing Goethe would have liked—and they had been violently disagreeing with Goethe all over Sicily. An untouched example of the most tiresome form of Eighteenth Century gardening—a cross between a wedding cake and a German Noah’s Ark. All rigid, glaring, gravelly little allées, with trees as denuded of natural luxuriance as a picked chicken; sugar-icing grottoes; baroque fountains; gaudy music kiosks; cages of frowzy birds and mangy monkeys; and posé busts in self-conscious bowers. Not here could these Eden-exiled Eves lunch, nor yet in the untidy, uninteresting Botanic Gardens next door—a wilderness of potted specimens and obtrusive labels—but wandering melancholily around a vast egregious gas tank, they came upon a long, neglected avenue of great trees; all that was left of some once lovely villa swept out of existence by the gas works. And here upon a stone bench in the glimmering shade they fed at the feet of a feeble little knock-kneed marble King. One of the Spanish monarchs of Sicily it was, thus commemorated in marble Roman armour and a curled marble wig, and his rickety, anæmic majesty moved them to smiling pity, so feeble and miserable he looked, forgotten and overshadowed by modern gas tanks, his boneless legs ready to give under him, and his peevish face smeared with creeping lichens. The green tunnel of the trees framed a blazing sapphire at the other end—a glimpse of the bay—and ragged pink roses, and neglected purple iris bloomed together along the path. Ere another year the blight of the gas works will have swept away the airy avenue, the wilding flowers, the poor spineless little King, and the two bid it all a wistfully smiling farewell, knowing they should never again eat an April day’s bread and cheese under those sweet auspices.
... Will travellers from the roaring cities of Central Africa come a couple of centuries hence and mark with regret the last bit of some now flourishing boscage being eaten away by Twenty-Second Century progress, and smile indulgently at one of our foolishly feeble statues, in granite frock coats, tottering to lichened oblivion? No doubt. Palermo has seen so many changes since the Phœnicians used to trade and build along this coast. For this was the Carthagenian “sphere of influence” from the first, and the Greeks were here but little, and have left no traces in Palermo, though in the long wars between Carthagenian and Greek it was captured by the latter from time to time, and held for a space. The Greeks called it Panormous—meaning all harbour, for in their day deep water curved well up into the town, where are now streets and palaces and hotels. Of course Rome held it for a while, as she held pretty nearly everything. Held it for close upon a thousand years—with the Goths for its masters at one interval—but there are few traces of Rome either, and then the Arabs took it and set their seal so deep, in less than two centuries, that after the lapse of nearly another thousand years their occupation is still visible at every turn. For under the Saracens it was a capital, and after their destruction of Syracuse, which ended Greek domination in the Island, it gained a pre-eminence among Sicilian cities never afterwards lost.
That garrulous old traveller from Bagdad, Ibn Haukal, writing in 943, says that Palermo then had a most formidable nine-gated wall, a population of close upon half a million, and many mosques. He also says that near where the Cathedral now stands was a great swamp full of papyrus plants, serving not only for paper but for the manufacture of rope.
Already Sicily was beginning to suffer from the scarcity of water, and the merchant from Bagdad, accustomed to the abundant pools and conduits of his own city, makes severe comments upon the lack of these in Palermo. It could only have been by contrast, however, that the Palermians could have seemed to Haukal dirty, because Jane and Peripatetica, going to see a part of the old Moorish quarter, in process of demolition, found multitudinous water-pipes in the houses, entering almost every chamber. Haukal says that the Greek philosopher Aristotle was buried in one of the mosques of Palermo, and he opines that the most serious defect of the citizens was their universal consumption of onions. Peripatetica—to whom that repulsive vegetable is a hissing and an astonishment—read aloud in clamant sympathy this outburst of Haukal’s:
“There is not a person among them, high or low, who does not eat them in his house daily, both in the morning and at evening. This is what has ruined their intelligence and affected their brains and degraded their senses and distracted their faculties and crushed their spirits and spoiled their complexions, and so altogether changed their temperaments that everything, or almost everything, appears to them quite different from what it is.”
“That gentleman from Bagdad is a man after my own heart,” she declared triumphantly. “I have always been sure that people who eat onions must be those to whom ‘almost everything appears quite different from what it is,’ for if they had the slightest idea of ‘what it is’ for other people to be near them after they have indulged that meretricious appetite they would certainly never do it!”
This Arab impress, though visible everywhere, is more a general atmosphere than definite remains; for with but few exceptions their creations are so overlaid and modified by subsequent Occidental work that it glows through this overlay rather than defines itself. It was while searching for Moorish fragments that Jane and Peripatetica came upon La Ziza. The guide-books unanimously asserted that Al Aziz—La Ziza—was the work of the Norman King, William I., but the guide-books, they had long since discerned, were as prone to jump to unwarranted conclusions, and, having jumped, to be as aggravatingly cocksure in sticking to their mistakes as was Peripatetica herself. So they took leave to doubt this assertion, and concluded that William probably seized the lovely country-house of some Moorish magnate, adding to it sufficiently to make of it a “lordly pleasure dome” for himself in the wide orange gardens, but the core of the place was wholly Moorish in character; well worth the annexing, well worth its name Al Aziz—The Beloved.
They came through the hot, white sunshine up wide, low steps, through a huge grille in an enormous archway, to find a windowless room where the glaring day paled to glaucous shadow against the green tiles of a lofty chamber, as cool and glistening as a sea cave. And the sound of rippling water echoed from the lucent sides and honeycomb vaultings, for a shining fountain gushed from the wall into a tiled channel of irregular levels, artfully planned to chafe the sliding water into music before it slept for awhile in a pool, and then slipped again through another channel to another pool, and so passed from the chamber—having glinted over its shining path of gold and green and blue, and having filled the place with cool moisture and clear song.
“With fierce noons beaming,
Moons of glory gleaming,
Full conduits streaming
Where fair bathers lie—”
Quoted Peripatetica—who might be safely counted on to have a tag of verse concealed about her person for every possible occasion.
“Did you ever see anything that so adequately embodied the Arab conception of pleasure? Coolness, moisture, the singing of water, noble proportions, and clean colour wrought into grave and continent devices? Was there ever anything,” she went on, “so curious as the contradictions of racial instincts? Who could suppose that this would be the home-ideal of those wild desert dwellers who always loved and fought like demons; who were the most voluptuous, the most cruel, the most poetic and the ’so fightingest’ race the world has probably ever seen!”
“Oh, contradictions!” laughed Jane. “Here’s a flat contradiction, if you like. Please contemplate the delicious, the exquisite absurdities of these frescoes.”
For, needless to say, the Eighteenth Century had not allowed to escape so exquisite an opportunity to make an ass of itself, and had spread over the clean, composed patterns of the tiled walls a layer of lime-wash on which it had proceeded to paint in coarse, bright colours indecently unclad goddesses, all flushed blowzy and beribboned; all lolloping amourously about on clouds or in chariots, or falling into the arms of be-wigged deities of war or of love. Fortunately the greater part of these gross conceptions had been diligently scrubbed away, but enough remained to make Peripatetica splutter indignantly:
“Well, of all the hideous barbarians! The Eighteenth Century was really the darkest of dark ages.”
“My dear,” Jane explained contemptuously, “the Eighteenth Century wasn’t a period of time. It was merely a deplorable state of mind. And the mind seems to have been slightly tipsy, it was so fantastic and ridiculous, and yet so gravely self-satisfied.”
La Cuba, another Saracenic relic, was so obliterated into the mere military barrack to which it had been transformed that there was nothing for it but to pass on to the Normans, and to great Roger de Hauteville, a fit companion of the Paladins, so heavy a “Hammer of the Moors” was he—so knightly, so romantic, so beautiful.
Not until twelve years after that bold attempt at Messina to conquer a kingdom with only sixty companions was Roger able to enter Palermo, and he and his nephews chose for themselves “delectable gardens abounding with fruit and water, and the knights were royally lodged in an earthly paradise.”
