I had read Dr. Norris’s letters from Taormina in those early days, when he and Mrs. Norris were among the most active relief workers. We picked up the threads and I listened to the story of this and that family these dear people had succored. They had invited to meet me a Sicilian lady, who had escaped, almost miraculously, from Messina, a fine energetic young woman, half Italian, half German by birth. She gave me a firm grasp of the hand, and was able and willing to talk with me about her own experience.
She had waked at the first shock, put a pillow over her face to protect it from falling plaster, held firm to the sides of her bed, and the next minute found herself in the street, perfectly safe, without a scratch—her room had been in the fourth story! All her family, except one sister in Switzerland, were killed—parents, brothers, sisters; their bodies were still buried in the ruins. The sister in Switzerland had gone mad with grief.
This girl believes that the loss was harder on her sister than it had been on herself.
Dr. Norris said that the sentiments of many of the survivors were paralyzed; that everybody being in more or less the same case of having lost all their friends, they accepted it as a matter of course. It seemed part of the natural order, and easier to bear than if they alone had been singled out to bear a crushing blow. Some sense also of having been among those preserved, it often seemed miraculously, stayed them. The people who had been buried alive for three days, however, do not recover; they have a fixed look of horror. That side I cannot bear to dwell on,—the dreadful number of lingering deaths!
Some of the cultivated people we met, who have lost every one belonging to them, showed a calm, a manner of putting it all behind them that is admirable. The grief for one person, greatly loved in a family, casts a greater and longer shadow apparently than these awful catastrophes. It seems also that nothing that happens to any one else can affect us as much as what happens to ourselves. Those people who have looked death in the face and escaped seem, almost against their volition, to bloom out and to rejoice in life itself, even though they seem to have lost everything that makes life dear. I must confess that I felt this with the people who had come into property by the death of all their families, and not with those who had lost everything. I suppose this is perfectly human and natural.
Our last day at Taormina we had tea in the enchanted garden, with some of our Sicilian friends.
In an upper room of the Timeo, Tetrazzini was singing (through the Victor) the great aria from Mignon; when it was finished, Caruso sang his song from l’Africaine.
“To hear the Etna among tenors, while we are looking at Mt. Etna,” said Patsy, “gives one a faint idea of what the old Taorminians enjoyed in their theatre!” The music over, we sat talking with our friends. One of the men, a professor, lassoed and caught round the neck a little green lizard; very soon the pretty creature was quite tame.
“Be thou quiet or I shall hurt thee, little one!” said the Professor, as he cut the lasso, and the lizard ran away with a necklace round his throat. The talk ranged wide, of books, operas, artists, everything but what was at hand. Finally the Professor held up a warning finger:
“Listen, the nightingale! He never says the same thing twice—while we—” he shrugged his shoulders, picked a scarlet poppy and stuck it in his coat.