Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions Part 34

"It must be nearly exhaustive!" said another.

"Observe the collateral placing of remarkable persons and events," said a third.

"One could find almost anything one wanted," said a fourth.

"Ah!" they exclaimed; "oh! now if only we could manage to get a little life into some of these dead bones, how pleased Clio would be!"

They rifled the show-cases and carried off the most attractive details, each taking whatever pleased her best. They stole from Clio her transient facts and made them live again as their own by breathing into them the spirit of eternal truth and re-stating them in folk-lore, in tradition, in verse, in romance, in melody, in superst.i.tion, in outline, in colour, in modelling, in the movements of the dance; they set them up in libraries, in concert-rooms, in picture-galleries, in theatres, in churches, in corridors of sculpture, in the hearts of the people. This was not what Clio had intended; she was not at all pleased; she complained that her sisters had meddled, they had robbed her of her chief possessions and left the remainder in disorder; her collection no longer corresponded with the catalogue. In attempting to reconstruct she floundered into such blunders that the saying has come down to us: Blessed are the people that have no history, for they shall not be misrepresented.

Strictly speaking, of course, every man has history, such as it is, and the beat.i.tude was intended to refer only to those whose history has escaped the attention of the muses as that of Arethusa did for many ages.

We know enough, however, to guess that her exile cannot have been pa.s.sed in solitude and, if only we had her Visitors' Book complete, we should have something that would keep many learned persons busy. We get an early glimpse of her on her underground journey, pa.s.sing near enough to the dread abode of Pluto to overhear some scandal about

That fair field Of Enna where Proserpine, gathering flowers, Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis Was gathered.

She did not fully understand, but the nymph Cyane, who dwelt in another fountain up the river Anapo and remembered the affair, gave her full particulars; she made a mental note of it all and imparted the information to Ceres, who came weeping and telling her grief as she wandered the world in search of her lost daughter.

Venus, in one or other of her manifestations, was and is a welcome visitor; she rises from the sea as constantly as Arethusa falls into it, and some little time ago gave the nymph, for a keepsake, a portrait of herself as Venere Anadiomene done in marble. I know enough about painting not to be afraid to own that I know nothing about it, whereas with regard to sculpture my ignorance is so unfathomable that I can have no hesitation in saying what I think about this statue, which is that it is a pity it has been broken. If only it had its head and its right arm it would be an entry of which the owner of any visitors' book might well be proud. It is now in the museum of Ortigia, where there is also a marble portrait of Cupid as he comes riding into the Great Harbour mounted on his dolphin's back.

Diana, sailing through the night, seated in her silver chair, comes regularly to Ortigia. Arethusa always receives her with the respect and honour due to her Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair. Some centuries ago she built her a temple with Doric columns and everything handsome about it; she put inside it a statue of the G.o.ddess, and the people forsook their old deity, whatever she was called, and went to the new temple worshipping Diana.

Phoenician traders came and did business with Arethusa, some of it not very straight business; for Ctesius, the king of the place, had a woman-servant, very tall and comely, who was from their own country; they cajoled her in ways that no woman can resist and, partly by means of "a necklace of gold with amber beads strung among it," induced her to go away with them one evening, and she took with her out of the palace three cups and the king's son, a child just able to run about. She may have thought of taking the boy because she had herself been kidnapped from Sidon, brought to Ortigia and sold to Ctesius. Before they had been a week on the voyage, Diana struck the woman dead and the traders threw her body overboard to the seals and fishes. We should never have known her tragic end but for the fact that the _Odyssey_ was written by a woman jealous for the honour of her s.e.x. The boy was afterwards sold to Laertes, the father of Ulysses, in whose service he put on immortality as the swineherd Eumaeus. {294}

Early Greeks also did business with Arethusa and left with her vases, gold rings, gla.s.s beads, ivory combs and other objects which she still preserves in her museum. Later on, in quite modern days, about the time that Rome was being founded, less than eight centuries before Christ, other Greeks came from Corinth, turned out the Sikels and established a colony of their own in Ortigia.

After this Arethusa was no longer among those who have no history in any sense of the word. The records become less scanty, even voluminous, and they are more legible. The books are full of the great names of her visitors and of those native to her island. We read of the Tyrants, of AEschylus and Pindar, of Theocritus and Archimedes; of the great siege when the Athenians failed to take the city; of Cicero coming to view the locality when preparing his speeches against Verres; of the five parts into which ancient Siracusa was divided, namely, Ortigia, on the island, and those four others with the beautiful names on the mainland, Achradina, Tyche, Neapolis, Epipolae, the memory of whose former splendour still trembles among their ruins.

