Sea and Sardinia
by D. H. Lawrence · English · Gutenberg #37206 · 454,623 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sea and Sardinia
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Sea and Sardinia
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Illustrator: Jan Juta
Release date: August 26, 2011 [eBook #37206]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37206
Credits: Produced by Charlene Taylor, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEA AND SARDINIA ***
Produced by Charlene Taylor, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
SEA AND SARDINIA
BY D. H. LAWRENCE
WITH EIGHT PICTURES
IN COLOR BY
Jan Juta
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
THOMAS SELTZER, INC.
_All rights reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
[Illustration: OROSEI]
CONTENTS
I. AS FAR AS PALERMO 11
II. THE SEA 44
III. CAGLIARI 99
IV. MANDAS 127
V. TO SORGONO 154
VI. TO NUORO 212
VII. TO TERRANOVA AND THE STEAMER 260
VIII. BACK 312
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
OROSEI _Frontispiece_
MAP--BY D. H. LAWRENCE 44
ISILI 100
TONARA 148
SORGONO 180
FONNI 204
GAVOI 236
NUORO 268
TERRANOVA 300
SEA AND SARDINIA
I.
AS FAR AS PALERMO.
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move
in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the
move, and to know whither.
Why can't one sit still? Here in Sicily it is so pleasant: the sunny
Ionian sea, the changing jewel of Calabria, like a fire-opal moved in
the light; Italy and the panorama of Christmas clouds, night with the
dog-star laying a long, luminous gleam across the sea, as if baying at
us, Orion marching above; how the dog-star Sirius looks at one, looks at
one! he is the hound of heaven, green, glamorous and fierce!--and then
oh regal evening star, hung westward flaring over the jagged dark
precipices of tall Sicily: then Etna, that wicked witch, resting her
thick white snow under heaven, and slowly, slowly rolling her
orange-coloured smoke. They called her the Pillar of Heaven, the
Greeks. It seems wrong at first, for she trails up in a long, magical,
flexible line from the sea's edge to her blunt cone, and does not seem
tall. She seems rather low, under heaven. But as one knows her better,
oh awe and wizardy! Remote under heaven, aloof, so near, yet never with
us. The painters try to paint her, and the photographers to photograph
her, in vain. Because why? Because the near ridges, with their olives
and white houses, these are with us. Because the river-bed, and Naxos
under the lemon groves, Greek Naxos deep under dark-leaved, many-fruited
lemon groves, Etna's skirts and skirt-bottoms, these still are our
world, our own world. Even the high villages among the oaks, on Etna.
But Etna herself, Etna of the snow and secret changing winds, she is
beyond a crystal wall. When I look at her, low, white, witch-like under
heaven, slowly rolling her orange smoke and giving sometimes a breath of
rose-red flame, then I must look away from earth, into the ether, into
the low empyrean. And there, in that remote region, Etna is alone. If
you would see her, you must slowly take off your eyes from the world and
go a naked seer to the strange chamber of the empyrean. Pedestal of
heaven! The Greeks had a sense of the magic truth of things. Thank
goodness one still knows enough about them to find one's kinship at
last. There are so many photographs, there are so infinitely many
water-colour drawings and oil paintings which purport to render Etna.
But pedestal of heaven! You must cross the invisible border. Between the
foreground, which is our own, and Etna, pivot of winds in lower heaven,
there is a dividing line. You must change your state of mind. A
metempsychosis. It is no use thinking you can see and behold Etna and
the foreground both at once. Never. One or the other. Foreground and a
transcribed Etna. Or Etna, pedestal of heaven.
Why, then, must one go? Why not stay? Ah, what a mistress, this Etna!
with her strange winds prowling round her like Circe's panthers, some
black, some white. With her strange, remote communications and her
terrible dynamic exhalations. She makes men mad. Such terrible
vibrations of wicked and beautiful electricity she throws about her,
like a deadly net! Nay, sometimes, verily, one can feel a new current of
her demon magnetism seize one's living tissue and change the peaceful
life of one's active cells. She makes a storm in the living plasm and a
new adjustment. And sometimes it is like a madness.
This timeless Grecian Etna, in her lower-heaven loveliness, so lovely,
so lovely, what a torturer! Not many men can really stand her, without
losing their souls. She is like Circe. Unless a man is very strong, she
takes his soul away from him and leaves him not a beast, but an
elemental creature, intelligent and soulless. Intelligent, almost
inspired, and soulless, like the Etna Sicilians. Intelligent daimons,
and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on earth. Ach,
horror! How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight? It was she
who broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gave
the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, the
Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and
broke their souls.
Perhaps it is she one must flee from. At any rate, one must go: and at
once. After having come back only at the end of October, already one
must dash away. And it is only the third of January. And one cannot
afford to move. Yet there you are: at the Etna bidding one goes.
* * * * *
Where does one go? There is Girgenti by the south. There is Tunis at
hand. Girgenti, and the sulphur spirit and the Greek guarding temples,
to make one madder? Never. Neither Syracuse and the madness of its great
quarries. Tunis? Africa? Not yet, not yet. Not the Arabs, not yet.
Naples, Rome, Florence? No good at all. Where then?
Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia, which is
like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no
offering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans nor Phoenicians,
Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside the
circuit of civilisation. Like the Basque lands. Sure enough, it is
Italian now, with its railways and its motor-omnibuses. But there is an
uncaptured Sardinia still. It lies within the net of this European
civilisation, but it isn't landed yet. And the net is getting old and
tattered. A good many fish are slipping through the net of the old
European civilisation. Like that great whale of Russia. And probably
even Sardinia. Sardinia then. Let it be Sardinia.
* * * * *
There is a fortnightly boat sailing from Palermo--next Wednesday, three
days ahead. Let us go, then. Away from abhorred Etna, and the Ionian
sea, and these great stars in the water, and the almond trees in bud,
and the orange trees heavy with red fruit, and these maddening,
exasperating, impossible Sicilians, who never knew what truth was and
have long lost all notion of what a human being is. A sort of
sulphureous demons. _Andiamo!_
But let me confess, in parenthesis, that I am not at all sure whether I
don't really prefer these demons to our sanctified humanity.
Why does one create such discomfort for oneself! To have to get up in
the middle of the night--half past one--to go and look at the clock. Of
course this fraud of an American watch has stopped, with its impudent
phosphorescent face. Half past one! Half past one, and a dark January
night. Ah, well! Half past one! And an uneasy sleep till at last it is
five o'clock. Then light a candle and get up.
The dreary black morning, the candle-light, the house looking
night-dismal. Ah, well, one does all these things for one's pleasure. So
light the charcoal fire and put the kettle on. The queen bee shivering
round half dressed, fluttering her unhappy candle.
"It's fun," she says, shuddering.
"Great," say I, grim as death.
First fill the thermos with hot tea. Then fry bacon--good English bacon
from Malta, a god-send, indeed--and make bacon sandwiches. Make also
sandwiches of scrambled eggs. Make also bread and butter. Also a little
toast for breakfast--and more tea. But ugh, who wants to eat at this
unearthly hour, especially when one is escaping from bewitched Sicily.
Fill the little bag we call the kitchenino. Methylated spirit, a small
aluminium saucepan, a spirit-lamp, two spoons, two forks, a knife, two
aluminium plates, salt, sugar, tea--what else? The thermos flask, the
various sandwiches, four apples, and a little tin of butter. So much for
the kitchenino, for myself and the queen bee. Then my knapsack and the
q-b's handbag.
Under the lid of the half-cloudy night sky, far away at the rim of the
Ionian sea, the first light, like metal fusing. So swallow the cup of
tea and the bit of toast. Hastily wash up, so that we can find the house
decent when we come back. Shut the door-windows of the upper terrace and
go down. Lock the door: the upper half of the house made fast.
The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red gape.
Looking across from the veranda at it, one shivers. Not that it is cold.
The morning is not at all cold. But the ominousness of it: that long red
slit between a dark sky and a dark Ionian sea, terrible old bivalve
which has held life between its lips so long. And here, at this house,
we are ledged so awfully above the dawn, naked to it.
Fasten the door-windows of the lower veranda. One won't fasten at all.
The summer heat warped it one way, the masses of autumn rain warped it
another. Put a chair against it. Lock the last door and hide the key.
Sling the knapsack on one's back, take the kitchenino in one's hand and
look round. The dawn-red widening, between the purpling sea and the
troubled sky. A light in the capucin convent across there. Cocks crowing
and the long, howling, hiccuping, melancholy bray of an ass. "All
females are dead, all females--och! och! och!--hoooo! Ahaa!--there's one
left." So he ends on a moaning grunt of consolation. This is what the
Arabs tell us an ass is howling when he brays.
* * * * *
Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still
the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree
invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The
broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall
on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah, dark garden, dark garden,
with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many
almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am
leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the
tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big
eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, I
have got so far.
* * * * *
It is full dawn--dawn, not morning, the sun will not have risen. The
village is nearly all dark in the red light, and asleep still. No one
at the fountain by the capucin gate: too dark still. One man leading a
horse round the corner of the Palazzo Corvaia. One or two dark men along
the Corso. And so over the brow, down the steep cobble-stone street
between the houses, and out to the naked hill front. This is the
dawn-coast of Sicily. Nay, the dawn-coast of Europe. Steep, like a vast
cliff, dawn-forward. A red dawn, with mingled curdling dark clouds, and
some gold. It must be seven o'clock. The station down below, by the sea.
And noise of a train. Yes, a train. And we still high on the steep
track, winding downwards. But it is the train from Messina to Catania,
half an hour before ours, which is from Catania to Messina.
* * * * *
So jolt, and drop, and jolt down the old road that winds on the cliff
face. Etna across there is smothered quite low, quite low in a dense
puther of ink-black clouds. Playing some devilry in private, no doubt.
The dawn is angry red, and yellow above, the sea takes strange colors. I
hate the station, pigmy, drawn out there beside the sea. On this steep
face, especially in the windless nooks, the almond blossom is already
out. In little puffs and specks and stars, it looks very like bits of
snow scattered by winter. Bits of snow, bits of blossom, fourth day of
the year 1921. Only blossom. And Etna indescribably cloaked and
secretive in her dense black clouds. She has wrapped them quite round
her, quite low round her skirts.
* * * * *
At last we are down. We pass the pits where men are burning
lime--red-hot, round pits--and are out on the high-way. Nothing can be
more depressing than an Italian high-road. From Syracuse to Airolo it is
the same: horrible, dreary, slummy high-roads the moment you approach a
village or any human habitation. Here there is an acrid smell of lemon
juice. There is a factory for making citrate. The houses flush on the
road, under the great lime-stone face of the hill, open their slummy
doors, and throw out dirty water and coffee dregs. We walk over the
dirty water and coffee dregs. Mules rattle past with carts. Other people
are going to the station. We pass the Dazio and are there.
* * * * *
Humanity is, externally, too much alike. Internally there are
insuperable differences. So one sits and thinks, watching the people on
the station: like a line of caricatures between oneself and the naked
sea and the uneasy, clouding dawn.
You would look in vain this morning for the swarthy feline southerner of
romance. It might, as far as features are concerned, be an early morning
crowd waiting for the train on a north London suburb station. As far as
features go. For some are fair and some colorless and none racially
typical. The only one that is absolutely like a race caricature is a
tall stout elderly fellow with spectacles and a short nose and a
bristling moustache, and he is the German of the comic papers of twenty
years ago. But he is pure Sicilian.
They are mostly young fellows going up the line to Messina to their job:
not artizans, lower middle class. And externally, so like any other
clerks and shop-men, only rather more shabby, much less _socially_
self-conscious. They are lively, they throw their arms round one
another's necks, they all but kiss. One poor chap has had earache, so a
black kerchief is tied round his face, and his black hat is perched
above, and a comic sight he looks. No one seems to think so, however.
Yet they view my arrival with a knapsack on my back with cold
disapprobation, as unseemly as if I had arrived riding on a pig. I ought
to be in a carriage, and the knapsack ought to be a new suit-case. I
know it, but am inflexible.
That is how they are. Each one thinks he is as handsome as Adonis, and
as "fetching" as Don Juan. Extraordinary! At the same time, all flesh is
grass, and if a few trouser-buttons are missing or if a black hat
perches above a thick black face-muffle and a long excruciated face, it
is all in the course of nature. They seize the black-edged one by the
arm, and in profound commiseration: "Do you suffer? Are you suffering?"
they ask.
And that also is how they are. So terribly physically all over one
another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted
butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a
tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness
into each other's face. Never in the world have I seen such melting gay
tenderness as between casual Sicilians on railway platforms, whether
they be young lean-cheeked Sicilians or huge stout Sicilians.
There must be something curious about the proximity of a volcano. Naples
and Catania alike, the men are hugely fat, with great macaroni paunches,
they are expansive and in a perfect drip of casual affection and love.
But the Sicilians are even more wildly exuberant and fat and all over
one another than the Neapolitans. They never leave off being amorously
friendly with almost everybody, emitting a relentless physical
familiarity that is quite bewildering to one not brought up near a
volcano.
This is more true of the middle classes than of the lower. The working
men are perforce thinner and less exuberant. But they hang together in
clusters, and can never be physically near enough.
* * * * *
It is only thirty miles to Messina, but the train takes two hours. It
winds and hurries and stops beside the lavender grey morning sea. A
flock of goats trail over the beach near the lapping wave's edge,
dismally. Great wide deserts of stony river-beds run down to the sea,
and men on asses are picking their way across, and women are kneeling by
the small stream-channel washing clothes. The lemons hang pale and
innumerable in the thick lemon groves. Lemon trees, like Italians, seem
to be happiest when they are touching one another all round. Solid
forests of not very tall lemon trees lie between the steep mountains and
the sea, on the strip of plain. Women, vague in the orchard
under-shadow, are picking the lemons, lurking as if in the undersea.
There are heaps of pale yellow lemons under the trees. They look like
pale, primrose-smouldering fires. Curious how like fires the heaps of
lemons look, under the shadow of foliage, seeming to give off a pallid
burning amid the suave, naked, greenish trunks. When there comes a
cluster of orange trees, the oranges are red like coals among the darker
leaves. But lemons, lemons, innumerable, speckled like innumerable tiny
stars in the green firmament of leaves. So many lemons! Think of all
the lemonade crystals they will be reduced to! Think of America drinking
them up next summer.
* * * * *
I always wonder why such vast wide river-beds of pale boulders come out
of the heart of the high-rearing, dramatic stone mountains, a few miles
to the sea. A few miles only: and never more than a few threading
water-trickles in river-beds wide enough for the Rhine. But that is how
it is. The landscape is ancient, and classic--romantic, as if it had
known far-off days and fiercer rivers and more verdure. Steep, craggy,
wild, the land goes up to its points and precipices, a tangle of
heights. But all jammed on top of one another. And in old landscapes, as
in old people, the flesh wears away, and the bones become prominent.
Rock sticks up fantastically. The jungle of peaks in this old Sicily.
* * * * *
The sky is all grey. The Straits are grey. Reggio, just across the
water, is white looking, under the great dark toe of Calabria, the toe
of Italy. On Aspromonte there is grey cloud. It is going to rain. After
such marvelous ringing blue days, it is going to rain. What luck!
* * * * *
Aspromonte! Garibaldi! I could always cover my face when I see it,
Aspromonte. I wish Garibaldi had been prouder. Why did he go off so
humbly, with his bag of seed-corn and a flea in his ear, when His
Majesty King Victor Emmanuel arrived with his little short legs on the
scene. Poor Garibaldi! He wanted to be a hero and a dictator of free
Sicily. Well, one can't be a dictator and humble at the same time. One
must be a hero, which he was, and proud, which he wasn't. Besides people
don't nowadays choose proud heroes for governors. Anything but. They
prefer constitutional monarchs, who are paid servants and who know it.
That is democracy. Democracy admires its own servants and nothing else.
