She pattered along, her bare feet skimming carelessly over the sharp-cobbled road, spindle steadily whirling, past the Campo Santo, where at the top of a sudden ravine the road forked and strings of panniered donkeys and straight, graceful girls with piles of linen on their heads were going down to a hidden stream tinkling below. They longed to follow, but Carmela took them on around a curve, through a door in a high wall, past a deserted barn, along a grassy path under almond trees, and they found themselves in a spot that made them catch breath with delight.
The crown of a mountain spur dropped in terraced orchards and gardens to the sea below. Taormina was hidden behind intervening heights. Below, an opal sea divided Sicily from wraiths of the Calabrian mountains drifting along the horizon, and curves of yellow sand and white, surf-frothed rocks outlined the far indentations of the Island’s mountainous coast spreading blue and rosy-purple on their left. Fringed with blossoming plum and yellow gorse, the spur on which they stood dropped sheer to the river ravine, and above still towered Mola and Monte Venere.
It was a world of sun and colour and sweet silence. The cold, moaning wind was shut off by the heights behind them, and turned full to the glowing South, a real warmth of sun bathed the sheltered spot and had spread a carpet of flowers of more brilliant and harmonious arabesques than any of Oriental weaving. Of purple and puce and gold, coral and white and orange, of blues faint and deep, of rose and sharp crimson, it was woven exquisitely through the warp of young spring green. Even without the view, nothing so sweet and really springlike as that bit of mountain meadow had Peripatetica and Jane yet seen. They cried out in joy and sat them down among all the unknown bewitching flowers.
Carmela’s face lit up at their appreciation. She too sat down, let her spindle fall, and gazed about as if her eyes loved what they rested upon; then looking from one strange face to the other:
“You are really from America?” she asked, and let her pathetic little story pour out. Nine children she had borne, and all but one dead. She told how that one, a splendid youth, had gone to America three years ago to make a fortune for himself and her, and at first had written to her that he was doing well; but for two years she had spent her hard earnings to have letters written to him, and had prayed with tears at the Madonna’s shrine, but for two long years now—no answer.
Her round little old, yet childlike, face fell into tragic lines. With work-scarred hands clasping her knees across her patched apron she sat, a creature of simple and dignified pathos, opening her heart in brief and poignant words to the response in Peripatetica’s eyes. Among the blossoms and the bees the three women of such different lives and experiences, with the barrier of a strange tongue between them, came into close touch for a moment in the elementary humanity of that pain known to all women—Goddess Demeter and ragged peasant alike—when their dearest has gone forth from the longing shelter of their arms and theirs is the part of passive loneliness and waiting.
“Yes, life was brutta,” said Carmela simply, “but one had always one’s work.”
Picking up the spindle, winding again her even thread, smilingly she bade these strange friends “a rivedercela,” and departed, a certain tragic dignity clinging to the square little figure going sturdily, yet with head drooping, back to her life of hard and lonely labour. Whether that moment of sympathetic intercourse had meant anything to her or not, to the two idle ones that trusting touch of the life about them meant much. It pulled them out of the world of ghosts, from the empty sense of being outside of any connection with other lives, and by that contact of living, pitiful drama they came back into realities.
For all the tiny extent of Taormina’s boundaries, the discoveries of its antiquities seemed never ending; the cella of a Greek temple hidden in San Pancrazio’s church; the tiny Roman theatre, a section of its pit and auditorium with seats still in perfect rows sticking out from another old church whose greediness had only succeeded in half swallowing it; the enormous Roman baths whose old pools and conduits a thriving lemon orchard is now enjoying; the Roman pavement next to the Hotel Victoria; that bit of Greek inscription hospitably let into church walls, exciting imagination with its record that the “people of Tauromenium accord these honours to Olympis, son of Olympis” for having gained the prize in horse racing at the Pythian games.