The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping down from the north. March ought by Caprese experience to be the difficult month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is already rippling under the olives, leaf-buds run like little jets of green light along the brown vine-stems, the grey weird fig-branches are dotted with fruit, women are spinning again on the housetops, boys are playing with the birds they have caught in the myrtles, the bright shore across the bay is veiled in a summer haze, and winter is gone. It is hard to provide in English fashion against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, to be borne with "pazienza" and a shrug of the shoulders. When the storm-wind blows he lounges in the sunny corner of the Piazza; when the rain comes he smokes at home or mends his nets under the picture of the Madonna and the Bambino; when the cold comes he sits passive and numbed till the cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will pass, and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay; and so instead of making a fuss about winter he looks on it as a casual little parenthesis in the business of life, intensely disagreeable but luckily brief. He sees no poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist; he hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles so dear to Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much of a festa in the South, and has none of the mystery and home pathos which makes it dear to Englishmen. There is the "presepio" in the church, there is the procession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide, but the only real break to the winter's dulness is the Feast of the Coral-Fishers.
What with the poverty of the island and its big families it is hard to see how Capri could get along at all if it were not for the extra employment and earnings which are afforded by the coral-fishery off the African coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn; and the Sunday before they start—generally one of the last Sundays in January—serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness streams out of church into the sunshine. At its head come the "Daughters of Mary," some mere little trots, some girls of sixteen, but all clad in white, with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles of red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor-boys followed by rough grizzled elders bearing candles like the girls before them, and then the village Brotherhood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments of grey, with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving nothing but the bright good-humoured eye to guide one under this sepulchral figure to the Giovanni or Beppino who was cracking jokes yesterday till the Blue Grotto rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by the four elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of "samite, mystic, wonderful"—somewhat like a doctor of music's gown in our unpoetic land—comes the Madonna herself, "La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her fingers. It is the Madonna of Carmel who disputes with San Costanzo, the Saint of the mother-church below, the spiritual dominion of Capri. If he is the "Protector" of the island, she is its "Protectress." The older and graver sort indeed are faithful to their bishop-saint, and the loyalty of a vinedresser in the piazza remains unshaken even by the splendour of the procession. "Yes, signore!" he replies to a sceptical Englishman who presses him hard with the glory of "the Protectress," "yes, signore, the Madonna is great for the fisher-folk; she gives them fish. But fish are poor things after all and bring little money. It is San Costanzo who gives us the wine, the good red wine which is the wealth of the island. And so this winter feast of the fishermen is a poor little thing beside our festa of San Costanzo in the May-time. For the image of our Protector is all of silver, and sometimes the bishop comes over from Sorrento and walks behind it, and we go all the way through the vineyards, and he blesses them, and then at nightfall we have 'bombi'—not such as those of the Madonna," he adds with a quiet shrug of the shoulders, "but great bombi and great fireworks at the cost of the Municipio."
On the other hand, all the girls go with the fisher-folk in their love of the Madonna. "Ah yes, signore," laughs a maiden whose Greek face might have served Pheidias for a model, "San Costanzo is our protector, but he is old and the Madonna is young, so young and so pretty, signore, and she is my protectress." A fisherman backs up the feminine logic by a gird at the silver image which is evidently the strong point of the opposite party. The little commune is said to have borrowed a sum of money on the security of this work of art, and the fisherman is correspondingly scornful. "San Costanzo owes much, many danari, signore; and it is said," he whispers roguishly, "that if they don't pay pretty soon his creditors at Naples will send him to prison for the debt of the Municipio." But the Madonna has her troubles as well as the Saint. Her hair which has been dyed for the occasion has unhappily turned salmon colour by mistake; but the blunder has no sort of effect on the enthusiasm of her worshippers; on the canons who follow her in stiff copes, shouting lustily, or on the maidens and matrons who bring up the rear. Slowly the procession winds its way through the little town, now lengthening into a line of twinkling tapers as it passes through the narrow alleys which serve for streets, now widening out again on the hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the sun. And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without which the procession would go for nothing, catherine-wheels spinning in the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries of terror and delight.
Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands, the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the adjoining coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one resource is the coral-fishery.
The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it, the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted room where her friends await her with a charming air of ignorance as to the errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in diplomatic fence, in chat over the weather, the crops, or the price of macaroni, till at a given signal the girl herself leaves the room, and the "ambassadress" breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments pass quickly into business, and a vow of eternal friendship between the families is sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon called in and the lovers are formally betrothed for six months, a ceremony which was followed in times past by a new appearance of the ambassadress with the customary offering of trinkets from the lover to his promised spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, but the girls still pride themselves on the number and value of their ornaments—the "spadella," or stiletto which binds the elaborately braided mass of their ebon hair; the circular gold earrings with inner circles of pearls; the gold chain or lacÉtta, worn fold upon fold round the neck; the bunch of gold talismans suspended on the breast; the profusion of heavy silver rings which load every finger. The Sunday after her betrothal when she appears at High Mass in all her finery is the proudest day of a Capri girl's life; but love has few of the tenderer incidents which make its poetry in the North. There is no "lover's lane" in Capri, for a maiden may not walk with her betrothed save in presence of witnesses; and a kiss before marriage is, as "Auld Robin Gray" calls it, "a sin" to which no modest girl stoops. The future husband is in fact busy with less romantic matters; it is his business to provide bed and bedding, table and chairs, drawers and looking-glass, and above all a dozen gaudy prints from Naples of the Madonna and the favourite saints of the day. The bride provides the rest, and on the eve of the marriage the families meet once more to take an inventory of her contributions which remain her own property till her death. The morning's sun streams in upon the lovers as they kneel at the close of mass before the priest in San Stefano; all the boyhood of Capri is waiting outside to pelt the bridal train with "confetti" as it hurries amidst blushes and laughter across the Piazza; a dinner of macaroni and the island wine ends in a universal "tarantella," there is a final walk round the village at the close of the dance, and the coral-fisher reaps the prize of his toil as he leads his bride to her home.
THE END.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
THIRTY-FOURTH THOUSAND.
