Paddling out in the rain to hotels for meals was at first a drawback to life in the Villa Schuler. To sit with damp ankles through the endless procession of table d’hôte meals, and afterwards have the odoriferous bespatterings of the Scesa Morgana as dessert, was not an enjoyable feature of local colour. Frau Schuler was implored to feed her lodgers.
“But we are simple people; our plain cooking would not satisfy the ladies,” she protested, distressed. But the ladies felt that a crust and an egg in their own sitting-room would be more satisfying than all the triumphs of hotel chefs out in the wet. And to bread and eggs they resigned themselves. Instead came a five-course banquet, served by beaming Butler Maria in a dazzling new grass-green bodice—soup and macaroni, meat and vegetables, perfect in seasoning and succulence, crisp salad from the garden, and with it the demanded poached eggs which were to have constituted the whole dinner, almond pudding with a wondrous sauce; dates, oranges, sugary figs beaded on slivers of bamboo, mellow red wine. It seemed a very elastic two lire which could cover all that, as Frau Schuler said it did! Truly the Fraulein Niece was an artist. Peripatetica and Jane thereafter dined at home in tea gowns and luxury—and the pudding sauces grew more bland and wonderful every night. Also eggs continued to give originality by the vagaries of their appearance. As Peripatetica said, “they just ran along anyhow, and jumped on at any course they took a fancy to!” And to see where they were going to land—in the soup, the vegetables, the salad, the stewed fruit of dessert—or what still other and stranger companionships they might form, lent a sort of prize-packet excitement to each succeeding course. Dinner at the Villa Schuler, with little Vesuvius glowing warmingly through all his fiery eyes and steaming out spicy incense of lemon and mandarin peel, the soft low lamplight, the gleam of Maria’s smile and green bodice, the blessed remoteness from all tourist gabble, was truly a cosy function. They took to making elaborate toilets in honour of it, adding their Taormina acquisitions of old lace and jewels to Maria’s round-eyed amazement. When Jane burst out in an Empire diadem, and Peripatetica not to be outdone donned a ravishing lace cap, their status as good republicans was forever lost in the villa. Maria spread the tale of this splendour abroad, firmly convinced that these lodgers were incognito members of the most exalted nobility of distant “Nuova Yorka.” The tongues which could not pronounce their harsh foreign names insisted on labelling them the “Big and Little Princess”—and no protests could bring their rank down lower than “the most gentle Countesses,” upon their washing-bills.
It amused them in fine weather to try the various hotels for lunch. In mid-town was the Hotel Victoria, the haunt of artists and gourmets, famous for its food and for its garden, which climbed the hillside in blooming terraces and loggias, all stairways, springing bridges, and queer little passages leading to buildings and courts on different levels. Peripatetica and Jane wandered into it almost by accident. They noticed the name over a dingy door as they were strolling aimlessly one day, and Peripatetica remembered having heard of a picturesque garden within. Penetrating through empty hall and up various winding stairways they came to a charming garden court. There appeared the proprietor, and in Parisian French treated their curiosity as a boon and a pleasure. A little man, the Padrone, with nothing large about him but the checks of his trousers and the soft black eyes which turned upon the gay colour about him with gentle melancholy. He did the honours of the place with all the courtesy and dignity of Louis XIV showing Versailles. When they admired the aviary of Sicilian and tropical birds, the budding roses clambering everywhere, the strange feathery-fringed irises like gaudy little cockatoos, the delicate bits of Moorish carving and arches built into the hotel walls, he accepted all their enthusiasm for the charms of his property with no sign of pride, but rather with the pensive melancholy of one whose soul was above such things, as of one who knew the hollowness of earthly delights. Courteously he exhibited everything, taking them to still higher and more glowing terraces where his laden orange trees were burnished green and gold, and his violets sheets of deepest, royalest purple underneath.
A pair of monkeys lived in cage up there, and while the Signor deftly fed them for the amusement of his visitors he warmed up into caustic philosophic comment upon human and monkey nature, comment not unspiced with wit. Peripatetica, always ready for philosophy, immediately plunged into the depths of her French vocabulary and responded in kind. The discussion grew warm and fluent, and the little Padrone became a new man. With kindling eye and a pathetic eagerness he kept the ball rolling in polished Voltairian periods, intoxicated apparently with the joy of mental intercourse. He snatched and clung to it, inventing new pretexts to detain them, new things to exhibit, while the talk rolled on.
But Peripatetica, whose next passion to Philosophy is Floriculture, broke off to exclaim at the violets as they passed a bed of purple marvels. Emperors they were among violets. The Padrone immediately proffered some, setting two contadini to picking more. Peripatetica contemplating gluttonously the wonderful spread of the deep purple calyx, the long firm stems of those in her hand, and at the profusion of others sweetening the air, cried from her heart, “Oh, Monsieur, what luxury to have such a garden! You should be one of the happiest creatures in the world to be able to grow such flowers as these!”
The Padrone, from his knees, picking more violets, glanced up, and gloom fell over him again.
“Madame,” he inquired bitterly, “does happiness ever consist in what one possesses of material things? Contentment, perhaps—but happiness? Not the most beautiful garden in the world can grow that,” and with dark Byronic mystery, “Ah, one can live amid brightness and yet be very miserable.”
They parted with much friendliness, the Padrone hoping the ladies would do his hotel the honour of visiting it again. Surely, yes, they said; they would give themselves the pleasure of lunching there some day.... Upon that it seemed as if his gloom grew darker, but he implied courteously that that would do him too much honour, but if they did venture as much he would do his best to content them. His was but a rough little place, but it had been wont to be the haunt of artists and “they, you know, are always ‘un peu gourmet!’”
“What do you suppose is the story of that man?” they asked each other; and amused themselves inventing romantic pretexts to explain his air of blighted hopes and poetic pain.
Before long their curiosity impelled them to try the Victoria’s cuisine. They were a half hour before the time. No guests had yet gathered. They stood again in front of the aviary, but no polite philosopher made his appearance. A little yellow-haired maid in a frock as brightly purple as the violets, carrying decanters into the empty dining-room, was the only creature about. The sitting room offered them shelter from the wind, and for entertainment heaps of German novels and innumerable sketches of Sicilian scenery and types, which they hoped the Victoria’s artist patrons had not given in settlement of their hotel bills. A bell rang, and people streamed in until every seat in the clean, bare dining-room had its occupant. Not the artists Peripatetica and Jane were looking for, but types fixed and amusing, such as they had never before encountered in such numbers and contrasts. Rosy, bland English curates and their meek little wives; flashy fat Austrians, with powdered ladies of unappetizing look; limp English spinsters of the primmest propriety; seedy old men with dyed moustaches and loud clothes, diffusing an aroma of shady gambling-rooms. Scholarly old English professors; and Germans, Germans, Germans of all varying degrees of fatness, shininess, and loud-voicedness, but all united in double-action feeding power of knife and fork.