Part 17

We gravitated naturally to the cathedral of San Nicolò, pausing outside to look at the fountain surmounted by the oddest figure of a Minotaur, with the head of a man and the body of a bull. The fore legs are missing; the quaint emblem balances perilously on its hind legs. The old name of Taormina was Mount Taurus, so called because the two points of the hill on which it stands, from a distance, look like the horns of a bull. Later it was called Tauromenium, the abiding place of the bull. One of the architectural details that delighted us was a sort of Saracenic rose window, repeated over the main door of several of the churches.

We entered the cathedral by an enchanting door, encircled by a vine, covered with bunches of grapes, boldly carved in stone; the vine springs from a classic vase on either side the portal. Later we found this same design in other Sicilian churches. There are several at Palermo, none, however, that compare with the grape-vine at Taormina.

An old dame, who had loitered in the offing, hobbled ahead to lift the leathern curtain and earn her two sous. She was bent, wrinkled, wise looking. Of course Patsy annexed her; for him the people, no matter how dirty or dull, are always of greater interest than the place.

Before the high altar stood a carved, gilded wooden statue of San Pancrazio, the African, dressed in his best robes, wearing his finest jewels, mitre and gloves. He was mounted on a paso (platform), like those we saw at Seville in the Easter processions. Opposite stood a similar figure of San Pietro. As we were looking at them, Ciro tracked us down--when he had no fare he haunted Patsy’s footsteps. He said a sharp word in _dialetto_ to the old woman--something equivalent to “hands off”--we were his legitimate _forestieri_; had not Gasperone recommended us to him?

“San Pancrazio--_molto bello_.”

“When it comes to beauty,” said Patsy, “don’t you prefer Ciro’s style?”

Ciro, warm with running, his young face glowing, his eyes like gems, was certainly handsomer than the poor old bedizened negro saint.

“It is the _festa_ of San Pancrazio perhaps?” I asked, puzzled to account for his presence before the altar.

“No. After the earthquake San Pancrazio was brought here, and for the moment remains,” said Ciro. “Some people say, how do I know if it is true, that he caused the earthquake? He has great powers, he protects against dangers of land and sea. Lately, for one reason or another, he has been neglected--it is true, when I was a child they made far more of his _festa_ than now.”

“Maria Santa is my witness,” cried the woman passionately, “that for two years next to nothing has been spent for the patron’s _festa_! There were warnings: an old crone appeared to a _contadino_ and, waving her stick, cried three times, _acqua, acqua, acqua leggiera_, then she disappeared in the clouds. The _contadino_ from that day was seen no more. Behold! three weeks before the earthquake, the _acqua leggiera_ came--it was a cloudburst, bad enough but nothing to what came after--if we had only taken warning!”

She wiped the saint’s foot with her apron, kissed it, and wiped again as good manners demand.

* * * * *

“Behold! here is money for two candles; let me see you light them.” Patsy gave her a franc.

“May you be blessed, by Santissima Maria, by all the saints, by the Apostles! The ignorant say that San Pancrazio and San Pietro were brothers--a madness! Saint Peter was a Sicilian, white as the blessed Lord himself. San Pancrazio was a Moor, with a black skin as you see. The truth is, their mothers were sisters and they were cousins. The morning of the _terramoto_ we carried San Pancrazio to the Piazza outside there and showed him to the sea. It was a terrible sight! The water had been drawn back one hundred metres; we saw all the rocks at the bottom, the great fish leaping in the air. After a moment a big wave came high, high, and remained on the shore. It broke the boats, tore the nets; one fisherman was drowned. When the wave saw San Pancrazio, _poco à poco_, it went back to its place.”

“It was pitch-dark,” murmured Patsy, “nobody saw anything.”

“Enough, enough, nonna,” Ciro interrupted, “the signori are in haste! To San Domenico now? I will call the _custode_, he is my friend.”

“What does that strip of black cloth nailed across the shutter signify?” Patsy asked, as we walked towards San Domenico.

“Mourning,” Ciro explained. “Wherever you see it, you may know that in the house dwell refugees, or people who have lost relations in the earthquake.”

Every third house in Taormina had this mourning badge.

