Kitabı oku: «Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885», sayfa 10

Some of the most famous divinations about marriage are practised with hazel-nuts on Allhallowe’en. In Indo-European tradition the hazel was sacred to love; and when Loki in the form of a falcon rescued Idhunn, the goddess of youthful life, from the power of the frost-giants, he carried her off in his beak in the shape of a hazel-nut.¹⁵ So in Denmark, as in ancient Rome, nuts are scattered at a marriage. In northern divinations on Allhallowe’en nuts are placed on the bars of a grate by pairs, which have first been named after a pair of lovers, and according to the result, their combustion, explosion, and the like, the wise divine the fortune of the lovers. Graydon has beautifully versified this superstition: —

 
These glowing nuts are emblems true
Of what in human life we view;
The ill-matched couple fret and fume,
And thus in strife themselves consume;
Or from each other wildly start,
And with a noise for ever part.
But see the happy, happy pair,
Of genuine love and truth sincere;
With mutual fondness, while they burn,
Still to each other kindly turn;
And as the vital sparks decay,
Together gently sink away;
Till, life’s fierce ordeal being past,
Their mingled ashes rest at last.¹⁶
 

Nevertheless modes of love-divination for this special evening, which is as propitious to lovers as Valentine’s Day, may be found in Brand, and other collectors of these old customs.

Peas are also sacred to Freya, almost vying with the mistletoe in alleged virtue for lovers. In one district of Bohemia the girls go into a field of peas, and make there a garland of five or seven kinds of flowers (the goddess of love delights in uneven numbers), all of different hues. This garland they must sleep upon, lying with their right ear upon it, and then they hear a voice from underground, which tells what manner of men they will have for husbands. Sweet-peas would doubtless prove very effectual in this kind of divination, and there need be no difficulty in finding them of different hues. If Hertfordshire girls are lucky enough to find a pod containing nine peas, they lay it under a gate, and believe they will have for husband the first man that passes through. On the Borders unlucky lads and lasses in courtship are rubbed down with pea straw by friends of the opposite sex. These beliefs connected with peas are very widespread. Touchstone, it will be remembered, gave two peas to Jane Smile, saying, “with weeping tears, ‘Wear these for my sake.’”¹⁷

In Scotland on Shrove Tuesday a national dish called “crowdie,” composed of oatmeal and water with milk, is largely consumed, and lovers can always tell their chances of being married by putting into the porringer a ring. The finder of this in his or her portion will without fail be married sooner than any one else in the company. Onions, curiously enough, figure in many superstitions connected with marriage – why, we have no idea. It might be ungallantly suggested that it is from their supposed virtue to produce tears, or from wearing many faces, as it were, under one hood. While speaking of these unsavory vegetables, we are reminded of a passage in Luther’s “Table Talk”: “Upon the eve of Christmas Day the women run about and strike a swinish hour” (whatever this may mean): “if a great hog grunts, it decides that the future husband will be an old man; if a small one, a young man,”¹⁸ The orpine is another magical plant in love incantations. It must be used on Midsummer Eve, and is useful to inform a maiden whether her lover is true or false. It must be stuck up in her room, and the desired information is obtained by watching whether it bends to the right or the left. Hemp-seed, sown on that evening, also possesses marvellous efficacy. One of the young ladies mentioned above, who sewed bay leaves on her pillow, and had the felicity of seeing Mr. Blossom in consequence, writes, “The same night, exactly at twelve o’clock, I planted hemp-seed in our back yard, and said to myself, ‘Hemp seed I sow, hemp-seed I hoe, and he that is my true love come after me and mow!’ Will you believe it? I looked back and saw him behind me, as plain as eyes could see him.” And she adds, as another wrinkle to her sex, “Our maid Betty tells me that if I go backwards, without speaking a word, into the garden upon Midsummer Eve, and gather a rose and keep it in a clean sheet of paper without looking at it till Christmas Day, it will be as fresh as in June; and if I then stick it in my bosom, he that is to be my husband will come and take it out.” Whatever be the virtue of Betty’s recipe, it would at all events teach a lover patience. Mr. Henderson supplies two timely cautions from Border folk-lore. A girl can “scarcely do a worse thing than boil a dish-clout in her crock.” She will be sure, in consequence, to lose all her lovers, or, in Scotch phrase, “boil all her lads awa’;” “and in Durham it is believed that if you put milk in your tea before sugar, you lose your sweetheart,”¹⁹ We may add that unless a girl fasts on St. Catherine’s Day (Nov. 25) she will never have a good husband. Nothing can be luckier for either bachelor or girl than to be placed inadvertently at some social gathering between a man and his wife. The person so seated will be married before the year is out.