I do not know whether Ptolemy Philadelphos actually visited the nymph, but I have read somewhere that the papyrus which now grows where she rises was originally a present from him. It does not look so healthy as that which grows in the Fontana Cyane up the river Anapo across the harbour, and which he also sent to her.

About three hundred years after the statue of Venus was made, S. Paul, being on his way to Rome, was shipwrecked at Malta, where he remained three months. He sailed away in the _Castor and Pollux_ of Alexandria, landed at Siracusa and tarried there three days. We know what S. Paul must have thought of Diana from the account of what happened at Ephesus, where the G.o.ddess was also worshipped; it is probable that he was among those who disbelieved in the eternal virginity of Arethusa, and he surely must have disapproved of the frequent visits of Venus and Cupid. In time the people of Ortigia professed themselves converted to his views and made a change, but they made it in a half-hearted way; for instead of pulling down the heathen temple, so that not one stone should be left upon another, they allowed the Doric columns to remain and merely filled up the intercolumniations with building material and baptised it into the Christian faith with a coat of whitewash and a new name. In other respects they went on very much as before.

Saracens visited the nymph, and Normans; Egyptians, Germans, Goths, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Albanians all came and all bequeathed some record of their coming. Many of them left their autographs written one over the other upon the forms and features of the ancestors of those who still have their dwelling in her island.

Lord Nelson on his way to the Nile, where the papyrus came from, sailed into the Great Harbour with his fleet and did business with the nymph.

He wrote to Sir William and Lady Hamilton:

Thanks to your exertions we have victualled and watered; and surely, having watered at the fountain of Arethusa we must have victory.

What a picture these words call up of Arethusa welcoming Nelson's jolly tars! They are coming in their pinnaces and filling their barrels and kegs with the waters of the sacred spring and, as they row back across the harbour to the ships, one can almost hear them singing of "Tom Bowling," "Black-eyed Susan" and "The Roast Beef of Old England."

I have myself seen the German Emperor visiting Arethusa. His yacht, the _Hohenzollern_, was in the Great Harbour, and one afternoon I watched his suite being put ash.o.r.e in little boats, like Nelson's sailors, only there was no singing, and presently he came in a little boat and they all drove away in carriages to the Cappuccini, where I read in the _Giornale di Sicilia_ that they inspected the latomia and took tea. They pa.s.sed quite close to me and, although I had never seen His Majesty before, I was bold enough to raise my hat to him; he observed my salute and most affably returned it. I thought him looking extremely well.

The Kaiser landed at the Pa.s.seggiata Aretusa, a promenade that runs under shady trees between the Great Harbour and the cliff on which the city is built. It leads south to a garden, and further progress appears to be blocked by a b.u.t.tress of the cliff; but the b.u.t.tress is pierced by a tunnel, through which a path leads to another garden lying in an enclosure protected from the harbour by a wall which encircles it; the wall slopes down and on the top of it runs a path up which one can walk and so enter the town without returning through the tunnel.

In this enclosure is the famous Fontana Aretusa, but there is nothing about it that reminds one of the fountains of the Crystal Palace or of Versailles. One first catches sight of a pond and then of a spring bubbling into it with irresistible volubility at the north end; at the south end the water tumbles out into the harbour through a hole in the sea wall. The surface of the pond is below the level of the pa.s.seggiata and probably the bed of it is below the level of the water in the harbour, so that, as Cicero observed, it is the wall that keeps out the waves and if the hole had been pierced lower the pond would be submerged by the sea. On the sides of the cliff and on the wall grow plants with aromatic leaves and flowers, and one can walk round the pond and watch the fish which are, or ought to be, the descendants of those which Cicero saw, as they swim about among the roots of Ptolemy's papyrus. The water is not now used for washing, but I suspect that the Sidonian woman who stole the little Eumaeus was so using it, for she was washing near the ship of her countrymen when they got into conversation with her, and their ship would be moored in the Great Harbour, close by the fountain.

