understand that la Durlindana, the sword of Orlando, was a magical sword and not a miraculous one. And yet this distinction between miracle and magic was the pivot of the plot as it was presented to them. If they had felt themselves lifted out of their ordinary routine I do not think they would have done what they did after the curtain had fallen on the section of the story presented each evening.
At the Machiavelli they are accustomed to remain for the farce and the Canzonettisti Napoletani which close the performance; so at the Sicilia they remain for the cinematograph. Every evening during Holy Week the programme posted up at the door concluded with these words “Indi Cinematografo,” and there were always three parts to the show. First there was cruelty—victorious tyrants forcing conquered queens to drink their lovers’ blood, or some horror of the Inquisition, or the barrel of Regulus bumping down-hill and coming to smash at the bottom. The second part was a modern comedy carried on in Parisian drawing-rooms or on board an electric launch on an American river. The third part was always a wild farce and usually contained an impossible chase. Not till after the cinematograph had concluded its show did the audience go away contented.
ORTIGIA
CHAPTER XXII
O FOUNTAIN ARETHUSE
When “Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian mountains” she had scarcely reached the age at which women begin to dream of love. She spied the approaching river-god Alpheus and, to preserve what was dearer to her than life, for she was a nymph of Diana, plunged heroically into the earth. Alpheus, who had reached the age when men desire to act, plunged in after her. They flowed along inside the ground and under the sea, he following her, all the way from Greece to Sicily and, according to the recognised habit of gods and demi-gods believed to be dead and buried, they rose again. The place of Arethusa’s resurrection is the island of Ortigia, but, although I have the story from the fountain head, it all happened so long ago that I have not been able to ascertain whether Alpheus rose there or at a spot on the mainland of Sicily nearer Etna where S. Alfio is the patron saint, and although the “e” in Alpheus takes the stress and the “i” in Alfio does not, nevertheless, the custode of the spring, who was himself my informant, may confuse the two names. The difference between the versions is that between tragedy and comedy. If they, the pursued and her pursuer, rose in the same place it can hardly be that he did not catch her. If he rose somewhere else, then she may still preserve her everlasting virginity and they will neither of them ever reach the age when experience teaches both men and women to regret. She will be ever flying, he ever pursuing, like the maiden and the lover on that Grecian Urn which an eminent authority, baffled in his attempts at identification, thinks was “probably imagined” by Keats.
I possess a Bible and Prayer-book bound together in one volume which was given me on leaving Rottingdean by my sincere friend, the master of the preparatory school there. It contains, just before the First Chapter of Genesis, a Chronological Map “with remarkable persons and events collaterally placed.” I remember how I used to mitigate the tedium of divine service by reading to myself that the creation of the world occupied one of the weeks of the year 4004 B.C.; that Egypt was founded about 2190 B.C.; that Troy fell about 1180 B.C., seventy years or so before the birth of King David; and that Homer and Elijah flourished contemporaneously between 1000 and 900 B.C. My schoolmaster wrote my name in the book with a suitable inscription and a reference to Psalm cxix. 105. I turned up the passage and drew the conclusion that he desired his gift to be a lantern unto my feet and a light unto my paths. And so it was until other knowledge, the rudiments of which he had himself endeavoured to impart to me, threw glimmerings across my way and I passed through a distracted period of inability to distinguish the signals of danger from those of safety. Much the same thing has happened to many others and assistance has sometimes been found in compromise and accommodation. Thus the statement about 4004 B.C., when read by the light of another statement in the Book, does not seriously conflict with the teachings of modern science. Until further knowledge shall eclipse the few feeble lanterns that are now doing their best to illuminate my course I shall continue to hold the opinion that, as in the sight of Him, who is the Life of the Universe, a thousand years are but as yesterday, so in the sight of man, who has been God’s image upon earth for more ages than anyone can tell, six thousand years are but as last week. And I shall keep my thousands in a condition as elastic as may be necessary to bear any stretching that future discoveries may put upon them.
It was many thousands of such weeks ago, when Mother
Earth was herself in her infancy, before her baby bones had hardened, that Arethusa first came to the island she has made her home. She is still coming and can be seen to-day still rising as fresh as ever. The story of the early days of her exile was not told by Clio because Clio was only a modern Agamemnon in history, many a brave muse had flourished before she was thought of. One of them took for her infinite papyrus the firmament of space, those heavens which shall one day be rolled together as a scroll, whereon she inscribed chapters in stars and volumes in constellations. We cannot see all her works, nor can we read all we see, but we know that she put us into one of her books. A few paragraphs of that chapter which forms our planet lie scattered around Siracusa; we recognise her manuscript in the shape of the Great Harbour, in the depth of the sea, in the height of the hills, in the strata of the rocks, in the soil, in the vegetation.
There were early muses who employed flint implements and arrow-heads for records, and neglected to clear away the remains of prehistoric meals in caverns. Others preferred to write their chronicles upon pots, urns and tombs or to scrawl placid monosyllables upon polygonal walls. But with all their industry the muses have never been able to keep pace with the material that has accumulated round the dwellings of men and women. They have done their best and, when their mother Mnemosyne began to fail and the business was split up first into three, then four, seven, eight, and ultimately into nine departments, it was hoped that a better result would be shown; but they have never had an adequate allowance, and have always been in financial difficulties, besides which they have disagreed among themselves, and quarrelling wastes time.
Clio in her matter-of-fact way built a storehouse wherein to preserve her treasures; her curious, imaginative sisters peeped through the key-hole.