Waiting outside the church of San Domenico, were two gentlemen from Turin, a large urbane man, and a slight taciturn person who never spoke. Patsy, who apparently knew them, began asking questions about the church.

“I have not yet seen it,” said the urbane man, “but I hear it is the best in Taormina--“

San Domenico is a fine old church with a soft cracked bell; we liked it far better than the cathedral. The _custode_, unfortunately, was a layman; he knew his lesson well, however.

“This,” he said, pointing to a curious picture, “is San Domenico. Observe the _manta_, real silver, and the chasing--ah! there is but one finer, the _manta_ of the Madonna at the Matrice in Messina.”

The saint’s head, painted on wood or canvas, was set into the _manta_, a square of wrought silver, very Spanish in feeling, that filled the entire frame.

On a quaint old tomb a warrior in armor, a crusader from his crossed legs, lies uneasily on his side. His name was Giovanni Corvaia; he built the palace of that name.

“Come see the organ,” said Patsy, “it’s like Saint Cecilia’s in the Domenichino picture.”

The organ stands in a damp side chapel. It is of wood, painted a soft green, with gilded pipes and ornaments.

“_Molto antico_, four hundred years old and still in use,” the _custode_ declared. “Will one of the gentry be pleased to play? I will blow the bellows.”

The urbane Torinese took his seat at the organ; the _custode_ raised the lid of the keyboard. There was but one bank of yellow ivory keys, much worn by pious fingers.

“Four octaves,” said the Torinese; he measured the notes with a musician’s hand, then began to play an air from Pagliacci. The organ’s voice, like an old artist’s, was still sweet and true, though uncertain and tremulous. As he played the Torinese talked over his shoulder:

“You know this air--yes? and this? You like our Italian composers? Tell me where you will find their match! Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini, Boito--for me his Mefistofile is the noblest of modern operas.”

“Come!” cried Patsy, the concert over, “I have found two portraits of a jolly old monk, who spent his whole life beautifying this church. First, look at his work. This pulpit, these choir stalls--aren’t they lovely?”

When we had admired the richly carved pulpit and choir, Patsy took us to the sacristy, where the carving is even finer than in the church. The figure of San Domenico asleep on the ground, the roster of the order he founded, growing like a genealogical tree out of his side, is charming. The figures of saints and martyrs, some of them full of dignity and beauty, are held up by pairs of chubby children, playing on pipes and cymbals; meant for _angelini_, they look far more like _amorini_. The wood-carving, evidently by the same hand throughout, rises to heights in the figure of Christ in the sacristy and Saint Michael in the choir.

“_Un capo lavoro!_” cried the Torinese. “It has been shockingly neglected though; I must write to the Prince about it!”

The monk could illuminate a missal as well as carve a choir; the _custode_ assured us that the handsome parchment music-book in the choir was the work of the same monk.

“Here’s the old fellow’s signature to his magnum opus,” said Patsy, “carved on a panel of the choir: _Hoc opus fieri fecit ad deis_, etc., etc. _Fr. Joseph Alermo, 1602._ The frate’s Latin is queer, but we know what he means. Here he is young, there he is old, painted by himself. Wood-carver, illuminator, portrait-painter, well done, Fra Joseph!”

In a room leading to the sacristy hang the monk of Taormina’s two portraits of himself. The first shows a jovial full-blooded man in the Dominican habit, holding a skull in his hand; below are the words: _Junior fui et fecit illum._ The older portrait is much defaced; the motto in Fra Joseph’s queer Latin remains clear: _Eterni servi et feci istud._

“That was a man with good red blood in his veins,” said Patsy. “We have all fallen under his spell! That’s because what he did, he did with all his might. Joseph--could he have been English?”

“I believe he was German,” said the Torinese. “He must have passed his life in Taormina though, to live in this place of unparalleled beauty, to enjoy an existence devoted to art and religion--_beato lui_!”

As we left the San Domenico, Patsy and the Torinese had some discussion about paying the _custode_.

“It’s my turn,” I heard Patsy say. “You paid last night.”

“You are Americans?” the Torinese asked.

“Yes.”

