Part 3

I haunted the station in those days, watching the departure of the bands of engineers, firemen, doctors, medical students that went down from Rome by every train that left for Naples. From Milan, from Turin, from Florence, from every city or town of northern Italy, help poured down towards the stricken country. The Knights of Malta sent a field hospital and a corps of doctors and nurses. Food, clothes, medicines, tents, nurses, doctors, the great stream of help flowed steadily towards the south. The railroads were not equal to the tremendous strain put upon them, and the congestion of traffic was one of the hardest of Italy’s trials. Her people were starving, dying of cold and hunger, while the whole railroad system was congested and the good food and the warm clothes, instead of reaching the poor victims, were shunted on side-tracks or delayed in freight houses for weeks, even months. It was inevitable that this should have happened; the same thing would have happened in any country. But everything was against Italy. The unheard-of severity of the winter was not the least element of danger and difficulty. The railroad is managed by the Government, that poor overburdened Government that tries its best to carry the great weight put upon it. The strain of carrying south the vast stream of provisions and supplies and of carrying north the enormous numbers of the refugees flying from Sicily was too much for it. What nation, what railroad system could have handled such a situation? One sinister commodity took precedence of all others--quicklime; already the menace of pestilence was in people’s minds, for now we knew that in Messina, a city of 200,000 souls, more than half the inhabitants had perished.

On Saturday, the second of January, Athol asked me to visit one of the first families of refugees who had arrived in Rome. I found them in a gaunt new barrack of a house in an arid street of one of the ugliest quarters of new Rome.

“You have some _superstiti_ here?” I inquired of the porter’s wife, who came out of the little den where she lived and cooked (chiefly garlic it appeared), for her husband and children.

“Oh yes, poor people! You will find them on the second floor. You are not the first who has asked for them.” She stopped and looked at me curiously. “Excuse me, you too have perhaps come to inquire for news of some relative down there?”

“No, no, thank Heaven! only to ask if I can do anything for them.”

“So much the better! There is enough to do.” The porter’s wife nodded and went back to her cooking. I climbed two long flights of the cheap, stark building and rang a strident bell. The thin varnished pine door was opened a crack, and a handsome slatternly woman looked out. When I asked to see the _profughi_, she stood aside and let me pass. In the entry I met two people coming out, a shabby man with a hard dry face like an eagle’s and a very beautiful young girl with a waxen complexion. When they heard me ask for the _profughi_ they stopped and looked at me so intently that I paused and looked helplessly back at them.

“You have asked to see the _profughi_,” said the man in a harsh dry voice; “do you possibly know something of them--or of others--down there--?”

“Nothing. And you?--do you know anything of Messina?”

“I?” laughed the eagle-faced man drearily, “I am of Messina. This one also,” he looked at the girl, “though I never saw her till today. We go here, there, together, asking news--her people are all there and mine.”

“Come,” said the girl, “do not let us waste time.” She spoke with authority as one used to giving orders and having them obeyed. I noticed then how sumptuously she was dressed. They went down the stairs together, a strange pair, the shabby eagle-faced man and the young lovely lady. I never saw the girl again, or knew whether she found those for whom she sought.

“It is the truth that I have not had five minutes to comb myself today,” said the _padrona_, who had opened the door, a dark woman of the noble Trasteverine type. She smoothed her magnificent black hair that lay in full natural waves over her low forehead, and pulled up the collar of her white jacket to hide her beautiful bronze throat. “Believe me, Signora, that blessed bell has never stopped ringing. Holy Apostles! One would think that the Messinesi were different from other Christians, that they had two heads, everybody must have a look at them.”

“I am sorry to disturb you,” I began.