Song, play, and sonnet²⁰ have diffused far and wide the custom of blowing off the petals of a flower, saying the while, “He loves me – loves me not.” When this important business has been settled in the affirmative a hint may be useful for the lover going courting. If he meets a hare, he must at once turn back. Nothing can well be more unlucky. Witches are found of that shape, and he will certainly be crossed in love. Experts say that after the next meal has been eaten the evil influence is expended, and the lover can again hie forth in safety. In making presents to each other the happy pair must remember on no account to give each other a knife or a pair of scissors. Such a present effectually cuts love asunder. Take care, too, not to fall in love with one the initial of whose surname is the same as yours. It is quite certain that the union of such cannot be happy. This love-secret has been reduced into rhyme for the benefit of treacherous memories: —

 
To change the name and not the letter,
Is a change for the worse, and not for the better.
 

This love-lore belongs to the Northern mythology, else the Romans would never have used that universal formula, “ubi tu Caius ego Caia.”

These directions and cautions must surely have brought our pair of happy lovers to the wedding-day. Even yet they are not safe from malign influences, but folk-lore does not forget their welfare. If the bride has been courted by other sweethearts than the one she has now definitely chosen, there is a fear lest the discarded suitors should entertain unkindly feelings towards her. To obviate all unpleasant consequences from this, the bride must wear a sixpence in her left shoe until she is “kirked,” say the Scotch. And on her return home, if a horse stands looking at her through a gateway, or even lingers along the road leading to her new home, it is a very bad omen for her future happiness.

When once the marriage-knot is tied, it is so indissoluble that folk-lore for the most part leaves the young couple alone. It is imperative, however, that the wife should never take off her wedding-ring. To do so is to open a door to innumerable calamities, and a window at the same time through which love may fly. Should the husband not find that peace and quietness which he has a right to expect in matrimony, but discover unfortunately that he has married a scold or a shrew, he must make the best of the case: —

 
Quæ saga, quis te solvere Thessalis
Magus venenis, quis poterit deus?
 

Yet folk-lore has still one simple which will alleviate his sorrow. Any night he will, he may taste fasting a root of radish, say our old Saxon forefathers, and next day he will be proof against a woman’s chatter.²¹ By growing a large bed of radishes, and supping off them regularly, it is thus possible that he might exhaust after a time the verbosity of his spouse, but we are bound to add that we have never heard of such an easy cure being effected. The cucking-stool was found more to the purpose in past days.

But Aphrodite lays her finger on our mouth. Having disclosed so many secrets of her worship, it is time now to be silent.

After all this love-lore, supposing any one were to take a tender interest in our welfare, we should hint to her that she had no need of borrowed charms or mystic foreshadowing of the future, in Horatian words, which we shall leave untranslated as a compliment to Girton: —

 
Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
Finem di dederint, Leuconoe; nec Babylonios
Tentaris numeros.
 

Simplicity and openness of disposition are worth more than all affectations of dress or manner. Well did the Scotch lad in the song rebuke his sweetheart, who asked him for a “keekin’-glass” (Anglice, “looking-glass”): —

 
“Sweet sir, for your courtesie,
When ye come by the Bass, then,
For the love ye bear to me,
Buy me a keekin’-glass, then.”
 

But he answered —

 
“Keek into the draw-well,
Janet, Janet;
There ye’ll see your bonny sel’,
My jo, Janet.”
 

In truth, the best divination for lovers is a ready smile, and the most potent charms a maiden can possess are reticence and patience. And so to end (with quaint old Burton²²), “Let them take this of Aristænetus (that so marry) for their comfort: ‘After many troubles and cares, the marriages of lovers are more sweet and pleasant.’ As we commonly conclude a comedy with a wedding and shaking of hands, let’s shut up our discourse and end all with an epithalamium. Let the Muses sing, the Graces dance, not at their weddings only, but all their dayes long; so couple their hearts that no irksomeness or anger ever befall them: let him never call her other name than my joye, my light; or she call him otherwise than sweetheart.” —Belgravia.