“Let me do so little for the people who are doing so much for Sicily. If you come to my city, do me the favor to call--I have not a card, alas! May I write my name on yours?” Patsy had no card. I produced one of J.’s, and the Torinese wrote his name and address on the back.

Those days at Taormina slipped by as a chaplet of odd and even pearls slips between the fingers. Now and then it poured, and we would come home drenched to the skin, glad for once of the steam-heater to dry our wet garments. Those rainy days were the uneven pearls; the others were each rounded from dawn to dark to a sphere of perfect beauty. Whether Etna was all visible, or all hidden, or half revealed, we always felt the great presence, were never for one moment out of its influence.

“Hullo! this must be Mr. Wood’s studio,” said Patsy, pointing to a picturesque sign, “why not go in?”

Mr. Wood lives in a dignified old palazzo. We were made welcome, and spent a delightful afternoon, poring over a portfolio of water-colors; pictures of Etna in its countless moods, at every hour of the day, from a hundred points of view.

“No work since the earthquake,” sighed the painter.

“That’s not what they say at camp.”

“Well, no work of my own; there has been too much to do!”

As we were having tea, Mr. Bowdoin happened in; later, several English and American Taorminians dropped in. This was one of the colony’s social centres.

“All of us here,” said Mr. Wood, “had a narrow escape. We had arranged to go to Messina on the 27th of December, spend the night and hear Madame Butterfly. At the last minute the manager changed the opera to Aida; we had all heard Aida so often that we gave up going. The hotel where we would have stayed was destroyed; all the opera singers perished!”

We tried to talk of other things, a dozen subjects were started--in vain, it was impossible to get away from that all-absorbing topic, the earthquake. One and another told their experiences, letters were read, extracts from journals. With our new friends, we lived over again those dreadful days, when we in Rome were torn with anxiety about them, because no word came from Taormina.

“The Sicilians are a strange race,” said one; “they talk loud over nothing; when something really hurts, they burn dumb; at heart they are a melancholy people. Here at Taormina they had a bad earthquake, a bad tidal wave. In the beginning the poor were dazed, but the first clothing distributed was collected by a Sicilian woman, who performed an act extraordinary among people so Oriental as the Sicilians still are. She went from house to house, at the tail of a cart, gathering clothing. This lady does not leave her house alone twice a month; Sicilian women, even by daylight, mostly go out in twos and threes. Her house was turned into a factory for cutting out and making clothes and mattresses. The money I was able to get together for her, bought an incredible number of mattresses--incredible except for the fact that she and the women of Taormina made them up themselves. A sister of this woman went about the village, asking for helpers to go down with her to meet the trains. At first Sicilian men and two English women went with her. Later the _forestieri_ waked up and with their greater command of money of course accomplished much more--the work of the foreign colony here has been splendid; but it was not the foreign colony that started the work; the impulse was Sicilian.”

“I see you like the Sicilians,” I said.

“I love them,” said my new friend. “Give them three words of _dialetto_, and you will see; there are no warmer hearts in the world.”

* * * * *

Though we never saw Miss Hill, we heard of her everywhere. She had provided the necessary sewing for our camp; she had defended carloads of lumber destined for a wretched hamlet, that had been seized by the people in a larger and less needy village, One morning, when it was too wet to be out of doors, we went to see Miss Hill’s school of needlework. The names of the streets we passed through delighted Patsy,--the Lane-behind-the-nut-tree, the Alley-behind-the-Cathedral. In a pleasant workroom a bevy of girls sat at work, learning to make the lovely Sicilian drawn-work and embroidery. Before Miss Hill started her school, these industries were among the lost arts.

“The shops are full of our patterns,” said the manageress tartly. “They learn them here and then go away and make them for any one who will pay them!”

“That’s the test of the school’s usefulness, isn’t it?” I asked. Impossible to resist the lovely Sicilian embroideries and drawn-thread work, Patsy and I bought all we could afford.