I drank of this water, following the example of all visitors and of many of the inhabitants who believe it to produce a beneficial effect upon the digestion. It may have been good enough for Nelson, and I trust that the digestions of his sailors derived benefit from it--anyhow, they had victory at the battle of the Nile--but for a modern Londoner, accustomed to do business with the Metropolitan Water Board, it is too salt, which is perhaps why the papyrus here looks less flourishing than that up the Anapo. The water tastes as though Arethusa had been the heroine of another story besides the one with the uncertain ending about Alpheus--one with Neptune as the villain and an ending tragic enough to justify S. Paul in his att.i.tude towards the nymph. Some who adopt this view suppose that Neptune's designs were forwarded by an earthquake which, they think, must have occurred since Nelson's time, because he speaks as though he gave his sailors the water of the spring; but that is not enough to date the disturbance. It is some distance from Greece to Sicily, and along all those miles, during all those ages, there may have been many earthquakes, any one of which would have served Neptune's turn; some may have been before S. Paul's time, some before Eumaeus was born, some in still earlier days. If the earthquake had already been, Nelson must have observed the brackishness of the spring and he would then have preferred to take his water from the usual fresh source which supplied the inhabitants of his day, and, in speaking of "having watered at the fountain of Arethusa," he would be trusting to Lady Hamilton's familiarity with that figure which permits the part to be put for the whole.

I have visited Arethusa many times. Once, on a calm evening in early summer, Diana was high up in the sky, shining over the harbour; although, like others, she may not have been sure which was her temple and which was Minerva's, she could not help wondering whether anything was ever going to be done about openly restoring them both to their ancient worship. She was, however, comforting herself in the meantime with the reflection that neither she nor Minerva had much to complain of, inasmuch as it was clear that if it were not for the support of those Doric columns the modern Church would not stand as it does, and after all, she thought, "What's in a name?" Down below in the pa.s.seggiata, officers and young men were strolling about, listening to a pot-pourri of _Faust_.

Their cheeks were shaved smooth to show the modelling and their moustaches gave evidence of hours of toil and even suffering; they met their friends and gesticulated with them, smoking cigarettes and being polite to everyone. Mothers and elder sisters in cool white dresses sat under the trees, and little parties of children darted away from them, hand in hand, returning after breathless excursions. I took a seat among it all and, as the King of Thule, in honour of his lady, was drinking for the last time out of his golden cup, a young voice over my shoulder demanded two soldi. I turned and thought I recognised the speaker; surely he must have left his dolphin in the Great Harbour where the Phoenician traders used to moor their ships, and put on his sailor suit at the Custom House.

"Very well, Cupid," I replied, "I don't mind giving you two soldi, but why do you ask as though you were ent.i.tled to them? And why do you wear that red tam-o'-shanter? And how old are you, if you please?"

He said he was seven and the cap was his uniform; he was collecting the pennies for the chairs. So I gave him two soldi and another for himself and saw him scamper happily away and join a knot of brother Cupids who were playing together round a lamp-post. He showed them the soldo I had given him for himself and the meeting became as ebullient and full of excitement as the Arethusa herself.

He reappeared while Siebel, with the voice of a clarinet, was beginning to tell the flowers what they were to say to Margherita. This time he brought a foreign penny and wanted to know why they had refused to take it at the marionette theatre. I looked at it and said:

"If you want to know about this coin, mount your dolphin again and direct his course to distant Argentina, the people of that country will tell you all about it and will give you its full value. You will have a delightful voyage and, if I were not such a bad sailor, I believe I should ask you to take me with you."

It seemed, however, that his dolphin was tired and I was to give him ten centimes down and done with it. He was such a jolly little fellow that just for the pleasure of seeing him smile again I gave him the soldi in exchange for his coin and he danced away in delight.

Margherita in prison was crazily recalling the strains of the waltz she had heard--Ah, what ages ago it seemed!--when she was yet a happy girl, as pure as Arethusa in h.e.l.las, and through the waltz I heard the young voice again over my shoulder. He was asking me to give him bronze for an Italian nickel piece of twenty centesimi. It was a bad one. I told him so and accused him of attempting to utter counterfeit coin. He laid his two hands on his breast, raised his elbows, threw back his head with conscious innocence and swore on the honour of his mother that the coin was good. He did it so well--so beautifully--that for a moment I was tempted to wonder whether he might perhaps be speaking the truth, but I glanced again at his coin and recovered myself.

