The Collected Works of Susan Coolidge: 7 Novels, 35+ Short Stories, Essays & Poems (Illustrated). Susan Coolidge
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But after they had bought two or three of these enormous bouquets, and had discovered that not a single rose boasted an inch of stem, and that all were pierced with long wires through their very hearts, she ceased to care for them.
“I would rather have one Souvenir or General Jacqueminot, with a long stem and plenty of leaves, than a dozen of these stiff platters of bouquets,” Katy told Mrs. Ashe. But when they drove beyond the city gates, and the coachman came to anchor beneath walls overhung with the same roses, and she found that she might stand on the seat and pull down as many branches of the lovely flowers as she desired, and gather wallflowers for herself out of the clefts in the masonry, she was entirely satisfied.
“This is the Italy of my dreams,” she said.
With all its beauty there was an underlying sense of danger about Naples, which interfered with their enjoyment of it. Evil smells came in at the windows, or confronted them as they went about the city. There seemed something deadly in the air. Whispered reports met their ears of cases of fever, which the landlords of the hotels were doing their best to hush up. An American gentleman was said to be lying very ill at one house. A lady had died the week before at another. Mrs. Ashe grew nervous.
“We will just take a rapid look at a few of the principal things,” she told Katy, “and then get away as fast as we can. Amy is so on my mind that I have no peace of my life. I keep feeling her pulse and imagining that she does not look right; and though I know it is all my fancy, I am impatient to be off. You won’t mind, will you, Katy?”
After that everything they did was done in a hurry. Katy felt as if she were being driven about by a cyclone, as they rushed from one sight to another, filling up all the chinks between with shopping, which was irresistible where everything was so pretty and so wonderfully cheap. She herself purchased a tortoise-shell fan and chain for Rose Red, and had her monogram carved upon it; a coral locket for Elsie; some studs for Dorry; and for her father a small, beautiful vase of bronze, copied from one of the Pompeian antiques.
“How charming it is to have money to spend in such a place as this!” she said to herself with a sigh of satisfaction as she surveyed these delightful buyings. “I only wish I could get ten times as many things and take them to ten times as many people. Papa was so wise about it. I can’t think how it is that he always knows beforehand exactly how people are going to feel, and what they will want!”
Mrs. Ashe also bought a great many things for herself and Amy, and to take home as presents; and it was all very pleasant and satisfactory except for that subtle sense of danger from which they could not escape and which made them glad to go. “See Naples and die,” says the old adage; and the saying has proved sadly true in the case of many an American traveller.
Beside the talk of fever there was also a good deal of gossip about brigands going about, as is generally the case in Naples and its vicinity. Something was said to have happened to a party on one of the heights above Sorrento; and though nobody knew exactly what the something was, or was willing to vouch for the story, Mrs. Ashe and Katy felt a good deal of trepidation as they entered the carriage which was to take them to the neighborhood where the mysterious “something” had occurred.
The drive between Castellamare and Sorrento is in reality as safe as that between Boston and Brookline; but as our party did not know this fact till afterward, it did them no good. It is also one of the most beautiful drives in the world, following the windings of the exquisite coast mile after mile, in long links of perfectly made road, carved on the face of sharp cliffs, with groves of oranges and lemons and olive orchards above, and the Bay of Naples beneath, stretching away like a solid sheet of lapis-lazuli, and gemmed with islands of the most picturesque form.
It is a pity that so much beauty should have been wasted on Mrs. Ashe and Katy, but they were too frightened to half enjoy it. Their carriage was driven by a shaggy young savage, who looked quite wild enough to be a bandit himself. He cracked his whip loudly as they rolled along, and every now and then gave a long shrill whistle. Mrs. Ashe was sure that these were signals to his band, who were lurking somewhere on the olive-hung hillsides. She thought she detected him once or twice making signs to certain questionable-looking characters as they passed; and she fancied that the people they met gazed at them with an air of commiseration, as upon victims who were being carried to execution. Her fears affected Katy; so, though they talked and laughed, and made jokes to amuse Amy, who must not be scared or led to suppose that anything was amiss, and to the outward view seemed a very merry party, they were privately quaking in their shoes all the way, and enjoying a deal of highly superfluous misery. And after all they reached Sorrento in perfect safety; and the driver, who looked so dangerous, turned out to be a respectable young man enough, with a wife and family to support, who considered a plateful of macaroni and a glass of sour red wine as the height of luxury, and was grateful for a small gratuity of thirty cents or so, which would enable him to purchase these dainties. Mrs. Ashe had a very bad headache next day, to pay for her fright; but she and Katy agreed that they had been very foolish, and resolved to pay no more attention to unaccredited rumors or allow them to spoil their enjoyment, which was a sensible resolution to make.
Their hotel was perched directly over the sea. From the balcony of their sitting-room they looked down a sheer cliff some sixty feet high, into the water; their bedrooms opened on a garden of roses, with an orange grove beyond. Not far from them was the great gorge which cuts the little town of Sorrento almost in two, and whose seaward end makes the harbor of the place. Katy was never tired of peering down into this strange and beautiful cleft, whose sides, two hundred feet in depth, are hung with vines and trailing growths of all sorts, and seem all a-tremble with the fairy fronds of maiden-hair ferns growing out of every chink and crevice. She and Amy took walks along the coast toward Massa, to look off at the lovely island shapes in the bay, and admire the great clumps of cactus and Spanish bayonet which grew by the roadside; and they always came back loaded with orange-flowers, which could be picked as freely as apple-blossoms from New England orchards in the spring. The oranges themselves at that time of the year were very sour, but they answered as well for a romantic date, “From an orange grove,” as if they had been the sweetest in the world.
They made two different excursions to Pompeii, which is within easy distance of Sorrento. They scrambled on donkeys over the hills, and had glimpses of the far-away Calabrian shore, of the natural arch, and the temples of Pæstum shining in the sun many miles distant. On Katy’s birthday, which fell toward the end of January, Mrs. Ashe let her have her choice of a treat; and she elected to go to the Island of Capri, which none of them had seen. It turned out a perfect day, with sea and wind exactly right for the sail, and to allow of getting into the famous “Blue Grotto,” which can only be entered under particular conditions of tide and weather. And they climbed the great cliff-rise at the island’s end, and saw the ruins of the villa built by the wicked emperor Tiberius, and the awful place known as his “Leap,” down which, it is said, he made his victims throw themselves; and they lunched at a hotel which bore his name, and just at sunset pushed off again for the row home over the charmed sea. This return voyage was almost the pleasantest thing of all the day. The water was smooth, the moon at its full. It was larger and more brilliant than American moons are, and seemed to possess an actual warmth and color. The boatmen timed their oar-strokes to the cadence of Neapolitan barcaroles and folk-songs, full of rhythmic movement, which seemed caught from the pulsing tides. And when at last the bow grated on the sands of the Sorrento landing-place, Katy drew a long, regretful breath, and declared that this was her best birthday-gift of all, better than Amy’s flowers, or the pretty tortoise-shell locket that Mrs. Ashe had given her, better even than the letter from home, which, timed by happy accident, had arrived by the morning’s post to make a bright opening for the day.
All pleasant things must come to an ending.
“Katy,” said Mrs. Ashe, one afternoon in early February, “I heard some ladies talking just now in the salon, and they said that Rome is filling up very fast. The Carnival begins in less than two weeks, and everybody wants to be there then. If we don’t make haste, we shall not be able to get any rooms.”
“Oh dear!” said Katy, “it is very trying not to be able to be in two places at once. I want to see Rome dreadfully, and yet I cannot bear to leave Sorrento. We