Taormina is like Cornish, the chief personage in the place is the mountain. There is much rivalry among the colonists as to who has the best view. You go to make a visit, first of all you must make your respects to the mountain. I thought of dear blue Ascutney, whenever I was asked to pronounce for or against each new view of Etna, from hotel terrace or friendly garden. One of the best was from the old house on the Corso, where we went one afternoon to tea, with Dr. and Mrs. Paton. The stemma over the door bears the column of the Colonnas, the lily of the Farnese; these familiar emblems of two famous old Roman families made us feel at home at once. We had arrived punctually on the minute of half past four; so had the prince of peacocks. Walking sedately to the side of his mistress, he fed daintily from her hand, his jewelled neck shining in the sun, the splendor of his fan unfolded.

I had read Dr. Norris’s letters from Taormina in those early days, when he and Mrs. Norris were among the most active relief workers. We picked up the threads and I listened to the story of this and that family these dear people had succored. They had invited to meet me a Sicilian lady, who had escaped, almost miraculously, from Messina, a fine energetic young woman, half Italian, half German by birth. She gave me a firm grasp of the hand, and was able and willing to talk with me about her own experience.

She had waked at the first shock, put a pillow over her face to protect it from falling plaster, held firm to the sides of her bed, and the next minute found herself in the street, perfectly safe, without a scratch--her room had been in the fourth story! All her family, except one sister in Switzerland, were killed--parents, brothers, sisters; their bodies were still buried in the ruins. The sister in Switzerland had gone mad with grief.

This girl believes that the loss was harder on her sister than it had been on herself.

Dr. Norris said that the sentiments of many of the survivors were paralyzed; that everybody being in more or less the same case of having lost all their friends, they accepted it as a matter of course. It seemed part of the natural order, and easier to bear than if they alone had been singled out to bear a crushing blow. Some sense also of having been among those preserved, it often seemed miraculously, stayed them. The people who had been buried alive for three days, however, do not recover; they have a fixed look of horror. That side I cannot bear to dwell on,--the dreadful number of lingering deaths!

Some of the cultivated people we met, who have lost every one belonging to them, showed a calm, a manner of putting it all behind them that is admirable. The grief for one person, greatly loved in a family, casts a greater and longer shadow apparently than these awful catastrophes. It seems also that nothing that happens to any one else can affect us as much as what happens to ourselves. Those people who have looked death in the face and escaped seem, almost against their volition, to bloom out and to rejoice in life itself, even though they seem to have lost everything that makes life dear. I must confess that I felt this with the people who had come into property by the death of all their families, and not with those who had lost everything. I suppose this is perfectly human and natural.

Our last day at Taormina we had tea in the enchanted garden, with some of our Sicilian friends.

In an upper room of the Timeo, Tetrazzini was singing (through the Victor) the great aria from Mignon; when it was finished, Caruso sang his song from l’Africaine.

“To hear the Etna among tenors, while we are looking at Mt. Etna,” said Patsy, “gives one a faint idea of what the old Taorminians enjoyed in their theatre!” The music over, we sat talking with our friends. One of the men, a professor, lassoed and caught round the neck a little green lizard; very soon the pretty creature was quite tame.

“Be thou quiet or I shall hurt thee, little one!” said the Professor, as he cut the lasso, and the lizard ran away with a necklace round his throat. The talk ranged wide, of books, operas, artists, everything but what was at hand. Finally the Professor held up a warning finger:

“Listen, the nightingale! He never says the same thing twice--while we--” he shrugged his shoulders, picked a scarlet poppy and stuck it in his coat.

* * * * *

“That’s Luigi,” said Patsy, as we waited for the Syracuse train on the platform at Giardini, “that beautiful old fellow with the white beard! Bonanno told me about him. He was driven quite mad by the earthquake--benevolently mad, he’s perfectly good-natured. His mind is destroyed, as far as today is concerned. What’s left alive is the most interesting thing of his life--he was one of the ‘Mille;’ he sailed from here with Garibaldi for Calabria in 1860, nearly fifty years ago--he must have been a mere boy then, can’t be so very old now--looks hard as nails. The arrival of a train seems to be his link with the past. He meets them all, and marches up and down the platform, singing patriotic songs. He doesn’t beg; I tried to give him something the other day, and he would not take it.”

