Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Their sight, never clouded by any consent to evil, saw even in the most trifling failings a heinous offence against the Divine Majesty, and Its infinite Purity, visible to them, made their own fallen nature black by contrast. So they took that nature in hand, these athletes (called Benedict, and Francis, and Anthony, and many another blessed name written in the “Libro d’Oro” of the recording Angel), and thought a lifetime would not be too much to give to the task of subduing it. And the Heavenly Father bade them go on and be of good courage; and never, till the predestined moment came, did He let them dream that their years of prayer and fasting were just a preparation for generalship in His army, that in humbly striving to save their own souls they were fitting themselves to save millions and millions of others. The first symptom one notices about them is their complete disregard of the natty little idol we call “respectability”—the Church calls it “human respect.” We quite understand that great men should kick it out of the way—whoever heard of Wellington or Kitchener asking, “What are people going to say?” Their gifts and their calling place them above the reach of considerations by which we ordinary mortals are content to regulate our actions. We admire, rave over, their splendid carelessness. But when it comes to the Saints we take our shrunken measure, try to fit it to their conduct, and shake our heads. Their whole-heartedness is eccentricity, they thought nothing of inflicting most damaging shocks on public opinion—what a pity! And if we see any of our acquaintances beginning to follow in their steps we look the other way, as if the poor dears had come out into the street half dressed. I wonder how many of her friends cared to bow to the late Countess of Denbigh when, a few years ago, she took Bridget’s place at the crossing near Farm Street and swept it diligently, and stretched out her blessed hand for the pennies, and never thought she was doing anything heroic—just keeping old Bridget’s crossing for her while she went to Mass! I believe the very Angels wanted to throw down their shining mantles for her to walk over when she went to Heaven—but I am sure some of her friends on earth thought she was putting them in a most embarrassing position.

Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in her “Life of Santa Francesca Romana,” has described very truly and sympathetically these—to us—puzzling stages in the development of saintship. They vary in degree, of course, in each individual case, but the same note runs through all: “Permission to labour first,—the result far distant, but clear; the vision of that result when once He had said, ‘Begin and work.’ To tarry patiently for that signal, to obey it unhesitatingly when once given, is the rule of the Saints. How marvellous is their instinct! how accordant their practice! First, the hidden life, the common life; the silence of the house of Nazareth; the carpenter’s shop; the marriage-feast, it may be, for some; and, at last, ‘the hour is come,’ and the true work for which they are sent into the world has to be done, in the desert or in the cloister, in the temple or in the market-place, on Mount Tabor or on Mount Calvary; and the martyr or the confessor, the founder or the reformer of a religious order, comes forth, and in an instant, or in a few years, performs a work at which earth wonders and angels rejoice.”

CHAPTER IX PEOPLE OF THE HILLS

The Apennines—View from a Peak—Real Hospitality—Polenta—Woods of Sabina—A Hill Family—The Cook—A Queer Adventure—People of the South—A Night Festival in the Abruzzi—The Journey—The Old Organ—Marion Crawford’s Boys—Juvenile Theatricals.

How much our Italy of Rome and Naples owes to the Apennines! How gratefully should lovers of romance and history regard that mighty chain that runs, an inland sea of crag and peak, forest and ravine, between shore and shore! Physically and morally, it is the backbone of the country, the fortress of tradition, the nurse of what our modern cant calls, “Plain living and high thinking.” Its hard, yet beneficent, climate, with sharp delimitations of season, its passes so obdurate to the tainting allurements of railways, its hundreds of sturdy, self-contained little towns, each with its story of its own saints and heroes, its ancestry of tradition that laughs at the flight of centuries—all this has bred a race of men and women of whom modern Italy knows little, but who form the residue by which the mixed enfeebled masses of her cities and plains will in the end be saved. Faith is strong; morals, though often transgressed, still clear and commanding. New fads, make-believe religions, free love and race suicide presented as twin benefits to humanity, the worship of materialism—all the old crimes that come dressed up as new virtues—find no foothold here. The “pale-pink uplift” of these modern shams would be laughed to scorn by our people of Sabina and Abruzzi and Ciocciarìa. Their parish priests tramp round amongst them as friends and mentors. The “parroco” and the apothecary may be the only persons in a whole community who can read, but the child of ten knows the commandments of God and the Church, and the innovator who attempts to make little of these meets with a very cold reception. The people have many faults and many weaknesses, but they are all human ones, and, frankly, I would rather have to do with the man who has slain a rival or a sweetheart in a fit of jealous anger than with a railway magnate or a prophet of the Decadent. The murderer’s record is probably a good deal cleaner than theirs.

So my inheritance of Sabina has always been very precious to me. Many weary years have passed since I set foot there, but the remembrance of young days spent in those high rich solitudes comes still as a fresh breeze across the dusty wastes of the world, and very gladly shall I return to them before I die. I have travelled so far and seen such strange and endless varieties of scenery that I think I have a right to say that there are few places on earth where nature has done more to rejoice and strengthen the body and soul of man.

