Saunterings Part 13

I was sure that I had seen her before, looking down from the balcony of a villa just beyond the Roman wall, for the face was not one that even the most unimpressible idler would forget. I was sure that, young as she was, she had already a history; had lived her life, and now walked amid these groves and old streets in a dream. The story which I heard is not long.

In the drawing-room of the Villa Nardi was shown, and offered for sale, an enormous counterpane, crocheted in white cotton. Loop by loop, it must have been an immense labor to knit it; for it was fashioned in pretty devices, and when spread out was rich and showy enough for the royal bed of a princess. It had been crocheted by Fiammetta for her marriage, the only portion the poor child could bring to that sacrament.

Alas! the wedding was never to be; and the rich work, into which her delicate fingers had knit so many maiden dreams and hopes and fears, was offered for sale in the resort of strangers. It could not have been want only that induced her to put this piece of work in the market, but the feeling, also, that the time never again could return when she would have need of it. I had no desire to purchase such a melancholy coverlet, but I could well enough fancy why she would wish to part with what must be rather a pall than a decoration in her little chamber.

Fiammetta lived with her mother in a little villa, the roof of which is in sight from my sunny terrace in the Villa Nardi, just to the left of the square old convent tower, rising there out of the silver olive-boughs,--a tumble-down sort of villa, with a flat roof and odd angles and parapets, in the midst of a thrifty but small grove of lemons and oranges. They were poor enough, or would be in any country where physical wants are greater than here, and yet did not belong to that lowest cla.s.s, the young girls of which are little more than beasts of burden, accustomed to act as porters, bearing about on their heads great loads of stone, wood, water, and baskets of oranges in the shipping season. She could not have been forced to such labor, or she never would have had the time to work that wonderful coverlet.

Giuseppe was an honest and rather handsome young fellow of Sorrento, industrious and good-natured, who did not bother his head much about learning. He was, however, a skillful workman in the celebrated inlaid and mosaic woodwork of the place, and, it is said, had even invented some new figures for the inlaid pictures in colored woods. He had a little fancy for the sea as well, and liked to pull an oar over to Capri on occasion, by which he could earn a few francs easier than he could saw them out of the orangewood. For the stupid fellow, who could not read a word in his prayer-book, had an idea of thrift in his head, and already, I suspect, was laying up liras with an object. There are one or two dandies in Sorrento who attempt to dress as they do in Naples.

Giuseppe was not one of these; but there was not a gayer or handsomer gallant than he on Sunday, or one more looked at by the Sorrento girls, when he had on his clean suit and his fresh red Phrygian cap. At least the good Fiammetta thought so, when she met him at church, though I feel sure she did not allow even his handsome figure to come between her and the Virgin. At any rate, there can be no doubt of her sentiments after church, when she and her mother used to walk with him along the winding Ma.s.sa road above the sea, and stroll down to the sh.o.r.e to sit on the greensward over the Temple of Hercules, or the Roman Baths, or the remains of the villa of C. Fulvius Cunctatus Cocles, or whatever those ruins subterranean are, there on the Capo di Sorrento. Of course, this is mere conjecture of mine. They may have gone on the hills behind the town instead, or they may have stood leaning over the garden-wall of her mother's little villa, looking at the pa.s.sers-by in the deep lane, thinking about nothing in the world, and talking about it all the sunny afternoon, until Ischia was purple with the last light, and the olive terraces behind them began to lose their gray bloom. All I do know is, that they were in love, blossoming out in it as the almond-trees do here in February; and that all the town knew it, and saw a wedding in the future, just as plain as you can see Capri from the heights above the town.

It was at this time that the wonderful counterpane began to grow, to the continual astonishment of Giuseppe, to whom it seemed a marvel of skill and patience, and who saw what love and sweet hope Fiammetta was knitting into it with her deft fingers. I declare, as I think of it, the white cotton spread out on her knees, in such contrast to the rich olive of her complexion and her black shiny hair, while she knits away so merrily, glancing up occasionally with those liquid, laughing eyes to Giuseppe, who is watching her as if she were an angel right out of the blue sky, I am tempted not to tell this story further, but to leave the happy two there at the open gate of life, and to believe that they entered in.