And you couldn't make a real servant even of Garibaldi. Only of His
Majesty King Victor Emmanuel. So Italy chose Victor Emmanuel, and
Garibaldi went off with a corn bag and a whack on the behind like a
humble ass.
* * * * *
It is raining--dismally, dismally raining. And this is Messina coming.
Oh horrible Messina, earthquake-shattered and renewing your youth like a
vast mining settlement, with rows and streets and miles of concrete
shanties, squalor and a big street with shops and gaps and broken houses
still, just back of the tram-lines, and a dreary squalid
earthquake-hopeless port in a lovely harbor. People don't forget and
don't recover. The people of Messina seem to be today what they were
nearly twenty years ago, after the earthquake: people who have had a
terrible shock, and for whom all life's institutions are really nothing,
neither civilization nor purpose. The meaning of everything all came
down with a smash in that shuddering earthquake, and nothing remains but
money and the throes of some sort of sensation. Messina between the
volcanoes, Etna and Stromboli, having known the death-agony's terror. I
always dread coming near the awful place, yet I have found the people
kind, almost feverishly so, as if they knew the awful need for kindness.
* * * * *
Raining, raining hard. Clambering down on to the wet platform and
walking across the wet lines to the cover. Many human beings scurrying
across the wet lines, among the wet trains, to get out into the ghastly
town beyond. Thank heaven one need not go out into the town. Two
convicts chained together among the crowd--and two soldiers. The
prisoners wear fawny homespun clothes, of cloth such as the peasants
weave, with irregularly occurring brown stripes. Rather nice handmade
rough stuff. But linked together, dear God! And those horrid caps on
their hairless foreheads. No hair. Probably they are going to a convict
station on the Lipari islands. The people take no notice.
No, but convicts are horrible creatures: at least, the old one is, with
his long, nasty face: his long, clean-shaven, horrible face, without
emotions, or with emotions one cannot follow. Something cold, sightless.
A sightless, ugly look. I should loathe to have to touch him. Of the
other I am not so sure. He is younger, and with dark eyebrows. But a
roundish, softish face, with a sort of leer. No, evil is horrible. I
used to think there was no absolute evil. Now I know there is a great
deal. So much that it threatens life altogether. That ghastly
abstractness of criminals. They don't _know_ any more what other people
feel. Yet some horrible force drives them.
It is a great mistake to abolish the death penalty. If I were dictator,
I should order the old one to be hung at once. I should have judges with
sensitive, living hearts: not abstract intellects. And because the
instinctive heart recognised a man as evil, I would have that man
destroyed. Quickly. Because good warm life is now in danger.
* * * * *
Standing on Messina station--dreary, dreary hole--and watching the
winter rain and seeing the pair of convicts, I must remember again Oscar
Wilde on Reading platform, a convict. What a terrible mistake, to let
oneself be martyred by a lot of canaille. A man must say his say. But
_noli me tangere_.
Curious these people are. Up and down, up and down go a pair of
officials. The young one in a black gold-laced cap talks to the elder in
a scarlet gold-laced cap. And he walks, the young one, with a mad little
hop, and his fingers fly as if he wanted to scatter them to the four
winds of heaven, and his words go off like fireworks, with more than
Sicilian speed. On and on, up and down, and his eye is dark and excited
and unseeing, like the eye of a fleeing rabbit. Strange and beside
itself is humanity.
* * * * *
What a lot of officials! You know them by their caps. Elegant tubby
little officials in kid-and-patent boots and gold-laced caps, tall
long-nosed ones in more gold-laced caps, like angels in and out of the
gates of heaven they thread in and out of the various doors. As far as I
can see, there are three scarlet station-masters, five black-and-gold
substation-masters, and a countless number of principalities and powers
in more or less broken boots and official caps. They are like bees round
a hive, humming in an important _conversazione_, and occasionally
looking at some paper or other, and extracting a little official honey.
But the _conversazione_ is the affair of affairs. To an Italian
official, life seems to be one long and animated conversation--the
Italian word is better--interrupted by casual trains and telephones. And
besides the angels of heaven's gates, there are the mere ministers,
porters, lamp-cleaners, etc. These stand in groups and talk socialism. A
lamp-man slashes along, swinging a couple of lamps. Bashes one against a
barrow. Smash goes the glass. Looks down as if to say, What do you mean
by it? Glances over his shoulder to see if any member of the higher
hierarchies is looking. Seven members of higher hierarchies are
assiduously not looking. On goes the minister with the lamp, blithely.
Another pane or two gone. _Vogue la galere._
Passengers have gathered again, some in hoods, some in nothing. Youths
in thin, paltry clothes stand out in the pouring rain as if they did not
know it was raining. One sees their coat-shoulders soaked. And yet they
do not trouble to keep under shelter. Two large station dogs run about
and trot through the standing trains, just like officials. They climb up
the footboard, hop into a train and hop out casually when they feel like
it. Two or three port-porters, in canvas hats as big as umbrellas,
literally, spreading like huge fins over their shoulders, are looking
into more empty trains. More and more people appear. More and more
official caps stand about. It rains and rains. The train for Palermo
and the train for Syracuse are both an hour late already, coming from
the port. Flea-bite. Though these are the great connections from Rome.
Loose locomotives trundle back and forth, vaguely, like black dogs
running and turning back. The port is only four minutes' walk. If it
were not raining so hard, we would go down, walk along the lines and get
into the waiting train down there. Anybody may please himself. There is
the funnel of the great unwieldy ferry-object--she is just edging in.
That means the connection from the mainland at last. But it is cold,
standing here. We eat a bit of bread and butter from the kitchenino in
resignation. After all, what is an hour and a half? It might just as
easily be five hours, as it was the last time we came down from Rome.
And the _wagon-lit_, booked to Syracuse, calmly left stranded in the
station of Messina, to go no further. All get out and find yourselves
rooms for the night in vile Messina. Syracuse or no Syracuse, Malta boat
or no Malta boat. We are the _Ferrovia dello Stato_.
But there, why grumble. Noi Italiani siamo cosi buoni. Take it from
their own mouth.
* * * * *
Ecco! Finalmente! The crowd is quite joyful as the two express trains
surge proudly in, after their half-a-mile creep. Plenty of room, for
once. Though the carriage floor is a puddle, and the roof leaks. This
is second class.
* * * * *
Slowly, with two engines, we grunt and chuff and twist to get over the
break-neck heights that shut Messina in from the north coast. The
windows are opaque with steam and drops of rain. No matter--tea from the
thermos flask, to the great interest of the other two passengers who had
nervously contemplated the unknown object.
"Ha!" says he with joy, seeing the hot tea come out. "It has the
appearance of a bomb."
"Beautiful hot!" says she, with real admiration. All apprehension at
once dissipated, peace reigns in the wet, mist-hidden compartment. We
run through miles and miles of tunnel. The Italians have made wonderful
roads and railways.
* * * * *
If one rubs the window and looks out, lemon groves with many wet-white
lemons, earthquake-broken houses, new shanties, a grey weary sea on the
right hand, and on the left the dim, grey complication of steep heights
from which issue stone river-beds of inordinate width, and sometimes a
road, a man on a mule. Sometimes near at hand, long-haired, melancholy
goats leaning sideways like tilted ships under the eaves of some scabby
house. They call the house-eaves the dogs' umbrellas. In town you see
the dogs trotting close under the wall out of the wet. Here the goats
lean like rock, listing inwards to the plaster wall. Why look out?
Sicilian railways are all single line. Hence, the _coincidenza_. A
_coincidenza_ is where two trains meet in a loop. You sit in a world of
rain and waiting until some silly engine with four trucks puffs
alongside. Ecco la coincidenza! Then after a brief _conversazione_
between the two trains, _diretto_ and _merce_, express and goods, the
tin horn sounds and away we go, happily, towards the next coincidence.
Clerks away ahead joyfully chalk up our hours of lateness on the
announcement slate. All adds to the adventurous flavour of the journey,
dear heart. We come to a station where we find the other diretto, the
express from the other direction, awaiting our coincidential arrival.
The two trains run alongside one another, like two dogs meeting in the
street and snuffing one another. Every official rushes to greet every
other official, as if they were all David and Jonathan meeting after a
crisis. They rush into each other's arms and exchange cigarettes. And
the trains can't bear to part. And the station can't bear to part with
us. The officials tease themselves and us with the word _pronto_,
meaning _ready!_ Pronto! And again Pronto! And shrill whistles.
Anywhere else a train would go off its tormented head. But no! Here only
that angel's trump of an official little horn will do the business. And
get them to blow that horn if you can. They can't bear to part.
* * * * *
Rain, continual rain, a level grey wet sky, a level grey wet sea, a wet
and misty train winding round and round the little bays, diving through
tunnels. Ghosts of the unpleasant-looking Lipari islands standing a
little way out to sea, heaps of shadow deposited like rubbish heaps in
the universal greyness.
* * * * *
Enter more passengers. An enormously large woman with an extraordinarily
handsome face: an extraordinarily large man, quite young: and a
diminutive servant, a little girl-child of about thirteen, with a
beautiful face.--But the Juno--it is she who takes my breath away. She
is quite young, in her thirties still. She has that queenly stupid
beauty of a classic Hera: a pure brow with level dark brows, large,
dark, bridling eyes, a straight nose, a chiselled mouth, an air of
remote self-consciousness. She sends one's heart straight back to pagan
days. And--and--she is simply enormous, like a house. She wears a black
toque with sticking-up wings, and a black rabbit fur spread on her
shoulders. She edges her way in carefully: and once seated, is
terrified to rise to her feet. She sits with that motionlessness of her
type, closed lips, face muted and expressionless. And she expects me to
admire her: I can see that. She expects me to pay homage to her beauty:
just to that: not homage to herself, but to her as a _bel pezzo_. She
casts little aloof glances at me under her eyelids.
It is evident she is a country beauty become a _bourgeoise_. She speaks
unwillingly to the other squint-eyed passenger, a young woman who also
wears a black-rabbit fur, but without pretensions.
The husband of Juno is a fresh-faced bourgeois young fellow, and he also
is simply huge. His waistcoat would almost make the overcoat of the
fourth passenger, the unshaven companion of the squinting young woman.
The young Jupiter wears kid gloves: a significant fact here. He, too,
has pretensions. But he is quite affable with the unshaven one, and
speaks Italian unaffectedly. Whereas Juno speaks the dialect with
affectation.
No one takes any notice of the little maid. She has a gentle, virgin
moon-face, and those lovely grey Sicilian eyes that are translucent, and
into which the light sinks and becomes black sometimes, sometimes dark
blue. She carries the bag and the extra coat of the huge Juno, and sits
on the edge of the seat between me and the unshaven, Juno having
motioned her there with a regal inclination of the head.
The little maid is rather frightened. Perhaps she is an orphan
child--probably. Her nut-brown hair is smoothly parted and done in two
pigtails. She wears no hat, as is proper for her class. On her shoulders
one of those little knitted grey shoulder-capes that one associates with
orphanages. Her stuff dress is dark grey, her boots are strong.
The smooth, moon-like, expressionless virgin face, rather pale and
touching, rather frightened, of the girl-child. A perfect face from a
mediaeval picture. It moves one strangely. Why? It is so unconscious, as
we are conscious. Like a little muted animal it sits there, in distress.
She is going to be sick. She goes into the corridor and is sick--very
sick, leaning her head like a sick dog on the window-ledge. Jupiter
towers above her--not unkind, and apparently feeling no repugnance. The
physical convulsion of the girl does not affect him as it affects us. He
looks on unmoved, merely venturing to remark that she had eaten too much
before coming on to the train. An obviously true remark. After which he
comes and talks a few common-places to me. By and by the girl-child
creeps in again and sits on the edge of the seat facing Juno. But no,
says Juno, if she is sick she will be sick over me. So Jupiter
accommodatingly changes places with the girl-child, who is thus next to
me. She sits on the edge of the seat with folded little red hands, her
face pale and expressionless. Beautiful the thin line of her nut-brown
eyebrows, the dark lashes of the silent, pellucid dark eyes. Silent,
motionless, like a sick animal.
But Juno tells her to wipe her splashed boots. The child gropes for a
piece of paper. Juno tells her to take her pocket handkerchief. Feebly
the sick girl-child wipes her boots, then leans back. But no good. She
has to go in the corridor and be sick again.
After a while they all get out. Queer to see people so natural. Neither
Juno nor Jupiter is in the least unkind. He even seems kind. But they
are just not upset. Not half as upset as we are--the q-b wanting to
administer tea, and so on. We should have to hold the child's head. They
just quite naturally leave it alone to its convulsions, and are neither
distressed nor repelled. It just is so.
Their naturalness seems unnatural to us. Yet I am sure it is best.
Sympathy would only complicate matters, and spoil that strange, remote
virginal quality. The q-b says it is largely stupidity.
* * * * *
Nobody washes out the corner of the corridor, though we stop at
stations long enough, and there are two more hours journey. Train
officials go by and stare, passengers step over and stare, new-comers
stare and step over. Somebody asks _who_? Nobody thinks of just throwing
a pail of water. Why should they? It is all in the course of
nature.--One begins to be a bit chary of this same "nature", in the
south.
* * * * *
Enter two fresh passengers: a black-eyed, round-faced, bright-sharp man
in corduroys and with a gun, and a long-faced, fresh-colored man with
thick snowy hair, and a new hat and a long black overcoat of smooth
black cloth, lined with rather ancient, once expensive fur. He is
extremely proud of this long black coat and ancient fur lining.
Childishly proud he wraps it again over his knee, and gloats. The beady
black-eyes of the hunter look round with pleased alertness. He sits
facing the one in the overcoat, who looks like the last sprout of some
Norman blood. The hunter in corduroys beams abroad, with beady black
eyes in a round red face, curious. And the other tucks his fur-lined
long coat between his legs and gloats to himself: all to himself
gloating, and looking as if he were deaf. But no, he's not. He wears
muddy high-low boots.
At Termini it is already lamp-light. Business men crowd in. We get five
business men: all stout, respected Palermitans. The one opposite me has
whiskers, and a many-colored, patched traveling rug over his fat knees.
Queer how they bring that feeling of physical intimacy with them. You
are never surprised if they begin to take off their boots, or their
collar-and-tie. The whole world is a sort of bedroom to them. One
shrinks, but in vain.
There is some conversation between the black-eyed, beady hunter and the
business men. Also the young white-haired one, the aristocrat, tries to
stammer out, at great length, a few words. As far as I can gather the
young one is mad--or deranged--and the other, the hunter, is his keeper.
They are traveling over Europe together. There is some talk of "the
Count". And the hunter says the unfortunate "has had an accident." But
that is a southern gentleness presumably, a form of speech. Anyhow it is
queer: and the hunter in his corduroys, with his round, ruddy face and
strange black-bright eyes and thin black hair is a puzzle to me, even
more than the albino, long-coated, long-faced, fresh-complexioned, queer
last remnant of a baron as he is. They are both muddy from the land, and
pleased in a little mad way of their own.
But it is half-past six. We are at Palermo, capital of Sicily. The
hunter slings his gun over his shoulder, I my knapsack, and in the
throng we all disappear, into the Via Maqueda.
* * * * *
Palermo has two great streets, the Via Maqueda, and the Corso, which
cross each other at right-angles. The Via Maqueda is narrow, with narrow
little pavements, and is always choked with carriages and
foot-passengers.
It had ceased raining. But the narrow road was paved with large, convex
slabs of hard stone, inexpressibly greasy. To cross the Via Maqueda
therefore was a feat. However, once accomplished, it was done. The near
end of the street was rather dark, and had mostly vegetable shops.