As the engine slowed down, the old fisherman drew himself up to his great height and saluted. A fine man, with something very Spanish in his bearing, he must have had a drop of Castilian blood in his veins. His skin was tanned as leather, his eyes blue as the sea, his hair and beard of virile silver. As the guard blew the whistle, Luigi threw up his right hand, waved it gallantly over his head, charged across the platform, with the old cry of the Hunters of the Alps:

“_Italia e Vittorio Emanuele!_”

In the railroad carriage the people laughed. Patsy looked back at the old fisherman with that odd brightening of the eye, that in a woman ends in tears.

Down at Naxos burned a brushwood fire. The thin column of smoke mounted high in the breathless air. Here stood the altar to Apollo, where the Greek mariners, before they sailed back to Hellas, lighted a sacrificial fire.

XII

SYRACUSE

The only sounds in the quarry came from over our heads; first there was a soft rushing of wings, as a flock of birds alighted in the tree-tops, then the confused twittering of their voices as they chattered busily together; a bevy of quail had halted to rest on its flight from Africa to Europe. We listened to their plans for the next stage of the journey; orders were given, questions asked, signs and counter-signs exchanged. Then came another soft whirring noise, the sky was darkened by the shadow of wings, the air filled with sounds of flight--the aerial army was gone. We were alone again in that place of agony, “the Gethsemane of a nation,” the quarry where nine thousand Athenian captives languished and perished in their prison grave. Alone? no! Shadows of the broken remnant of that great army, that came to Syracuse to conquer and to crush and was itself crushed out of existence, crowd about us. We feel their presence, as we felt the birds’, even though we cannot see them. Here in the Latomia dei Capuccini, a hundred feet below the surface of the earth, the bitterness of that defeat is tasted again. The place that heard the groans of those sorrowing and dying men still claims its tribute of tears, and will while the imperishable spirit of Hellas rules, while from generation to generation one Grecian lives to repeat the dreadful story of Thucydides.

No defeat was ever so unexpected. The Athenians, led away by the eloquence of their evil genius, Alcibiades--he was then thirty-five years old--the wittiest, bravest, handsomest, most worthless of men, had gone mad over their anticipated victory. They would become masters of Syracuse and the other Greek cities of Sicily; when Trinacria was conquered, Athens would take Italy, Carthage, the western islands of the Mediterranean. So Athens dreamt of the empire that, five centuries later, Rome built. In 415 B.C. the Athenians began the war with Syracuse that ended in such terrible destruction, and led to the downfall of Athens. The Athenians were at first successful; they built a double wall around Syracuse, they seemed on the point of reducing the city, when something happened. Some say the total eclipse of the moon frightened Nicias, the vacillating Athenian General; others that the Athenians were made prisoners between their own lines of defence by reinforcements from perfidious Sparta, at the moment when the Athenian ships under Demosthenes were cut off by sea. The overthrow was so complete that not a ship escaped, not one man went back to Greece to tell the tale. Nicias and Demosthenes happily committed suicide; those others were left to rot and die in that living tomb, where for ten weeks long the dead and the living lay together. Months after a traveling merchant told the story of the disaster to a barber in Piraeus, supposing all Greece knew it.

The glaring stone quarry, where the Athenian captives were exposed to the burning sun by day, the bitter cold at night, while the gaily dressed Syracusan ladies, scent bottle in hand, peeped over the parapets, watching their agony curiously, is now a place of extraordinary beauty. We climbed down a flight of a hundred stairs to reach this subterranean garden, a solemn and romantic spot. The primrose colored walls of the old quarry are hung with a splendid tapestry, knotted ivy, and long trailing creepers of _madre selva_, clematis, the mother of the wood. Here and there, from some cranny in the dazzling limestone, a fig tree thrusts its strong green leaves up to the sun, the flame of the pomegranate glows beside the gold of oranges and lemons, long lines of lilies stand waiting to bloom for Easter. In the midst of this sunken garden of delight stand the busts of two great men the Syracusans of today delight to honor, Archimedes of Syracuse and Mazzini of Genoa.

“Amerigo, behold! thy compatriots! _Piano_, _piano_, so; that was a good _riverenza_!”

The father of Amerigo (porter at our hotel), a smart fellow dark as a Moor, patted his son, as the child, tugging at his scarlet cap, made us a deep bow.