This was about the time of the change of government, after this region had come to be a part of the Kingdom of Italy. After the first excitement was over, and the simple people found they were not all made rich, nor raised to a condition in which they could live without work, there began to be some dissatisfaction. Why the convents need have been suppressed, and especially the poor nuns packed off, they couldn't see; and then the taxes were heavier than ever before; instead of being supported by the government, they had to support it; and, worst of all, the able young fellows must still go for soldiers. Just as one was learning his trade, or perhaps had acquired it, and was ready to earn his living and begin to make a home for his wife, he must pa.s.s the three best years of his life in the army. The conscription was relentless.

The time came to Giuseppe, as it did to the others. I never heard but he was brave enough; there was no storm on the Mediterranean that he dare not face in his little boat; and he would not have objected to a campaign with the red shirts of Garibaldi. But to be torn away from his occupations by which he was daily laying aside a little for himself and Fiammetta, and to leave her for three years,--that seemed dreadful to him. Three years is a longtime; and though he had no doubt of the pretty Fiammetta, yet women are women, said the shrewd fellow to himself, and who knows what might happen, if a gallant came along who could read and write, as Fiammetta could, and, besides, could play the guitar?

The result was, that Giuseppe did not appear at the mustering-office on the day set; and, when the file of soldiers came for him, he was nowhere to be found. He had fled to the mountains. I scarcely know what his plan was, but he probably trusted to some good luck to escape the conscription altogether, if he could shun it now; and, at least, I know that he had many comrades who did the same, so that at times the mountains were full of young fellows who were lurking in them to escape the soldiers. And they fared very roughly usually, and sometimes nearly perished from hunger; for though the sympathies of the peasants were undoubtedly with the quasi-outlaws rather than with the carbineers, yet the latter were at every hamlet in the hills, and liable to visit every hut, so that any relief extended to the fugitives was attended with great danger; and, besides, the hunted men did not dare to venture from their retreats. Thus outlawed and driven to desperation by hunger, these fugitives, whom n.o.body can defend for running away from their duties as citizens, became brigands. A cynical German, who was taken by them some years ago on the road to Castellamare, a few miles above here, and held for ransom, declared that they were the most honest fellows he had seen in Italy; but I never could see that he intended the remark as any compliment to them. It is certain that the inhabitants of all these towns held very loose ideas on the subject of brigandage: the poor fellows, they used to say, only robbed because they were hungry, and they must live somehow.

What Fiammetta thought, down in her heart, is not told: but I presume she shared the feelings of those about her concerning the brigands, and, when she heard that Giuseppe had joined them, was more anxious for the safety of his body than of his soul; though I warrant she did not forget either, in her prayers to the Virgin and St. Antonino. And yet those must have been days, weeks, months, of terrible anxiety to the poor child; and if she worked away at the counterpane, netting in that elaborate border, as I have no doubt she did, it must have been with a sad heart and doubtful fingers. I think that one of the psychological sensitives could distinguish the parts of the bedspread that were knit in the sunny days from those knit in the long hours of care and deepening anxiety.

It was rarely that she received any message from him and it was then only verbal and of the briefest; he was in the mountains above Amalfi; one day he had come so far round as the top of the Great St. Angelo, from which he could look down upon the piano of Sorrento, where the little Fiammetta was; or he had been on the hills near Salerno, hunted and hungry; or his company had descended upon some travelers going to Paestum, made a successful haul, and escaped into the steep mountains beyond. He didn't intend to become a regular bandit, not at all. He hoped that something might happen so that he could steal back into Sorrento, unmarked by the government; or, at least, that he could escape away to some other country or island, where Fiammetta could join him.