“No, no,” she said, “I did not mean that. What is it to do? They are relations of relations of my husband’s. They knew our name and address in Rome and, having no other friends, they came to us. They arrived yesterday. We have taken the furniture out of one of our rooms, borrowed a few beds, and done what we could to make them comfortable. Poor souls! Anything that you can do--” she threw open the door of a large apartment, evidently the property room of some theatrical company. The floor space on the left was taken up with bundles of stage costumes neatly folded and tagged. A white toga with an olive wreath and a pair of sandals lay next a costume Othello might have worn, judging by the coffee-colored stockinette tucked into the yellow satin cloak. On the right of the door were four decent beds; in the corner stood a dining table with a loaf of bread, a green wicker basket of ricotta, and a flask of Genzano. The room was half full of people.

“This lady wishes to talk with the Messinesi,” cried the _padrona_, good-naturedly elbowing the crowd, evidently friends and hangers-on of the house. “You have seen them, yes? They only have two eyes apiece and one mouth? Well, then make room for the stranger lady. She may do something besides stare at the poor abandoned creatures.”

The people readily fell back and I found myself face to face with one of the first families of the survivors who had reached Rome. At sight of them I was overcome with suffocating emotion. It was a full minute before I could speak, before I could see through the sudden mist that blinded me. It was as if their sufferings had set them apart, their sorrows hallowed them.

In the middle of the group stood an old man and woman, holding each other by the hand. Both were bent and wan looking; the woman seemed the less shaken of the two. She had a wonderful shrivelled face with gray-blue eyes and a brown seamed skin, stooping shoulders covered by a small peasant shawl, and an alert wiry little body. It was my business to ask certain questions, but it was more than a minute before I could get out the words.

“What are your names?”

“I am Rosina Calabresi,” the staunch old woman quavered. “This is my husband; he cannot talk much yet. He is better now, but for three days after the earthquake he could not say a word. This is our son Francesco, and this is his wife.” Francesco, a soft-eyed young man, patted his wife’s hand; she hid her face on his shoulder and began to weep. “This is my grandson,” Rosina continued, “he is of Reggio. He was staying with us that he might go to school in Messina. His mother is my eldest daughter. We have not yet heard from his parents. We do not know whether they are alive or dead.”

The boy, a pale, interesting lad of fourteen, looked at me with serious unmoved face.

“My husband was a government employé formerly,” the old woman continued; “he was a postman.” She shook him gently by the arm. “Cannot you speak to the lady?” The old postman moved his lips dumbly. “He is only seventy-eight years old, and I am seventy,” Rosina went on. “Francesco is our youngest son.” I asked the young woman her name.

“Lucia,” she said, and hid her face again. The young man comforted her.

“She will do better soon,” said the old woman, nodding to me.

“When do you expect the baby?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “it will be nine months tomorrow, the first child, we have not been married quite a year.” Her soft eyes overflowed again.

“Do not cry. You have your husband and you will have your child. That is something to be thankful for. Did all your family escape?”

“Yes, all that were in our house, six of us,” said Francesco. “We do not know about the others.” I heard a deep sigh behind me and turned to see a little wan child, bandaged and pillowed up in a great bed. She never stirred or smiled during my whole visit. When I spoke to her, she only gazed at me with great sombre eyes that had lost their childishness, eyes that had seen sights of horror they could never forget.

“That is my grandchild Caterina,” the old woman explained. “She has been lame from birth. When we escaped from the house I carried her in my arms. As we ran the earth beneath us opened and threw stones at us. One of them struck Caterina and broke her lame leg.”

“Tell me how you escaped?”

The young man, Francesco Calabresi, a plumber of Messina, now spoke:

“We slept in two rooms on the ground floor behind the shop. We were all asleep in bed when the earthquake came. There were three long shocks and the earth groaned as it rocked from side to side as if it were in pain. Though the house fell down about us we were not hurt. The door into the street was jammed and would not open. I found a small hole in the wall near it and managed to crawl through it and to help the others out.”

“It was dark, and cold, and it rained--Oh, God, how it rained!” cried the old woman, “and we were all, except Lucia, naked as the day we were born.”

Lucia smiled for the first time and opened her dress to show me her high chemise.