Abundance of vegetables--piles of white-and-green fennel, like celery,
and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-colored artichokes,
nodding their buds, piles of big radishes, scarlet and bluey purple,
carrots, long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet
large peppers, a last slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colors and
vegetable freshnesses. A mountain of black-purple cauliflowers, like
niggers' heads, and a mountain of snow-white ones next to them. How the
dark, greasy, night-stricken street seems to beam with these vegetables,
all this fresh delicate flesh of luminous vegetables piled there in the
air, and in the recesses of the windowless little caverns of the shops,
and gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps. The q-b at once
wants to buy vegetables. "Look! Look at the snow-white broccoli. Look at
the huge finocchi. Why don't we get them? I _must_ have some. Look at
those great clusters of dates--ten francs a kilo, and we pay sixteen.
It's monstrous. Our place is simply monstrous."
For all that, one doesn't buy vegetables to take to Sardinia.
Cross the Corso at that decorated maelstrom and death-trap of the
Quattro Canti. I, of course, am nearly knocked down and killed. Somebody
is nearly knocked down and killed every two minutes. But there--the
carriages are light, and the horses curiously aware creatures. They
would never tread on one.
The second part of the Via Maqueda is the swell part: silks and plumes,
and an infinite number of shirts and ties and cuff-links and mufflers
and men's fancies. One realises here that man-drapery and man-underwear
is quite as important as woman's, if not more.
I, of course, in a rage. The q-b stares at every rag and stitch, and
crosses and re-crosses this infernal dark stream of a Via Maqueda,
which, as I have said, is choked solid with strollers and carriages. Be
it remembered that I have on my back the brown knapsack, and the q-b
carries the kitchenino. This is enough to make a travelling menagerie
of us. If I had my shirt sticking out behind, and if the q-b had
happened merely to catch up the table-cloth and wrap it round her as she
came out, all well and good. But a big brown knapsack! And a basket with
thermos flask, etc! No, one could not expect such things to pass in a
southern capital.
But I am case-hardened. And I am sick of shops. True, we have not been
in a town for three months. But _can_ I care for the innumerable
_fantasias_ in the drapery line? Every wretched bit of would-be-extra
chic is called a fantasia. The word goes lugubriously to my bowels.
Suddenly I am aware of the q-b darting past me like a storm. Suddenly I
see her pouncing on three giggling young hussies just in front--the
inevitable black velveteen tam, the inevitable white curly muffler, the
inevitable lower-class flappers. "Did you want something? Have you
something to say? Is there something that amuses you? Oh-h! You must
laugh, must you? Oh--laugh! Oh-h! Why? Why? You ask why? Haven't I heard
you! Oh--you spik Ingleesh! You spik Ingleesh! Yes--why! That's why!
Yes, that's why."
The three giggling young hussies shrink together as if they would all
hide behind one another, after a vain uprearing and a demand why? Madam
tells them why. So they uncomfortably squeeze together under the
unexpected strokes of the q-b's sledge-hammer Italian and more than
sledge-hammer retaliation, there full in the Via Maqueda. They edge
round one another, each attempting to get back of the other, away from
the looming q-b. I perceive that this rotary motion is equivalent to a
standstill, so feel called upon to say something in the manly line.
"Beastly Palermo bad-manners," I say, and throw a nonchalant "Ignoranti"
at the end, in a tone of dismissal.
Which does it. Off they go down-stream, still huddling and shrinking
like boats that are taking sails in, and peeping to see if we are
coming. Yes, my dears, we are coming.
"Why do you bother?" say I to the q-b, who is towering with rage.
"They've followed us the whole length of the street--with their _sacco
militario_ and their _parlano inglese_ and their _you spik Ingleesh_,
and their jeering insolence. But the English are fools. They always put
up with this Italian impudence."
Which is perhaps true.--But this knapsack! It might be full of
bronze-roaring geese, it would not attract more attention!
However, and however, it is seven o'clock, and the shops are beginning
to shut. No more shop-gazing. Only one lovely place: raw ham, boiled
ham, chickens in aspic, chicken vol-au-vents, sweet curds, curd-cheese,
rustic cheese-cake, smoked sausages, beautiful fresh mortadella, huge
Mediterranean red lobsters, and those lobsters without claws. "So good!
So good!" We stand and cry it aloud.
But this shop too is shutting. I ask a man for the Hotel Pantechnico.
And treating me in that gentle, strangely tender southern manner, he
takes me and shows me. He makes me feel such a poor, frail, helpless
leaf. A foreigner, you know. A bit of an imbecile, poor dear. Hold his
hand and show him the way.
* * * * *
To sit in the room of this young American woman, with its blue hangings,
and talk and drink tea till midnght! Ah these naive Americans--they are
a good deal older and shrewder than we, once it nears the point. And
they all seem to feel as if the world were coming to an end. And they
are so truly generous of their hospitality, in this cold world.
II.
THE SEA.
The fat old porter knocks. Ah me, once more it is dark. Get up again
before dawn. A dark sky outside, cloudy. The thrilling tinkle of
innumerable goat-bells as the first flock enters the city, such a
rippling sound. Well, it must be morning, even if one shivers at it. And
at least it does not rain.
* * * * *
That pale, bluish, theatrical light outside, of the first dawn. And a
cold wind. We come on to the wide, desolate quay, the curve of the
harbour Panormus. That horrible dawn-pallor of a cold sea out there. And
here, port mud, greasy: and fish: and refuse. The American girl is with
us, wrapped in her sweater. A coarse, cold, black-slimy world, she seems
as if she would melt away before it. But these frail creatures, what a
lot they can go through!
[Illustration: MAP FOR SEA AND SARDINIA]
Across the great, wide, badly paved, mud-greasy, despairing road of the
quay side, and to the sea. There lies our steamer, over there in the
dawn-dusk of the basin, half visible. "That one who is smoking her
cigarette," says the porter. She looks little, beside the huge _City of
Trieste_ who is lying up next her.
* * * * *
Our row-boat is hemmed in by many empty boats, huddled to the side of
the quay. She works her way out like a sheepdog working his way out of a
flock of sheep, or like a boat through pack-ice. We are on the open
basin. The rower stands up and pushes the oars from him. He gives a
long, melancholy cry to someone on the quay. The water goes chock-chock
against the urging bows. The wind is chill. The fantastic peaks behind
Palermo show half-ghostly in a half-dark sky. The dawn seems reluctant
to come. Our steamer still smokes her cigarette--meaning the
funnel-smoke--across there. So, one sits still, and crosses the level
space of half-dark water. Masts of sailing-ships, and spars, cluster on
the left, on the undarkening sky.
* * * * *
Climb up, climb up, this is our ship. Up we go, up the ladder. "Oh but!"
says the American girl. "Isn't she small! Isn't she impossibly small! Oh
my, will you go in such a little thing? Oh dear! Thirty two hours in
such a little boat? Why no, I wouldn't care for it at all."
A bunch of stewards, cooks, waiters, engineers, pan-cleaners and
what-not, mostly in black canvas jackets. Nobody else on the ship. A
little black bunch of loutish crew with nothing to do, and we the first
passengers served up to be jeered at. There you are, in the grey light.
"Who is going?"
"We two--the signorina is not going."
"Tickets!"
These are casual proletarian manners.
We are taken into the one long room with a long table and many
maple-golden doors, alternate panels having a wedge-wood blue-and-white
picture inserted--a would-be Goddess of white marble on a blue ground,
like a health-salts Hygeia advertisement. One of the plain panels
opens--our cabin.
"Oh dear! Why it isn't as big as a china-closet. However will you get
in!" cries the American girl.
"One at a time," say I.
"But it's the tiniest place I _ever_ saw."
It really was tiny. One had to get into a bunk to shut the door. That
did not matter to me, I am no Titanic American. I pitched the knapsack
on one bunk, the kitchenino on the other, and we shut the door. The
cabin disappeared into a maple-wood panel of the long, subterranean
state-room.
"Why, is this the only place you've got to sit in?" cried the American
girl. "But how perfectly awful! No air, and so dark, and smelly. Why I
never saw such a boat! Will you really go? Will you really!"
The state-room was truly rather subterranean and stuffy, with nothing
but a long table and an uncanny company of screw-pin chairs seated
thereat, and no outlet to the air at all, but it was not so bad
otherwise, to me who have never been out of Europe. Those maple-wood
panels and ebony curves--and those Hygeias! They went all round, even
round the curve at the dim, distant end, and back up the near side. Yet
how beautiful old, gold-coloured maple-wood is! how very lovely, with
the ebony curves of the door arch! There was a wonderful old-fashioned,
Victorian glow in it, and a certain splendour. Even one could bear the
Hygeias let in under glass--the colour was right, that wedge-wood and
white, in such lovely gold lustre. There was a certain homely grandeur
still in the days when this ship was built: a richness of choice
material. And health-salts Hygeias, wedge-wood Greek goddesses on
advertisement placards! Yet they _weren't_ advertisements. That was
what really worried me. They never had been. Perhaps Weego's Health
Salts stole her later.
* * * * *
We have no coffee--that goes without saying. Nothing doing so early. The
crew still stands in a gang, exactly like a gang of louts at a
street-corner. And they've got the street all to themselves--this ship.
We climb to the upper deck.
* * * * *
She is a long, slender, old steamer with one little funnel. And she
seems so deserted, now that one can't see the street-corner gang of the
casual crew. They are just below. Our ship is deserted.
The dawn is wanly blueing. The sky is a curdle of cloud, there is a bit
of pale gold eastwards, beyond Monte Pellegrino. The wind blows across
the harbour. The hills behind Palermo prick up their ears on the
sky-line. The city lies unseen, near us and level. There--a big ship is
coming in: the Naples boat.
And the little boats keep putting off from the near quay, and coming to
us. We watch. A stout officer, cavalry, in grayey-green, with a big
dark-blue cloak lined with scarlet. The scarlet lining keeps flashing.
He has a little beard, and his uniform is not quite clean. He has big
wooden chests, tied with rope, for luggage. Poor and of no class. Yet
that scarlet, splendid lining, and the spurs. It seems a pity they must
go second-class. Yet so it is, he goes forward when the dock porter has
hoisted those wooden boxes. No fellow-passenger yet.
Boats still keep coming. Ha-ha! Here is the commissariat! Various sides
of kid, ready for roasting: various chickens: fennel like celery: wine
in a bottiglione: new bread: packages! Hand them up, hand them up. "Good
food!" cries the q-b in anticipation.
It must be getting near time to go. Two more passengers--young thick men
in black broad-cloth standing up in the stern of a little boat, their
hands in their pockets, looking a little cold about the chin. Not quite
Italian, too sturdy and manly. Sardinians from Cagliari, as a matter of
fact.
* * * * *
We go down from the chill upper-deck. It is growing full day. Bits of
pale gold are flying among delicate but cold flakes of cloud from the
east, over Monte Pellegrino, bits of very new turquoise sky come out.
Palermo on the left crouches upon her all-harbour--a little desolate,
disorderly, end-of-the-world, end-of-the-sea, along her quay front. Even
from here we can see the yellow carts rattling slowly, the mules
nodding their high weird plumes of scarlet along the broad weary
harbour-side. Oh painted carts of Sicily, with all history on your
panels!
* * * * *
Arrives an individual at our side. "The captain fears it will not be
possible to start. There is much wind outside. Much wind!"
How they _love_ to come up with alarming, disquieting, or annoying news!
The joy it gives them. What satisfaction on all the faces: of course all
the other loafers are watching us, the street-corner loungers of this
deck. But we have been many times bitten.
"Ah ma!" say I, looking at the sky, "not so much wind as all that."
An air of quiet, shrugging indifference is most effectual: as if you
knew all about it, a good deal more than they knew.
"Ah si! Molto vento! Molto vento! Outside! Outside!"
With a long face and a dramatic gesture he points out of the harbour, to
the grey sea. I too look out of the harbour at the pale line of sea
beyond the mole. But I do not trouble to answer, and my eye is calm. So
he goes away, only half triumphant.
* * * * *
"Things seem to get worse and worse!" cries the American friend. "What
will you do on such a boat if you have an awful time out in the
Mediterranean here? Oh no--will you risk it, really? Won't you go from
Civita Vecchia?"
"How awful it will be!" cries the q-b, looking round the grey harbour,
the many masts clustering in the grey sky on the right: the big Naples
boat turning her posterior to the quay-side a little way off, and
cautiously budging backwards: the almost entirely shut-in harbour: the
bits of blue and flying white cloud overhead: the little boats like
beetles scuttling hither and thither across the basin: the thick crowd
on the quay come to meet the Naples boat.
* * * * *
Time! Time! The American friend must go. She bids us goodbye, more than
sympathetically.
"I shall be awfully interested to hear how you get on."
So down the side she goes. The boatman wants twenty francs--wants
more--but doesn't get it. He gets ten, which is five too much. And so,
sitting rather small and pinched and cold-looking, huddled in her
sweater, she bibbles over the ripply water to the distant stone steps.
We wave farewell. But other traffic comes between us. And the q-b,
feeling nervous, is rather cross because the American friend's ideas of
luxury have put us in such a poor light. We feel like the poorest of
poor sea-faring relations.
* * * * *
Our ship is hooting for all she's worth. An important last-minuter comes
surging up. The rope hawsers are being wound clankily in. Seagulls--they
are never very many in the Mediterranean--seagulls whirl like a few
flakes of snow in the upper chill air. Clouds spin. And without knowing
it we are evaporating away from the shore, from our mooring, between the
great _City of Trieste_ and another big black steamer that lies like a
wall. We breathe towards this second black wall of steamer: distinctly.
And of course an individual in an official cap is standing on the bottom
of our departure ladder just above the water, yelling Barca!
Barca!--shouting for a boat. And an old man on the sea stands up to his
oars and comes pushing his clumsy boat with gathering speed between us
and the other black wall. There he stands away below there, small,
firing his clumsy boat along, remote as if in a picture on the dark
green water. And our black side insidiously and evilly aspires to the
other huge black wall. He rows in the canyon between, and is nearly
here.
When lo, the individual on the bottom step turns in the other direction.
Another boat from the open basin is sweeping up: it is a race: she is
near, she is nearer, she is up. With a curvet the boat from the open
rounds up at the ladder. The boat between the gulf backs its oars. The
official individual shouts and waves, the old man backing his oars in
the gulf below yells expostulation, the boat from the open carries off
its prey, our ship begins slowly to puddle-puddle-puddle, working her
screw, the man in the gulf of green water rows for his life--we are
floating into the open basin.
Slowly, slowly we turn round: and as the ship turns, our hearts turn.
Palermo fades from our consciousness: the Naples boat, the disembarking
crowds, the rattling carriages to the land--the great _City of
Trieste_--all fades from our heart. We see only the open gap of the
harbour entrance, and the level, pale-grey void of the sea beyond. There
are wisps of gleamy light--out there.
And out there our heart watches--though Palermo is near us, just behind.
We look round, and see it all behind us--but already it is gone, gone
from our heart. The fresh wind, the gleamy wisps of light, the running,
open sea beyond the harbour bars.
* * * * *
And so we steam out. And almost at once the ship begins to take a long,
slow, dizzy dip, and a fainting swoon upwards, and a long, slow, dizzy
dip, slipping away from beneath one. The q-b turns pale. Up comes the
deck in that fainting swoon backwards--then down it fades in that
indescribable slither forwards. It is all quite gentle--quite, quite
gentle. But oh, so long, and so slow, and so dizzy.
"Rather pleasant!" say I to the q-b.
"Yes. Rather lovely _really_," she answers wistfully. To tell the truth
there is something in the long, slow lift of the ship, and her long,
slow slide forwards which makes my heart beat with joy. It is the motion
of freedom. To feel her come up--then slide slowly forward, with a sound
of the smashing of waters, is like the magic gallop of the sky, the
magic gallop of elemental space. That long, slow, waveringly rhythmic
rise and fall of the ship, with waters snorting as it were from her
nostrils, oh God what a joy it is to the wild innermost soul. One is
free at last--and lilting in a slow flight of the elements, winging
outwards. Oh God, to be free of all the hemmed-in life--the horror of
human tension, the absolute insanity of machine persistence. The agony
which a train is to me, really. And the long-drawn-out agony of a life
among tense, resistant people on land. And then to feel the long, slow
lift and drop of this almost empty ship, as she took the waters. Ah God,
liberty, liberty, elemental liberty. I wished in my soul the voyage
might last forever, that the sea had no end, that one might float in
this wavering, tremulous, yet long and surging pulsation while ever time
lasted: space never exhausted, and no turning back, no looking back,
even.
