Cynthia Steps Out

by Erick Berry

Now how to get that tone of sunlight between the deep leaf-shadows? Ah, that did it! Intent on the success of a trick of the trade, Cynthia forgot the voices and when she came out of her corner an hour later there was no one, native or American, in sight. Cynthia took the two mile walk home through a lemon tinted sunset, ran into another flag rehearsal just at the edge of the town and enjoyed it hugely.

So pervasive and insistent was the tap. tap ... tr...r..r..r... tap. tap. of the drums that she seemed, that night to dream about them all night long and she woke the next morning with the distant, dream patter of the rhythm still tapping merrily through her head. In the pale light of early morning the sound was so real she could not banish it with the remainder of her doze and finally hopped out of bed to see if she had been hearing the reality.

Sure enough, just down the street the banner-dancers were practicing their strange little steps, and the first rays of sunlight over the housetops caught the gilded tips of the banner staves as they were flung, in the final flourish of the dance, to the house tops. Cynthia remembered the fourteenth of July celebration in Paris and grinned to herself. She was prepared, now, for such festive spirits. Besides that, and all reports to the contrary notwithstanding, the Italians didn’t seem to put so much noise into their celebrations as their French neighbors. But then they let off more steam in just every-day living.

When she had finished her brief and early breakfast and emerged to the street she saw that this was truly and whole-heartedly a gala day.

The steep cobbled way to the cathedral which crowned the hill was like an illustration clipped from her Morte d’Arthur, a street made ready for the entrance of a Lancelot or a King. Banners of silk and banners of velvet, cloth of gold and cloth of silver, all embroidered with the arms of Siena and her ruling houses, and, so far as Cynthia knew, of Mussolini himself, hung from every upper window and balcony, fluttering in the morning breeze with a constant play of color and pageantry along the gay little street. Every doorway held smiling faces above the garments of this holiday mood. Every child carried a brilliant hued balloon or a whistle, or a small flag. And down around the piazza where the race was to be run the side streets were crowded with tiny bright colored booths, peddling those cheap and sticky indigestibles that go with a holiday all the world over.

Cynthia wanted very much to see the ceremony of blessing the horses that were to run in the race. Only ten of the seventeen wards might compete, due to the tiny race course, and these would be chosen by lot just before the race began. Each horse would be in the little chapel of its own contrada, so Cynthia chose the Snail, since that of all the ward names seemed to appeal to her most. It was so delightfully silly for a Snail to be running a race, even by proxy.

The chapel was a plain little building of warm stone, hidden in the lower edges of the walled town, and the room was already crowded with interested and loyal Snailists, including the horse, who seemed the most interested of all.

Cynthia listened with delight to the sonorous Latin phrases of the little priest, but almost burst into giggles at the horse’s astonished expression when his nose was sprinkled with water from a kind of overgrown silver pepper box. It was an emotional relief when she caught a glance from an amused gray eye, twinkling over the heads of the shorter Sienese and automatically she twinkled back at it. Then she saw a tuft of stiff white hair and recognized her acquaintance of the day before. Cynthia flushed and bit her lip. When she looked again he was gone.

Behind the chapel was a room used for exhibition purposes. Here in the dim glass cases, dusty with age, were the ancient costumes worn in past Palios by the jockeys of the Snail. Many of them were hundreds of years old and all displayed the same careful craftsmanship, the same loving care for detail that Cynthia had noted in the costumes she had seen on the streets.

She made some sketches in her notebook, and went back to the pensione by way of the leather shop to have another look at the frame in the window.