“Yes, I had this on; it was the only thing we saved.” She was evidently proud that she alone of all the family had escaped with a garment to hide her nakedness. In Sicily the old Italian habit of sleeping without night clothes still prevails. There is a widespread prejudice against night clothes. Nena, an old Venetian servant, once told me that it was very unwholesome to sleep _dressed_. This absolute nakedness, both of the living and of the dead, seemed to the rescuers the last touch of horror.

“It was quite dark,” the old woman continued, “only out over the sea there was a strange light like fire. We found our way to the Villa Mazzini. Part of the railing and the gates had been thrown down so that we could get into the garden. That is how we escaped being killed. We waited together till it was light, then Francesco went and tried to find help. We stayed in the villa two days and two nights. The rain never stopped for one moment. We had no food, no clothes, no shelter, but we were alive and safe.”

“Did you see any of your neighbors?”

“No, but as we ran we heard people all about us crying ‘_misericordia_.’”

“Did you expect to escape?”

“Oh, no! I believed it was the end of the world. The earth shook and rumbled underneath us. When it grew light it seemed as if the mountains of Calabria were coming at us across the straits to crush us.”

Francesco now took up the story: “I made my way down to the Faro. When it was light I found a boat and rowed out to the ships in the harbor. Later, when the Russian vessels came, they gave me a little food and a few clothes. In the end they took us on board their ship, they fed and clothed us. Russians, did I say, Signora? No, they were angels. They took us and many, many others to Naples on their great ship. At Naples the highest _signoria_ waited upon us as if they had been servants. They gave us white bread and wine and more clothes, shoes also, and they showed us the kindness of brothers and sisters. We shall never forget them. Then the Duchess of Aosta paid our fare to Rome.”

“What? The railroad did not take you free?”

“Oh, no! Every one was paid for by the _Duchessa benedetta_.”

As they seemed pleased to have me stay with them, I sat and comforted them as well as I could for an hour. After a little Lucia came and sat beside me and promised me that she would not grieve when her time came to go to the hospital. We made out a list of the things most needed, headed by a set of plumber’s tools for Francesco and a basket for the baby to sleep in. I promised to return in a few days, and as I rose to take leave they clung to me as if I had been an old friend.

“Is it your wish in the future,” I said to Francesco, “to remain in Rome, or later to return to Messina?” Even now we outsiders had not yet grasped the awful completeness of the disaster.

At my question Rosina became terrified, and for the first time in our interview lost her self-control. She threw both her hands above her head with a dreadful gesture of despair and shrieked:

“Messina? What is it that you say? _Messina non esiste più!_”

It was from Rosina that the eagle-faced man had got his phrase; it was from her that I for the first time had an inkling of the true extent of the calamity. When I look back at these last months during which I have lived with the thought of Messina always with me, till it seems as if the word Messina must be found seared upon my heart when I am dead, I hear those words, “_Messina non esiste più!_” When I pass in review the hundreds of survivors I have seen and talked with in Rome, Syracuse, Palermo, finally in Messina itself, I see clearest of all the face of Rosina, the ancient woman; I hear her shriek of woe:

“_Messina non esiste più!_”

II

THE STRAITS OF DEATH

Wednesday, December 30th, the King and Queen of Italy sailed through the straits and into the harbor of Messina. As their ship, the “Vittorio Emanuele,” approached the Faro, the gunners of the Russian cruisers, the English men-of-war, and the Italian battleships began to fire the royal salute.

“Cease firing!” The signal flashed from the King’s ship; this was no time for royal salvos. The “Vittorio Emanuele” crept cautiously along, feeling every inch of her way, for a new terror had been added to the old perils of Scylla and Charybdis. It was said that under the seething waters of the uneasy straits a submarine volcano had arisen, and no one knew how much the bottom of straits or harbor had been altered by the action of this hidden volcano.