No hideous massacre or sack followed the taking of Palermo, for though Roger had conquered the island for himself he was a true mirror of chivalry, and was never cruel. He was chivalrous not only to the defeated, but to those other helpless creatures, women, who in his day were mere pawns in the great military and political games played by the men; married whether they would or no, and unmarried without heed of any protest from them; thrust into convents against their wishes, and haled out of convents if they were needed. And swept ruthlessly from the board when they had served their purpose, or when they got in the way of those fierce pieces passaging back and forth across the chequered squares of the field of life. Roger loved the Norman maid Eremberga from his early boyhood, it appears, and as soon as his hazardous fortunes would permit she was had out from Normandy, and the history of the great soldier is full of his devotion, and of her fidelity and courage. As at the siege of Troina, when the two were reduced by hunger and cold to the greatest extremities, sharing one cloak between them, so that finally Roger, rendered desperate by his wife’s sufferings, burst through the ring of Saracens, leaving her to defend the fortress with unshaken valour until he returned with a force adequate to save her, and raise the siege.
There is an amusing story of Roger and his eldest brother, that ruthless old fox, Robert Guiscard. They were fighting one another at the time, and Roger’s soldiers captured Robert, who was disguised and spying. He with difficulty rescued Robert from the angry captors, took him to a private room, kissed him, helped him to escape, and promptly next day fell upon his forces with such fury that Robert was glad to make peace and fulfil the broken promises which had caused the dispute....
It was not Roger, the great Count—he had little time in his busy life for building—but his son Roger the King, who raised the great pile at Monreale which Jane and Peripatetica were on their way to see. Not by way of the winding rocky road which for centuries the pious pilgrims had climbed, but whisked up the heights by an electric tram which pretended it was a moving-picture machine, displaying from its windows an ever widening panorama of burning blue sea, of pink and purple mountains, of valleys down which flowed rivers of orange groves, of a domed and spired city in the plain, and a foreground freaked with an astonishing carpet of flowers.
“If you were to see that in a picture you wouldn’t believe it,” quoted Jane from the famous Book of Bromides, writhing her neck like an uneasy serpent in an endeavour to see it all at once.
“No, of course, you wouldn’t,” said Peripatetica resentfully. “And when we try to tell it to people at home they’ll simply say our style is ‘plushy.’ There’s nothing so resented as an attempt to carry back in words to a pale-coloured country the incredible splendours of the south. The critics always call it ‘orchid and cockatoo writing,’ and sulkily declare, whenever they do have a fairly nice colourful day, that they are sure the tropics have nothing finer, whereas, if they only knew, it is but an echo of an echo of the real thing, and—” but words failed even Peripatetica.
On the breezy height, dominating all the deep-toned landscape, stood the Abbey church of Monreale—truly a royal mount, crowned by one of the finest shrines in Europe. The famous bronze doors of the main entrance had been oxidised by time and weather with a patine of greens and blues that lent subtle values to the bold delicate modelling of the metal, framed in a toothed doorway of warm, cream-tinted stone, whose magic harmony of colour was a fitting preliminary to the lofty glories of the interior. An unbelievable interior! faced throughout its three hundred and thirty-three feet of length with millions upon millions of tiny stones, gold and red and blue—stones of every colour. For all the interior they found, up to the very roof, was of this dim, glowing, gold-mosaic set with pictures of the Christian faith—the creation of Adam and Eve, the temptation by the Serpent, the casting out from Eden, the wrestling of Jacob, the whole Bible history, culminating above the altar in a gigantic Christ. More than 700,000 square feet of pictures made of bits of stone; and around and about pulpit, ambo, and altar, across steps and pavement, and enclosing every window and door, lovely mosaic patterns and devices, no two alike....
Brown-faced old peasants pushed aside the leathern curtain at the entrance and knelt, crossing themselves, in the shadow of enormous pillars, as their forebears had knelt and crossed themselves there for a thousand years. A mass droned from a side altar. Groups of young priests-in-the-making sauntered gossipping in whispers, or coming and going on ecclesiastic errands. Knots of tourists stared and wandered about the great spaces, and from behind the high altar rose boys’ voices at choir practice, echoing thin and pure from the painted roof.
Of all the Norman print upon Sicily nothing gave like this great church a sense of the potency of Tancred de Hauteville and his mighty brood. For no defacing hand has been laid upon this monument to their piety and power. It stands as they wrought, tremendous, glorious; commemorating the winning of the kingship of the Land of the Gods. A story as strange as any of the myths of the mythic world. And perhaps thousands of years hence the historians will relegate the Norman story, too, to the catalogue of the incredible—to the list of the sun-myths; and Tancred will be thought of as a principle of life and fecundity—his twelve strong sons be held to be merely signs of months and seasons.
Of the great Benedictine Abbey founded by William in connection with the Cathedral almost nothing remains unaltered except the delicious cloistered court with its fountain, and its two hundred and sixteen delicate, paired columns, no two alike, and with endless variations of freakish capitals.
All this freshness and richness of invention resulted from the mingling of the Saracen with the Norman, all this early work being wrought by Moslem hands under Norman direction, since King Roger and King William were no bigots, and, giving respect and security to their Saracen subjects, could command in return their skilled service and fine taste. So that this bold, springing, early Norman architecture, Gothic in outward form, is adorned by the chaste, delicate minuteness of the grave Arab ornament.
... It is Palm Sunday, and Jane and Peripatetica are at a reception—otherwise a Sicilian high mass. They have come, still on the trail of their beloved Normans, who have almost ousted the Greeks in their affections, to the Cappella Palatina in the Royal Palace. The chapel is less than a third as large as Monreale but is even more golden, more dimly splendid, more richly beautiful than the Abbey Church. It is crowded to the doors. Everywhere candles wink and drip in the blue clouds of incense. The voices of boys soar in a poignant treble, and the organ tones of men answer antiphonally. The priests mutter and drone, and occasionally take snuff. Mass goes on at a dozen side altars, oblivious of the more stately ceremonies conducted in the chancel. The congregation comes and goes. A family with all the children, including baby and nounou, enter and pray and later go out. Aristocrats and their servants kneel side by side. The crowd thickens and melts again, and companions separate to choose different altars and different masses, according to taste. All are familiar, friendly, at ease. The divine powers are holding a reception, and worshippers, having paid their respects, feel free to leave when they like. Long palm branches are carried to the altar from time to time by arriving visitors, each branch more splendid than the last. Palms braided and knotted, fluttering with ribbons, tied with rosettes of scarlet and blue, wrought with elaborate intricacies—hundreds of branches, which are solemnly sanctified, asperged, censed, with many genuflections. Priests in gold, in white, in scarlet, accompanied by candles, swinging censors and chanting, take up the palms and make a circuit of all the altars among the kneeling worshippers, and finally distribute the branches to their owners who bear their treasures away proudly.
With them go Jane and Peripatetica, joining a group, who, having paid their respects to heaven, are now ambitious to inspect the state chambers in the palace of their earthly sovereign. These prove to be the usual dull, uninviting apartments—flaring with gilt, and with the satins of criard colours which modern royalty always affect. There are the usual waxed floors, the usual uncomfortable fauteuils ranged stiffly against walls hung with inferior pictures, that are so tediously characteristic of palaces, and it is with relief and delight that Jane and Peripatetica find sandwiched amid these vulgar rooms two small chambers that by some miracle have escaped the ravages of the upholsterer. Two chambers, left intact from Norman days, that are like jewel caskets. Walls panelled with long smooth slabs of marble, grown straw-coloured with age, the delicate graining of the stone being matched like the graining of fine wood; panels set about with rich mosaics of fantastic birds and imaginary beasts framed in graceful arabesques. These are the Stanza Ruggiero; the rooms occupied by King Roger, the furnishings, such scant bits as there are, being also of his time.
“In Roger’s day,” commented Jane, “kings were not content with housings and plenishings of the ‘Early Pullman, or Late Hamburg-American School’; they knew how to be kingly in their surroundings.”