* * * * *
The ship was almost empty--save of course for the street-corner louts
who hung about just below, on the deck itself. We stood alone on the
weather-faded little promenade deck, which has old oak seats with old,
carved little lions at the ends, for arm-rests--and a little cabin
mysteriously shut, which much peeping determined as the wireless office
and the operator's little curtained bed-niche.
* * * * *
Cold, fresh wind, a black-blue, translucent, rolling sea on which the
wake rose in snapping foam, and Sicily on the left: Monte Pellegrino, a
huge, inordinate mass of pinkish rock, hardly crisped with the faintest
vegetation, looming up to heaven from the sea. Strangely large in mass
and bulk Monte Pellegrino looks: and bare, like a Sahara in heaven: and
old-looking. These coasts of Sicily are very imposing, terrific,
fortifying the interior. And again one gets the feeling that age has
worn them bare: as if old, old civilisations had worn away and exhausted
the soil, leaving a terrifying blankness of rock, as at Syracuse in
plateaus, and here in a great mass.
* * * * *
There seems hardly any one on board but ourselves: we alone on the
little promenade deck. Strangely lonely, floating on a bare old ship
past the great bare shores, on a rolling sea, stooping and rising in the
wind. The wood of the fittings is all bare and weather-silvered, the
cabin, the seats, even the little lions of the seats. The paint wore
away long ago: and this timber will never see paint any more. Strange to
put one's hand on the old oaken wood, so sea-fibred. Good old
delicate-threaded oak: I swear it grew in England. And everything so
carefully done, so solidly and everlastingly. I look at the lions, with
the perfect-fitting oaken pins through their paws clinching them down,
and their little mouths open. They are as solid as they were in
Victorian days, as immovable. They will never wear away. What a joy in
the careful, thorough, manly, everlasting work put into a ship: at least
into this sixty-year-old vessel. Every bit of this old oak wood so
sound, so beautiful: and the whole welded together with joints and
wooden pins far more beautifully and livingly than iron welds. Rustless,
life-born, living-tissued old wood: rustless as flesh is rustless, and
happy-seeming as iron never can be. She rides so well, she takes the
sea so beautifully, as a matter of course.
* * * * *
Various members of the crew wander past to look at us. This little
promenade deck is over the first-class quarters, full in the stern. So
we see first one head then another come up the ladder--mostly bare
heads: and one figure after another slouches past, smoking a cigarette.
All crew. At last the q-b stops one of them--it is what they are all
waiting for, an opportunity to talk--and asks if the weird object on the
top of Pellegrino is a ruin. Could there be a more touristy question!
No, it is the semaphore station. Slap in the eye for the q-b! She
doesn't mind, however, and the member of the crew proceeds to converse.
He is a weedy, hollow-cheeked town-product: a Palermitan. He wears faded
blue over-alls and informs us he is the ship's carpenter: happily
unemployed for the rest of his life, apparently, and taking it as rather
less than his dues. The ship once did the Naples-Palermo course--a very
important course--in the old days of the General Navigation Company. The
General Navigation Company sold her for eighty thousand liras years ago,
and now she was worth two million. We pretend to believe: but I make a
poor show. I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras. No man
can overhear ten words of Italian today without two thousand or two
million or ten or twenty or two liras flying like venomous mosquitoes
round his ears. Liras--liras--liras--nothing else. Romantic, poetic,
cypress-and-orange-tree Italy is gone. Remains an Italy smothered in the
filthy smother of innumerable Lira notes: ragged, unsavoury paper money
so thick upon the air that one breathes it like some greasy fog. Behind
this greasy fog some people may still see the Italian sun. I find it
hard work. Through this murk of Liras you peer at Michael Angelo and at
Botticelli and the rest, and see them all as through a glass, darkly.
For heavy around you is Italy's after-the-war atmosphere, darkly
pressing you, squeezing you, milling you into dirty paper notes. King
Harry was lucky that they only wanted to coin him into gold. Italy wants
to mill you into filthy paper Liras.
* * * * *
Another head--and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time--to
tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too. We go down into the
subterranean state-room and sit on the screw-pin chairs, while the ship
does the slide-and-slope trot under us, and we drink a couple of cups of
coffee-and-milk, and eat a piece of bread and butter. At least one of
the innumerable members of the crew gives me one cup, then casts me
off. It is most obviously his intention that I shall get no more:
because of course the innumerable members of the crew could all just do
with another coffee and milk. However, though the ship heaves and the
alpaca coats cluster menacingly in the doorway, I balance my way to the
tin buffet and seize the coffee pot and the milk pot, and am quite
successful in administering to the q-b and myself. Having restored the
said vessels to their tin altar, I resume my spin chair at the long and
desert board. The q-b and I are alone--save that in the distance a very
fat back with gold-braid collar sits sideways and a fat hand disposes of
various papers--he is part of the one-and-only table, of course. The
tall lean alpaca jacket, with a face of yellow stone and a big black
moustache moves from the outer doorway, glowers at our filled cups, and
goes to the tin altar and touches the handles of the two vessels: just
touches them to an arrangement: as one who should say: These are mine.
What dirty foreigner dares help himself!
* * * * *
As quickly as possible we stagger up from the long dungeon where the
alpaca jackets are swooping like blue-bottles upon the coffee pots, into
the air. There the carpenter is waiting for us, like a spider.
"Isn't the sea a little quieter?" says the q-b wistfully. She is growing
paler.
"No, Signora--how should it be?" says the gaunt-faced carpenter. "The
wind is waiting for us behind Cape Gallo. You see that cape?" he points
to a tall black cliff-front in the sea ahead. "When we get to that cape
we get the wind and the sea. Here--" he makes a gesture--"it is
moderate."
"Ugh!" says the q-b, turning paler. "I'm going to lie down."
She disappears. The carpenter, finding me stony ground, goes forward,
and I see him melting into the crowd of the innumerable crew, that
hovers on the lower-deck passage by the kitchen and the engines.
* * * * *
The clouds are flying fast overhead: and sharp and isolated come drops
of rain, so that one thinks it must be spray. But no, it is a handful of
rain. The ship swishes and sinks forward, gives a hollow thudding and
rears slowly backward, along this pinkish lofty coast of Sicily that is
just retreating into a bay. From the open sea comes the rain, come the
long waves.
* * * * *
No shelter. One must go down. The q-b lies quietly in her bunk. The
state-room is stale like a passage on the underground railway. No
shelter, save near the kitchen and the engines, where there is a bit of
warmth. The cook is busy cleaning fish, making the whiting bite their
tails venomously at a little board just outside his kitchen-hole. A slow
stream of kitchen-filth swilkers back and forth along the ship's side. A
gang of the crew leans near me--a larger gang further down. Heaven knows
what they can all be--but they never do anything but stand in gangs and
talk and eat and smoke cigarettes. They are mostly young--mostly
Palermitan--with a couple of unmistakable Neapolitans, having the
peculiar Neapolitan hang-dog good looks, the chiselled cheek, the little
black moustache, the large eyes. But they chew with their cheeks bulged
out, and laugh with their fine, semi-sarcastic noses. The whole gang
looks continually sideways. Nobody ever commands them--there seems to be
absolutely no control. Only the fat engineer in grey linen looks as
clean and as competent as his own machinery. Queer how machine-control
puts the pride and self-respect into a man.
* * * * *
The rain over, I go and squat against the canvas that is spread over the
arched sky-lights on the small promenade deck, sitting on the seat that
is fixed to the sky-light sides. The wind is cold: there are snatches of
sun and spits of rain. The big cape has come and is being left behind:
we are heading for a far-off cape like a cloud in the grey air. A
dimness comes over one's mind: a sort of stupefaction owing to the wind
and the relentless slither-and-rearing of the ship. Not a sickness, but
a sort of dim faintness. So much motion, such moving, powerful air. And
withal a constant triumph in the long, slow sea-gallop of the ship.
* * * * *
A great loud bell: midday and the crew going to eat, rushing to eat.
After some time we are summoned. "The Signora isn't eating?" asks the
waiter eagerly: hoping she is not. "Yes, she is eating," say I. I fetch
the q-b from her berth. Rather wanly she comes and gets into her spin
chair. Bash comes a huge plate of thick, oily cabbage soup, very full,
swilkering over the sides. We do what we can with it. So does the third
passenger: a young woman who never wears a hat, thereby admitting
herself simply as one of "the people," but who has an expensive
complicated dress, nigger-coloured thin silk stockings, and suede
high-heeled shoes. She is handsome, sturdy, with large dark eyes and a
robust, frank manner: far too robustly downright for Italy. She is from
Cagliari--and can't do much with the cabbage soup: and tells the waiter
so, in her deep, hail-fellow-well-met voice. In the doorway hovers a
little cloud of alpaca jackets grinning faintly with malignant
anticipation of food, hoping, like blow-flies, we shall be too ill to
eat. Away goes the soup and appears a massive yellow omelette, like some
log of bilious wood. It is hard, and heavy, and cooked in the usual
rank-tasting olive oil. The young woman doesn't have much truck with it:
neither do we. To the triumph of the blow-flies, who see the yellow
monster borne to their altar. After which a long long slab of the
inevitable meat cut into innumerable slices, tasting of dead nothingness
and having a thick sauce of brown neutrality: sufficient for twelve
people at least. This, with masses of strong-tasting greenish
cauliflower liberally weighted with oil, on a ship that was already
heaving its heart out, made up the dinner. Accumulating malevolent
triumph among the blow-flies in the passage. So on to a dessert of
oranges, pears with wooden hearts and thick yellowish wash-leather
flesh, and apples. Then coffee.
And we had sat through it, which is something. The alpaca blue-bottles
buzzed over the masses of food that went back on the dishes to the tin
altar. Surely it had been made deliberately so that we should not eat
it! The Cagliarese young woman talked to us. Yes, she broke into that
awful language which the Italians--the quite ordinary ones--call
French, and which they insist on speaking for their own glorification:
yea, when they get to heaven's gate they will ask St. Peter for:
"OOn bigliay pour ung--trozzieme classe."
Fortunately or unfortunately her inquisitiveness got the better of her,
and she fell into her native Italian. What were we, where did we come
from, where were we going, _why_ were we going, had we any children, did
we want any, etc. After every answer she nodded her head and said Ahu!
and watched us with energetic dark eyes. Then she ruminated over our
nationalities and said, to the unseeing witnesses: Una bella coppia, a
fine couple. As at the moment we felt neither beautiful nor coupled, we
only looked greener. The grim man-at-arms coming up to ask us again if
we weren't going to have a little wine, she lapsed into her ten-pounder
French, which was most difficult to follow. And she said that on a
sea-voyage one must eat, one must eat, if only a little. But--and she
lapsed into Italian--one must by no means drink wine--no--no! One didn't
want to, said I sadly. Whereupon the grim man-at-arms, whom, of course,
we had cheated out of the bottle we refused to have opened for us, said
with a lost sarcasm that wine made a man of a man, etc., etc. I was too
weary of that underground, however. All I knew was that he wanted wine,
wine, wine, and we hadn't ordered any. He didn't care for food.
The Cagliarese told us she came now from Naples, and her husband was
following in a few days. He was doing business in Naples. I nearly asked
if he was a little dog-fish--this being the Italian for profiteer, but
refrained in time. So the two ladies retired to lie down, I went and sat
under my tarpaulin.
* * * * *
I felt very dim, and only a bit of myself. And I dozed blankly. The
afternoon grew more sunny. The ship turned southwards, and with the wind
and waves behind, it became much warmer, much smoother. The sun had the
lovely strong winey warmth, golden over the dark-blue sea. The old
oak-wood looked almost white, the afternoon was sweet upon the sea. And
in the sunshine and the swishing of the sea, the speedier running of the
empty ship, I slept a warm, sweet hour away, and awoke new. To see ahead
pale, uplooming islands upon the right: the windy Egades: and on the
right a mountain or high conical hill, with buildings on the summit: and
in front against the sea, still rather far away, buildings rising upon a
quay, within a harbor: and a mole, and a castle forward to sea, all
small and far away, like a view. The buildings were square and fine.
There was something impressive--magical under the far sunshine and the
keen wind, the square and well-proportioned buildings waiting far off,
waiting like a lost city in a story, a Rip van Winkle city. I knew it
was Trapani, the western port of Sicily, under the western sun.
* * * * *
And the hill near us was Mount Eryx. I had never seen it before. So I
had imagined a mountain in the sky. But it was only a hill, with
undistinguishable cluster of a village on the summit, where even now
cold wisps of vapour caught. They say it is 2,500 feet high. Still it
looks only a hill.
But why in the name of heaven should my heart stand still as I watch
that hill which rises above the sea? It is the Etna of the west: but
only a town-crowned hill. To men it must have had a magic almost greater
than Etna's. Watching Africa! Africa, showing her coast on clear days.
Africa the dreaded. And the great watch-temple of the summit,
world-sacred, world-mystic in the world that was. Venus of the
aborigines, older than Greek Aphrodite. Venus of the aborigines, from
her watch-temple looking at Africa, beyond the Egatian isles. The
world-mystery, the smiling Astarte. This, one of the world centres,
older than old! and the woman-goddess watching Africa! _Erycina
ridens._ Laughing, the woman-goddess, at this centre of an ancient,
quite-lost world.
I confess my heart stood still. But is mere historical fact so strong,
that what one learns in bits from books can move one so? Or does the
very word call an echo out of the dark blood? It seems so to me. It
seems to me from the darkest recesses of my blood comes a terrible echo
at the name of Mount Eryx: something quite unaccountable. The name of
Athens hardly moves me. At Eryx--my darkness quivers. Eryx, looking west
into Africa's sunset. _Erycina ridens._
There is a tick-tocking in the little cabin against which I lean. The
wireless operator is busy communicating with Trapani, no doubt. He is a
fat young man with fairish curly hair and an important bearing. Give a
man control of some machine, and at once his air of importance and
more-than-human dignity develops. One of the unaccountable members of
the crew lounges in the little doorway, like a chicken on one foot,
having nothing to do. The girl from Cagliari comes up with two young
men--also Sardinians by their thick-set, independent look, and the touch
of pride in their dark eyes. She has no wraps at all: just her elegant
fine-cloth dress, her bare head from which the wisps of hair blow across
her brow, and the transparent "nigger" silk stockings. Yet she does not
seem cold. She talks with great animation, sitting between the two
young men. And she holds the hand of the one in the overcoat
affectionately. She is always holding the hand of one or other of the
two young men: and wiping wisps of wind-blown hair from her brow: and
talking in her strong, nonchalant voice, rapidly, ceaselessly, with
massive energy. Heaven knows if the two young men--they are third-class
passengers--were previous acquaintances. But they hold her hand like
brothers--quite simply and nicely, not at all sticky and libidinous. It
all has an air of "Why not?"
She shouts at me as I pass, in her powerful, extraordinary French:
"Madame votre femme, elle est au lit?"
I say she is lying down.
"Ah!" she nods. "Elle a le mal de mer?"
No, she is not sea-sick, just lying down.
The two young men, between whom she is sitting as between two pillows,
watch with the curious Sardinian dark eyes that seem alert and show the
white all round. They are pleasant--a bit like seals. And they have a
numb look for the moment, impressed by this strange language. She
proceeds energetically to translate into Sardinian, as I pass on.