Did she love him yet, as in the old happy days? As for him, she was now everything to him; and he would willingly serve three or thirty years in the army, if the government could forget he had been a brigand, and permit him to have a little home with Fiammetta at the end of the probation. There was not much comfort in all this, but the simple fellow could not send anything more cheerful; and I think it used to feed the little maiden's heart to hear from him, even in this downcast mood, for his love for her was a dear certainty, and his absence and wild life did not dim it.

My informant does not know how long this painful life went on, nor does it matter much. There came a day when the government was shamed into new vigor against the brigands. Some English people of consequence (the German of whom I have spoken was with them) had been captured, and it had cost them a heavy ransom. The number of the carbineers was quadrupled in the infested districts, soldiers penetrated the fastnesses of the hills, there were daily fights with the banditti; and, to show that this was no sham, some of them were actually shot, and others were taken and thrown into prison. Among those who were not afraid to stand and fight, and who would not be captured, was our Giuseppe. One day the Italia newspaper of Naples had an account of a fight with brigands; and in the list of those who fell was the name of Giuseppe---, of Sorrento, shot through the head, as he ought to have been, and buried without funeral among the rocks.

This was all. But when the news was read in the little post office in Sorrento, it seemed a great deal more than it does as I write it; for, if Giuseppe had an enemy in the village, it was not among the people; and not one who heard the news did not think at once of the poor girl to whom it would be more than a bullet through the heart. And so it was.

The slender hope of her life then went out. I am told that there was little change outwardly, and that she was as lovely as before; but a great cloud of sadness came over her, in which she was always enveloped, whether she sat at home, or walked abroad in the places where she and Giuseppe used to wander. The simple people respected her grief, and always made a tender-hearted stillness when the bereft little maiden went through the streets,--a stillness which she never noticed, for she never noticed anything apparently. The bishop himself when he walked abroad could not be treated with more respect.

This was all the story of the sweet Fiammetta that was confided to me. And afterwards, as I recalled her pensive face that evening as she kneeled at vespers, I could not say whether, after all, she was altogether to be pitied, in the holy isolation of her grief, which I am sure sanctified her, and, in some sort, made her life complete. For I take it that life, even in this sunny Sorrento, is not alone a matter of time.

ST. MARIA A CASTELLO

The Great St. Angelo and that region are supposed to be the haunts of brigands. From those heights they spy out the land, and from thence have, more than once, descended upon the sea-road between Castellamare and Sorrento, and caught up English and German travelers. This elevation commands, also, the Paestum way. We have no faith in brigands in these days; for in all our remote and lonely explorations of this promontory we have never met any but the most simple-hearted and good-natured people, who were quite as much afraid of us as we were of them. But there are not wanting stories, every day, to keep alive the imagination of tourists.

We are waiting in the garden this sunny, enticing morning-just the day for a tramp among the purple hills--for our friend, the long Englishman, who promised, over night, to go with us. This excellent, good-natured giant, whose head rubs the ceiling of any room in the house, has a wife who is fond of him, and in great dread of the brigands. He comes down with a sheepish air, at length, and informs us that his wife won't let him go.

"Of course I can go, if I like," he adds. "But the fact is, I have n't slept much all night: she kept asking me if I was going!" On the whole, the giant don't care to go. There are things more to be feared than brigands.

The expedition is, therefore, reduced to two unarmed persons. In the piazza we pick up a donkey and his driver for use in case of accident; and, mounting the driver on the donkey,--an arrangement that seems entirely satisfactory to him,--we set forward. If anything can bring back youth, it is a day of certain sunshine and a bit of unexplored country ahead, with a whole day in which to wander in it without a care or a responsibility. We walk briskly up the walled road of the piano, striking at the overhanging golden fruit with our staves; greeting the orange-girls who come down the side lanes; chaffing with the drivers, the beggars, the old women who sit in the sun; looking into the open doors of houses and shops upon women weaving, boys and girls slicing up heaps of oranges, upon the makers of macaroni, the sellers of sour wine, the merry shoemakers, whose little dens are centers of gossip here, as in all the East: the whole life of these people is open and social; to be on the street is to be at home.