“It’s a curious fact,” agreed Peripatetica, “that there isn’t a modern palace in Europe that a self-respecting American millionaire wouldn’t blush to live in. No one ever hears of great artists being called upon to design or beautify a modern royal residence. Bad taste in furnishing seems universal among latter-day kings, who appear to form their ideas of domestic decoration from second-rate German hotels. Fancy any one seeing the high purity and beauty of Roger’s chambers and then ordering such ruthless splashings of gilt and cotton satin! Why, even ‘the best families’ of Podunk or Kalamazoo would gibe at the contrast, and as for the Wheat and Pork Kings of Denver or Chicago—they would have the whole place made époque in a week, if they had to corner the lard market, or form a breakfast-food trust to be able to afford it!”
“God made the day to be followed by the night. The moon and stars are at His command. Has He not created all things? Is He not Lord of all? Blessed be the Everlasting God!”
Jane was reading aloud from her guide-book.
They had been to Cefalu, looking for Count Roger in the great Cathedral built by his son, but found that he had vanished long ago, and his sarcophagus was in Naples. They had found instead traces of Sikel, Greek, and Roman; had lingered long before the splendid church, so noble even in decay, and now they were back again in Palermo, still on the track of their Normans. What Jane read from her book was also inscribed over the portal of Palermo’s Cathedral before which they stood, but being carved in Cufic script, and Jane’s Cufic being—to put it politely—not fluent enough to be idiomatic, she preferred to use the guide-book’s translation rather than deal with the original.
They had been skirting about the Duomo for days, for it dominated all Palermo with its bigness. Seated in a wide Piazza that was dotted about with mussy-looking marble saints and bishops, and a great statue of Santa Rosalia, the city’s patron, the Cathedral was flanked by the huge Archepiscopal Palace, by enormous convents and public buildings, so that one couldn’t hope to ignore or escape it. Yet they had deferred the Duomo from day to day because they knew their pet abomination, the Eighteenth Century, had been there before them, and that they would find it but an extremely mitigated joy in consequence.
They knew that the swamp full of pxapyrus plants of Haukal’s time had given way to the “Friday Mosque” which the two Rogers and William the Bad had left undisturbed, but which had been pulled down by William the Good—being somewhat ruinous, and also seeing that William was “the Good” in the eyes of his ecclesiastic historians because he reversed the old Norman liberality to his Moslem subjects. Then Walter of the Mill, an Englishman, built the Cathedral, making it glorious within and without, and time and additions only made it more lovely until the modern tinkering began. A foolish, unsuitable dome was thrust among its delicate towers, and the whole interior ravaged and vulgarised.
Still, if one were hunting Normans, the Cathedral must be seen, and most of all they wished to find the last resting-place of Constance, around whose memory hung a drama and a mystery, and drama and mystery were as the very breath of their nostrils to Jane and Peripatetica.
The interior was impressive for size despite all the scrolled and writhed and gilded mud pies with which Ferdinand Fuga, the Neapolitan, had plastered it by way of decoration, and here and there still lingered things worth seeing. Such as the delicious bas reliefs of Gagini, Sicily’s greatest native sculptor; his statues of the Apostles and the fine old choir stalls, only making clearer by their ancient beauty how much that was beautiful had been swept away. Also there was the splendid silver sarcophagus of Santa Rosalia, weighing more than a thousand pounds, and other such matters, but the real attraction of the Cathedral was the great porphyry tombs of the Kings—huge coffers of ensanguined stone, as massive and tremendous as the mummy cases of the Pharaohs. Here lay Roger the King in the sternest and plainest of them, under a fretted Gothic canopy. In one more ornate, his daughter Constance, and near at hand her husband Henry VI. of Germany, and their son, the Emperor Frederick the Second.
Jane and Peripatetica longed that Constance, like Hamlet’s Father might
“ope those ponderous and marble jaws”
and come forth to tell them the real story of her strange life. For she too had been one of those hapless feminine pawns used so recklessly in the game of kingdoms played by the men about her; yet a whisper still lingered that this pawn had not been always passive, but had reached out her white hand and lifted the king from the board, and thus altered the whole course of the game!
Constance, King Roger’s daughter, had early made her choice for peace and safety by retiring into the veiled seclusion of the convent. But even the coif of the religieuse was no sure guard if the woman who wore it was an heiress, or of royal blood, and, the German alliance being needed after her father’s death, she was plucked forth by her brother, and in spite of her vows wedded to Henry of Hohenstaufen, son of Frederick Barbarossa, a man of such nature she must have hated him from the first. She bore him one son, and when her brother and her nephew—William the Bad and William the Good—were both dead without heirs, Henry Hohenstaufen immediately laid claim to the Sicilian crown in the name of his son. The Sicilians, however, had no mind to be ruled by the Germans, and chose instead Tancred, son of the House of de Hauteville, though with a bar sinister upon his shield. Tancred—a good and able sovereign—fought off Henry for five years, but then he too was dead, and only his widow and infant son stood between Henry, now Emperor of Germany, and the much-lusted-after throne of Sicily. Against the wish of Constance, who would have gladly abjured her rights, the German invaded the island and after incredible cruelties and ravagings reduced the widow and baby King to such straits that they negotiated an honourable surrender. But no sooner were they in Henry’s hands than the child was murdered, and there ensued a reign of abominable oppressions and furious revolts, stamped out each time with blood and fire, and followed by still bitterer injustice and plunderings. When matters had reached a stage of desperation Henry died suddenly while besieging a rebellious town.
Now in the Middle Ages no charge was so frequently and lightly made as that of poisoning. Nearly all sudden deaths not wrought by cold steel were attributed to some secret malfeasance by drugs. The fear of it fairly obsessed the mediæval mind, and gave rise to legends of poisoned gloves and rings, deadly smelling-balls and pounce boxes, and fatal chalices. A whole series of myths grew around it. Modern bacteriological discoveries, and a knowledge of ptomaines, incline the modern mind to believe that many a poor wretch brutally done to death for the crime of poisoning really died an innocent martyr to medical ignorance. Yet Henry’s taking off was so welcome and so opportune, and that Constance had struggled to protect her fellow countrymen and kinspeople from his cruelties was so well known, it began to be breathed about that she was a second Judith who had reached out in agony to protect her people, even though the blow fell upon the father of her child. At all events, whatever the truth may have been, she, when she buried Henry with imperial pomp, cut off her magnificent hair and laid it in his tomb. Then, sending away the Germans, she ruled “in peace with great honour” until the son she had trained to mercy and virtue was ready to take her place.
Now they all lie here together under their pompous canopies, and whatever may be the real dramas of those fierce and turbulent lives, the great porphyry sarcophagi combine to turn a face of cynical and haughty silence to the importunate questioning of peeping tourists.
In 1781 the tombs were opened by the Spanish King Ferdinand I., who found Constance’s son Frederick robed and crowned, with sword and orb beside his pillow, and almost lifelike in preservation. Henry too was almost unchanged by the six hundred years that had passed in such change and turmoil beyond the walls of his silent tomb, and he lay wrapped from head to heel in yellow silk with the heavy blond tresses of his wife laid upon his breast, still golden despite the lapse of long centuries, but “nulle ne peut dire si c’est le dernier sacrifice d’une femme dévouée, ou l’homage ironique d’une reine contrainte à choisir entre deux devoirs; placée entre son époux et son peuple, entre sa famille et sa patrie.”
Gaspero was a gift—a priceless parting gift from the Northman, who had gone farther south to the Punic shores from whence had come the first settlers of the Palermian Coast. And to console Jane and Peripatetica for the loss of his charming boyish gaiety he had made over to them that treasure. For Gaspero not only drove the smartest and most comfortable of all the victorias on hire to the public, but he was an artist in the matter of sight-seeing. A true gastronome, mingling flavours with delicate wisdom; keeping delicious surprises up his sleeve lest one’s spirit might pall, and mingling tombs and sunshine, crypts and “molto bella vistas,” history and the colourful daily life of the people, with a masterhand. And all so fused in the warm atmosphere of his own sympathetic and indulgent spirit that “touristing” became a feast of the soul unknown to those not guided by his discreet and skilful judgment. He knew where one might purchase honey which bees had brewed from orange flowers into a sublimated perfume; and he introduced them to certain patisseries at Cafleisch’s that gave afternoon tea a new meaning.