A ROMANCE OF A GREEK STATUE
BY J. THEODORE BENT

I cannot tell you the story just as Nikola told it to me, with all that flow of language common in a Greek, my memory is not good enough for that; but the facts, and some of his quaint expressions, I can recount, for these I never shall forget. My travel took me to a distant island of the Greek Archipelago, called Sikinos, last winter, an island only to be reached by a sailing-boat, and here, in quarters of the humblest nature, I was storm-stayed for five long days. Nikola had been my muleteer on an expedition I made to a remote corner of the island where still are to be traced the ruins of an ancient Hellenic town, and about a mile from it a temple of Pythian Apollo. He was a fine stalwart fellow of thirty or thereabouts; he had a bright intelligent face, and he wore the usual island costume, namely, knickerbocker trousers of blue homespun calico, with a fulness, which hangs down between the legs, and when full of things, for it is the universal pocket, wabbles about like the stomach of a goose; on his head he wore a faded old fez, his feet were protected from the stones by sandals of untanned skin, and he carried a long stick in his hand with which to drive his mule.

Sikinos is perhaps the most unattainable corner of Europe, being nothing but a barren harborless rock in the middle of the Ægean sea, possessing as a fleet one caique, which occasionally goes to a neighboring island where the steamer stops, to see if there are any communications from the outer world, and four rotten fishing boats, which seldom venture more than a hundred yards from the shore. The fifteen hundred inhabitants of this rock lead a monotonous life in two villages, one of which is two hundred years old, fortified and dirty, and called the “Kastro,” or the “camp”; the other is modern, and about five minutes’ walk from the camp, and is called “the other place”; so nomenclature in Sikinos is simple enough. The inhabitants are descended from certain refugees who, two hundred years ago, fled from Crete during a revolution, and built the fortified village up on the hillside out of the reach of pirates, and remained isolated from the world ever since. Before they came, Sikinos had been uninhabited since the days of the ancient Greeks. The only two men in the place who have travelled – that is to say, who have been as far as Athens – are the Demarch, who is the chief legislator of the island, and looked up to as quite a man of the world, and Nikola, the muleteer.

I must say, the last thing I expected to hear in Sikinos was a romance, but on one of the stormy days of detention there, with the object of whiling away an hour, I paid a visit to Nikola in his clean white house in “the other place.” He met me on the threshold with a hearty “We have well met,” bade me sit down on his divan, and sent his wife – a bright, buxom young woman – for the customary coffee, sweets, and raki; he rolled me a cigarette, which he carefully licked, to my horror, but which I dared not refuse to smoke, cursed the weather, and stirred the embers in the brazier preparatory to attacking me with a volley of questions. I always disarm inquisitiveness on such occasions by being inquisitive myself. “How long have you been married?” “How many children have you got?” “How old is your wife?” and by the time I had asked half a dozen such questions, Nikola, after the fashion of the Greeks, had forgotten his own thirst for knowledge in his desire to satisfy mine.

In Nikola’s case unparalleled success attended this manœuvre, and from the furtive smiles which passed between husband and wife I realised that some mystery was attached to their unions which I forthwith made it my business, to solve.

“I always call her ‘my statue,’” said the muleteer, laughing, “‘my marble statue,’” and he slapped her on the back to show that, at any rate, she was made of pretty hard material.

“Can Pygmalion have married Galatea after all?” I remarked for the moment, forgetting the ignorance of my friends on such topics, but a Greek never admits that he does not understand, and Nikola replied, “No; her name is Kallirhoe, and she was the priest’s daughter.”

Having now broached the subject, Nikola was all anxiety to continue it; he seated himself on one chair, his wife took another, ready to prompt him if necessary, and remind him of forgotten facts. I sat on the divan; between us was the brazier; the only cause for interruption came from an exceedingly naughty child, which existed as a living testimony that this modern Galatea had recovered from her transformation into stone.

“I was a gay young fellow in those days,” began Nikola.

“Five years ago last carnival time,” put in the wife, but she subsided on a frown from her better half; for Greek husbands never meekly submit, like English ones, to the lesser portion of command, and the Greek wife is the pattern of a weaker vessel, seldom sitting down to meals, cooking, spinning, slaving, – a mere chattel, in fact.