From Rome the Sabines are merely a noble chain of peaks, culminating in the calm Lion profile of the couchant “Lionessa,” her face to the north, waiting through the long blue days of summer for the crown of snow that the winter lays on her brow. The slopes and spurs that descend towards the Campagna are smiling enough—as they should be, turned everlastingly to the sun and the sea. One must pass beyond all that, climb by rough and narrow paths to the great tossed heart of the hills, and stand on some peak like Guadognolo to take in the amazing grandeur of the Sabines. Even from lower places—Olevano, for instance—you may look east and west and south and north, and feel as if you were standing on an island crag in an ocean of long sapphire billows rolling away, breaker beyond breaker, into infinity, a sea that in some moment of surpassing pride raised its breast too near the sky and froze to stone in that passion of ambition; and your heart, the heart of the native-born, tells you that every hollow between the breakers holds its rivers and lakes smothered in olives and vines and corn, its walled town and ancient Church, its old fortified farmhouses, dazzlingly white against the sun-warmed rock of the mounting ridge—farmhouses with broad brick loggias garlanded with festoons of scarlet and orange, the bursting red “pepperoni” as big as citrons, and strings of flame-coloured maize like golden spear-heads, all drying in the sun for the winter’s needs.

Stop at one of these houses and ask for hospitality, and you will find out what the word really means. I have often thought of it when I was sitting through huge official dinners where the great ones of the earth were arranging its destinies over the champagne and truffles—with the murder of a nation in their hearts. The commanded smile, and the cold watchful eyes—the men fencing with words for rapiers, and we women watching every play of the shrouded steel and pretending to talk amiable nothings to each other; the gasp of relief at parting, and the consignment to everlasting perdition of the adversary, which broke from our worried mate when the door of the brougham had been clapped to and we could sink back on the cushions as we rolled away! Then would return a vision of some halt in the hills at home, of the dark cavernous kitchen with its freshly sprinkled brick floor and its bunches of herbs hanging from the high blackened beams overhead shedding their dry fragrance on the air, so cool and refreshing on entering from the burning midday sunshine outside. “Favorisca!” cries the “Sposa”—she may be eighteen or eighty, but that is her title from her wedding day forward.—“Condescend to enter! Let the signori be accommodated!” The rush-bottomed chairs are set out on the loggia in the shade, the boys are sent to fetch ice-cool water from the well, and, as the bucket goes splashing down into the invisible flood and comes up all diamonds in the sun, “Sposa” brings out four or five heavy glasses, freshly rinsed, in the fingers of one hand and a straw-bound fiaschetta of her own wine in the other. “Vino sincero, signori miei!” she assures you as she sets it down on the deal table already spread with the clean cloth that smells of rosemary. Ay, a “sincere wine,” with no “dope” in its crimson or topaz depths, and the welcome is as sincere as the wine. She pours it out, smiling, her handsome head and rich costume standing out picturesquely against the dark doorway behind her, within which one of her girls is kneeling on the bricks, washing freshly pulled lettuce for your salad in a great copper bowl, hand-beaten and reflecting the light from every one of its red-bronze facets. Everything in the kitchen is of beaten copper; these people would as soon think of cooking in any other metal as of sleeping in cotton sheets—a degradation the poorest scorns to put up with.

“Sposa” disappears within the kitchen and one of the girls comes out to entertain the visitors while the dinner is cooking. She stands with one hand on the back of a chair, the other fingering her blue and yellow apron, pink with shyness, but devoured with curiosity. Every detail of one’s dress, every bit of jewellery is being taken in—to be described to all the other girls of the place when they meet at Church on Sunday—but she answers one’s questions with a confident smile. How old? Oh, “in seventeen”—that is, sixteen last birthday. Her name? Candiduccia, at the Signora’s service! Betrothed! A pinker flush and an indescribable little movement of the shoulders, and then down goes her head, while “Mammà,” whose sharp ears have heard all, replies in her deep sonorous tones, from among the pots and pans: “A good youth, but he is getting a bad bargain! This lazy one has not spun half her linen yet. I had mine all spun and woven by the time I was fourteen! Here, thou! come and fetch the plates! The illustrious ones are hungry!”

Candiduccia dives into the kitchen, and a moment later your dinner is before you—a big dimpled omelet, trout from the stream fried in olive oil, and crisp salad in a big majolica bowl. Sposa cuts the fresh rough bread—first making the sign of the Cross over the loaf—and serves you cream cheese, made from goat’s milk, instead of butter. Butter and cow’s milk do not enter into the Sabina bill of fare; our mountain people do not care about these things, but it is a feast for the gods, all the same.