Daphne: An Autumn Pastoral Part 6

CHAPTER VII

Up the long smooth road that lay by the walls of the villa came toiling a team of huge grayish oxen, with monstrous spreading horns tied with blue ribbons. The cart that they drew was filled with baskets loaded with grapes, and a whiff of their fragrance smote Daphne's nostrils as she walked on the balcony in the morning air.

"a.s.sunta, a.s.sunta!" she cried, leaning over the gray, moss-coated railing, "what is it?"

a.s.sunta was squatting on the ground in the garden below, digging with a blunt knife at the roots of a garden fern. There was a gray red cotton shawl over her head, and a lilac ap.r.o.n upon her knees.

"It's the vintage, Signorina," she answered, "the wine makes itself."

"Everything does itself in this most lazy country," remarked Daphne.

"Dresses make themselves, boots repair themselves, food eats itself.

There's just one idiom, si fa,"--

"What?" asked a.s.sunta.

"Reflections," answered the girl, smiling down on her. "a.s.sunta, may I go and help pick grapes?"

"Ma che!" screamed the peasant woman, losing her balance in her sudden emotion and going down on her knees in the loosened soil.

"The Signorina, the sister of the Contessa, go to pick grapes in the vineyard?"

"Si'" answered Daphne amiably. Her face was alive with laughter.

"But the Contessa would die of shame!" a.s.serted a.s.sunta, rising with bits of dirt clinging to her ap.r.o.n, and gesticulating with the knife.

"It would be a scandal, and all the pickers would say, 'Behold the mad English-Woman!'"

She looked up beseechingly at her mistress. She and Giacomo never could tell beforehand which sentences the Signorina was going to understand.

"Come with me!" coaxed the girl.

"But does the Signorina want to"--

"I want everything!" Daphne interrupted. "Grapes and flowers and wine and air and sunshine. I want to see and feel and taste and touch and smell everything there is. The days are too short to take it all in.

Hurry!"

As most of this outburst was in English, a.s.sunta could do nothing but look up with an air of deepened reproach. Daphne disappeared from the railing, and a minute later was at a.s.sunta's side.

"Come, come, come!" she cried, pulling her by the lilac ap.r.o.n. "Our time is brief, and we must gather rosebuds while we may. I am young and you are old, and neither of us has any time to lose."

Before she knew it, a.s.sunta was trotting meekly down the road at the young lady's heels, carrying a great flat basket for the Signorina's use in picking grapes.

They were bound for the lower slopes; the grapes ripened earlier there, the peasant woman explained, and the frosts came later. The loaded wagons that they met were going to Arata, a wine press in the valley beyond this nearest hill. Perhaps the Signorina would like to go there to see the new wine foaming in the vat? Strangers often went to see this.

Daphne's blood went singing through her veins with some new sense of freedom and release, for the gospel of this heathen G.o.d was working in her pulses. Wistfully her eyes wandered over the lovely slopes with their clothing of olive and of vine, and up and down the curling long white roads. At some turning of the way, or at some hilltop where the road seemed to touch the blue sky, surely she would see him coming with that look of divine content upon his face!

Suddenly she realized that they were inside the vineyard walls, for fragrance a.s.sailed her nostrils, fragrance of ripened grapes, of grapes crushed under foot as the swift pickers went snipping the full purple bunches with their shears.

"I shall see Bacchus coming next," she said to herself, but hoping that it would not be Bacchus. "He will go singing down the hill with the Maenads behind him, with fluttering hair and draperies."

It was not nearly so picturesque as she had hoped, she confessed to herself, as her thoughts came down to their customary level. The vineyard of her dreams, with its long, trailing vines, was not found in this country; there were only close-clipped plants trained to stakes.

