Vignettes: A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment

NAPLES IN NOVEMBER

Late afternoon in the Strada del Chiaja
November 9

Up the squalid, ill-paved street, lumber the great landaus—an interminable, toiling stream, carrying home from the corso the morose, sallow-faced ladies of the Neapolitan nobility, and crushing on either side the hedge of gaping hobbledehoys that line the niggardly pavement.

From Posilipo

Nov. 12

Heaped beneath us all Naples, white and motionless in the silent blaze of the midday sun; circling the bay, still and smooth and blue as the sky above, a misty line of white villages; dark, velvety shadows draping the hills; on the horizon, rising abruptly, Capri’s notched silhouette—tout semble suer la beautÉ—la bonne et franche beautÉ criarde des pays chauds europÉens.

In the Strada del Porto

Nov. 12

A strip of treacherous pavement slimy with garbage; the wan flicker of foul lanterns, vaguely revealing the black shapes of sail-like awnings above a network of mysterious masts; and the sodden, continuous uproar of a reeking crowd—hawkers of fruit, of fish, of assorted cigar-ends—fiercely clamouring together in the darkness....

By-and-bye, through the obscurity, peers the glossy vermilion of piled capsicums, the scarlet sparkle of bleeding pomegranates, and the hard flashing of scattered, silvery sardines. Here and there, behind a chestnut-brazier that shoots long, licking tongues of ruddy flame, the vacant, battered countenance of some aged crone; or amid a frenzied cracking of whips the clattering passage of a team of trembling mules, straining at a lean-shafted, high-wheeled cart, passing across the street, to disappear, engulfed in cavernous blackness, beneath a noisome archway. Bands of sailors jostle their way down the alley, rudely rebuffing the obscene advances of slatternly women; the night grows airless and stifling, under the dingy stars that speckle the black strip of sky overhead; and the street comes to possess a satanic fascination, almost epic in its intensity....

Moonlight

Nov. 29

The long line of lamps casts countless, trembling pillars of dusky gold into the sea: the night is full of stifled light—a pale, quivering suffusion of mysterious blue. The Castello d’Oro floats, black as ink, like a shapeless hulk; across the empty sky a solitary, ghostly cloud lies sleeping; somewhere, beyond the bay, the moonlight is dancing; and the rhythm of the sleek, rolling waves drowsily, lazily, rises and falls.

A boy and a girl lean together, watching the waves: some mandolines start a faint twanging; the distant rattle of a cab—then all is quiet; and the glow above Vesuvius, sullenly pulsing, alone breaks in upon the delicate serenity of the night....

At the Theatre Manzoni

Nov. 26

I have been to many first-nights there, for I have found a certain childish charm in the small, shabby, blue-and-white theatre, the tiers of minute boxes, close-packed with faces, the noisy Neapolitan pit, and the inevitable row of callow critics, sucking their pencil-stumps, each with his hat tight-jammed behind his head.

But especially there lingers in my mind the memory of a certain brief, mediÆval drama, where a little flaxen-haired lady, wearing a low-cut dress of arsenic-green satin, passionately implored mercy of a curly-pated knight in a shirt of maroon-coloured velvet, for a great wrong she had done him. She wept piteously, poor little creature, tearing tremulously at her fluffy locks, and on her knees appealing to us all to help her. But the little knight kept his wooden gaze obdurately averted from her, till, exhausted, she sank dying on to a gilt-legged couch.

The actors were only marionettes. The little lady was somewhat obviously painted, and the little knight stood a trifle stiffly, as if suffering slightly from stage-fright. But the pit sat the scene out in breathless silence, and the row of callow critics sucked their pencil-stumps with renewed vigour, and jammed their hats tighter behind their heads. For in some curious, inexplicable way the thing was quite moving—he was so brutal, the little curly-pated knight in his shirt of maroon-coloured velvet; and she, poor, sobbing, little flaxen-haired lady, pleaded so desperately....

Once before, in my childhood, through a half-closed door, I saw a girl plead with that same tense fragility. She, too, had flaxen hair, and wore a low-necked dress of green satin; and he, the man, stood stiffly, turning his gaze away from her, obdurately. And each scene, as I now compose them, seems to contain a kindred underlying element of grotesque unreality.

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