“I was the youngest of six – two sisters and four brothers, and we four worked day after day to keep our old father’s land in order, for we were very poor, and had nothing to live upon except the produce of our land.”

Land in Sikinos is divided into tiny holdings: one man may possess half a dozen plots of land in different parts of the island, the produce of which – the grain, the grapes, the olives, the honey, etc. – he brings on mules to his store (ἀποθήκη) near the village. Each landowner has a store and a little garden around it on the hillside, just outside the village, of which the stores look like a mean extension, but on visiting them we found their use.

“We worked every day in the year except feast-days, starting early with our ploughs, our hoes, and our pruning hooks, according to the season, and returning late, driving our bullocks and our mules before us.” An islander’s tools are simple enough – his plough is so light that he can carry it over his shoulders as he drives the bullocks to their work. It merely scratches the back of the land, making no deep furrows; and when the work is far from the village the husbandman starts from home very early, and seldom returns till dusk.

“On feast-days we danced on the village square. I used to look forward to those days, for then I met Kallirhoe, the priest’s daughter, who danced the syrtos best of all the girls, tripping as softly as a Nereid,” said Nikola, looking approvingly at his wife. I had seen a syrtos at Sikinos, and I could testify to the fact that they dance it well, revolving in light wavy lines backwards, forwards, now quick, now slow, until you do not wonder that the natives imagine those mystic beings they call Nereids to be for ever dancing thus in the caves and grottoes. The syrtos is a semicircular dance of alternate young men and maidens, holding each other by handkerchiefs, not from modesty, as one might at first suppose, but so as to give more liberty of action to their limbs, and in dancing this dance it would appear Nikola and Kallirhoe first felt the tender passion of love kindled in their breasts. But between the two a great gulf was fixed, for marriages amongst a peasantry so shrewd as the Greeks are not so easily settled as they are with us. Parents have absolute authority over their daughters, and never allow them to marry without a prospect, and before providing for any son a father’s duty is to give his daughters a house and a competency, and he expects any suitor for their hand to present an equivalent in land and farm stock. The result of this is to create an overpowering stock of maiden ladies, and to drive young men from home in search of fortunes and wives elsewhere.

This was the breach which was fixed between Nikola and Kallirhoe – apparently a hopeless case, for Nikola had sisters, and brothers, and poverty-stricken parents; he never could so much as hope to call a spade his own; during all his life he would have to drudge and slave for others. They could not run away; that idea never occurred to them, for the only escape from Sikinos was by the solitary caique. “I had heard rumors,” continued Nikola, “of how men from other islands had gone to far-off countries and returned rich, but how could I, who had never been off this rock in all my life?

“I should have had to travel by one of those steamers which I had seen with their tail of smoke on the horizon, and about which I had pondered many a time, just like you, sir, may look and ponder at the stars; and to travel I should require money, which I well knew my father would not give me, for he wanted me for his slave. My only hope, and that was a small one, was that the priest, Papa Manoulas, Kallirhoe’s father, would not be too hard on us when he saw how we loved each other. He had been the priest to dip me in the font at my baptism; he always smoked a pipe with father once a week; he had known me all my life as a steady lad, who only got drunk on feast-days. ‘Perhaps he will give his consent,’ whispered my mother, putting foolish hopes into my brain. Poor old woman! she was grieved to see her favorite looking worn and ill, listless at his work, and for ever incurring the blame of father and brothers; only when I talked to her about Kallirhoe did my face brighten a little, so she said one day, ‘Papa Manoulas is kind; likely enough he may wish to see Kallirhoe happy.’ So one evil day I consented to my mother’s plan, that she should go and propose for me.”

