Elizabeth Bisland - Seekers in Sicily

Demeters Well-Beloved Children

NOTE

THE designs upon the cover of this book, and at the heads of the chapters, are the tribe signs or totems of the original inhabitants of the island of Sicily, which have survived all conquests and races and are still considered as tokens of good luck and defenders from the Evil-eye.

When this book was writtenin the spring of the yearthe Land of the Older Gods was unmarred by the terrible seismic convulsions which wrought such ruin in the last days of 1908.

Very sad to each of us it is when time and the sorrows of this unintelligible world carve furrows upon our own countenances, but when the visage of the globe shrivels and wrinkles with the lapse of ages then the greatness of the disaster touches the whole race. Sicily, whose history is so full of blood and tears, has been the victim of the greatest natural tragedy that mans chronicles record because of this line drawn by Time upon our planets faceyet it leaves her still so fair, so poignantly lovely, that pilgrims of beauty willforgetting this slight blemishstill journey to see the sweetest remnant of the worlds youth. Happily Messina, the one city injured, was the one city where travellers rarely paused. All the others remain unmarred and are still exactly as they were when this chronicle of their ancient beauty and charm was set down.

E. B. and A. H.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SEEKERS IN SICILY

Oh , Persephone, Persephone!... Surely Kor is in Hell.

This is a discouraged voice from the window.

Peripatetica, that sounds both insane and improper. Would it fatigue you too much to explain in the vernacular what you are trying, in your roundabout way, to suggest?

Thus Jane, a mere diaphanous mauve cloud, from which the glimmering fire picked out glittering points here and there. When Jane takes to teagowns she is really very dressy.

Peripatetica strolled up and down the dusky drawing-room two or three times, without answering. Outside a raging wind drove furiously before it in the darkness the snow that flew upward in long spirals, like desperate hunted ghosts. Finally she took up a book from the table, and kneeling, to get the light from the logs on the page, began to read aloud.

These two were on such kindly terms that either one could read aloud without arousing the other to open violence.

Persephone, sometimes called Kor read Peripatetica, having been seized by Pluto, as she gathered narcissus, and wild thyme, and mint, and the violet into her green kirtlewas carried, weeping very bitterly, into his dark hell. And Demeter, her mother, missing her fair and sweet-curled daughter, sought her through all the world with tears and ravings; the bitter sound and moisture of her grief making a noise as of winter wind and rain. And her warm heart being so cold with pain the blossoms died on her bosom, and her vernal hair was shredded abroad into the air, and all growing things drooped and perished, and her brown benignant face became white as the face of the dead are white

Peripatetica closed the book, put it back on the table, and drew a hassock under her for a seat.

I see, said Jane. Demeter is certainly passing this way to-night, poor dear! Its a pity she cant realize Persephone, that sweet soul of Spring, will come back. She always does come back.

Yes; but Demeter, the mother-earth, always fears that this time she may not; that Pluto will keep her in hell always. And every time she makes the same outcry about it.

I suppose she always finds her first in Enna, Jane hazarded. Isnt Enna in Sicily?

Yes, I think so; but I dont know much about Sicily, though everybody goes there nowadays. Lets go there, Jane, and help Demeter find Persephone.

Lets! agreed Jane, with sympathetic enthusiasm, and they went.

Now, being Americans, and therefore accustomed to the most obliging behaviour on the part of the male sex, it never occurred to them that Pluto might be ungallant enough to object to their taking a hand in. But he didas they might have foreseen would be likely in a person so unmannerly as to snatch lovely daughters from devoted mothers.

It began on the ocean. On quite a calm evening a wave, passing from under the side of the ship, threw its crest backperhaps to look at the starsand fell head over heels into their open port. Certainly as much as two tons of green and icy Atlantic entered impulsively, and by the time they were dried out and comforted by the tight-corseted, rosy, sympathetic Lemon every object they possessed was a mere bunch of depressed rumples. Throughout the rest of the voyage they presented the unfortunate appearance of having slept in their clothes, including their hats. These last, which they had believed refreshingly picturesque, or coquettish, at starting, had that defiantly wretched aspect displayed by the broody hen after she has been dipped in the rain-barrel to check her too exuberant aversion to race-suicide.

That was how Pluto began, and it swiftly went from bad to worse.

Three large tourist ships discharged bursting cargoes of humanity upon Naples on one and the same day, and the hotel-keepers rose to their opportunity and dealt guilefully with the horde clamouring as with one voice for food and shelter. That ones hard-won shelter was numbered 12 bis (an artful concealment of the unlucky number 13) was apparently an unimportant detail. It was shelter, though even a sea-sodden mind should have seen something suspicious in those egregious frescoes of fat ladies sitting on the knife edge of crescent moons with which Room 13 endeavoured to conceal its real banefulness. Even such a mind should have distrusted that flamingly splendid fire-screen in front of a walled-up fireplace; should have scented danger in that flamboyant black and gold and blue satin furniture of the vintage of 1870. There was plainly, to an observant eye, something sinister and meretricious in so much dressiness, but Jane and Peripatetica yielded themselves up to that serpent lodging without the smallest precaution, and lived to rue their impulsive confidence.