Maud Howe Elliott

“ J. knew him by his gold earrings and the red scar on his cheek.
“Un soldo!” the boy implored. J. tossed a coin into the water; the boy dived for the money, caught it before it was ten feet below the surface, and came up snorting like a young grampus, the soldo in his cheek, his arm raised in that irresistible gesture.
“Basta!” cried Antonio, bending to his oars. There is war to the knife between him and the diver, a share of whose profits he demands. “To the American war-ship, Signore? Off to Messina again? ”

“ I asked Bonanno what manner of man the general was; I remember his answer well.
“A good man and a brave soldier. He has but one fault, the incurable one: he is sixty-eight years old and out of health besides!”
The proclaiming of martial law was a military necessity. The prison at Messina had been destroyed by the earthquake, and the convicts, the scum of Sicily, were at large. From Naples, from Palermo, from all over Italy, the offscouring of the cities raced, like beasts of prey who scent the carnage of battle, to the ruin of Messina, the beautiful. ”

“ What booty did Belknap and his men hope to find in that abomination of desolation, Messina? They planted their flag where the standards of kings and conquerors have waved, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, and set to work at their task of teaching the inhabitants how to build and how to live in wooden houses. Sicily has never had a Wooden Age till now; here primitive man left his cave to build a cavelike house of the soft, easily worked, tufa stone of the island. ”

“ There was a certain exaltation in all the people who worked for Sicily and Calabria that seemed to lift them above the smallnesses of every day existence. They saw each other transfigured, they lived the heroic life. Each was eager to do the other’s work,—all were quick to sacrifice themselves to the others, as well as to the cause. It was a time when men and women seemed purged of meanness and jealousy. ”

“ In the people we meet, there is the same bewildering contrast of types as in the architecture. Ciro is a Greek; his profile is classic as the head of Apollo on a coin fresh from the mint of Taormina; Assunta is a Roman, coarser, heavier, but with a certain force that has its charm.
We gravitated naturally to the cathedral of San Nicolò, pausing outside to look at the fountain surmounted by the oddest figure of a Minotaur, with the head of a man and the body of a bull. ”

“ Lorenzo was Villegas’s factotum in the days when our dear Maestro lived in his Andalusian villa on the Viale Pariole, before his Mother Spain called him to Madrid to be custodian of her greatest treasure, the Prado Museum. We had not sent for Lorenzo because we knew he had met with an accident. What wireless telegraphy had summoned him just when he was needed?
“What a pleasure to see thee!” Agnese exclaimed as she let Lorenzo in. “And thy foot? Will it allow thee to work? The Signore was bewailing that thou couldst not wax the studio floor. Thou knowest he believes no other is to be trusted.” ”

“ Scylla, the ancient village at the foot of the purple Calabrian mountains, was not forgotten, nor Reggio, nor the white fishing hamlets that line the tawny shores of Sicily and Calabria on either side of the restless straits. The people of the coast were soonest reached and soonest helped by the sailors of the passing ships, for the navies of the world flew on the wings of love and pity to succor the stricken ports. ”

“ No defeat was ever so unexpected. The Athenians, led away by the eloquence of their evil genius, Alcibiades—he was then thirty-five years old—the wittiest, bravest, handsomest, most worthless of men, had gone mad over their anticipated victory. They would become masters of Syracuse and the other Greek cities of Sicily; when Trinacria was conquered, Athens would take Italy, Carthage, the western islands of the Mediterranean. So Athens dreamt of the empire that, five centuries later, Rome built. ”

“ The real danger of the island, these early adventurers said, was not the Sicans—they were a quiet agricultural people, no match for the clever Greeks—but Polyphemus, the Laestrygones, and Hephaestus. They were right; Sicily’s real danger now as then is the terrible volcanic force, to account for whose havoc the ancients created those dear giants and monsters, the Cyclops, the Titans, and a hundred others.
In the lovely crescent-shaped harbor that once was called Zancle (sickle) , then Messana, now Messina, two large deserted fruit steamers lay swinging idly at their moorings. ”

“ The cart was piled high. The streets were emptying; people were going home to lunch. The students and the tall man with the bandaged throat held a consultation, to decide whether or no there was any use going on with their work. Meanwhile, the bugler, sitting on his stool at the back of the cart, lighted a cigarette and began to read a newspaper. The sight of his sturdy merry face was somehow calming. If the end of the world was coming, had begun, while his world lasted it was for him to blow his bugle!—to call upon the people to give food, clothes, money, everything, pro Calabria e Sicilia. ”

“ Lloyd Griscom, despatched the first American relief party from Rome to Messina. The Ambassador himself had hoped to lead the expedition. In those days of anguish when we knew that thousands of lives might yet be saved if only help came in time, it was torture for such a man to sit with idle hands,—hands that might dig!—no matter how actively he might be working with brain and wits. ”

“ I thought it melancholy to sit at meals alone in the big dining-room; Patsy argued that we were better able to “reconstruct” ancient Syracuse in solitude than if surrounded by a lot of interesting people.
The Greek Theatre gave me my first overwhelming sense of really being in Magna Grecia; the beauty of the lines of the semicircle, the tiers of seats rising one above the other; the permanent feeling of the work hewn from the bed rock, are all extraordinarily impressive. The custode, a serious olive-colored man, was full of serviceable knowledge. ”

“ Palermo is alive! When still far off we had felt its life pulse throbbing stronger and stronger; when we were in its midst, we knew this was the heart of Sicily. We arrived at the Hotel des Palmes in good time for dinner. The fine dining-room was filled with gaily dressed Palermitans. After the loneliness of Syracuse and Girgenti it was pleasant to find ourselves again among people full of the business life. Even at the Timeo in Taormina, we had been in the shadow of the disaster ”

