Seekers in Sicily: Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica

Now, being Americans, and therefore accustomed to the most obliging behaviour on the part of the male sex, it never occurred to them that Pluto might be ungallant enough to object to their taking a hand in. But he did—as they might have foreseen would be likely in a person so unmannerly as to snatch lovely daughters from devoted mothers.

It began on the ocean. On quite a calm evening a wave, passing from under the side of the ship, threw its crest back—perhaps to look at the stars—and fell head over heels into their open port. Certainly as much as two tons of green and icy Atlantic entered impulsively, and by the time they were dried out and comforted by the tight-corseted, rosy, sympathetic Lemon every object they possessed was a mere bunch of depressed rumples. Throughout the rest of the voyage they presented the unfortunate appearance of having slept in their clothes, including their hats. These last, which they had believed refreshingly picturesque, or coquettish, at starting, had that defiantly wretched aspect displayed by the broody hen after she has been dipped in the rain-barrel to check her too exuberant aversion to race-suicide.

That was how Pluto began, and it swiftly went from bad to worse.

Three large tourist ships discharged bursting cargoes of humanity upon Naples on one and the same day, and the hotel-keepers rose to their opportunity and dealt guilefully with the horde clamouring as with one voice for food and shelter. That one’s hard-won shelter was numbered 12 bis (an artful concealment of the unlucky number 13) was apparently an unimportant detail. It was shelter, though even a sea-sodden mind should have seen something suspicious in those egregious frescoes of fat ladies sitting on the knife edge of crescent moons with which Room 13 endeavoured to conceal its real banefulness. Even such a mind should have distrusted that flamingly splendid fire-screen in front of a walled-up fireplace; should have scented danger in that flamboyant black and gold and blue satin furniture of the vintage of 1870. There was plainly, to an observant eye, something sinister and meretricious in so much dressiness, but Jane and Peripatetica yielded themselves up to that serpent lodging without the smallest precaution, and lived to rue their impulsive confidence.

To begin with, Naples, instead of showing herself all flowers and sunshine, tinkling mandolins, and moonlight and jasper seas, was as merry and pleasing as an iced sponge. Loud winds howled through the streets, driving before them cold deluges of rain, and in these chilling downpours the street troubadours stood one foot in the puddles snuffling songs of “Bella Napoli” to untuned guitars, with water dripping from the ends of their noses. Peripatetica—whose eyes even under her low-spirited hat had been all through the voyage full of dreamful memories of Neapolitan tea-roses and blue blandness—curled up like a disappointed worm and retired to a fit of neuralgia and a hot-water bottle. There was something almost uncanny in the scornful irony of her expression as she hugged her steaming comforter to her cheek, and paced the floor in time to those melancholy damp wails from the street. Instead of tea-roses she was prating all day of American comforts, as she clasped the three tepid coils of the chilly steam-heater to her homesick bosom, while Jane paddled about under an umbrella in search of the traditional ideal Italian maid, who would be willing to contribute to the party all the virtues and a cheerful disposition, for sixty francs a month.

Minna, when she did appear, proved to be Swiss instead of Italian, but she carried an atmosphere of happy comfort about her, could spin the threads of three languages with her gifted tongue, while sixty francs seemed to satisfy her wildest dreams of avarice. So the two depressed pilgrims, soothed by Minna’s promise to assume their burdens the next day, fell asleep dreaming that the weather might moderate or even clear.

Eight o’clock of the following morning came, but Minna didn’t. Jane interviewed the concierge, who had recommended her. The concierge interviewed the heavens and the earth, and the circumambient air, but spite of outflung fingers and polyglot cries, the elements had nothing to say about the matter, and for twenty-four hours they declined to let the secret leak out that other Americans in the same hotel had ravished their Minna from them with the glittering lure of twenty francs more.

Finally it dawned upon two damp and depressed minds that some unknown enemy had put a comether on them—though at that time they had no inkling of his identity. Large-eyed horror ensued. First aid to the hoodooed must be sought. Peripatetica tied a strip of red flannel around her left ankle.

“In all these very old countries,” she said oracularly, “secret malign influences from the multitudes of wicked dead rise up like vapours from the soil where they have been buried.”

Jane listened and, pale but resolute, went forth and purchased a coral jettatura.

“Let us pass on at once from this moist Sodom,” she said.

Visions of sun and Sicily dawned upon their mildewed imaginations.

Now there is really but one way to approach Sicily satisfactorily. Of course a boat leaves Naples every evening for Palermo, but the Mediterranean is a treacherous element in February. It had broken night after night in thunderous shocks upon the sea wall, making the heavy stone-built hotel quiver beneath their beds, and in the darkness of each night they had seen the water squadron charge again and again, the foremost spinning up tall and white to fling itself in frenzied futile spray across the black street. So that the thought of trusting insides jaded by two weeks of the Atlantic to such a foe as this was far from their most reckless dreams. The none too solid earth was none too good for such as they, and a motor eats up dull miles by magic. Motors are to be had in Naples even when fair skies lack, and with a big Berliet packed with luggage, and with the concierge’s tender, rueful smile shedding blessings, at last they slid southward.

—Pale clouds of almond blossoms were spread against grey terraces.... Less pale smells rose in gusty whiffs.... Narrow yellow streets crooked before them, where they picked a cautious hooting way amid Italy’s rising population complicated with goats and asses.... Then flat, muddy roads, and Berliet bumping, splashing between fields of green artichokes.... The clouds held up; thinned, and parted, showing rifts of blue.... Vesuvius pushed the mists from her brow, and purple shadows dappled her shining, dripping flanks.... Orange groves rose along the way. Flocks of brown goats tinkled past. More almond boughs leaned over walls washed a faded rose. Church bells clanked sweetly through the moist air from far-away hills. Runnels chattered out from secret channels fringed with fern. Grey olive orchards hung like clouds along the steep.... The sun was fairly out, and Italy assuming her old traditional air of professional beauty among the nations of the earth....

The Berliet climbed as nimbly as a goat toward Sorrento. The light deepened; the sea began to peacock. More and more the landscape assumed the appearance of the impossibly chromatic back drop of an opera, and as the turn was made under the orange avenue of the hotel at Sorrento everything was ready for the chorus of merry villagers, and for the prima donna to begin plucking song out of her bosom with stereotyped gestures.

It was there they began to offer the light wines of the country, as sweetly perfumed and innocent as spring violets; no more like to the astringent red inks masquerading in straw bottles in America under the same names, than they to Hercules. The seekers of Persephone drank deeply—as much as a wine-glass full—and warmed by this sweet ichor of Bacchus they bid defiance to hoodoos and pushed on to Amalfi.

Berliet swam along the Calabrian shore, lifting them lightly up the steeps, swooping purringly down the slopes,—swinging about the bold curves of the coast; rounding the tall spurs, where the sea shone, green and purple as a dove’s neck, five hundred feet below, and where orange, lemon, and olive groves climbed the narrow terraces five hundred feet above. They were following the old, old way, where the Greeks had gone, where the Romans went, where Normans rode, where Spaniards and Saracens marched; the line of the drums and tramplings of not three, but of three hundred conquests! They were following—in a motor car—the passageway of three thousand years of European history that was to lead them back beyond history itself to the old, old gods.