A fleet of small boats filled with desperate half-naked men put off from the shore and surrounded the King’s ship. This was the third day after the earthquake; the survivors were starving, dying of cold and hunger, when in every Italian village men and women had taken the clothes from their backs, the food from their mouths for them, when in Rome the poor prisoners in the gaols had voted to a man that the little sums they had earned and put by against their release should be spent for them. The shivering figures in the boats stretched out appealing hands towards the King.

“_Aiutarteci, aiutarteci!_” they cried. “Help us, Majesty. Give us to eat, give us to drink, clothes to cover us, the abandoned of God and man!” These broken men were the King’s escort, their frenzied cries Messina’s greeting to her sovereign. In a crazy felucca a tall old sailor held up a hand to silence the clamoring crew, snatched a red biretta from his silver curls, waved it above his head with a ringing cry:

“Evviva! We have the King, we have all!”

“Thou sayest well, Luigi,” the young _avvocato_, Arcangelo Bonanno, called out from the pier. He knew Luigi, the old fisherman, and had sailed with him from Giardini to Messina

in the “Stella del Mare,” one of the few boats spared by the tidal wave that had made total wrecks of most of the fishing smacks along the coast.

As the “Vittorio Emanuele” neared the shore those on board saw the white façade of the palazzata through the gray rain--for still it rained and always rained a fine cold rain, “not quite like any other rain,” as Rosina Calabresi had said. “Earthquake rain” I remember she called it. At first sight it seemed as if the palazzata--the splendid row of palaces two miles long, that lined the sickle-shaped harbor fronting the straits--was little damaged. As they came nearer they saw that the outer wall, with its sculptured façade of graceful reclining goddesses, was an empty shell.

“There were three shocks,” Rosina said. “One from side to side, one up and down as if the earth jumped under us, one round and round; that was the worst, the very earth groaned with the pain of it.”

These three shocks that reduced the beautiful city of Messina to a heap of ruins, lasted just thirty-two seconds! The sidewise movement threw down the side walls; then the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth floors, with all that in them lived, dropped one over the other in awful chaos to the bottom of the cellars. Along the water front high in air hung a cloud of dun smoke; for after earthquake and tidal wave came fire. That drifting smoke was the only thing in sight that moved as the King approached; it might have been the soul of Messina hanging over the dead city.

The King’s launch made its way through the harbor’s dreadful debris,--there were floating corpses everywhere,--and drew up at the heavy stone quay; here the land looked like the waves of the sea, in some places it had sunk six feet below the water, in others it had been heaved high in air. A long line of unrecognized dead had been laid out for identification; naked and helpless the poor disfigured corpses washed to and fro with the tide, while those among the survivors who had the heart and courage tried to find a name for each. Our friend the Avvocato Bonanno (he had spent the night of the 28th in Taormina and so escaped destruction) was helping make up the tragic rollcall.

“That is Maddalena, youngest daughter of Count Q.; I danced with her on Christmas Day. This is her old grandmother, yes, I am sure, I remember the little mole on her cheek. And this--might be Nina, the eldest daughter; look for an emerald scarab on her left hand. Ah, God, the human brutes!” The emerald ring, the finger it had graced were both gone, cut off by ghouls that rob the dead.

The launch touched the quay, and the King stepped on shore where he was met by the few city officials who had survived. The spokesman began a halting address of welcome:

“The visit of your august majesty is an honor that we shall never forget, in the name of the city--“

The King cut the good man short with an abrupt:

“_Scusi_, do not let us talk nonsense,” and in silence led the way to the barracks where hundreds of his brave soldiers had perished.

“Snuffed out,” Bonanno said, “or so we hope, like so many rush candles.” A few steps farther on the King met four soldiers carrying a wounded officer on a litter. The King glanced at the man and a flash of recognition lighted his face.