It was Gaspero who took them to the lofty shrine of Santa Rosalia on Monte Pellegrino; that grotto where lived the royal maiden hermit, and where lie her bones within the tomb on which Gregorio Tedeschi has made an image of her in marble with a golden robe, glowing dimly in the light of a hundred lamps. On that rosy height, dominating the beautiful landscape, Gaspero told them the story of the niece of William the Good, whose asceticism and devotion set so deep a seal of reverence upon the people of Palermo that they enshrined her as the city’s patron saint, and still celebrate her memory every year with a great festival. All the population climb the hill in July to say a prayer in her windy eyrie, and the enormous car bearing her image is dragged through the city’s streets, so towering in its gilded glories that one of the city gates has been unroofed to permit of its entrance. At that time the Marina—the wide sea-front street—instead of being merely a solemn Corso for the staid afternoon drive of the upper classes, becomes the scene of a sort of Pagan Saturnalia. The Galoppo takes place then—races of unmounted free horses—delicious races, Gaspero says, in which there can be no jockeying, and in which the generous-blooded animals strive madly to distance each other from sheer love of the sport and the rivalry. A gay people’s revel, this, of flying hoofs and tossing manes; of dancing feet; of cries and songs; mandolins, pipes, and guitars fluting and twittering. The water-sellers with their glittering carts and delicate bubble-like bottles crying acqua fredda, offering golden orange juice, and the beloved pink anisette. The Polichinello booths, the open-air puppet shows, the toy-sellers with their tall poles hung with sparkling trifles, the tables spread with dainties of rosy sugar, with melting pastries, with straw-covered flasks of wine. All perspiring, talking, laughing, guzzling, gormandising in honour of the anæmic, ascetic girl who passed long, lonely, silent days and nights in passionate ecstasies and visions in those high, voiceless solitudes. Gaspero made it all very vivid, with hands, lips, eyes. He was possessed with the drama and strange irony of it.
“Have the Signorine ever seen a Sicilian puppet show?” Gaspero demanded, à propos of nothing in particular, turning from a brown study on the box to inquire.
He plainly intended that this should be a memorable day.
No; the Signorine had not seen a puppet show. If they properly should see one then they would see one. It was for Gaspero to judge. Very well, then. He would come for them at half past eight that evening—at least, he added with proud modesty, if the Signorine would not object to his wearing his best clothes. His festa garments, and not the uniform of his calling.
Object! On the contrary, they would be flattered. Gaspero settled back to his duties with the triumphant expression of the artist who by sudden inspiration has added the crowning touch to his picture. He composed the days for them on his mental palette, and this one he plainly considered one of his masterpieces.
Yesterday had been a failure. Jane and Peripatetica had waked full of plans, but before the breakfast trays had departed they were aware of a heavy sense of languor and ennui which made the pleasantest plans a prospect of weariness and disgust.
“If you sit around in a dressing-gown all day we’ll never get anything done,” suggested Peripatetica crossly, as Jane lounged in unsympathetic silence at the window.
“Considering that you’ve been half an hour dawdling over your hair and have got it up crooked at last, I wouldn’t talk about others,” snapped Jane over her shoulder without changing her attitude.
A strained silence ensued. Peripatetica slammed down a hand mirror and spilled a whole paper of hairpins, which she contemplated stonily, with no movement to recover them.
A hot wind whirled up a spiral of dust in the street.
“My arms are so tired I can’t make a coiffure,” wailed Peripatetica.
Jane merely laid her head on the window sill and rolled a feeble, melancholy eye at the disregarded hairpins.
The wind sent up another curtain of hot dust.
“I don’t know what’s the matter,” complained Jane, “but I don’t feel as if I wanted to see another sight—ever—as long as I live.”
“Perhaps this is the sirocco one hears of,” piped Peripatetica weakly. “The guide-book says ‘the effect of it is to occasion a difficulty in breathing, and a lassitude which unfits one for work, especially of a mental nature.’”
By this time there could be no doubt of the sirocco. A hot, dry tempest raged, whipping the rattling palms, driving clouds of dust before it, so that Jane could only dimly discern an occasional scurrying cab, or an overtaken pedestrian pursuing an invisible hat through the roaring fog of flying sand. The day had turned to a brown and tempestuous dusk, and the voice of a hoarse Saharan wind shouted around the corners.
But that was yesterday. To-day was golden and gracious. Rain in the night had cooled and effaced all memory of the sirocco, and Gaspero was outdoing himself in astonishing and piquant contrasts.
He drove them to the Cappucini Convent by the devious route of the Street of the Washerwomen. This roundabout way of reaching the Convent was one of Gaspero’s artful devices.
Down each side of the broad tree-shadowed way, bordered on either hand by the little stone-built cubicles washed pink or white or blue, in which lived the multitudinous laundresses, ran a clear rushing brook. These brooks flowed through a sort of shallow tunnel with a wide orifice before each dwelling, and in every one of these openings was standing a bare-legged blanchisseuse, dealing strenuously with Palermian linen, with skirts tucked up above sturdy knees that were pink and fresh from the rush of the bright water. Vigorous girls trotted back and forth with large baskets heaped with wet garments, and bent, but still energetic, granddams spread the garments to dry. Hung them from the tree branches, swung them from the low eaves of the little dwellings, threaded them on lines that laced and crossed like spiderwebs, so that the whole vista was a flutter of fabrics—rose and white and green—dancing in the breeze. A human and homely scene, with play of brown arms and bright eyes amid the flying linen and laces; with sounds of rippling leaves, of calls and laughter, and the gurgling of quick water—drudgery that was half a frolic in the cheerful sunshine.
Now behold Gaspero’s sense of dramatic contrast!
A plain, frigid façade, guarded by a bearded and rather grubby monk in a brown robe. The eye does not linger upon the grubby monk, being led away instantly by the vista through the arched doorway behind him of a cloistered court; a court solemn with the dark spires of towering cypresses, and brilliant with roses—roses wine-coloured, golden, pink. Behind this screen of flowers and trees lies the bit of ground possessing the peculiar property of quickly desiccating and mummifying the human bodies buried in it. Many hundreds have been laid in this earth for awhile, and then removed to the convent crypts to make room for others. It is to these crypts another monk leads the way. A saturnine person this, handing his charges over to another, still more gloomy, who sits at the foot of the stairs and watches at the crypt’s entrance. A perfectly comprehensible depression, his, when one reflects that all the sunshiny hours of these golden Sicilian days he sits at the shadowed door of a great tomb, mounting guard over surely the most grisly charge the mind can conceive; over Death’s bitterest jest at Life.
The walls of the high, clean corridors are lined with glass cases like a library, but instead of printed books the shelves are crammed with ghastly phantoms of humanity, all grinning in horrible, silent amusement as at a mordant, unutterable joke.
Jane and Peripatetica gasp and clutch one another’s hand at the grey disorder of this soundless merriment—breathless, fixed, perpetual.
Here and there a monk, crowded for lack of space from the shelves, hangs from a hook in limp, dishevelled leanness, his head drooped mockingly sidewise, his shrunken lips twisted in a dusty fatuous leer, a lid drooped over a withered eye in a hideous wink. Others huddle in fantastic postures within their contracted receptacles, as if convulsed by some obscenely wicked jest which forces them to throw back their heads, to fling out their hands, to writhe their limbs into unseemly attitudes of amusement. One lies flat, with rigid patience in every line of the meagre body, a rictus of speechless agony pinching back the mouldy cheeks.
Coffins are heaped about the floor everywhere. Through the glass tops the occupants grin in weary scorn from amid the brown and crumbling flowers that have dried around their faces.
The ghastliest section of this ghastly place is that where the women crouch in their cases, clad in the fripperies of old fashions. Earrings swing from dusty ears; necklaces clasp lean grey throats; faded hair is tortured into elaborate coiffures; laces, silks, and ribbons swathe the tragic ruins of beauty. And these women, too, all simper horribly, voicelessly, remembering perhaps how dear these faded gauds once were before they passed beyond thought of “tires and crisping pins.”