"Now look here, Cupid," I said, "I don't want to breathe a syllable against the honour of your mother, but you know better than anyone that when a woman loses her head you are generally to blame. This is your doing"--and I took out of my pocket and showed him a post-card I had bought that morning in the Via Roma with a reproduction of the Venere Anadiomene. "And men also have lost their heads because of you. I am not the only one who has heard about the Duca di Bronte and Lady Hamilton. Look round at these beautiful ladies and at these brave officers and young men--do they not bear upon their forms and features the signatures of Arethusa's foreign visitors? You ought to be able to decipher that palimpsest, if anyone can, for it was you who taught them to write; Ortigia would never have seen them if it had not been for you.

And why are they sitting under the trees and walking about in the moonlight, do you suppose?"

He replied that they had come out to listen to the music and he wished there were more of them because then he would get more pennies.

"What!" I exclaimed; "people who do not even recognise a modulation to the dominant when they hear one come out to listen to music! You know better than that. They have not come out because of Gounod, they have come because of you. It is always the same old story. It was your fault that Alpheus chased Arethusa out of Greece and that Proserpine was carried off from Enna. It was you who suggested to those Phoenician traders that the nurse of the little Eumaeus would be good company for them, and you who made her consent to go. This music, of which I should have heard more this evening but for your frequent interruptions, you were at the bottom of it all. And it is because you are always hanging about the theatre that those wretched puppets are so constantly going mad for love of one another."

He pouted and said I was making myself disagreeable and that there had been plenty to praise him.

I replied: "Yes; you swallow the praise, but you won't listen to the blame."

He said that as for the praise or the blame it was nothing to him one way or the other. He was too much interested in the future of the race to care about any of those old stories--they bored him--and, please, wouldn't I leave off preaching and give him four soldi?

I replied: "You have immortal youth without the troublesome necessity of periodically dying and rising again; on that stage of the world where we mortals, untrained amateurs, improvise the drama of our lives, you have always been behind the scenes, inspiring and stage-managing more history and more poetry than has ever been written; without you Clio would never have built herself a treasure-house or, if she had made one, her sisters would have found in it nothing worth stealing; it is you who direct the modulation from the old generation to the young; it is your voice that is heard every Easter behind the bells and the music of the Gloria. And now you ask for riches! No wonder we complain that you are unreasonable.

Can you not be satisfied and, in looking after the future of the race, put a little more variety into its history and its poetry? Why do you so often begin a story as comedy and end it as tragedy? It is unworthy of you to play fast and loose with us; great poets do not do so. But there!

you are too young to know what conscience is, and I am afraid you are too old to learn."

He replied that he was not accustomed to be talked to in this way and did not know what I meant by it.

I said: "Very well, I will leave off preaching, and perhaps you will allow me to conclude with a piece of advice that ought to be acceptable to one whose ambition it is to become a millionaire. You cannot have forgotten where you put your mother's head. Now, be a sensible boy for once, run away and find it, take it to Dr. Orsi up there in the museum and he will give you plenty of soldi for it--more than you can count, and no questions asked about honour."

He laughed and said I seemed to take a good deal of interest in the personal appearance of his mother who, he thought, could be trusted to look after herself, and that so long as a woman's heart was in the right place it did not much matter what she did with her head. Besides, even if he were to find the head, he knew nothing about business and a scientific man in a museum would be sure to get the better of him.

There is no resisting Cupid, so I let him think he had got the better of me, gave him four soldi and added his coin to my collection of similar pieces, while he frisked away back to his friends boasting of his success, as Cupid will. He had not quite done with me, however, he came once more to see whether I should be likely to give him a cigarette, but a rough man caught him, told him not to worry the gentry, boxed his ears for him and drove him from me.

Fancy boxing the ears of a young Greek G.o.d off a dolphin's back within sound of the Fontana Aretusa!

And yet, perhaps the rough man was right. I have sometimes thought since that it cannot have been really Cupid who came to me that evening; I must have been wasting my time and money, as others have done before, upon some false G.o.d, false as his counterfeit coin, one of those who go up and down the world seeking whom they may despoil. Well, let it be so. One does not keep an account of the hours and minutes one spends in a country where the existence of time is scarcely recognised, and as for the money--of all the mult.i.tudes of men who have been fooled by Commerce in the guise of Love only a few have had the luck to escape with a total loss not exceeding four-pence half-penny.

THE END