“_Fermate!_” he cried. The bearers set down the litter; the King propped the poor head, rolling helplessly from side to side, with a fragment of gray military cloak folded for a pillow, wiped the ashen face, and whispered the one brave word ever on his lips “_Coraggio!_”

The streets through which the King passed were mountains of rubbish, the houses heaps of ruins, the air pestilential; the fire still burned in many places, and the smell of roasting flesh was simply overpowering. The few survivors who hung about the ruins added to the despair of the scene; some crazed with hunger, thirst, despair, behaved like maddened children; they talked of their dead or lost families with the terrible indifference of the insane; their minds were not strong enough to grasp what had happened. Others, oftenest women, appealed to every passer-by, imploring help in their frenzied efforts to reach some beloved being buried under tons of masonry. A woman tearing desperately with her bare hands at a huge mass of stone it would have taken a regiment of men a week to move recognized the King; she ran as if in frantic haste, threw

herself at his feet, raised her bleeding hands in an agony of appeal.

“_Maestá, aiuto!_ Save them! They are alive. I hear them, my husband, my son, my only son.”

“It is too much,” the King broke from her with a sob. “Help her, you others, if you can,” he cried to his aides and pushed on through the ghastly ruin of what three days ago had been the famous Marina, one of the most beautiful streets in the world.

“The King’s walk through Messina,” said Bonanno the _avvocato_ who followed him, “was like the walk of Dante and Virgil through the Inferno. At every step raving men, weeping women clutched at him, clung to him, stretched out their hands to him. Those hands! I dream of them now, hairy hands of men, transparent hands of women, old shrivelled hands with gripping fingers, chubby hands of little children lifted to the King, as if he could help them. I would not have been in his place, no, not for three kingdoms.”

From that desperate throng one tragic figure must stand out clear in the King’s memory as it does in Bonanno’s--the Deputy Ludovico Fulci pacing back and forth before the ruin of his brother’s house. Though Bonanno knew him well, he did not at first recognize him; in four days the deputy had grown twenty years older.

“Nicoló, Nicoló! Art thou yet alive?” he shrieked. “Oh, my brother, make one little sign! Until tonight I heard his voice crying for help! It has grown weaker and weaker; now I hear no sound. If help had come in time, I could have saved him, saved my brother, do you hear? Him, his wife, his little child, God knows how many others now dead, _sotto le macerie_.”

Under the masonry! No one who was in Italy during this dreadful season will ever forget that phrase, “_sotto le macerie_,” the deadly refrain of the great tragedy. Where is your mother, your lover, your child? The answer was always the same “_sotto le macerie_.”

The King, Bonanno said, above all else insisted that his visit should bring no interruption to the rescue work: indeed it proved an impetus to it, for he did much to establish something approaching system. The work of excavation was begun by the Russian sailors. Three Russian warships, the “Cesarevich,” the “Makaroff” and the “Slava,” cruising off the Calabrian coast, met a vessel--some say English, some say Italian--flying to Naples with the news of the earthquake: the Russians hurried to Messina, they were the first to arrive on the ground. What they did there Sicily will remember as long as her history survives. Like Francesco Calabresi, my plumber, the Avvocato Bonanno described their work in rescuing the entombed men, women and children as something superhuman.

“They did not wait for orders, they did not need them; each of them was an inspired leader; they saw no danger, but rushed like madmen among crumbling ruins, toppling walls; they worked like Titans I tell you. The English were not long behind the Russians, as you may believe. What a people! We Sicilians know what we owe them! Did these foreigners save many lives? Yes, hundreds, thousands of lives. More than all, the sight of their incredible labors--I say it to you again, they worked like gods not men--broke the spell of apathy that at first held us powerless. _Madonna mia!_ I myself felt it, though at Taormina the shock was light. At first I was stunned, dazed, lacked power to lift a hand! These unfortunates, you may believe, were worse. The first man I met after I returned to Messina was a colleague of mine; we had worked in the same office. He was quite stupefied. He did not know if any of his family had escaped or not, he did not seem to care. The visit of the King roused the people; ah! it was like cordial to one who faints. Imagine, on the fourth day hardly a cup of water, scarcely a loaf of bread had come to us from the outside. Was it wonderful we believed the end of the world had come, that we were abandoned by God and man?”