“Why do they do it?” demanded Peripatetica in whispered disgust. “What strange passion for publicity prompts them thus to flout and outrage the decent privacies of death”—for they noted that each case bore a name and the date of decease, and that some of these dates were but of a few years back. “Didn’t they know, from having seen others, how they themselves would look in their turn? Why would any woman be willing to come here in laces and jewels to be a disgusting nightmare of femininity for other women to stare at?”
“Vanity of vanities—all is vanity!” murmured Jane. “Now they all lie here laughing at the strange vanity that brought them to this place—at the vanity that will bring others in their turn to this incredible hypogeum.”
Then they turned a corner and came suddenly upon the little horribly smiling babies, and instantly fled in simultaneous nausea and disgust—flinging themselves at Gaspero, who with a tenderly sympathetic manner suggested an expedition to La Favorita as a corrective of gruesome impressions. Carrying them swiftly to it by way of the long double boulevards of the newer Palermo, between the smiling villas of creamy stone that were wreathed with yellow banksias and purple wisteria, their feet set among gay beds of blossoms and facing the cheerful street life of the town.
“How odd these Sicilians are!” reflected Jane, as they drove. “An incomprehensible mixture to an Anglo-Saxon. For example one finds almost universal open-hearted gentleness and courtesy, and yet the Mafia holds the whole land in a grip of iron—a dangerous, murderous, secret society as widespread as the population, yet never betrayed, and uncontrollable by any power, even so popular and so democratic a one as the present government.”
“Yes; their attitude to life is as puzzling as the face they turn toward death,” agreed Peripatetica, remembering that almost every other building in Taormina and many in Palermo wore nailed to the door a broad strip of mourning—often old and tattered—on which was printed “Per mio Frate,” or “Per mia Madre”—that even a newspaper kiosk had worn weeds—“Per mio Padre.”
At that very moment there passed a cheerful hearse, all glass and gilding, wreathed with fresh flowers into a gay dancing nosegay, and hung with fluttering mauve streamers which announced in golden letters that the white coffin within enclosed all that was mortal of some one’s beloved sister Giuseppina. It might have been a catafalque of some Spirit of Spring, so many, so sweet, so daintily gracious were the blooming boughs that accompanied Giuseppina to her last resting-place.... And yet they had but just come from the grim horrors of that crypt of the Cappuccini!...
La Favorita, curiously, is one of the few monuments of beauty or charm left by that long reign of the Spanish monarchs of Sicily, which, with some mutations, lasted for about six hundred years. They loaded the land with a weight of many churches and convents, yet what one goes to see is what was done by the Greeks, the Moslems, and the Normans. La Favorita is not old, as one counts age in that immemorial land of the High Gods. A slight century or so of age it has, being built for the villegiatura of Ferdinando IV. at the period when the Eighteenth Century affected a taste in Chinoiseries, bought blue hawthorn jars, ate from old Pekin plates, set up lacquered cabinets, and built Pagoda-esque pleasure houses. The Château is but a flimsy and rather vulgar example of the taste of the day, but the Eighteenth Century often planted delicious gardens, and the pleached allées, the ilex avenues, the fountains and plaisances of La Favorita, make an adorable park for modern Palermo, having by time and the years grown into a majestic richness of triumphant verdure.
But Gaspero is not content with La Favorita. He has things even better in store for Jane and Peripatetica—explaining that by giving the most minute gratuity to the guardian of the park’s nether portal they may be allowed to slip through into a private path that leads to the sea. They do give the gratuity, and do slip through, winding along a rough country road leading under the beetling red cliffs of Pellegrino; by way of olive orchards, mistily grey as smoke, through which burn the rosy spring fires of the Judas-trees, whose drifting pink clouds are so much more beautiful than the over-praised almond blossoms. They skirt flowery meadows all broad washes of gold and mauve, past a landscape as fair as a dream of Paradise, and Gaspero draws up at last upon a beach of shining silver upon which a sea of heaving sapphire lips softly and without speech. A sea that strews those argent sands with shells like rose petals, like flakes of gold, like little, curled, green leaves. And dismounting they rest there in the sunset, forgetting “dusty death,” and glad to be alive; glad of Gaspero’s tender indulgent joy in their pleasure as he gathers for them the strewn sea-flowers, tells them little Sicilian stories of the people, and makes them entirely forget they haven’t had their tea.
It was in returning from this place of peace that he had that crowning inspiration about the puppet show, which is why in the darkness of that very evening they are threading a black and greasy alleyway which smells of garlic and raw fish. But they go cheerfully and confidently in the dimly seen wake of Gaspero’s festa richness of attire.
An oil torch flares and reeks before a calico curtain. This curtain, brushed aside, shows a pigeon-hole room, nine feet high, very narrow, and not long. On either wall hangs a frail balcony, into one of which the three wriggle carefully and deposit themselves on a board hardly a palm’s breadth wide. From the vantage point of these choice and expensive seats—for which they have magnificently squandered six cents apiece—they are enabled to look down about four inches on the heads of the commonality standing closely packed into the narrow alley leading to the stage. A strictly masculine commonality, for Gaspero explains in a whisper that the gentler sex of Palermo are not expected to frequent puppet shows, lest their delicate sensibilities may suffer shock from the broad behaviour of the wooden dolls. Of course, he hurries to add, handsomely, all things are permitted to forestieri, whose bold fantasticalities are taken for granted.
The groundlings appear to be such folk as fishpeddlers, longshoremen, ragpickers—what you will—who smoke persistent tiny cigarettes, and refresh themselves frequently with orange juice, or anisette and water. These have plunged to the extent of two cents for their evening’s amusement, and have an air of really not considering expense. The gallery folk are of a higher class. On Peripatetica’s right hand sits one who has the air of an unsuccessful author or artist; immediately upon the entrance of the forestieri he carefully assumes an attitude of sarcastic detachment, as of one who lends himself to the pleasures of the people merely in search of material. Opposite is an unmistakable valet who also, after a quick glance at the newcomers, buttons his waistcoat and takes on an appearance of indulgent condescension to the situation.
A gay drop curtain, the size of a dinner napkin, rolls up after a preliminary twitter from concealed mandolins. The little scene is set in a wood. From the left enters a splendid miniature figure glittering in armour, crowned, plumed, and robed, stepping with a high melodramatic stride. It is King Charlemagne, the inevitable deus ex machina of every Sicilian puppet play. Taking the centre of the stage and the spotlight, he strikes his tin-clad bosom a resounding blow with his good right wooden hand, and bursts into passionate recitative.
“The cursèd Moslem dogs have seized his subjects upon the high seas, and cast them into cruellest slavery. Baptised Christians bend their backs above the galley oars of Saracen pirate ships, and worse—oh, worst of all!”—both hands here play an enraged tattoo upon his resounding bosom-pan—“they have seized noble Christian maidens and haled them to their infernal harems.
“S’death! shall such things be? No! by his halidome, no! Rinaldo shall wipe this stain from his ’scutcheon. What ho—without there!”
Enter hastily from right Orlando.
“His Majesty called?”
“Called? well rather! Go find me that good Knight Rinaldo, the great Paladin, and get the very swiftest of moves on, or something will happen which is likely to be distinctly unpleasant.”
Orlando vanishes, and in a twinkling appears Rinaldo, more shining, more resplendent, more befeathered even than the King; with an appalling stride (varied by a robin-like hop), calculated to daunt the boldest worm of a Moslem.
He awaits his sovereign’s commands with ligneous dignity, but as the King pours out the tale his legs rattle with strained attention, and when the Christian maids come into the story his falchion flashes uncontrollably from its sheath.
“Will he go? Will a bird fly? Will a fish swim?”
Charlemagne retires, leaving Rinaldo to plan the campaign with Orlando.
Enter now another person in armour, but wearing half an inch more of length of blue petticoat, and with luxuriant locks streaming from beneath the plumed helmet. ’Tis Bramante, the warrior maiden, who in shrill soprano declines to be left out of any chivalric ruction. Three six-inch swords flash in the candlelight; three vows to conquer or die bring down the dinner napkin to tumultuous applause.
The pit has been absorbed to the point of letting its cigarettes go out, and the author and the valet hastily resume their forgotten condescension.