We wind up the steep hill behind Meta, every foot of which is terraced for olive-trees, getting, at length, views over the wayside wall of the plain and bay and rising into the purer air and the scent of flowers and other signs of coming spring, to the little village of Arola, with its church and bell, its beggars and idlers,--just a little street of houses jammed in between the hills of Camaldoli and Pergola, both of which we know well.

Upon the cliff by Pergola is a stone house, in front of which I like to lie, looking straight down a thousand or two feet upon the roofs of Meta, the map of the plain, and the always fascinating bay. I went down the backbone of the limestone ridge towards the sea the other afternoon, before sunset, and unexpectedly came upon a group of little stone cottages on a ledge, which are quite hidden from below. The inhabitants were as much surprised to see a foreigner break through their seclusion as I was to come upon them. However, they soon recovered presence of mind to ask for a little money. Half a dozen old hags with the parchment also sat upon the rocks in the sun, spinning from distaffs, exactly as their ancestors did in Greece two thousand years ago, I doubt not. I do not know that it is true, as Ta.s.so wrote, that this climate is so temperate and serene that one almost becomes immortal in it. Since two thousand years all these coasts have changed more or less, risen and sunk, and the temples and palaces of two civilizations have tumbled into the sea. Yet I do not know but these tranquil old women have been sitting here on the rocks all the while, high above change and worry and decay, gossiping and spinning, like Fates. Their yarn must be uncanny.

But we wander. It is difficult to go to any particular place here; impossible to write of it in a direct manner. Our mulepath continues most delightful, by slopes of green orchards nestled in sheltered places, winding round gorges, deep and ragged with loose stones, and groups of rocks standing on the edge of precipices, like medieval towers, and through village after village tucked away in the hills.

The abundance of population is a constant surprise. As we proceed, the people are wilder and much more curious about us, having, it is evident, seen few strangers lately. Women and children, half-dressed in dirty rags which do not hide the form, come out from their low stone huts upon the windy terraces, and stand, arms akimbo, staring at us, and not seldom hailing us in harsh voices. Their sole dress is often a single split and torn gown, not reaching to the bare knees, evidently the original of those in the Naples ballet (it will, no doubt, be different when those creatures exchange the ballet for the ballot); and, with their tangled locks and dirty faces, they seem rather beasts than women. Are their husbands brigands, and are they in wait for us in the chestnut-grove yonder?

The grove is charming; and the men we meet there gathering sticks are not so surly as the women. They point the way; and when we emerge from the wood, St. Maria a Castello is before us on a height, its white and red church shining in the sun. We climb up to it. In front is a broad, flagged terrace; and on the edge are deep wells in the rock, from which we draw cool water. Plentifully victualed, one could stand a siege here, and perhaps did in the gamey Middle Ages. Monk or soldier need not wish a pleasanter place to lounge. Adjoining the church, but lower, is a long, low building with three rooms, at once house and stable, the stable in the center, though all of them have hay in the lofts. The rooms do not communicate. That is the whole of the town of St. Maria a Castello.

In one of the apartments some rough-looking peasants are eating dinner, a frugal meal: a dish of unclean polenta, a plate of grated cheese, a basket of wormy figs, and some sour red wine; no bread, no meat. They looked at us askance, and with no sign of hospitality. We made friends, however, with the ragged children, one of whom took great delight in exhibiting his litter of puppies; and we at length so far worked into the good graces of the family that the mother was prevailed upon to get us some milk and eggs. I followed the woman into one of the apartments to superintend the cooking of the eggs. It was a mere den, with an earth floor. A fire of twigs was kindled against the farther wall, and a little girl, half-naked, carrying a baby still more economically clad, was stooping down to blow the smudge into a flame. The smoke, some of it, went over our heads out at the door. We boiled the eggs. We desired salt; and the woman brought us pepper in the berry. We insisted on salt, and at length got the rock variety, which we pounded on the rocks. We ate our eggs and drank our milk on the terrace, with the entire family interested spectators. The men were the hardest-looking ruffians we had met yet: they were making a bit of road near by, but they seemed capable of turning their hands to easier money-getting; and there couldn't be a more convenient place than this.