We do not seem to be going to Trapani. There lies the town on the left,
under the hill, the square buildings that suggest to me the factories
of the East India Company shining in the sun along the curious,
closed-in harbour, beyond the running, dark blue sea. We seem to be
making for the island bulk of Levanzo. Perhaps we shall steer away to
Sardinia without putting in to Trapani.
On and on we run--and always as if we were going to steer between the
pale blue, heaped-up islands, leaving Trapani behind us on our left. The
town has been in sight for an hour or more: and still we run out to sea
towards Levanzo. And the wireless-operator busily tick-tocks and throbs
in his little cabin on this upper deck. Peeping in, one sees his bed and
chair behind a curtain, screened off from his little office. And all so
tidy and pleased-looking.
From the islands one of the Mediterranean sailing ships is beating her
way, across our track, to Trapani. I don't know the name of ships but
the carpenter says she is a schooner: he says it with that Italian
misgiving which doesn't really know but which can't bear not to know.
Anyhow on she comes, with her tall ladder of square sails white in the
afternoon light, and her lovely prow, curved in with a perfect hollow,
running like a wild animal on a scent across the waters. There--the
scent leads her north again. She changes her tack from the harbour
mouth, and goes coursing away, passing behind us. Lovely she is, nimble
and quick and palpitating, with all her sails white and bright and
eager.
We are changing our course. We have all the time been heading for the
south of Levanzo. Now I see the island slowly edging back, as if
clearing out of the way for us, like a man in the street. The island
edges and turns aside: and walks away. And clearly we are making for the
harbour mouth. We have all this time been running, out at sea, round the
back of the harbour. Now I see the fortress-castle, an old thing, out
forward to sea: and a little lighthouse and the way in. And beyond, the
town-front with great palm trees and other curious dark trees, and
behind these the large square buildings of the south rising imposingly,
as if severe, big palaces upon the promenade. It all has a stately,
southern, imposing appearance, withal remote from our modern centuries:
standing back from the tides of our industrial life.
I remember the Crusaders, how they called here so often on their way to
the East. And Trapani seems waiting for them still, with its palm trees
and its silence, full in the afternoon sun. It has not much to do but
wait, apparently.
The q-b emerges into the sun, crying out how lovely! And the sea is
quieter: we are already in the lea of the harbour-curve. From the north
the many-sailed ship from the islands is running down towards us, with
the wind. And away on the south, on the sea-level, numerous short
windmills are turning their sails briskly, windmill after windmill,
rather stumpy, spinning gaily in the blue, silent afternoon, among the
salt-lagoons stretching away towards Marsala. But there is a whole
legion of windmills, and Don Quixote would have gone off his head. There
they spin, hither and thither, upon the pale-blue sea-levels. And
perhaps one catches a glitter of white salt-heaps. For these are the
great salt-lagoons which make Trapani rich.
* * * * *
We are entering the harbour-basin, however, past the old castle out on
the spit, past the little lighthouse, then through the entrance,
slipping quietly on the now tranquil water. Oh, and how pleasant the
fulness of the afternoon sun flooding this round, fast-sleeping harbour,
along whose side the tall palms drowse, and whose waters are fast
asleep. It seems quite a small, cosy harbour, with the great buildings
warm-colored in the sun behind the dark tree-avenue of the marina. The
same silent, sleeping, endlessly sun-warmed stateliness.
In the midst of this tranquillity we slowly turn round upon the shining
water, and in a few moments are moored. There are other ships moored
away to the right: all asleep, apparently, in the flooding of the
afternoon sun. Beyond the harbour entrance runs the great sea and the
wind. Here all is still and hot and forgotten.
"Vous descendez en terre?" shouts the young woman, in her energetic
French--she leaves off holding the young men's hands for the moment. We
are not quite sure: and we don't want her to come with us, anyhow, for
her French is not our French.
The land sleeps on: nobody takes any notice of us: but just one boat
paddles out the dozen yards to our side. We decide to set foot on shore.
* * * * *
One should not, and we knew it. One should never enter into these
southern towns that look so nice, so lovely, from the outside. However,
we thought we would buy some cakes. So we crossed the avenue which looks
so beautiful from the sea, and which, when you get into it, is a cross
between an outside place where you throw rubbish and a humpy unmade road
in a raw suburb, with a few iron seats, and litter of old straw and rag.
Indescribably dreary in itself: yet with noble trees, and lovely
sunshine, and the sea and the islands gleaming magic beyond the harbour
mouth, and the sun, the eternal sun full focussed. A few mangy,
nothing-to-do people stand disconsolately about, in southern fashion,
as if they had been left there, water-logged, by the last flood, and
were waiting for the next flood to wash them further. Round the corner
along the quay a Norwegian steamer dreams that she is being loaded, in
the muddle of the small port.
* * * * *
We looked at the cakes--heavy and wan they appeared to our sea-rolled
stomachs. So we strolled into a main street, dark and dank like a sewer.
A tram bumped to a standstill, as if now at last was the end of the
world. Children coming from school ecstatically ran at our heels, with
bated breath, to hear the vocal horrors of our foreign speech. We turned
down a dark side alley, about forty paces deep: and were on the northern
bay, and on a black stench that seemed like the perpetual sewer, a bank
of mud.
So we got to the end of the black main street, and turned in haste to
the sun. Ah--in a moment we were in it. There rose the palms, there lay
our ship in the shining, curving basin--and there focussed the sun, so
that in a moment we were drunk or dazed by it. Dazed. We sat on an iron
seat in the rubbish-desolate, sun-stricken avenue.
A ragged and dirty girl was nursing a fat and moist and immovable baby
and tending to a grimy fat infant boy. She stood a yard away and gazed
at us as one would gaze at a pig one was going to buy. She came nearer,
and examined the q-b. I had my big hat down over my eyes. But no, she
had taken her seat at my side, and poked her face right under my hat
brim, so that her towzled hair touched me, and I thought she would kiss
me. But again no. With her breath on my cheek she only gazed on my face
as if it were a wax mystery. I got up hastily.
"Too much for me," said I to the q-b.
She laughed, and asked what the baby was called. The baby was called
Beppina, as most babies are.
Driven forth, we wandered down the desolate avenue of shade and sun
towards the ship, and turned once more into the town. We had not been on
shore more than ten minutes. This time we went to the right, and found
more shops. The streets were dark and sunless and cold. And Trapani
seemed to me to sell only two commodities: cured rabbit skins and
cat-skins, and great, hideous, modern bed-spread arrangements of heavy
flowered silk and fabulous price. They seem to think nothing of
thousands of liras, in Trapani.
But most remarkable was bunny and pussy. Bunny and pussy, flattened out
like pressed leaves, dangling in clusters everywhere. Furs! white bunny,
black bunny in great abundance, piebald bunny, grey bunny:--then pussy,
tabby pussy, and tortoiseshell pussy, but mostly black pussy, in a
ghastly semblance of life, all flat, of course. Just single furs.
Clusters, bunches, heaps, and dangling arrays of plain-superficies puss
and bun-bun! Puss and bun by the dozen and the twenty, like dried
leaves, for your choice. If a cat from a ship should chance to find
itself in Trapani streets, it would give a mortal yell, and go mad, I am
sure.
We strolled for ten more minutes in this narrow, tortuous, unreal town,
that seemed to have plenty of flourishing inhabitants, and a fair number
of Socialists, if one was to judge by the great scrawlings on the walls:
W. LENIN and ABASSO LA BORGHESIA. Don't imagine, by the way, that Lenin
is another Wille on the list. The apparent initial stands for _Evviva_,
the double V.
* * * * *
Cakes one dared not buy, after looking at them. But we found macaroon
biscuits, and a sort of flat plaster-casts of the Infant Jesus under a
dove, of which we bought two. The q-b ate her macaroon biscuits all
through the streets, and we went towards the ship. The fat boatman
hailed us to take us back. It was just about eight yards of water to
row, the ship being moored on the quay: one could have jumped it. I gave
the fat boatman two liras, two francs. He immediately put on the
socialist-workman indignation, and thrust the note back at me. Sixty
centimes more! The fee was thirteen sous each way! In Venice or Syracuse
it would be two sous. I looked at him and gave him the money and said:
"Per Dio, we are in Trapani!" He muttered back something about
foreigners. But the hateful, unmanly insolence of these lords of toil,
now they have their various "unions" behind them and their "rights" as
working men, sends my blood black. They are ordinary men no more: the
human, happy Italian is most marvellously vanished. New honors come upon
them, etc. The dignity of human labour is on its hind legs, busy giving
every poor innocent who isn't ready for it a kick in the mouth.
* * * * *
But, once more in parenthesis, let me remind myself that it is our own
English fault. We have slobbered about the nobility of toil, till at
last the nobles naturally insist on eating the cake. And more than that,
we have set forth, politically, on such a high and Galahad quest of holy
liberty, and been caught so shamelessly filling our pockets, that no
wonder the naive and idealistic south turns us down with a bang.
* * * * *
Well, we are back on the ship. And we want tea. On the list by the door
it says we are to have coffee, milk and butter at 8.30: luncheon at
11.30: tea, coffee or chocolate at 3.00: and dinner at 6.30. And
moreover: "The company will feed the passengers for the normal duration
of the voyage only." Very well--very well. Then where is tea? Not any
signs! and the alpaca jackets giving us a wide berth. But we find our
man, and demand our rights: at least the q-b does.
The tickets from Palermo to Cagliari cost, together, 583 liras. Of this,
250 liras was for the ticket, and 40 liras each for the food. This, for
two tickets, would make 580 liras. The odd three for usual stamps. The
voyage was supposed to last about thirty or thirty-two hours: from eight
of the morning of departure to two or four of the following afternoon.
Surely we pay for our tea.
The other passengers have emerged: a large, pale, fat, "handsome"
Palermitan who is going to be professor at Cagliari: his large, fat, but
high-coloured wife: and three children, a boy of fourteen like a thin,
frail, fatherly girl, a little boy in a rabbit-skin overcoat, coming
rather unfluffed, and a girl-child on the mother's knee. The
one-year-old girl-child being, of course, the only man in the party.
They have all been sick all day, and look washed out. We sympathise.
They lament the cruelties of the journey--and _senza servizio! senza
servizio!_ without any maid servant. The mother asks for coffee, and a
cup of milk for the children: then, seeing our tea with lemon, and
knowing it by repute, she will have tea. But the rabbit-boy will have
coffee--coffee and milk--and nothing else. And an orange. And the baby
will have lemon, pieces of lemon. And the fatherly young "miss" of an
adolescent brother laughs indulgently at all the whims of these two
young ones: the father laughs and thinks it all adorable and expects us
to adore. He is almost too washed-out to attend properly, to give the
full body of his attention.
So the mother gets her cup of tea--and puts a piece of lemon in--and
then milk on top of that. The rabbit boy sucks an orange, slobbers in
the tea, insists on coffee and milk, tries a piece of lemon, and gets a
biscuit. The baby, with weird faces, chews pieces of lemon: and drops
them in the family cup: and fishes them out with a little sugar, and
dribbles them across the table to her mouth, throws them away and
reaches for a new sour piece. They all think it humorous and adorable.
Arrives the milk, to be treated as another loving cup, mingled with
orange, lemon, sugar, tea, biscuit, chocolate, and cake. Father,
mother, and elder brother partake of nothing, they haven't the
stomach. But they are charmed, of course, by the pretty pranks and
messes of the infants. They have extraordinary amiable patience,
and find the young ones a perpetual source of charming amusement.
They look at one another, the elder ones, and laugh and comment,
while the two young ones mix themselves and the table into a
lemon-milk-orange-tea-sugar-biscuit-cake-chocolate mess. This inordinate
Italian amiable patience with their young monkeys is astonishing. It
makes the monkeys more monkey-like, and self-conscious incredibly, so
that a baby has all the tricks of a Babylonian harlot, making eyes and
trying new pranks. Till at last one sees the southern Holy Family as an
unholy triad of imbecility.
Meanwhile I munched my Infant-Jesus-and-Dove arrangement, which was
rather like eating thin glass, so hard and sharp. It was made of almond
and white of egg presumably, and was not so bad if you could eat it at
all. It was a Christmas relic.--And I watched the Holy Family across the
narrow board, and tried not to look all I felt.
* * * * *
Going on deck as soon as possible, we watched the loading of barrels of
wine into the hold--a mild and happy-go-lucky process. The ship seemed
to be almost as empty of cargo as of passengers. Of the latter, we were
apparently twelve adults, all told, and the three children. And as for
cargo, there were the wooden chests of the officer, and these fourteen
barrels of wine from Trapani. The last were at length settled more or
less firm, the owner, or the responsible landsman seeing to it. No one
on the ship seemed to be responsible for anything. And four of the
innumerable crew were replacing the big planks over the hold. It was
curious how forlorn the ship seemed to feel, now she was ready for sea
again. Her innumerable crew did not succeed in making her alive. She ran
her course like a lost soul across the Mid-Mediterranean.
* * * * *
Outside the harbour the sun was sinking, gorgeous gold and red the sky,
and vast, beyond the darkening islands of the Egades group. Coming as we
did from the east side of the island, where dawn beyond the Ionian sea
is the day's great and familiar event: so decisive an event, that as the
light appears along the sea's rim, so do my eyes invariably open and
look at it, and know it is dawn, and as the night-purple is fused back,
and a little scarlet thrills towards the zenith, invariably, day by day,
I feel I must get up: coming from the east, shut off hermetically from
the west by the steep spikes of the mountains at our back, we felt this
sunset in the African sea terrible and dramatic. It seemed much more
magnificent and tragic than our Ionian dawn, which has always a
suggestion of a flower opening. But this great red, trumpet-flaring
sunset had something African, half-sinister, upon the sea: and it seemed
so far off, in an unknown land. Whereas our Ionian dawn always seems
near and familiar and happy.
A different goddess the Eryx Astarte, the woman Ashtaroth, _Erycina
ridens_ must have been, in her prehstoric dark smiling, watching the
fearful sunsets beyond the Egades, from our gold-lighted Apollo of the
Ionian east. She is a strange goddess to me, this Erycina Venus, and the
west is strange and unfamiliar and a little fearful, be it Africa or be
it America.
Slowly at sunset we moved out of the harbour. And almost as we passed
the bar, away in front we saw, among the islands, the pricking of a
quick pointed light. Looking back, we saw the light at the harbour
entrance twitching: and the remote, lost town beginning to glimmer. And
night was settling down upon the sea, through the crimsoned purple of
the last afterglow.
The islands loomed big as we drew nearer, dark in the thickening
darkness. Overhead a magnificent evening-star blazed above the open sea,
giving me a pang at the heart, for I was so used to see her hang just
above the spikes of the mountains, that I felt she might fall, having
the space beneath.
Levanzo and the other large island were quite dark: absolutely dark,
save for one beam of a lighthouse low down in the distance. The wind was
again strong and cold: the ship had commenced her old slither and heave,
slither and heave, which mercifully we had forgotten. Overhead were
innumerable great stars active as if they were alive in the sky. I saw
Orion high behind us, and the dog-star glaring. And _swish!_ went the
sea as we took the waves, then after a long trough, _swish!_ This
curious rhythmic swishing and hollow drumming of a steamer at sea has a
narcotic, almost maddening effect on the spirit, a long, hissing burst
of waters, then the hollow roll, and again the upheaval to a sudden
hiss-ss-ss!
A bell had clanged and we knew the crew were once more feeding. At every
moment of the day and presumably of the night, feeding was going on--or
coffee-drinking.
* * * * *
We were summoned to dinner. Our young woman was already seated: and a
fat uniformed mate or purser or official of some sort was finishing off
in the distance. The pale professor also appeared: and at a certain
distance down the table sat a little hard-headed grey man in a long grey
alpaca travelling coat. Appeared the beloved macaroni with tomato sauce:
no food for the sea. I put my hopes on the fish. Had I not seen the
cook making whiting bite their own tails viciously?--The fish appeared.
