This was in the morning. They had compared the bleatings of the goats; the raucous early cries of the population; the effects of sirocco; the devices by which, clinging with teeth and nails, they had succeeded in maintaining their perch on the tile roofs; had boasted of their shikarry among the hopping, devouring monsters of the dark.
“Talk of history!” mourned Jane. “Who could be the adequate Herodotus of last night?”
They were on their way to the Temple of Minerva. The route led by a wide sea-street, half of whose length gave upon that famous Inner Harbour so often filled with hostile fleets, so often barred by great chains, so often echoing with clanging battles, with the bubbling shrieks of the drowning. Now the sparkling waters rolled untinged with blood, the clean salt air swept unhindered across their path, for half of the huge sea-wall had been recently demolished to let in wind and sun, though part still towered grimly, darkening the way, shutting out the light from the opposite dwellings.
The path turned at right angles and wound through narrow foot-pathless cracks, between houses; cracks that served the older Syracuse in lieu of streets, where swarmed in the dingy narrownesses the everlasting goat, the ever pervasive child. Very different children these from those cherub heads, with busy little legs growing out of them, who formed the rising population of Taormina. Taormina, who has solved that whole question of educating children; a question which still so puzzles the unintelligent rest of mankind. For weeks they had walked the ancient ways of that high-perched town, picking careful steps amid its infant hordes, and never once had they heard a cry, or seen a discontented child.
“Occupation was the secret of all that cherubic goodness, I think,” said Peripatetica reflectively. “Don’t you remember that every single one of them had a job?”
“Of course, I remember,” said Jane crossly. “You needn’t remind me. It was only twenty-four hours ago we were there—though it seems ages since we fell out of the tender protecting care of dear ‘Questo-qui.’ You can put it all in the book if you feel you must talk about it.”
“Jane, your usually charming temper has been spoiled by a night on a roof. It has made a cat of you,” persisted Peripatetica as she calmly circled round a goat. When the fount of her eloquence was unsealed it was not to be choked by the mere casting of a stony snub into it.
“I devoted some of the dark hours on my tiles to profound philosophic reflection upon the Taorminian methods with children,” she continued. “I have often thought the ennui suffered by children and pet animals was the cause of much of their restless fretfulness. Even the most undeveloped nature feels the difference between a real occupation and an imitation one; feels the importance of being an economic factor. Now those Taormina children from the age of two years are made to feel they are really important and necessary members of the family. They knit as soon as they can walk; they sew, they do drawn-work, at five. They sit in the streets at little tables and help cobble shoes or mend teakettles. They shop for busy parents; they fetch and carry. They pull out of the gardens and orchards weeds as tall as themselves, and everywhere are calm and self-respecting, and receive from their parents and their grown-up neighbours that serious courtesy and consideration due to useful and well-behaved citizens. One does not slap or jerk or scold valuable and important members of the community, and no youthful Taorminian would permit such an unjustifiable liberty from a parent.”
Borne on this flood of words they suddenly flowed out into a big irregular square where stood one of the most curious buildings in the world; the great temple of Pallas of the Syracusans. The enormous fluted Doric columns were sunk into the walls of a Cathedral, for Zosimus, bishop of Syracuse in the Seventh Century, had seized the columned frame and had plastered his church upon it—but so great was the diameter of the pillars that their sides and capitals protruded through the walls inside and out like the prodigious stone ribs of some huge skeleton. The Saracens had come later, and, after slaughtering the priests and women who clung shrieking to the altars, had added battlements to the roof, and the Eighteenth Century, being unable, of course, to keep its finger out of even the most reverend pie, had gummed upon the portal a flaring baroque façade of yellow stone. But through all disfigurements and defacements the temple still showed its soaring majesty, and Peripatetica, at sight of it, cried:
“One dead in the fields!”...