Every one cracks and eats melon seeds until the second act reveals the court of a Saracen palace.
The thumps of the three adventurers’ striding feet bring out hasty swarms of black slaves, who fall like grain before the Christian swords. Better metal than this must meet a Paladin!
Turbaned warriors fling themselves into the fray, and the clash of steel on steel rings through the palace. Orlando is down, Rinaldo and Bramante fight side by side, though Rinaldo staggers with wounds. The crescented turbans one by one roll in the dust, and as the two panting conquerors lean exhausted upon their bloody swords—enter the Soldan himself!
Now Turk meets Paladin, and comes the tug of war.
Bramante squeaks like a mouse; hops like a sparrow.
Ding, dong! Rinaldo is beaten to his knee and the Soldan shortens his blade for a final thrust, but—Bramante rushes in, and with one terrific sweep of her sword shears his head so clean from his shoulders that it rolls to the footlights and puts out one of the candles.
Ha! ha! He trusted in his false god, Mahound!
Bramante hops violently.
Enter suddenly, rescued Christian Maid. Also in armour; also possessing piercing falsetto.
Saved! saved! She falls clattering upon Rinaldo’s breast, and Bramante, after an instant’s hesitation, falls there on top of her, with peculiarly vicious intensity.
More dinner napkin. More frenzied applause. Gaspero draws a long breath. His eyes are full of tears of feeling.
Scene in the wood again. Charlemagne has thanked Rinaldo. Has thanked Bramante. Has blessed the Christian Maid, and has retired exhausted to his afternoon nap!
Christian Maid insists upon expressing her gratitude to the Paladin with her arms round his neck.
Bramante drags her off by her back hair, a dialogue ensuing which bears striking likeness to the interview of cats on a back fence.
Christian Maid opines that Bramante is no lady, and swords are out instantly.
One, two, three!—clash, slash, bang!
Rinaldo hops passionately and futilely around the two contestants.
Ladies! Ladies! he protests in agony, but blood is beginning to flow, when, suddenly, a clap of thunder—a glitter of lightning!
The cover of an ancient tomb in the wood rolls away, and from the black pit rises a grisly skeleton. Six legs clatter and rattle like pie-pans; swords fall. It is the ghost of Rinaldo’s father. Christian Maid is really Rinaldo’s sister, he explains, carried off by Saracens in her childhood.
Skeleton pulls down the cover of the tomb and retires to innocuous desuetude.
Opportune entry of Orlando miraculously cured of his wounds. Rinaldo has an inspiration, and bestows upon Orlando the hand of the Christian Maid.
All the tins of the kitchen tumble at once—everybody has fallen on every one else’s mail-clad bosom!...
Dear Gaspero! It has been a wonderful day.
A slow, fine rain falls. Vapours roll among the vapoury hills.
It is just the day for the museum, and such a museum! Not one of those cold and formal mausoleums built by the modern world for the beauties of the dead past, but a fine old monastery of the Philippines with two cloistered cortile; with a long, closed gallery for the hanging of the pictures; with big refectories, ambulatories, and chapels for housing the sculpture, and with its little cells crammed with gold and silver work, with enamels, with embroideries, with jewels. A gracious casket for the treasures of old time.
The rain is dripping softly into the open cloister, where the wet garlands of wisteria and heavy-clustered gold of the banksias are distilling their mingled fragrance in the damp air. The rain makes sweet tinklings in the old fountains and in the sculptured wellheads gathered in the court; on the cloister walls are grouped bas-reliefs—tinted Madonnas by Gagini; Greek fragments, stone vases standing on the floor, twisted columns, broken but lovely torsos.
Indeed, it is not like a museum at all. No ticketed rigidity, no historical sequence—just treasures set about where the setting will best accord with and display their beauties. There is not even a catalogue to be had, which gives a delightful sense of freedom at first, but this has its drawbacks when Jane and Peripatetica come to the tomb of Aprilis in a side chamber, and wish to know something more of this sad little maid sculptured into the marble of the tomb’s sunken lid—wrapped in a straitly folded wimple, with slim crossed feet, and small head turned half aside; smiling innocently in the sleep which has lasted so long. Aprilis, whose April had never blossomed into May, and whose epitaph has for five hundred years called Sicily to witness the grief of those who lost her:
“Sicilia, Hic Jacet Aprilis. Miseranda Puella
Unicce Quælugens Occultipa Diem 18 Otobre
XIII 1495.”
Of course, the guide-books ignore her. Trust the guide-books to preserve a stony silence about anything of real human interest!...
Another court; a great basin where papyrus grows, where bananas wave silken banners amid the delicate plumes of tall bamboo, where are more purple wreaths of wistaria and snow-drifts of roses, and where the treasures are mostly Greek. Very notable among these a marble tripod draped with the supple folds of a python; the lax power of the great snake subtly contrasted with, and emphasized by, the rigid lines of the seat of the soothsayer. More notable still, in the Sala del Fauna, is an archaic statue of Athene from Selinunto—like some splendid sharded insect in her helmet and lion skin—rescued from that vast wreck of a city. They had travelled from Palermo a few days before to see that city, drawn by Crawford’s fine passages of description, and there they, too, had wondered at the astonishing remains of those astonishing Greeks.
... “There is nothing in Europe like the ruins of Selinunto. Side by side, not one stone upon another, as they fell at the earthquake shock, the remains of four temples lie in the dust within the city, and still more gigantic fragments of three others lie without the ruined walls. At first sight the confusion looks so terrific that the whole seems as if it might have fallen from the sky, from a destruction of the home of the gods—as if Zeus might have hurled a city at mankind, to fall upon Sicily in a wild wreck of senseless stone. Blocks that are Cyclopean lie like jackstraws one upon another; sections of columns twenty-eight feet round are tossed together upon the ground like leaves from a basket, and fragments of cornice fifteen feet long lie across them, or stand half upright, or lean against the enormous steps. No words can explain to the mind the involuntary shock which the senses feel at first sight of it all. One touches the stones in wonder, comparing one’s small human stature with their mass, and the intellect strains hopelessly to recall their original position; one climbs in and out among them, sometimes mounting, sometimes descending, as one might pick one’s way through an enormous quarry, scarcely understanding that the blocks one touches have all been hewn into shape by human hands, and that the hills from which men brought them are but an outline in the distance.”...
All that quiet falling day Jane and Peripatetica wandered in the transformed monastery, staring at the great metopes; lingering among the Saracenic carvings and jewelled windows, poring over Phœnician seals; over the amazing ecclesiastic needlework, the gold monstrances, the carved gems, and last and best of all some delicious reliefs at sight of which they forgave at once and forever their old enemy, the Eighteenth Century, for all its disgusting crimes against beauty. They sought madly through the books for some mention of these tall, adorable nymphs in adorably impossible attitudes, these curled and winged and dimpled babies, fluttering like fat little wrens sweetly ignorant of the laws of gravitation; but as always on any subject of interest Baedeker and the rest frigidly refused to tell the name of the man out of whose head and hands had grown these enchanting figures.
“Oh, dear Unknown!” cries Jane regretfully, “why is your noble name buried in silence! I wish to make a pilgrimage to your tomb, to cover it with Sicilian roses, and breathe a prayer for the repose of your sweet and gracious soul.”
“Me too!” echoes Peripatetica, in tender scorn of the stodgy rules of English grammar.
The Paschal season is near.
Always, in all lands of all faiths, the coming of Spring, the yearly resurrection of life and nature, has been welcomed with gladness. The occultation of Osiris, of Baldur, of Persephone, of the Christ, is mourned; their coming again hailed with flowers and feasting.
Palermo is filling with visitors; with a glory of flowers and verdure in which the loveliest city in the world grows daily lovelier. The Conca d’Oro—the Shell of Gold—swims in a golden sea of sunshine.
On the Wednesday before Easter the whole population exchanges cakes. Cakes apotheosized by surprising splendours of icing; icing, gilded, silvered, snowily sculptured into Loves and angels and figures of national heroes. Icing wrought into elaborate garlands tinted rose, purple, and green; built into towers and ornate architectural devices. Structures of confectionery three feet high are borne on big platters between two men. Every child carries gay little cakes to be presented to grandparents and godparents, to cousins and playmates.