And what was it? Fried ink-pots. A _calamaio_ is an ink-pot: also it is
a polyp, a little octopus which, alas, frequents the Mediterranean and
squirts ink if offended. This polyp with its tentacles is cut up and
fried, and reduced to the consistency of boiled celluloid. It is
esteemed a delicacy: but is tougher than indiarubber, gristly through
and through.
I have a peculiar aversion to these ink-pots. Once in Liguria we had a
boat of our own and paddled with the peasant paddlers. Alessandro caught
ink-pots: and like this. He tied up a female by a string in a cave--the
string going through a convenient hole in her end. There she lived, like
an Amphitrite's wire-haired terrier tied up, till Alessandro went
a-fishing. Then he towed her, like a poodle behind. And thus, like a
poodly-bitch, she attracted hangers-on in the briny seas. And these poor
polyp inamorati were the victims. They were lifted as prey on board,
where I looked with horror on their grey, translucent tentacles and
large, cold, stony eyes. The she-polyp was towed behind again. But after
a few days she died.
And I think, even for creatures so awful-looking, this method is
indescribably base, and shows how much lower than an octopus even, is
lordly man.
Well, we chewed a few ends of oil-fried ink-pots, and gave it up. The
Cagliari girl gave up too: the professor had not even tried. Only the
hard-headed grey man in the alpaca coat chewed animatedly, with bouncing
jaws. Mountains of calamaio remained for the joyous blue-bottles.
Arrived the inevitable meat--this long piece of completely tasteless
undercut in innumerable grey-brown slices. Oh, Italy! The professor
fled.
Arrived the wash-leather pears, the apples, the oranges--we saved an
apple for a happier hour.
Arrived coffee, and, as a magnificent treat, a few well-known pastries.
They all taste wearily alike. The young woman shakes her head. I shake
mine, but the q-b, like a child, is pleased. Most pleased of all,
however, are the blue-bottles, who dart in a black-alpaca bunch to the
tin altar, and there loudly buzz, wildly, above the sallow cakes.
The citron-cheeked, dry one, however, cares darkly nothing for cakes. He
comes once more to twit us about wine. So much so that the Cagliari girl
orders a glass of Marsala: and I must second her. So there we are, three
little glasses of brown liquid. The Cagliari girl sips hers and suddenly
flees. The q-b sips hers with infinite caution, and quietly retires. I
finish the q-b's little glass, and my own, and the voracious blow-flies
buzz derisively and excited. The yellow-cheeked one has disappeared with
the bottle.
From the professorial cabin faint wails, sometimes almost fierce, as one
or another is going to be ill. Only a thin door is between this
state-room and them. The most down-trodden frayed ancient rag of a man
goes discreetly with basins, trying not to let out glimpses of the awful
within. I climb up to look at the vivid, drenching stars, to breathe the
cold wind, to see the dark sea sliding. Then I too go to the cabin, and
watch the sea run past the porthole for a minute, and insert myself like
the meat in a sandwich into the tight lower bunk. Oh, infinitesimal
cabin, where we sway like two matches in a match box! Oh strange, but
even yet excellent gallop of a ship at sea.
* * * * *
I slept not so badly through the stifled, rolling night--in fact later
on slept soundly. And the day was growing bright when I peered through
the porthle, the sea was much smoother. It was a brilliant clear
morning. I made haste and washed myself cursorily in the saucer that
dribbled into a pail in a corner: there was not space even for one
chair, this saucer was by my bunk-head. And I went on deck.
Ah the lovely morning! Away behind us the sun was just coming above the
sea's horizon, and the sky all golden, all a joyous, fire-heated gold,
and the sea was glassy bright, the wind gone still, the waves sunk into
long, low undulations, the foam of the wake was pale ice-blue in the
yellow air. Sweet, sweet wide morning on the sea, with the sun coming,
swimming up, and a tall sailing bark, with her flat fore-ladder of sails
delicately across the light, and a far-far steamer on the electric vivid
morning horizon.
The lovely dawn: the lovely pure, wide morning in the mid-sea, so
golden-aired and delighted, with the sea like sequins shaking, and the
sky far, far, far above, unfathomably clear. How glad to be on a ship!
What a golden hour for the heart of man! Ah if one could sail for ever,
on a small quiet, lonely ship, from land to land and isle to isle, and
saunter through the spaces of this lovely world, always through the
spaces of this lovely world. Sweet it would be sometimes to come to the
opaque earth, to block oneself against the stiff land, to annul the
vibration of one's flight against the inertia of our _terra firma!_ but
life itself would be in the flight, the tremble of space. Ah the
trembling of never-ended space, as one moves in flight! Space, and the
frail vibration of space, the glad lonely wringing of the heart. Not to
be clogged to the land any more. Not to be any more like a donkey with a
log on its leg, fastened to weary earth that has no answer now. But to
be off.
To find three masculine, world-lost souls, and world-lost saunter, and
saunter on along with them, across the dithering space, as long as life
lasts! Why come to anchor? There is nothing to anchor for. Land has no
answer to the soul any more. It has gone inert. Give me a little ship,
kind gods, and three world-lost comrades. Hear me! And let me wander
aimless across this vivid outer world, the world empty of man, where
space flies happily.
* * * * *
The lovely, celandine-yellow morning of the open sea, paling towards a
rare, sweet blue! The sun stood above the horizon, like the great
burning stigma of the sacred flower of day. Mediterranean sailing-ships,
so mediaeval, hovered on the faint morning wind, as if uncertain which
way to go, curious, odd-winged insects of the flower. The steamer,
hull-down, was sinking towards Spain. Space rang clear about us: the
level sea!
Appeared the Cagliari young woman and her two friends. She was looking
handsome and restored now the sea was easy. Her two male friends stood
touching her, one at either shoulder.
"Bonjour, Monsieur!" she barked across at me. "Vous avez pris le cafe?"
"Pas encore. Et vous?"
"Non! Madame votre femme...."
She roared like a mastiff dog: and then translated with unction to her
two uninitiated friends. How it was they did not understand her French I
do not know, it was so like travestied Italian.
I went below to find the q-b.
* * * * *
When we came up, the faint shape of land appeared ahead, more
transparent than thin pearl. Already Sardinia. Magic are high lands seen
from the sea, when they are far, far off, and ghostly translucent like
ice-bergs. This was Sardinia, looming like fascinating shadows in
mid-sea. And the sailing ships, as if cut out of frailest pearl
translucency, were wafting away towards Naples. I wanted to count their
sails--five square ones which I call the ladder, one above the
other--but how many wing-blades? That remained yet to be seen.
* * * * *
Our friend the carpenter spied us out: at least, he was not my friend.
He didn't find me _simpatico_, I am sure. But up he came, and proceeded
to entertain us with weary banality. Again the young woman called, had
we had coffee? We said we were just going down. And then she said that
whatever we had today we had to pay for: our food ended with the one
day. At which the q-b was angry, feeling swindled. But I had known
before.
* * * * *
We went down and had our coffee notwithstanding. The young woman came
down, and made eyes at one of the alpaca blue-bottles. After which we
saw a cup of coffee and milk and two biscuits being taken to her into
her cabin, discreetly. When Italians are being discreet and on the sly,
the very air about them becomes tell-tale, and seems to shout with a
thousand tongues. So with a thousand invisible tongues clamouring the
fact, the young woman had her coffee secretly and _gratis_, in her
cabin.
* * * * *
But the morning was lovely. The q-b and I crept round the bench at the
very stern of the ship and sat out of the wind and out of sight, just
above the foaming of the wake. Before us was the open morning--and the
glisten of our ship's track, like a snail's path, trailing across the
sea: straight for a little while, then giving a bend to the left, always
a bend towards the left: and coming at us from the pure horizon, like a
bright snail-path. Happy it was to sit there in the stillness, with
nothing but the humanless sea to shine about us.
But no, we were found out. Arrived the carpenter.
"Ah, you have found a fine place--!"
"Molto bello!" This from the q-b. I could not bear the irruption.
He proceeded to talk--and as is inevitable, the war. Ah, the war--it was
a terrible thing. He had become ill--very ill. Because, you see, not
only do you go without proper food, without proper rest and warmth, but,
you see, you are in an agony of fear for your life all the time. An
agony of fear for your life. And that's what does it. Six months in
hospital--! The q-b, of course, was sympathetic.
The Sicilians are quite simple about it. They just tell you they were
frightened to death, and it made them ill. The q-b, woman-like, loves
them for being so simple about it. I feel angry somewhere. For they
_expect_ a full-blown sympathy. And however the great god Mars may have
shrunk and gone wizened in the world, it still annoys me to hear him
_so_ blasphemed.
* * * * *
Near us the automatic log was spinning, the thin rope trailing behind us
in the sea. Erratically it jerked and spun, with spasmodic torsion. He
explained that the little screw at the end of the line spun to the
speed of travelling. We were going from ten to twelve Italian miles to
the hour. Ah, yes, we _could_ go twenty. But we went no faster than ten
or twelve, to save the coal.
The coal--il carbone! I knew we were in for it. England--l'Inghilterra
she has the coal. And what does she do? She sells it very dear.
Particularly to Italy. Italy won the war and now can't even have coal.
Because why! The price. The exchange! _Il cambio._ Now I am doubly in
for it. Two countries had been able to keep their money high--England
and America. The English sovereign--la sterlina--and the American
dollar--_sa_, these were money. The English and the Americans flocked to
Italy, with their _sterline_ and their _dollari_, and they bought what
they wanted for nothing, for nothing. Ecco! Whereas we poor Italians--we
are in a state of ruination--proper ruination. The allies, etc., etc.
I am so used to it--I am so wearily used to it. I can't walk a stride
without having this wretched _cambio_, the exchange, thrown at my head.
And this with an injured petulant spitefulness which turns my blood. For
I assure them, whatever I have in Italy I pay for: and I am not England.
I am not the British Isles on two legs.
Germany--La Germania--she did wrong to make the war. But--there you
are, that was war. Italy and Germany--l'Italia e la Germania--they had
always been friends. In Palermo....
My God, I felt I could not stand it another second. To sit above the
foam and have this miserable creature stuffing wads of chewed newspaper
into my ear--no, I could not bear it. In Italy, there is no escape. Say
two words, and the individual starts chewing old newspaper and stuffing
it into you. No escape. You become--if you are English--_l'Inghilterra_,
_il carbone_, and _il cambio_; and as England, coal and exchange you are
treated. It is more than useless to try to be human about it. You are a
State usury system, a coal fiend and an exchange thief. Every Englishman
has disappeared into this triple abstraction, in the eyes of the
Italian, of the proletariat particularly. Try and get them to be human,
try and get them to see that you are simply an individual, if you can.
After all, I am no more than a single human man wandering my lonely way
across these years. But no--to an Italian I am a perfected abstraction,
England--coal--exchange. The Germans were once devils for inhuman
theoretic abstracting of living beings. But now the Italians beat them.
I am a walking column of statistics, which adds up badly for Italy.
Only this and nothing more. Which being so, I shut my mouth and walk
away.
* * * * *
For the moment the carpenter is shaken off. But I am in a rage, fool
that I am. It is like being pestered by their mosquitoes. The sailing
ships are near--and I count fifteen sails. Beautiful they look! Yet if I
were on board somebody would be chewing newspaper at me, and addressing
me as England--coal--exchange.
The mosquito hovers--and hovers. But the stony blank of the side of my
cheek keeps him away. Yet he hovers. And the q-b feels sympathetic
towards him: quite sympathetic. Because of course he treats her--a _bel
pezzo_--as if he would lick her boots, or anything else that she would
let him lick.
* * * * *
Meanwhile we eat the apples from yesterday's dessert, and the remains of
the q-b's Infant-Jesus-and-dove cake. The land is drawing nearer--we can
see the shape of the end promontory and peninsula--and a white speck
like a church. The bulk of the land is forlorn and rather shapeless,
coming towards us: but attractive.
Looking ahead towards the land gives us away. The mosquito swoops on us.
Yes--he is not sure--he thinks the white speck is a church--or a
lighthouse. When you pass the cape on the right, and enter the wide bay
between Cape Spartivento and Cape Carbonara, then you have two hours
sail to Cagliari. We shall arrive between two and three o'clock. It is
now eleven.
Yes, the sailing ships are probably going to Naples. There is not much
wind for them now. When there is wind they go fast, faster than our
steamer. Ah Naples--bella, bella, eh? A little dirty, say I. But what do
you want? says he. A great city! Palermo of course is better.
Ah--the Neapolitan women--he says, a propos or not. They do their hair
so fine, so neat and beautiful--but underneath--sotto--sotto--they are
dirty. This being received in cold silence, he continues: _Noi giriamo
il mondo! Noi, chi giriamo, conosciamo il mondo._ _We_ travel about,
and _we_ know the world. Who _we_ are, I do not know: his highness the
Palermitan carpenter lout, no doubt. But _we_, who travel, know the
world. He is preparing his shot. The Neapolitan women, and the English
women, in this are equal: that they are dirty underneath. Underneath,
they are dirty. The women of London--
But it is getting too much for me.
"You who look for dirty women," say I, "find dirty women everywhere."
He stops short and watches me.
"No! No! You have not understood me. No! I don't mean that. I mean that
the Neapolitan women and the English women have dirty underclothing--"
To which he gets no answer but a cold look and a cold cheek. Whereupon
he turns to the q-b, and proceeds to be _simpatica_. And after a few
moments he turns again to me:
"Il signore is offended! He is offended with me."
But I turn the other way. And at last he clears out: in triumph, I must
admit: like a mosquito that has bitten one in the neck. As a matter of
fact one should _never_ let these fellows get into conversation
nowadays. They are no longer human beings. They hate one's Englishness,
and leave out the individual.
* * * * *
We walk forward, towards the fore-deck, where the captain's lookout
cabin is. The captain is an elderly man, silent and crushed: with the
look of a gentleman. But he looks beaten down. Another, still another
member of the tray-carrying department is just creeping up his ladder
with a cup of black coffee. Returning, we peep down the sky-light into
the kitchen. And there we see roast chicken and sausages--roast chicken
and sausages! Ah, this is where the sides of kid and the chickens and
the good things go: all down the throats of the crew. There is no more
food for us, until we land.
* * * * *
We have passed the cape--and the white thing is a lighthouse. And the
fattish, handsome professor has come up carrying the little girl-child,
while the femalish elder brother leads the rabbit-fluffy small boy by
the hand. So _en famille_: so terribly _en famille_. They deposit
themselves near us, and it threatens another conversation. But not for
anything, my dears!
The sailors--not sailors, some of the street-corner loafers, are
hoisting the flag, the red-white-and-green Italian tricolor. It floats
at the mast-head, and the femalish brother, in a fine burst of feeling,
takes off his funny hat with a flourish and cries:
"Ecco la bandiera italiana!"
Ach, the hateful sentimentalism of these days.
The land passes slowly, very slowly. It is hilly, but barren looking,
with few trees. And it is not spikey and rather splendid, like Sicily.
Sicily has style. We keep along the east side of the bay--away in the
west is Cape Spartivento. And still no sight of Cagliari.
"Two hours yet!" cries the Cagliari girl. "Two hours before we eat. Ah,
when I get on land, what a good meal I shall eat."
The men haul in the automatic log. The sky is clouding over with that
icy curd which comes after midday when the bitter north wind is blowing.
It is no longer warm.
* * * * *
Slowly, slowly we creep along the formless shore. An hour passes. We see
a little fort ahead, done in enormous black-and-white checks, like a
fragment of gigantic chess-board. It stands at the end of a long spit of
land--a long, barish peninsula that has no houses and looks as if it
might be golf-links. But it is not golf-links.