When our repast was over, and I had drunk a gla.s.s of wine with the proprietor, I offered to pay him, tendering what I knew was a fair price in this region. With some indignation of gesture, he refused it, intimating that it was too little. He seemed to be seeking an excuse for a quarrel with us; so I pocketed the affront, money and all, and turned away. He appeared to be surprised, and going indoors presently came out with a bottle of wine and gla.s.ses, and followed us down upon the rocks, pressing us to drink. Most singular conduct; no doubt drugged wine; travelers put into deep sleep; robbed; thrown over precipice; diplomatic correspondence, flattering, but no compensation to them. Either this, or a case of hospitality. We declined to drink, and the brigand went away.

We sat down upon the jutting ledge of a precipice, the like of which is not in the world: on our left, the rocky, bare side of St. Angelo, against which the sunshine dashes in waves; below us, sheer down two thousand feet, the city of Positano, a nest of brown houses, thickly cl.u.s.tered on a conical spur, and lying along the sh.o.r.e, the home of three thousand people,--with a running jump I think I could land in the midst of it,--a pygmy city, inhabited by mites, as we look down upon it; a little beach of white sand, a sailboat lying on it, and some fishermen just embarking; a long hotel on the beach; beyond, by the green sh.o.r.e, a country seat charmingly situated amid trees and vines; higher up, the ravine-seamed hill, little stone huts, bits of ruin, towers, arches. How still it is! All the stiller that I can, now and then, catch the sound of an axe, and hear the shouts of some children in a garden below. How still the sea is! How many ages has it been so? Does the purple mist always hang there upon the waters of Salerno Bay, forever hiding from the gaze Paestum and its temples, and all that sh.o.r.e which is so much more Grecian than Roman?

After all, it is a satisfaction to turn to the towering rock of St. Angelo; not a tree, not a shrub, not a spire of gra.s.s, on its perpendicular side. We try to a.n.a.lyze the satisfaction there is in such a bald, treeless, verdureless ma.s.s. We can grasp it intellectually, in its sharp solidity, which is undisturbed by any ornament: it is, to the mind, like some complete intellectual performance; the mind rests on it, like a demonstration in Euclid. And yet what a color of beauty it takes on in the distance!

When we return, the bandits have all gone to their road-making: the suspicious landlord is nowhere to be seen. We call the woman from the field, and give her money, which she seemed not to expect, and for which she shows no grat.i.tude. Life appears to be indifferent to these people.

But, if these be brigands, we prefer them to those of Naples, and even to the innkeepers of England. As we saunter home in the pleasant afternoon, the vesper-bells are calling to each other, making the sweetest echoes of peace everywhere in the hills, and all the piano is jubilant with them, as we come down the steeps at sunset.

"You see there was no danger," said the giant to his wife that evening at the supper-table.

"You would have found there was danger, if you had gone," returned the wife of the giant significantly.

THE MYTH OF THE SIRENS

I like to walk upon the encircling ridge behind Sorrento, which commands both bays. From there I can look down upon the Isles of the Sirens. The top is a broad, windy strip of pasture, which falls off abruptly to the Bay of Salerno on the south: a regular embankment of earth runs along the side of the precipitous steeps, towards Sorrento. It appears to be a line of defence for musketry, such as our armies used to throw up: whether the French, who conducted siege operations from this promontory on Capri, under Murat, had anything to do with it, does not appear.

Walking there yesterday, we met a woman shepherdess, cowherd, or siren--standing guard over three steers while they fed; a scantily-clad, brown woman, who had a distaff in her hand, and spun the flax as she watched the straying cattle, an example of double industry which the men who tend herds never imitate. Very likely her ancestors so spun and tended cattle on the plains of Thessaly. We gave the rigid woman good-morning, but she did not heed or reply; we made some inquiries as to paths, but she ignored us; we bade her good-day, and she scowled at us: she only spun. She was so out of tune with the people, and the gentle influences of this region, that we could only regard her as an anomaly,--the representative of some perversity and evil genius, which, no doubt, lurks here as it does elsewhere in the world. She could not have descended from either of the groups of the Sirens; for she was not fascinating enough to be fatal.