“ The very grapes grown on its flanks make potent inflaming wine; if its fever is in the blood of the grape, a thousand times more is it in the hot blood of its men and women.
The earthquake? It is as if the giant had turned over in his bed, shaken his great shoulders, brought down town and city, destroyed a district, snapped ancient temple columns like pipestems, crushed cathedral and hut alike in one awful blood-curdling welter of pain, that has darkened the earth, made the whole world mourn. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now the smoke, instead of blowing aside, hangs above the cone in two snowy rings. On the shore glisten the white houses of Giardini; close at hand is Taormina—the old city wall, the flame-shaped battlements of the Badia, the clock on the cathedral. The hum of bees as they delve in the flower-cups, rifling honey for their hive—honey that Assunta will in turn ravish for some stranger, fills the air; the ceaseless chirrup of the tree-toads makes a soft alto to the bees{317}’ treble; the fragrance of the flowers floats up like incense, that delights yet does not stupefy ”

“ There has never been a Sicilian nation. Perhaps that is the reason the story of the island is so hard to follow, it’s all snarled up with the history of first one, then another nation. The most obvious way of learning something about Sicily is to read what historians have to say about it; a pleasanter way is to listen to what the poets from Homer to Goethe have sung of it, paying special heed to Theocritus—he knew Sicily better than anybody else before his time or since! ”

“ And all this time the great stream of supplies was pouring in a steady flood toward Messina. The city was like a man who dies of starvation in the midst of plenty, because he has lost the power to swallow.
“I went first to the house where I had lived,” Bonanno said. “It was a heap of ruins fallen outwards into the street; the inner wall was standing. ”

“ THE CRUISE OF THE “BAYERN”
“It looks as if God had put His foot upon it!” said Hugh, the Yeoman. J., watching the pallid sunset from the deck of the “Bayern,” as she swung at anchor in the sickle-shaped harbor of Messina, turned from the sombre Sicilian mountains, rising tier above tier to the wet gray sky, and looked at what men called the “indispensable city” before God had set His foot upon it. ”

“ I gathered a small acanthus leaf, and smoothed it between the leaves of a book for comfort in the days to come. Do you know why the Greeks plucked out the very heart of Beauty? Because they lived with beauty. Their minds were formed, perhaps their very bodies were affected by the beauty that surrounded the race from its beginning. The lines of their hills and coasts; the colors of their sea and sky are the most beautiful on earth. Their eyes were trained by these things, their imagination roused, their minds exalted. Like Greece, Sicily is noble in its very foundation. ”

“ The perfume of the orange and the lemon blossoms was intoxicating as sweet wine; the comfortable hum of bees made a low undersong to the music of the magic fountain in the corner of the cloister. It is not Italian, it is not Sicilian. What manner of fountain can it be? Listen! Its language is softer than any now spoken in Trinacria!
“Allah il Allah!” The fountain still murmurs the old cry of the muezzin.
From a large basin rises a high carved shaft of rich topaz colored marble, supporting a curiously wrought ball with sculptured figures, foliage, and the alternate heads of men and lions. ”

“ There are some good architectural fragments—bits of mosaics and inscriptions from the theatre, a good torso of Bacchus, a head of Apollo.”
Patsy introduced the custode, one of the characters of the place, who welcomed us and showed his few treasures with a fine pride. He spoke Italian with chiseled care.
“To hear him talk, after the dialetto, is like listening to Beethoven after rag-time!” said Patsy. “Do you realize how fortunate we are that the tourist season is spoiled by the earthquake? We have the theatre and the custode all to ourselves? It’s too good to be true!” ”

“ As the steamer bore me away from Messina and towards Naples, I looked my last on the old sickle-shaped harbor of Zancle, on Cape Faro, where the current sweeping through the narrow straits was full of bewildering purple, blue, and green tints like a piece of shot silk. We passed a fishing boat with a man standing on a stunted mast above his fellows at the oars, on the lookout for swordfish; above boat and fishermen towered the crag and castle of Scylla. ”

“ Geologically, Sicily has been as restless as it has been politically and socially. At least twice it was connected with Italy, and once probably with Africa, so that African animals entered it. The Straits of Messina, only two miles wide, and one hundred and fifty fathoms deep, are Nature’s record of an earthquake rupture between Italy and Sicily. Mount Etna, the most impressive thing in the island, has been there since early tertiary times—before the days of the ice-age, when the mammoth and cave-bear roamed through the woods of Europe. ”

“ Belknap is one of those natural leaders of men, who seem providentially to arise in great emergencies. His tireless energy, his cheerful courage are positively infectious; his example and influence are felt in every phase of the enterprise of which he was the leader.
Just what was his work? To bring order out of chaos. Men are the instruments of mankind; the race chooses the individual to carry out its desires, as the sculptor his tools. ”

“ Truth is, we were all working for humanity, to try and give the poor scared hungry souls food and drink and homes; it didn’t matter whether it was A, B or C; they all did splendid work and all worked with all their souls, and every one, including the Sicilian ladies and people from Russia, Germany, Austria and France, was only too glad to help. We gave away over three hundred loaves of bread a day, crackers, oranges, cooked polenta, everything that could be found to eat, milk, water and wine, all paid for by the forestieri, and a few of the townspeople. ”

“ Every able-bodied American in Rome was working pro Sicilia e Calabria, and the Ambassador’s home was not only the nerve-center of the relief work but a warehouse, a base of supplies.
From the ballroom came the sound of women’s voices, the snip-snip of shears, the click of sewing machines. Here was another transformation; the sumptuous ballroom with the smooth polished floor had become a busy workroom. Under the gilt chandelier stood a long table, heaped with bales of flannel and cloth, over which leaned four or five ladies, scissors in hand, cutting out skirts, blouses{81} and jackets. ”