And suddenly there is Cagliari: a naked town rising steep, steep,
golden-looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head of the
formless hollow bay. It is strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like
Italy. The city piles up lofty and almost miniature, and makes me think
of Jerusalem: without trees, without cover, rising rather bare and
proud, remote as if back in history, like a town in a monkish,
illuminated missal. One wonders how it ever got there. And it seems like
Spain--or Malta: not Italy. It is a steep and lonely city, treeless, as
in some old illumination. Yet withal rather jewel-like: like a sudden
rose-cut amber jewel naked at the depth of the vast indenture. The air
is cold, blowing bleak and bitter, the sky is all curd. And that is
Cagliari. It has that curious look, as if it could be seen, but not
entered. It is like some vision, some memory, something that has passed
away. Impossible that one can actually _walk_ in that city: set foot
there and eat and laugh there. Ah, no! Yet the ship drifts nearer,
nearer, and we are looking for the actual harbour.
* * * * *
The usual sea-front with dark trees for a promenade and palatial
buildings behind, but here not so pink and gay, more reticent, more
sombre of yellow stone. The harbour itself a little basin of water, into
which we are slipping carefully, while three salt-barges laden with salt
as white as snow creep round from the left, drawn by an infinitesimal
tug. There are only two other forlorn ships in the basin. It is cold on
deck. The ship turns slowly round, and is being hauled to the quay side.
I go down for the knapsack, and a fat blue-bottle pounces at me.
"You pay nine francs fifty."
I pay them, and we get off that ship.
III.
CAGLIARI.
There is a very little crowd waiting on the quay: mostly men with their
hands in their pockets. But, thank Heaven, they have a certain aloofness
and reserve. They are not like the tourist-parasites of these post-war
days, who move to the attack with a terrifying cold vindictiveness the
moment one emerges from any vehicle. And some of these men look really
poor. There are no poor Italians any more: at least, loafers.
Strange the feeling round the harbour: as if everybody had gone away.
Yet there are people about. It is "festa" however, Epiphany. But it is
so different from Sicily: none of the suave Greek-Italian charms, none
of the airs and graces, none of the glamour. Rather bare, rather stark,
rather cold and yellow--somehow like Malta, without Malta's foreign
liveliness. Thank Goodness no one wants to carry my knapsack. Thank
Goodness no one has a fit at the sight of it. Thank Heaven no one takes
any notice. They stand cold and aloof, and don't move.
We make our way through the Customs: then through the Dazio, the City
Customs-house. Then we are free. We set off up a steep, new, broad road,
with little trees on either side. But stone, arid, new, wide stone,
yellowish under the cold sky--and abandoned-seeming. Though, of course,
there are people about. The north wind blows bitingly.
We climb a broad flight of steps, always upwards, up the wide,
precipitous, dreary boulevard with sprouts of trees. Looking for the
Hotel, and dying with hunger.
* * * * *
At last we find it, the Scala di Ferro: through a courtyard with green
plants. And at last a little man with lank, black hair, like an esquimo,
comes smiling. He is one brand of Sardinian--esquimo looking. There is
no room with two beds: only single rooms. And thus we are led off, if
you please, to the "bagnio": the bathing-establishment wing, on the dank
ground floor. Cubicles on either side a stone passage, and in every
cubicle a dark stone bath, and a little bed. We can have each a little
bath cubicle. If there's nothing else for it, there isn't: but it seems
dank and cold and horrid, underground. And one thinks of all the
unsavory "assignations" at these old bagnio places. True, at the end of
the passage are seated two carabinieri. But whether to ensure
respectibility or not, Heaven knows. We are in the baths, that's all.
[Illustration: ISILI]
The esquimo returns after five minutes, however. There _is_ a bedroom in
the house. He is pleased, because he didn't like putting us into the
bagnio. Where he found the bedroom I don't know. But there it was,
large, sombre, cold, and over the kitchen fumes of a small inner court
like a well. But perfectly clean and all right. And the people seemed
warm and good-natured, like human beings. One has got so used to the
non-human ancient-souled Sicilians, who are suave and so completely
callous.
* * * * *
After a really good meal we went out to see the town. It was after three
o'clock and everywhere was shut up like an English Sunday. Cold, stony
Cagliari: in summer you must be sizzling hot, Cagliari, like a kiln. The
men stood about in groups, but without the intimate Italian watchfulness
that never leaves a passer-by alone.
Strange, stony Cagliari. We climbed up a street like a corkscrew
stairway. And we saw announcements of a children's fancy-dress ball.
Cagliari is very steep. Half-way up there is a strange place called the
bastions, a large, level space like a drill-ground with trees,
curiously suspended over the town, and sending off a long shoot like a
wide viaduct, across above the corkscrew street that comes climbing up.
Above this bastion place the town still rises steeply to the Cathedral
and the fort. What is so curious is that this terrace or bastion is so
large, like some big recreation ground, that it is almost dreary, and
one cannot understand its being suspended in mid-air. Down below is the
little circle of the harbour. To the left a low, malarial-looking sea
plain, with tufts of palm trees and Arab-looking houses. From this runs
out the long spit of land towards that black-and-white watch-fort, the
white road trailing forth. On the right, most curiously, a long strange
spit of sand runs in a causeway far across the shallows of the bay, with
the open sea on one hand, and vast, end-of-the-world lagoons on the
other. There are peaky, dark mountains beyond this--just as across the
vast bay are gloomy hills. It is a strange, strange landscape: as if
here the world left off. The bay is vast in itself; and all these
curious things happening at its head: this curious, craggy-studded town,
like a great stud of house-covered rock jutting up out of the bay flats:
around it on one side the weary, Arab-looking palm-desolated malarial
plain, and on the other side great salt lagoons, dead beyond the
sand-bar: these backed again by serried, clustered mountains, suddenly,
while away beyond the plain, hills rise to sea again. Land and sea both
seem to give out, exhausted, at the bay head: the world's end. And into
this world's end starts up Cagliari, and on either side, sudden,
serpent-crest hills.
But it still reminds me of Malta: lost between Europe and Africa and
belonging to nowhere. Belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to
anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phoenicians most. But as if
it had never really had a fate. No fate. Left outside of time and
history.
The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to
override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister
spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will
smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens, and all that we think the
real thing will go off with a pop, and we shall be left staring.
* * * * *
On the great parapet above the Municipal Hall and above the corkscrew
high-street a thick fringe of people is hanging, looking down. We go to
look too: and behold, below there is the entrance to the ball. Yes,
there is a china shepherdess in pale blue and powdered hair, crook,
ribbons, Marie Antoinette satin daintiness and all, slowly and
haughtily walking up the road, and gazing superbly round. She is not
more than twelve years old, moreover. Two servants accompany her. She
gazes supremely from right to left as she goes, mincingly, and I would
give her the prize for haughtiness. She is perfect--a little too haughty
for Watteau, but "marquise" to a T. The people watch in silence. There
is no yelling and screaming and running. They watch in a suitable
silence.
Comes a carriage with two fat bay horses slithering, almost swimming up
the corkscrew high-street. That in itself is a "tour-de-force": for
Cagliari doesn't have carriages. Imagine a street like a corkscrew
stair, paved with slippery stone. And imagine two bay horses rowing
their way up it: they did not walk a single stride. But they arrived.
And there fluttered out three strangely exquisite children, two frail,
white satin Pierrots and a white satin Pierrette. They were like fragile
winter butterflies with black spots. They had a curious, indefinable
remote elegance, something conventional and "fin-de-siecle". But not our
century. The wonderful artificial delicacy of the eighteenth. The boys
had big, perfect ruffs round their necks: and behind were slung old,
cream-colored Spanish shawls, for warmth. They were frail as tobacco
flowers, and with remote, cold elegance they fluttered by the carriage,
from which emerged a large black-satin Mama. Fluttering their queer
little butterfly feet on the pavement, hovering round the large Mama
like three frail-tissued ghosts, they found their way past the solid,
seated Carabinieri into the hall.
Arrived a primrose-brocade beau, with ruffles, and his hat under his
arm: about twelve years old. Walking statelily, without a qualm up the
steep twist of the street. Or perhaps so perfect in his
self-consciousness that it became an elegant "aplomb" in him. He was a
genuine eighteenth-century exquisite, rather stiffer than the French,
maybe, but completely in the spirit. Curious, curious children! They had
a certain stand-offish superbness, and not a single trace of misgiving.
For them, their "noblesse" was indisputable. For the first time in my
life I recognized the true cold superbness of the old "noblesse". They
had not a single qualm about their own perfect representing of the
higher order of being.
Followed another white satin "marquise", with a maid-servant. They are
strong on the eighteenth century in Cagliari. Perhaps it is the last
bright reality to them. The nineteenth hardly counts.
* * * * *
Curious the children in Cagliari. The poor seem thoroughly
poor-bare-footed urchins, gay and wild in the narrow dark streets. But
the more well-to-do children are so fine: so extraordinarily elegantly
dressed. It quite strikes one of a heap. Not so much the grown-ups. The
children. All the "chic," all the fashion, all the originality is
expended on the children. And with a great deal of success. Better than
Kensington Gardens very often. And they promenade with Papa and Mama
with such alert assurance, having quite brought it off, their
fashionable get-up. Who would have expected it?
* * * * *
Oh narrow, dark, and humid streets going up to the Cathedral, like
crevices. I narrowly miss a huge pail of slop-water which comes crashing
down from heaven. A small boy who was playing in the street, and whose
miss is not quite a clean miss, looks up with that naive, impersonal
wonder with which children stare at a star or a lamp-lighter.
The Cathedral must have been a fine old pagan stone fortress once. Now
it has come, as it were, through the mincing machine of the ages, and
oozed out baroque and sausagey, a bit like the horrible baldachins in
St. Peter's at Rome. None the less it is homely and hole-and-cornery,
with a rather ragged high mass trailing across the pavement towards the
high altar, since it is almost sunset, and Epiphany. It feels as if one
might squat in a corner and play marbles and eat bread and cheese and be
at home: a comfortable old-time churchey feel.
There is some striking filet lace on the various altar-cloths. And St.
Joseph must be a prime saint. He has an altar and a verse of invocation
praying for the dying.
"Oh, St. Joseph, true potential father of Our Lord." What can it profit
a man, I wonder, to be the potential father of anybody! For the rest I
am not Baedeker.
* * * * *
The top of Cagliari is the fortress: the old gate, the old ramparts, of
honey-combed, fine yellowish sandstone. Up in a great sweep goes the
rampart wall, Spanish and splendid, dizzy. And the road creeping down
again at the foot, down the back of the hill. There lies the country:
that dead plain with its bunch of palms and a fainting sea, and inland
again, hills. Cagliari must be on a single, loose, lost bluff of rock.
From the terrace just below the fortress, above the town, not behind it,
we stand and look at the sunset. It is all terrible, taking place beyond
the knotted, serpent-crested hills that lie, bluey and velvety, beyond
the waste lagoons. Dark, sultry, heavy crimson the west is, hanging
sinisterly, with those gloomy blue cloud-bars and cloud-banks drawn
across. All behind the blue-gloomy peaks stretches the curtain of
sinister, smouldering red, and away to the sea. Deep below lie the
sea-meres. They seem miles and miles, and utterly waste. But the
sand-bar crosses like a bridge, and has a road. All the air is dark, a
sombre bluish tone. The great west burns inwardly, sullenly, and gives
no glow, yet a deep red. It is cold.
We go down the steep streets, smelly, dark, dank, and very cold. No
wheeled vehicle can scramble up them, presumably. People live in one
room. Men are combing their hair or fastening their collars in the
doorways. Evening is here, and it is a feast day.
* * * * *
At the bottom of the street we come to a little bunch of masked youths,
one in a long yellow frock and a frilled bonnet, another like an old
woman, another in red twill. They are arm in arm and are accosting the
passers-by. The q-b gives a cry, and looks for escape. She has a terror
of maskers, a terror that comes from childhood. To say the truth, so
have I. We hasten invisibly down the far side of the street, and come
out under the bastions. Then we go down our own familiar wide, short,
cold boulevard to the sea.
At the bottom, again, is a carriage with more maskers. Carnival is
beginning. A man dressed as a peasant woman in native costume is
clambering with his great wide skirts and wide strides on to the box,
and, flourishing his ribboned whip, is addressing a little crowd of
listeners. He opens his mouth wide and goes on with a long yelling
harangue of taking a drive with his mother--another man in old-woman's
gaudy finery and wig who sits already bobbing on the box. The would-be
daughter flourishes, yells, and prances up there on the box of the
carriage. The crowd listens attentively and mildly smiles. It all seems
real to them. The q-b hovers in the distance, half-fascinated, and
watches. With a great flourish of whip and legs--showing his frilled
drawers--the masker pulls round to drive along the boulevard by the
sea--the only place where one can drive.
* * * * *
The big street by the sea is the Via Roma. It has the cafes on one side
and across the road the thick tufts of trees intervening between the sea
and us. Among these thick tufts of sea-front trees the little steam
tram, like a little train, bumps to rest, after having wound round the
back of the town.
The Via Roma is all social Cagliari. Including the cafes with their
outdoor tables on the one side of the road, and the avenue strand on the
other, it is very wide, and at evening it contains the whole town. Here,
and here alone carriages can spank along, very slowly, officers can
ride, and the people can promenade "en masse."
We were amazed at the sudden crowd we found ourselves amongst--like a
short, dense river of people streaming slowly in a mass. There is
practically no vehicular traffic--only the steady dense streams of human
beings of all sorts, all on a human footing. It must have been something
like this in the streets of imperial Rome, where no chariots might drive
and humanity was all on foot.
Little bunches of maskers, and single maskers danced and strutted along
in the thick flow under the trees. If you are a mask you don't walk like
a human being: you dance and prance along extraordinarily like the
life-size marionettes, conducted by wires from above. That is how you
go: with that odd jauntiness as if lifted and propelled by wires from
the shoulders. In front of me went a charming coloured harlequin, all in
diamond-shaped colours, and beautiful as a piece of china. He tripped
with the light, fantastic trip, quite alone in the thick crowd, and
quite blithe. Came two little children hand in hand in brilliant scarlet
and white costumes, sauntering calmly. They did not do the mask trip.
After a while a sky-blue girl with a high hat and full skirts, very
short, that went flip-flip-flip, as a ballet dancer's, whilst she
strutted; after her a Spanish grandee capering like a monkey. They
threaded among the slow stream of the crowd. Appeared Dante and
Beatrice, in Paradise apparently, all in white sheet-robes, and with
silver wreaths on their heads, arm in arm, and prancing very slowly and
majestically, yet with the long lilt as if hitched along by wires from
above. They were very good: all the well-known vision come to life,
Dante incorporate, and white as a shroud, with his tow-haired,
silver-crowned, immortal Beatrice on his arm, strutting the dark
avenues. He had the nose and cheek-bones and banded cheek, and the
stupid wooden look, and offered a modern criticism on the Inferno.
* * * * *
It had become quite dark, the lamps were lighted. We crossed the road to
the Cafe Roma, and found a table on the pavement among the crowd. In a
moment we had our tea. The evening was cold, with ice in the wind. But
the crowd surged on, back and forth, back and forth, slowly. At the
tables were seated mostly men, taking coffee or vermouth or aqua vitae,
all familiar and easy, without the modern self-consciousness. There was
a certain pleasant, natural robustness of spirit, and something of a
feudal free-and-easiness. Then arrived a family, with children, and
nurse in her native costume. They all sat at table together, perfectly
easy with one another, though the marvellous nurse seemed to be seated
below the salt. She was bright as a poppy, in a rose-scarlet dress of
fine cloth, with a curious little waistcoat of emerald green and purple,
and a bodice of soft, homespun linen with great full sleeves. On her
head she had a rose-scarlet and white head-dress, and she wore great
studs of gold filigree, and similar ear-rings. The feudal-bourgeois
family drank its syrup-drinks and watched the crowd. Most remarkable is
the complete absence of self-consciousness. They all have a perfect
natural "sang-froid," the nurse in her marvellous native costume is as
thoroughly at her ease as if she were in her own village street. She
moves and speaks and calls to a passer-by without the slightest
constraint, and much more, without the slightest presumption. She is
below the invisible salt, the invisible but insuperable salt. And it
strikes me the salt-barrier is a fine thing for both parties: they both
remain natural and human on either side of it, instead of becoming
devilish, scrambling and pushing at the barricade.
