The Children of the King | Page 4

Amalfi. The pavement is of the
roughest cobble stones, and the pigs are the scavengers. Pigs
everywhere, in the streets, in the houses, at the windows, on the steps
of the church in the market-place, to right and left, before you and

behind you--like the guns at Balaclava. You never heard of the Six
Hundred, though your father was boatswain of a Palermo grain bark
and lay three months in the harbour of Sebastapol during the fighting.
Pigs everywhere, black, grunting and happy. Red-skirted,
scarlet-bodiced women everywhere, too, all moving and carrying
something. Galantuomini loafing at most of the corners, smoking clay
pipes with cane stems, and the great Jew shopkeeper's nose just visible
from a distance as he stands in the door of his dingy den. Dirtier and
dirtier grow the cobble stones as you go on. Brighter and brighter the
huge bunches of red peppers fastened by every window, thicker and
thicker on the upper walls and shaky balconies the black melons and
yellowish grey cantelopes hung up to keep in the high fresh air, each
slung in a hitch of yarn to a nail of its own.
Here and there some one greets you. What have you to sell? Will you
take a cargo of pears? Good this year, like all the fruit. The figs and
grapes will not be dry for another month. They nod and move on, as
you pass by them. Verbicaro is a commercial centre, in spite of the pigs.
A tall, thin priest meets you, with a long black cigar in his mouth.
When he catches your eye he takes it from between his teeth and
knocks the ash off, seeing that you are a stranger. Perhaps it is not very
clerical to smoke in the streets. But who cares? This is Verbicaro--and
besides, it is not a pipe. Monks smoke pipes. Priests smoke cigars.
One more turn down a narrow lane--darkest and dirtiest of all the lanes,
the cobble stones only showing here and there above the universal
black puddle. Yet the air is not foul and many a broad street by the
Basso Porto in Naples smells far worse. The keen high atmosphere of
the Calabrian mountains is a mighty purifier of nastiness, and perhaps
the pig is not to be despised after all, as sanitary engineer, scavenger
and street sweeper.
This is Don Pietro Casale's house, the last on the right, with the steep
staircase running up outside the building to the second story. And the
staircase has an iron railing, and so narrows the lane that a broad
shouldered man can just go by to the cabbage garden beyond without
turning sideways. On the landing at the top, outside the closed door and

waiting for visitors, sits the pig--a pig larger, better fed and by one
shade of filthiness cleaner than other pigs. Don Pietro Casale has been
seen to sweep his pig with a broken willow broom, after it has rained.
"Do you take him for a Christian?" asked his neighbour, in amazement,
on the occasion.
"No," answered Don Pietro gravely. "He is certainly not a Christian.
But why should he spoil the tablecloth with his muddy hog's back when
my guests are at their meals? He is always running under the table for
the scraps."
"And what are women for, except to wash tablecloths?" inquired the
neighbour contemptuously.
But he got no answer. Few people ever get more than one from Don
Pietro Casale, whose eldest son is doing well at Buenos Ayres, and in
whose house the postmaster takes his meals now that he is a widower.
For Don Pietro and his wife Donna Concetta sell their own wine and
keep a cook-shop, besides a guest-room with a garret above it, and two
beds, with an old-fashioned store of good linen in old-fashioned
iron-bound chests. At the time of the fair they can put up a dozen or
fourteen guests. People say indeed that the place is not so well
managed, nor the cooking so good since poor Carmela died, the widow
of Ruggiero dei Figli del Re--Roger of the Children of the King.
For this is the place where the Children of the King lived and died for
many generations, and this house of Don Pietro Casale was theirs, and
the one on the other side of the cabbage garden, a smaller and poorer
one, in which Carmela died. The garden itself was once theirs, and the
vineyard beyond, and the olive grove beyond that, and much good land
in the valley. For they were galantuomini, and even thought themselves
something better, and sometimes, when the wine was new, they talked
of noble blood and said that their first ancestor had indeed been a son
of a king who had given him all Verbicaro for his