Some explanation is here necessary. At Sikinos, as in other remote corners of Greece, they still keep up a custom called προξενία. The man does not propose in person, but sends an old female relative to seek the girl’s hand from her parents; this old woman must have on one stocking white and the other red or brown. “Your stockings of two colors make me think that we shall have an offer,” sings an island poem. Nikola’s mother went thus garbed, but returned with a sorrowful face. “I was made to eat gruel,” said he, using the common expression in these parts for a refusal, “and nobody ate more than I did. Next day Papa Manoulas called at our house. My heart stood still as he came in, and then bubbled over like a seething wine vat when he asked to speak to me alone. ‘You are a good fellow, Kola,’ he began. ‘Kallirhoe loves you, and I wish to see you happy;’ and I had fallen on his neck and kissed him on both cheeks before he could say, ‘Wait a bit, young man; before you marry her you must get together just a little money; I will be content with 1,000 drachmas (£40). When you have that to offer in return for Kallirhoe’s dower you shall be married,’ ‘A thousand drachmas!’ muttered I. ‘May the God of the ravens help me!’” (an expression denoting impossibility), “and I burst into tears.”

The men of modern Greece when violently agitated cry as readily as cunning Ulysses, and are not ashamed of the fact.

“I remember well that evening,” continued Nikola. “I left the house as it was getting dusk, and climbed down the steep path to the sea. I wandered for hours amongst the wild mastic and the brushwood. My feet refused to carry me home that night, so I lay down on the floor in the little white church, dedicated to my patron saint, down by the harbor, where we go for our annual festival when the priest blesses the waters and our boats. Many’s the time, as a lad, I’ve jumped into the water to fetch out the cross, which the priest throws into the sea with a stone tied to it on this occasion, and many’s the time I’ve been the lucky one to bring it up and get a few coppers for my wetting. That night I thought of tying a stone round my own neck and jumping into the sea, so that all traces of me might disappear.

“I could not make up my mind to face any one all next day, so I wandered amongst the rocks, scarcely remembering to feed myself on the few olives I had in my pocket. I could do nothing but sing ‘The Little Caique,’ which made me sob and feel better.”

The song of “The Little Caique” is a great favorite amongst the seafaring men of the Greek islands. It is a melancholy love ditty, of which the following words are a fairly close translation: —

 
In a tiny little caique
Forth in my folly one night
To the sea of love I wandered,
Where the land was nowhere in sight.
 
 
O my star! O my brilliant star!
Have pity on my youth,
Desert me not, oh! leave me not
Alone in the sea of love!
 
 
O my star! O my brilliant star!
I have met you on my path.
Dost thou bid me not tarry near thee?
Are thy feelings not of love?
 
 
Lo! suddenly about me fell
The darkness of that night,
And the sea rolled in mountains around me,
And the land was nowhere in sight.
 

“Towards evening I returned home. My mother’s anxious face told me that she, too, had suffered during my absence; and out of a pot of lentil soup, which was simmering on the embers, she gave me a bowlful, and it refreshed me. To my dying day I shall never forget my father’s and brothers’ wrath. I had wilfully absented myself for a whole day from my work. I was called ‘a peacock,’ ‘a burnt man’ (equivalent to a fool), ‘no man at all,’ ‘;horns,’ and any bad name that occurred to them. For days and weeks after this I was the most miserable, down-trodden Greek alive, and all on account of a woman.” And here Nikola came to a stop, and ordered his wife to fetch him another glass of raki to moisten his throat. No Greek can talk or sing long without a glass of raki.

“About two months after these events,” began Nikola with renewed vigor, “my father ordered me to clear away a heap of stones which occupied a corner of a little terrace-vineyard we owned on a slope near the church of Episcopì.²³ We always thought the stones had been put there to support the earth from falling from the terrace above, but it lately had occurred to my father that it was only a heap of loose stones which had been cleared off the field and thrown there when the vineyard was made, and the removal of which would add several square feet to the small holding. Next morning I started about an hour before the Panagía (Madonna) had opened the gates of the East,²⁴ with a mule and panniers to remove the stones. I worked hard enough when I got there, for the morning was cold, and I was beginning to find that the harder I worked the less time I had for thought. Stone after stone was removed, pannier-load after pannier-load was emptied down the cliff, and fell rattling amongst the brushwood and rousing the partridges and crows as they fell. After a couple of hours’ work the mound was rapidly disappearing, when I came across something white projecting upwards. I looked at it closely; it was a marble foot. More stones were removed, and disclosed a marble leg, two legs, a body, an arm; a head and another arm, which had been broken off by the weight of the stones, lay close by. Though I was somewhat astonished at this discovery, yet I did not suppose it to be of any value. I had heard of things of this kind being found before. My father had an ugly bit of marble which came out of a neighboring tomb. However, I did not throw it over the cliff with the other stones, but I put it on one side and went on again with my work.