All Maundy Thursday the population moves from church to church. Masses moan incessant in every chapel. Before the Virgins on every street-shrine, draped in black, candles blaze and drip. Priests and monks hurry to and fro, bent upon preparations for the great spectacle of the morrow.
Friday morning early all Palermo is in the streets in its best attire. Small children dressed as little cardinals, as nuns, as priests, bishops, angels with gilded wings, as Virgins, as John the Baptist, are on their way to the churches from which the processions are to flow. Monks and friars gather from outlying country convents.
At ten o’clock a throbbing dirge begins. The first of the processions is under way. A band plays a funeral march, and is followed by acolytes swinging censers. Pious elderly citizens, perspiring in frock coats, carry tall, flaming candles that drop wax upon their clothes. A few priests, in black and purple, follow, bearing holy vessels. Behind these a row of men in mediæval armour and carrying halberds, surround a heavy, hand-borne bier hung with black velvet, on which rests a glass and gilt case containing an image of the Crucified—a life-sized image, brown with age. Presumably it has been taken from some ancient and revered Spanish crucifix, for it is crowned with thorns, is emaciated, is writhed with pain, painted with the dark, faded red of streaming wounds—one of those agonised figures conceived by the pious realism of the older Spanish sculptors.
Immediately follows another hand-borne litter upon which is standing a tall Virgin clothed in black hood and mantle—a pallid, narrow-faced Virgin—also Spanish and realistic. The delicate clasped hands hold a lace handkerchief, her breast is hung with votive silver hearts. The features are distorted with grief, the lids, reddened with tears, are drooped over sunken, deep-shadowed eyes, and her countenance seamed and withered—a poignant figure of unutterable maternal woe! Burning candles alternate with mounds of roses about the edge of the platform on which she stands.
As the dead Son and the mourning Mother pass, hats come off and heads are bowed, signs of the cross are made. A few of the older peasant women fall to their knees upon the sidewalk and mutter an Agnus Dei, a Hail Mary, with streaming tears. A priest walks last of all, rattling a contribution box at the end of a long stick, looking anxiously at the balconies and windows from which the well-to-do spectators lean. For his is but a poor church; the velvet palls and cloaks are cotton, and frayed and faded, the bier and platform old, and so massive that the stalwart bearers must set them down often to wipe away the sweat, which is why it takes advantage of the unpre-empted morning hours and is early in the field.
Later in the day, in Gaspero’s cab and under his guidance, Jane and Peripatetica take up a coign of vantage in a square debouching upon the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, along which the Jesuits are to parade at four o’clock. Here the crowd is solidly packed, the balconies and windows crowded with the aristocracy of Palermo. The Guarda Mobili in their splendid uniforms keep open the way for the marching fraternities and sodalities with their crucifixes and Virgin-embroidered banners, open a lane for the monks, for the crowds of tiny angels and cardinals who must patter for hours in the slow-moving procession. Priests and acolytes swarm; censers steam, hundreds of candles of all weights and heights flare and flame, and then slowly, slowly, to the wailing music, moves forward a splendid catafalque of crystal in which lies stretched upon a bed of white velvet, richly wrought with gold, a fair youth. A youth with white, naked limbs, relaxed and pure; not soiled by the grimy, bloody agonies of martyrdom, but poetised to a picture of Love too early dead—a charming image. And the beautiful tall Virgin is not the simple Mother of the Carpenter convulsed with despair. She is a stately, sorrowful Queen, crowned, hung with jewels, robed in superb royal weeds; proudly refusing to show the full depth of her bereavement, as she follows her dead Son amid the wax torches shining palely in the sunshine through the white and green of the sheaves of lilies that grow about her knees.
The emotional effect upon the crowd is intense; one can hear like an undertone the sound of indrawn, gulping breath. Gaspero passes his sleeve across the tears in his dark eyes.
This version of the tragedy is lifted above the realism of pain into a penetrating and lovely symbolism that swells the heart with poignant and tender emotions as the divine funeral train winds slowly away, with perfume, with lights, and with the slow sobbing of the muffled drums.
So had Sicilians two thousand years ago crowded every spring to see a similar spectacle of a weeping Queen of Love following an image of a lovely dead youth....
“Ah! and himself—Adonis—how beautiful to behold he lies on his silver couch, with the first down on his cheeks, the thrice beloved Adonis—Adonis beloved even among the dead.... O Queen, O Aphrodite, that playest with gold, lo, from the stream eternal of Acheron they have brought back to thee Adonis—even in the twelfth month they have brought him, the dainty-footed Hours.... Before him lie all that the tall tree-branches bear, and the delicate gardens, arrayed in baskets of silver; and the golden vessels are full of the incense of Syria. And all the dainty cakes that women fashion in the kneading-tray, mingling blossoms manifold with the white wheaten flour, all that is wrought of honey sweet, and in soft olive-oil, all cakes fashioned in semblance of things that fly, and of things that creep, lo, here they are set before him.
“Here are built for him shadowy bowers of green, all laden with tender anise, and children flit overhead—the little Loves—as the young nightingales perched upon the trees fly forth and try their wings from bough to bough....
“But lo, in the morning we will all of us gather with the dew, and carry him forth among the waves that break upon the beach, and with locks unloosed, and ungirt raiment falling to the ankles, and bosoms bare we will begin our shrill sweet song.
“Thou only, dear Adonis, so men tell, thou only of the demigods, dost visit both this world and the stream of Acheron.... Dear has thine advent been, Adonis, and dear shall it be when thou comest again.”
Gaspero never permitted Jane and Peripatetica to lose anything. Doubling through narrow, black streets where lofty buildings nearly met above their heads and where they snatched hurried, delighted glimpses of intricate old grilles, of arched and wheeled windows, of splendid hatchments and fine carved portals—he brought them out at admirable view points for all the many similar parades in widely separated parts of the city.
As the purple dusk came down they found themselves in the Marina, watching the last of the processions moving slowly down the broad avenue to the sea-street. The crowd had thinned. The small angels and John the Baptists went wearily upon dusty little feet, their crowns of now wilted roses canted at dissipated angles over their flushed and tearful faces, the heavy, half-burned wax torches wabbling dangerously near the draggled veils and drooping gilt wings.
The bearers of the images paused often to set down their heavy burdens. The balconies began to blossom with tinted lights. Here and there the Virgin with her twinkling candles was turned toward a balcony filled with some specially faithful children of the church, and stood facing them a moment, tall, ghostly, tragical, in the gathering darkness, before passing onward in her long pilgrimage of mourning that was to end within the church doors as night came down.
“It is enough, Gaspero,” they cried, as the flickering train passed away down the water avenue into the blue blackness of the shadowy evening, and then they went homewards full of that strange mingled sense of languor and refreshment—that “cleansing of the soul with pity and terror” which is the gift of the heroic tragedies....
Every hour of that night the bells rang and masses sang throughout the city. All day Saturday the churches swarmed, and the purple veils, hung before the altar pictures throughout Lent, were rent from top to bottom to the sound of the wailing De Profundis. Sunday the religious world seemed to exhale itself in music and flowers and triumphant masses. Easter Monday morning the populace hurried through the necessary domestic duties at the earliest possible moment, for the Pasqua Flora is the day of villegiatura for all Palermo. Every one wears new clothes. Even the humble asinelli are, for once in the year at least, brushed and combed, and decorated with fresh red tassels if the master is too poor to afford more elaboration of the always elaborate harness. Those asses who have the luck to be the property of rich contadini appear resplendent in new caparison; with towering brass collars heavy with scarlet chenille, flashing with mirrors and inlays of mother-of-pearl, glittering from head to tail with brass buckles, with bells and red tags innumerable, drawing new carts carved and painted with all the myths and legends and history of Sicily in crude chromatic vivacity.
Whole families stream countrywards in these carts to-day; babies clean and starched for once, grandmothers in purple kerchiefs tied under the chin and yellow kerchiefs crossed upon the breast, with gold hoops in their ears; daughters in flowered cottons, their uncovered heads wrought with fearful and wonderful pompadours, sleek and jet black.