But there was a sound of talking and of laughter, and the pickers, moving among the even lines in their gay rags, lent motley color to the picture. There was scarlet of waistcoat or of petticoat, blue and saffron of jacket and ap.r.o.n, and a blending of all bright tints in the kerchiefs above the hair. The rich dark soil made a background for it all: the moving figures, the clumps of pale green vine leaves, the great baskets of piled-up grapes.

a.s.sunta was chattering eagerly with a young man who smiled, and took off his hat to the Signorina, and said something polite, with a show of white teeth. Daphne did not know what it was, but she took the pair of scissors that were given her, and began to cut bunch after bunch of grapes. If she had realized that the peasant woman, her heart full of shame, had confessed to the overseer her young lady's whim, and had won permission for her to join the ranks of the pickers, she might have been less happy. As it was, she noticed nothing, but diligently cut her grapes, piling them, misty with bloom, flecked with gold sunlights, in her basket. Then she found a flat stone and sat on it, watching the workers and slowly eating a great bunch of grapes. She had woven green leaves into the cord of her red felt hat; the peasants as they pa.s.sed smiled back to her in swift recognition of her friendliness and charm.

Her thoughts flamed up within her with sudden anger at herself. This vivid joy in the encompa.s.sing beauty had but one meaning: it was her sense of the glad presence of this new creature, man or G.o.d, who seemed continually with her, were he near or far.

"I'm as foolish as a sixteen-year-old girl," she murmured, fingering the grapes in the basket with their setting of green leaves, "and yet, and yet he isn't a man, really; he is only a state of mind!"

She sat, with the cool air of autumn on her cheeks, watching the pickers, who went with even motion up the great slope. Sometimes there was silence on the hillside; now and then there was a fragment of song.

One gay, tripping air, started by three women who stood idle with arms akimbo for a moment on the hillside, was caught up and echoed back by invisible singers on the other side of the hill. And once the red-cheeked Italian lads who were carrying loaded baskets down toward the vineyard gates burst into responsive singing that made her think that she had found, on the Roman hills, some remnant of the old Bacchic music, of the alternate strains that marked the festival of the G.o.d of wine. It was something like this:--

Carlo.

"Of all the gifts of all the G.o.ds I choose the ruddy wine.

The br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.s shall be my lot"--

Giovanni (interrupting).

"Carlotta shall be mine!

Take you the grape, I only ask The shadow of the vine To screen Carlotta's golden head"--

Carlo (interrupting).

"Give me the ruddy wine."

Together.

G. "Carlotta shall be mine!"

C. "Give me the ruddy wine!"

a.s.sunta was visibly happy when the Signorina signified her willingness to go home. The pride of the house servant was touched by being compelled to come too closely in contact with the workers in the fields, and where is there pride like that of a peasant? But her joy was short-lived. Outside the great iron gates stood a team of beautiful fawn-colored oxen, with spotless flanks, and great, blue, patient eyes looking out from under broad foreheads. They were starting, with huge muscles quivering under their white skin, to carry a load of grapes to the wine press, the yield of this year being too great for the usual transportation on donkey back.

"a.s.sunta, I go too," cried Daphne.

Five minutes later the Signorina, with her unwilling handmaid at her side, rode in triumph up the broad highway with the measured motion of slow oxen feet. Place had been made for them among the grape baskets, and they sat on folded blankets, a.s.sunta's face wearing the expression of one who was a captive indeed, the Signorina's shining with simple happiness and somewhat stained by grapes.

The wine press was nothing after all but a machine, and though a certain interest attached to the great vats, hollowed out in the tufa rock, into which the new-made wine trickled, Daphne soon signified her willingness to depart. Before she left they brought her a great gla.s.s of rich red grape juice fresh from the newly crushed grapes. She touched her lips to it, then looked about her. a.s.sunta was talking to the workman who had given it to her, and he was looking the other way.

She feasted her eyes on the color of the thing she held in her hand.

It was a rough gla.s.s whose shallow bowl had the old Etruscan curves of beauty, and the crimson wine caught the sunlight in a thousand ways.

Bending over, she poured it out slowly on the green gra.s.s.

"A libation to Apollo," she said, not without reverence.

CHAPTER VIII