“All day long my thoughts kept reverting to this statue. It was so very life-like – so different from the stiff, ugly marble figures I had seen; and it was so much larger, too, standing nearly four feet high. Perhaps, thought I, the Panagía has put it here – perhaps it is a sacred miracle-working thing, such as the priests find in spots like this. And then suddenly I remembered how, when I was a boy, a great German effendi had visited Sikinos, and was reported to have dug up and carried away with him priceless treasures. Is this statue worth anything? was the question which haunted me all day, and which I would have given ten years of my young life to solve.

“When my day’s work was over, I put the statue on to my mule, and carefully covered it over, so that no one might see what I had found; for though I was hopelessly ignorant of what the value of my discovery might be, yet instinct prompted me to keep it to myself. It was dark when I reached the village, and I went straight to the store, sorely perplexed as to what to do with my treasure. There was no time to bury it, for I had met one of my brothers, who would tell them at home that I had returned; so in all haste I hid the cold white thing under the grain in the corner, trusting that no one would find it, and went home. I passed a wretched night, dreaming and restless by turns. Once I woke up in horror, and found it difficult to dispel the effects of a dream in which I had sold Kallirhoe to a prince, and married the statue by mistake. And next day my heart stood still when my father went down to the store with me, shoved his hand into the grain, and muttered that we must send it up to the mill to be ground. That very night I went out with a spade and buried my treasure deep in the ground under the straggling branches of our fig-tree, where I knew it would not be likely to be disturbed.”

Nikola paused here for a while, stirred the embers with the little brass tweezers, the only diminutive irons required for so lilliputian a fire, sang snatches of nasal Greek music, so distasteful to a western ear, and joined his wife in muttering “winter!” “snow!” “storm!” and other less elegant invectives against the weather, which these islanders use when winter comes upon them for two or three days, and makes them shiver in their wretched unprotected houses; and they make no effort to protect themselves from it, for they know that in a few days the sun will shine again and dry them, their mud roofs will cease to leak, and nature will smile once more.

If they do get mysterious illnesses they will attribute them to supernatural causes, saying a Nereid or a sprite has struck them, and never suspect the damp. Nature’s own pupils they are. Their only medical suggestion is that all illnesses are worms in the body, which have been distributed by God’s agents, the mysterious and invisible inhabitants of the air, to those whose sin requires chastising, or whose days are numbered. Such is the simple bacillus theory prevalent in the Greek islands. Who knows but what they are right?

“Never was a poor fellow in such perplexity as I was,” continued Nikola, “the possessor of a marble woman whose value I could not learn, and about whom I did not care one straw, whilst I yearned after a woman whose value I knew to be a thousand drachmas, and whom I could not buy. My hope, too, was rendered more acute by the vague idea that perhaps my treasure might prove to be as valuable as Kallirhoe, and I smiled to think of the folly of the man who would be likely to prefer the cold marble statue to my plump, warm Kallirhoe. But they tell me that you cold Northerners have hearts of marble, so I prayed to the Panagía and all the saints to send some one who would take the statue away, and give me enough money to buy Kallirhoe.

“I was much more lively now; my father and brothers had no cause to scold me any longer, for I had hope; every evening now I went to the café to talk, and all the energy of my existence was devoted to one object, namely, to get the Demarch to tell me all he knew about the chances of selling treasures in that big world where the steamer went, without letting him know that I had found anything. After many fruitless efforts, one day the Demarch told me how, in the old Turkish days, before he was born, a peasant of Melos had found a statue of a woman called Aphrodite, just as I had found mine, in a heap of stones; that the peasant had got next to nothing for it, but that Mr. Brest, the French consul, had made a fortune out of it, and that now the statue was the wonder of the Western world. By degrees I learnt how relentless foreigners like you, Effendi, do swoop down from time to time on these islands and carry home what is worth thousands of drachmas, after giving next to nothing for them. A week or two later, I learnt from the Demarch’s lips how strict the Greek Government is, that no marble should leave the country, and that they never give anything like the value for the things themselves, but that sometimes by dealing with a foreign effendi in Athens good prices have been got and the Government eluded.