Along the seashore, up the sides of Pellegrino, in all the open country about Palermo, they spread and sun themselves, eat, sleep, make love, gossip, dance, and sing in the golden air.
Gaspero drives slowly through the wide-spread picnic, pausing wherever a characteristic group attracts.
Here lies a whole family asleep; gorged with endless coils of macaroni, saturated with sun—a mere heap of crude-coloured clothes, of brown open-mouthed faces, of lax limbs that to-morrow must be gathered up again for a hand-to-hand struggle for bread for another twelve-month.
Under this tree a long table is spread with loaves, with meats, with iced cakes, and straw-covered flasks. A rich confrère of Gaspero celebrates the betrothal of his only daughter, a plump and solid heiress, who beneath an inky and mighty pompadour simpers at the broad jokes of her pursey, elderly fiancé. A solid fiancé, financially and physically. Altogether a solid match, says Gaspero. A dashing guest thrums his guitar and sings throatily of the joys of love and of money in the stocking.
Here a group of very old men watch about a boiling pot hung above a little fire, and twitter reminiscences of youth, catching one last pale gleam of the fast sinking sun of their meagre, toilsome lives.
Everywhere music and laughter and the smell of flowers and food and wine.
A big piano-organ is playing a rouladed waltz to a ring of young spectators, crowding to watch the elaborate steps of dancers swinging about singly with grace-steps, with high prancings, with tarantella flourishes. Male dancers, all. Gaspero explains that no respectable girl would be allowed to join them, the Sicilian girl’s diversions being distressingly limited.
One of the boyish dancers, with the keen, bold face and square head of a mediæval Condottiere, flourishes his light cane in fencing passes as he swings, which challenge inspires a spectator to leap into the ring with his own cane drawn. The newcomer, an obvious dandy in pointed patent-leather shoes, blue-ribboned hat, and light suit of cheap smartness, crosses canes dashingly with the would-be fencer, and the rest of the dancers drop back to see the fun.
The Condottiere finds in a few passes that he has met his master and craftily begins a waiting game. Lithe and quick as a cat, he circles and gives way, his opponent driving him round and round the ring, lunging daringly and playing to the gallery. He flourishes unnecessarily, pursues recklessly, assumes a contemptuous carelessness of the boy, always circling, always on guard, always coolly thrifty of breath and strength.
The dandy grows tired and angry, rushes furiously to make an end of his nimble evasive antagonist, who at last turns with cold courage and by a twist of his weapon sends the dandy’s cane flying clean over the ring of spectators, who scream with delight. But the Condottiere is a generous as well as a wily foe. He offers an embrace. The dandy reluctantly allows himself to be kissed on both cheeks, but the victor catches him about the waist and waltzes him around madly amid the laughter and bravas of the crowd.
It is Jane’s and Peripatetica’s last day in Sicily. Gaspero has taken them to Santa Maria di Gesu, the Minorite Monastery, but has paused by the way for a look at San Giovanni degli Eremiti, whose little red domes float clear against the burning azure sky like coral-tinted bubbles, so airily do they rise from the green of the high hill-garden with its tiny cloisters of miniature columns and miniscule grey arches heavy with yellow roses. And yet from this rosy, arch little fane rang the Sicilian Vespers which gave the signal for one of the bloodiest butcheries in history. It was Pasqua Flora, and all Palermo, as it did yesterday, was feasting and dancing out of doors. One of the French soldiers—then in occupation, upholding the hated House of Anjou—insulted a Sicilian girl and was stabbed. Just then the Vesper bells rang from San Giovanni degli Eremiti, and at the signal the conspiracy, long festering, broke into open flame, and Palermo rose and massacred the French till the streets ran with blood.
The Gesu Monastery has no such sanguinary associations. The plain little building, high on the hillside, stands buried among enormous cypresses and clouds of roses, and surrounded by the massive marble tombs and mortuary chapels of Palermo’s nobility and Sicily’s magnates. It is a place of great peace and silence. A place of unutterable beauty of outlook upon gorges feathered with pines, upon stern violet mountains melting into more distant heights of amethyst, into outlines of hyacinth, into silhouettes of mauve, into high ghostly shadows that vanish into floods of aerial blue. A place which looks on sea and shore and city, and where the chemistry of sun and air transmutes the multitudinous tones of the landscape to an incredible witchery of tint, to living hues like those of the colours of jewels, of flowers, of the little burning feathers of the butterflies’ wings.
“Doubtless God might have made a more beautiful view than this from the Gesu, but doubtless God never did,” sighed Jane.
But still Gaspero is not satisfied. He can never rest content with anything less than perfection. Yes; he admits the Gesu is admirable, but he knows a still more “molto bella vista.”
“There is nothing better than the best,” says Jane sententiously. “I am drenched and satiated with all the loveliness that I can bear. Any other ‘vista’ would be an anticlimax.”
“Dear Jane,” remonstrated Peripatetica, “haven’t you yet guessed that Gaspero is a wizard? I suspected it the very first day. Of course, you can see that he’s no ordinary guide and cab-driver, and, as a matter of fact, I don’t believe there are any such sights as the ones we think he has showed us. You’ve been on Broadway? Well, can you lay your hand on your heart, and honestly affirm that when you are there again you won’t at once realize that there never were such beauties as these we’ve been seeing? Won’t you know then that this is all a glamour—a hypnotic suggestion of Gaspero’s mind upon ours?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” snapped Jane. “What is all this rhodomontade leading to?”
“To a desire to follow the wizard,” answered Peripatetica recklessly. “Whither Gaspero goeth I go! I am fully prepared to wallow in glamours, and besides we’ve luncheon in our basket, so don’t be tiresome, Jane. Let’s abandon the commonplace and ‘follow the Gleam.’”
“Very well,” laughed Jane, climbing into the carriage. “Gaspero and ‘gleam’ if you like.”
Whether the molto bella vista ever existed remains still a subject of dispute. Peripatetica insists that it was only a pretext for leading them to a place where Gaspero intended they should lunch, but Jane, who always kicks against the philosophic pricks of the determinists, contends that she exercised a certain measure of free will in the matter. However that may be, they wound among mountain roads, by caves Gaspero said were once the dwellings of giants, by little outlying villages where old women span and wove in the doorways and young women made lace; where copper-workers sat in the street and with musical clang of little hammers beat out glittering vessels of rosy metal. They scattered flocks of goats from their path, the shaggy white bucks leaping nimbly upon the wall and staring at them with curious ironic, satyr-like glances; and far, very far up, they came upon a mountain meadow mistily shadowed by enormous gnarled olive trees—a meadow knee-deep in flowers. A meadow that was a sea of flowers, orange, golden and lemon, rippling and dimpling in the light and shade, breathed upon by the faint flying airs of those high spaces:
“In Arcady, in Arcady!
Where all the leaves are merry—”
cried Peripatetica joyously.
“Of course it’s Arcady,” said Jane, with conviction. “And we have come upon it in the Age—or perhaps the moment—of Gold. Gaspero,” she announced firmly, “we will lunch right here.”
“But Signorina—the Vista!” protested the Wizard with a quizzical smile.
It was really (Peripatetica is convinced) Gaspero’s subtle understanding of Jane’s character which led him to offer just sufficient opposition to fix her determination to stay at the very spot where he could best work his magic, for a flowing world of shadowy purple swam about them in a thousand suave folds down to a shining sea, and he could not have showed them any vista more beautiful. But why attempt to shake Jane’s pleased conviction it was really owing to her that for a few hours she and Peripatetica could truly say, “I too have lived in Arcadia.” That it was owing to her they cheerfully fed there, and lay cradled for long warm hours in that perfumed flood of flowers in happy thoughtless silence, wrapped in a fold of the Earth Mother’s—the great Demeter’s—mantle; a fold embroidered by the fine fingers of her daughter Persephone, the Opener of Flowers.
That night, when the full moon rose over the silky sea, far down the horizon behind them slowly faded into the distance the ghostly silver peaks of the enchanted Land of the Older Gods.
The End