I like to look upon these islets or rocks of the Sirens, barren and desolate, with a few ruins of the Roman time and remains of the Middle-Age prisons of the doges of Amalfi; but I do not care to dissipate any illusions by going to them. I remember how the Sirens sat on flowery meads by the sh.o.r.e and sang, and are vulgarly supposed to have allured pa.s.sing mariners to a life of ign.o.ble pleasure, and then let them perish, hungry with all unsatisfied longings. The bones of these unfortunates, whitening on the rocks, of which Virgil speaks, I could not see. Indeed, I think any one who lingers long in this region will doubt if they were ever there, and will come to believe that the characters of the Sirens are popularly misconceived. Allowing Ulysses to be only another name for the sun-G.o.d, who appears in myths as Indra, Apollo, William Tell, the sure-hitter, the great archer, whose arrows are sunbeams, it is a degrading conception of him that he was obliged to lash himself to the mast when he went into action with the Sirens, like Farragut at Mobile, though for a very different reason. We should be forced to believe that Ulysses was not free from the basest mortal longings, and that he had not strength of mind to resist them, but must put himself in durance; as our moderns who cannot control their desires go into inebriate asylums.

Mr. Ruskin says that "the Sirens are the great constant desires, the infinite sicknesses of heart, which, rightly placed, give life, and, wrongly placed, waste it away; so that there are two groups of Sirens, one n.o.ble and saving, as the other is fatal." Unfortunately we are all, as were the Greeks, ministered unto by both these groups, but can fortunately, on the other hand, choose which group we will listen to the singing of, though the strains are somewhat mingled; as, for instance, in the modern opera, where the music quite as often wastes life away, as gives to it the energy of pure desire. Yet, if I were to locate the Sirens geographically, I should place the beneficent desires on this coast, and the dangerous ones on that of wicked Baiae; to which group the founder of Naples no doubt belonged.

Nowhere, perhaps, can one come nearer to the beautiful myths of Greece, the springlike freshness of the idyllic and heroic age, than on this Sorrentine promontory. It was no chance that made these coasts the home of the kind old monarch Eolus, inventor of sails and storm-signals.

On the Telegrafo di Mare Cuccola is a rude signal-apparatus for communication with Capri,--to ascertain if wind and wave are propitious for entrance to the Blue Grotto,--which probably was not erected by Eolus, although he doubtless used this sightly spot as one of his stations. That he dwelt here, in great content, with his six sons and six daughters, the Months, is nearly certain; and I feel as sure that the Sirens, whose islands were close at hand, were elevators and not destroyers of the primitive races living here.

It seems to me this must be so; because the pilgrim who surrenders himself to the influences of these peaceful and sun-inundated coasts, under this sky which the bright Athena loved and loves, loses, by and by, those longings and heart-sicknesses which waste away his life, and comes under the dominion, more and more, of those constant desires after that which is peaceful and enduring and has the saving quality of purity. I know, indeed, that it is not always so; and that, as Boreas is a better nurse of rugged virtue than Zephyr, so the soft influences of this clime only minister to the fatal desires of some: and such are likely to sail speedily back to Naples.

The Sirens, indeed, are everywhere; and I do not know that we can go anywhere that we shall escape the infinite longings, or satisfy them.

Here, in the purple twilight of history, they offered men the choice of good and evil. I have a fancy, that, in stepping out of the whirl of modern life upon a quiet headland, so blessed of two powers, the air and the sea, we are able to come to a truer perception of the drift of the eternal desires within us. But I cannot say whether it is a subtle fascination, linked with these mythic and moral influences, or only the physical loveliness of this promontory, that lures travelers. .h.i.ther, and detains them on flowery meads.