* * * * *
The crowd is across the road, under the trees near the sea. On this side
stroll occasional pedestrians. And I see my first peasant in costume.
He is an elderly, upright, handsome man, beautiful in the
black-and-white costume. He wears the full-sleeved white shirt and the
close black bodice of thick, native frieze, cut low. From this sticks
out a short kilt or frill, of the same black frieze, a band of which
goes between the legs, between the full loose drawers of coarse linen.
The drawers are banded below the knee into tight black frieze gaiters.
On his head he has the long black stocking cap, hanging down behind. How
handsome he is, and so beautifully male! He walks with his hands loose
behind his back, slowly, upright, and aloof. The lovely
unapproachableness, indomitable. And the flash of the black and white,
the slow stride of the full white drawers, the black gaiters and black
cuirass with the bolero, then the great white sleeves and white breast
again, and once more the black cap--what marvellous massing of the
contrast, marvellous, and superb, as on a magpie.--How beautiful
maleness is, if it finds its right expression.--And how perfectly
ridiculous it is made in modern clothes.
There is another peasant too, a young one with a swift eye and hard
cheek and hard, dangerous thighs. He has folded his stocking cap, so
that it comes forward to his brow like a phrygian cap. He wears close
knee breeches and close sleeved waistcoat of thick brownish stuff that
looks like leather. Over the waistcoat a sort of cuirass of black, rusty
sheepskin, the curly wool outside. So he strides, talking to a comrade.
How fascinating it is, after the soft Italians, to see these limbs in
their close knee-breeches, so definite, so manly, with the old
fierceness in them still. One realises, with horror, that the race of
men is almost extinct in Europe. Only Christ-like heroes and
woman-worshipping Don Juans, and rabid equality-mongrels. The old,
hardy, indomitable male is gone. His fierce singleness is quenched. The
last sparks are dying out in Sardinia and Spain. Nothing left but the
herd-proletariat and the herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful
poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable.
But that curious, flashing, black-and-white costume! I seem to have
known it before: to have worn it even: to have dreamed it. To have
dreamed it: to have had actual contact with it. It belongs in some way
to something in me--to my past, perhaps. I don't know. But the uneasy
sense of blood-familiarity haunts me. I _know_ I have known it before.
It is something of the same uneasiness I feel before Mount Eryx: but
without the awe this time.
* * * * *
In the morning the sun was shining from a blue, blue sky, but the
shadows were deadly cold, and the wind like a flat blade of ice. We went
out running to the sun. The hotel could not give us coffee and milk:
only a little black coffee. So we descended to the sea-front again, to
the Via Roma, and to our cafe. It was Friday: people seemed to be
bustling in from the country with huge baskets.
The Cafe Roma had coffee and milk, but no butter. We sat and watched the
movement outside. Tiny Sardinian donkeys, the tiniest things ever seen,
trotted their infinitesimal little paws along the road, drawing little
wagons like handcarts. Their proportion is so small, that they make a
boy walking at their side look like a tall man, while a natural man
looks like a Cyclops stalking hugely and cruelly. It is ridiculous for a
grown man to have one of these little creatures, hardly bigger than a
fly, hauling his load for him. One is pulling a chest of drawers on a
cart, and it seems to have a whole house behind it. Nevertheless it
plods bravely, away beneath the load, a wee thing.
They tell me there used to be flocks of these donkeys, feeding half wild
on the wild, moor-like hills of Sardinia. But the war--and also the
imbecile wantonness of the war-masters--consumed these flocks too, so
that few are left. The same with the cattle. Sardinia, home of cattle,
hilly little Argentine of the Mediterranean, is now almost deserted. It
is war, say the Italiana.--And also the wanton, imbecile, foul
lavishness of the war-masters. It was not alone the war which exhausted
the world. It was the deliberate evil wastefulness of the war-makers in
their own countries. Italy ruined Italy.
* * * * *
Two peasants in black-and-white are strolling in the sun, flashing. And
my dream of last evening was not a dream. And my nostalgia for something
I know not what was not an illusion. I feel it again, at once, at the
sight of the men in frieze and linen, a heart yearning for something I
have known, and which I want back again.
It is market day. We turn up the Largo Carlo-Felice, the second wide gap
of a street, a vast but very short boulevard, like the end of something.
Cagliari is like that: all bits and bobs. And by the side of the
pavement are many stalls, stalls selling combs and collar-studs, cheap
mirrors, handkerchiefs, shoddy Manchester goods, bed-ticking,
boot-paste, poor crockery, and so on. But we see also Madame of Cagliari
going marketing, with a servant accompanying her, carrying a huge
grass-woven basket: or returning from marketing, followed by a small
boy supporting one of these huge grass-woven baskets--like huge
dishes--on his head, piled with bread, eggs, vegetables, a chicken, and
so forth. Therefore we follow Madame going marketing, and find ourselves
in the vast market house, and it fairly glows with eggs: eggs in these
great round dish-baskets of golden grass: but eggs in piles, in mounds,
in heaps, a Sierra Nevada of eggs, glowing warm white. How they glow! I
have never noticed it before. But they give off a warm, pearly
effulgence into the air, almost a warmth. A pearly-gold heat seems to
come out of them. Myriads of eggs, glowing avenues of eggs.
And they are marked--60 centimes, 65 centimes. Ah, cries the q-b, I must
live in Cagliari--For in Sicily the eggs cost 1.50 each.
This is the meat and poultry and bread market. There are stalls of new,
various-shaped bread, brown and bright: there are tiny stalls of
marvellous native cakes, which I want to taste, there is a great deal of
meat and kid: and there are stalls of cheese, all cheeses, all shapes,
all whitenesses, all the cream-colours, on into daffodil yellow. Goat
cheese, sheeps cheese, Swiss cheese, Parmegiano, stracchino,
caciocavallo, torolone, how many cheeses I don't know the names of! But
they cost about the same as in Sicily, eighteen francs, twenty francs,
twenty-five francs the kilo. And there is lovely ham--thirty and
thirty-five francs the kilo. There is a little fresh butter too--thirty
or thirty-two francs the kilo. Most of the butter, however, is tinned in
Milan. It costs the same as the fresh. There are splendid piles of
salted black olives, and huge bowls of green salted olives. There are
chickens and ducks and wild-fowl: at eleven and twelve and fourteen
francs a kilo. There is mortadella, the enormous Bologna sausage, thick
as a church pillar: 16 francs: and there are various sorts of smaller
sausage, salami, to be eaten in slices. A wonderful abundance of food,
glowing and shining. We are rather late for fish, especially on Friday.
But a barefooted man offers us two weird objects from the Mediterranean,
which teems with marine monsters.
The peasant women sit behind their wares, their home-woven linen skirts,
hugely full, and of various colours, ballooning round them. The yellow
baskets give off a glow of light. There is a sense of profusion once
more. But alas no sense of cheapness: save the eggs. Every month, up
goes the price of everything.
"I must come and live in Cagliari, to do my shopping here," says the
q-b. "I must have one of those big grass baskets."
We went down to the little street--but saw more baskets emerging from a
broad flight of stone stairs, enclosed. So up we went-and found
ourselves in the vegetable market. Here the q-b was happier still.
Peasant women, sometimes barefoot, sat in their tight little bodices and
voluminous, coloured skirts behind the piles of vegetables, and never
have I seen a lovelier show. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to
predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and
black-purple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a
flower-show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. From
this green, white, and purple massing struck out the vivid rose-scarlet
and blue crimson of radishes, large radishes like little turnips, in
piles. Then the long, slim, grey-purple buds of artichokes, and dangling
clusters of dates, and piles of sugar-dusty white figs and
sombre-looking black figs, and bright burnt figs: basketfuls and
basketfuls of figs. A few baskets of almonds, and many huge walnuts.
Basket-pans of native raisins. Scarlet peppers like trumpets:
magnificent fennels, so white and big and succulent: baskets of new
potatoes: scaly kohlrabi: wild asparagus in bunches, yellow-budding
sparacelli: big, clean-fleshed carrots: feathery salads with white
hearts: long, brown-purple onions and then, of course pyramids of big
oranges, pyramids of pale apples, and baskets of brilliant shiny
mandarini, the little tangerine orange with their green-black leaves.
The green and vivid-coloured world of fruit-gleams I have never seen in
such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and
gorgeous. And all quite cheap, the one remaining cheapness, except
potatoes. Potatoes of any sort are 1.40 or 1.50 the kilo.
"Oh!" cried the q-b, "If I don't live at Cagliari and come and do my
shopping here, I shall die with one of my wishes unfulfilled."
* * * * *
But out of the sun it was cold, nevertheless. We went into the streets
to try and get warm. The sun was powerful. But alas, as in southern
towns generally, the streets are sunless as wells.
So the q-b and I creep slowly along the sunny bits, and then perforce
are swallowed by shadow. We look at the shops. But there is not much to
see. Little, frowsy provincial shops, on the whole.
But a fair number of peasants in the streets, and peasant women in
rather ordinary costume: tight-bodiced, volume-skirted dresses of
hand-woven linen or thickish cotton. The prettiest is of
dark-blue-and-red, stripes-and-lines, intermingled, so made that the
dark-blue gathers round the waist into one colour, the myriad pleats
hiding all the rosy red. But when she walks, the full-petticoated
peasant woman, then the red goes flash-flash-flash, like a bird showing
its colours. Pretty that looks in the sombre street. She has a plain,
light bodice with a peak: sometimes a little vest, and great full white
sleeves, and usually a handkerchief or shawl loose knotted. It is
charming the way they walk, with quick, short steps. When all is said
and done, the most attractive costume for women in my eye, is the tight
little bodice and the many-pleated skirt, full and vibrating with
movement. It has a charm which modern elegance lacks completely--a
bird-like play in movement.
* * * * *
They are amusing, these peasant girls and women: so brisk and defiant.
They have straight backs, like little walls, and decided, well-drawn
brows. And they are amusingly on the alert. There is no eastern
creeping. Like sharp, brisk birds they dart along the streets, and you
feel they would fetch you a bang over the head as leave as look at you.
Tenderness, thank heaven, does not seem to be a Sardinian quality. Italy
is so tender--like cooked macaroni--yards and yards of soft tenderness
ravelled round everything. Here men don't idealise women, by the looks
of things. Here they don't make these great leering eyes, the inevitable
yours-to-command look of Italian males. When the men from the country
look at these women, then it is Mind-yourself, my lady. I should think
the grovelling Madonna-worship is not much of a Sardinian feature. These
women have to look out for themselves, keep their own back-bone stiff
and their knuckles hard. Man is going to be male Lord if he can. And
woman isn't going to give him too much of his own way, either. So there
you have it, the fine old martial split between the sexes. It is tonic
and splendid, really, after so much sticky intermingling and
backboneless Madonna-worship. The Sardinian isn't looking for the "noble
woman nobly planned." No, thank you. He wants that young madam over
there, a young stiff-necked generation that she is. Far better sport
than with the nobly-planned sort: hollow frauds that they are. Better
sport too than with a Carmen, who gives herself away too much, In these
women there is something shy and defiant and un-get-atable. The defiant,
splendid split between the sexes, each absolutely determined to defend
his side, her side, from assault. So the meeting has a certain wild,
salty savour, each the deadly unknown to the other. And at the same
time, each his own, her own native pride and courage, taking the
dangerous leap and scrambling back.
Give me the old, salty way of love. How I am nauseated with sentiment
and nobility, the macaroni slithery-slobbery mess of modern adorations.
* * * * *
One sees a few fascinating faces in Cagliari: those great dark unlighted
eyes. There are fascinating dark eyes in Sicily, bright, big, with an
impudent point of light, and a curious roll, and long lashes: the eyes
of old Greece, surely. But here one sees eyes of soft, blank darkness,
all velvet, with no imp looking out of them. And they strike a stranger,
older note: before the soul became self-conscious: before the mentality
of Greece appeared in the world. Remote, always remote, as if the
intelligence lay deep within the cave, and never came forward. One
searches into the gloom for one second, while the glance lasts. But
without being able to penetrate to the reality. It recedes, like some
unknown creature deeper into its lair. There is a creature, dark and
potent. But what?
Sometimes Velasquez, and sometimes Goya gives us a suggestion of these
large, dark, unlighted eyes. And they go with fine, fleecy black
hair--almost as fine as fur. I have not seen them north of Cagliari.
* * * * *
The q-b spies some of the blue-and-red stripe-and-line cotton stuff of
which the peasants make their dress: a large roll in the doorway of a
dark shop. In we go, and begin to feel it. It is just soft, thickish
cotton stuff--twelve francs a metre. Like most peasant patterns, it is
much more complicated and subtle than appears: the curious placing of
the stripes, the subtle proportion, and a white thread left down one
side only of each broad blue block. The stripes, moreover, run _across_
the cloth, not lengthwise with it. But the width would be just long
enough for a skirt--though the peasant skirts have almost all a band at
the bottom with the stripes running round-ways.
The man--he is the esquimo type, simple, frank and aimiable--says the
stuff is made in France, and this the first roll since the war. It is
the old, old pattern, quite correct--but the material not _quite_ so
good. The q-b takes enough for a dress.
He shows us also cashmeres, orange, scarlet, sky-blue, royal blue: good,
pure-wool cashmeres that were being sent to India, and were captured
from a German mercantile sub-marine. So he says. Fifty francs a
metre--very, very wide. But they are too much trouble to carry in a
knapsack, though their brilliance fascinates.
* * * * *
So we stroll and look at the shops, at the filigree gold jewelling of
the peasants, at a good bookshop. But there is little to see and
therefore the question is, shall we go on? Shall we go forward?
There are two ways of leaving Cagliari for the north: the State railway
that runs up the west side of the island, and the narrow-gauge secondary
railway that pierces the centre. But we are too late for the big trains.
So we will go by the secondary railway, wherever it goes.
There is a train at 2.30, and we can get as far as Mandas, some fifty
miles in the interior. When we tell the queer little waiter at the
hotel, he says he comes from Mandas, and there are two inns. So after
lunch--a strictly fish menu--we pay our bill. It comes to sixty odd
francs--for three good meals each, with wine, and the night's lodging,
this is cheap, as prices now are in Italy.
Pleased with the simple and friendly Scala di Ferre, I shoulder my sack
and we walk off to the second station. The sun is shining hot this
afternoon--burning hot, by the sea. The road and the buildings look dry
and desiccated, the harbour rather weary and end of the world.
There is a great crowd of peasants at the little station. And almost
every man has a pair of woven saddle-bags--a great flat strip of
coarse-woven wool, with flat pockets at either end, stuffed with
purchases. These are almost the only carrying bags. The men sling them
over their shoulder, so that one great pocket hangs in front, one
behind.
These saddle bags are most fascinating. They are coarsely woven in bands
of raw black-rusty wool, with varying bands of raw white wool or hemp or
cotton--the bands and stripes of varying widths going cross-wise. And on
the pale bands are woven sometimes flowers in most lovely colours,
rose-red and blue and green, peasant patterns--and sometimes fantastic
animals, beasts, in dark wool again. So that these striped zebra bags,
some wonderful gay with flowery colours on their stripes, some weird
with fantastic, griffin-like animals, are a whole landscape in
themselves.
The train has only first and third class. It costs about thirty francs
for the two of us, third class to Mandas, which is some sixty miles. In
we crowd with the joyful saddle-bags, into the wooden carriage with its
many seats.
And, wonder of wonders, punctually to the second, off we go, out of
Cagliari. En route again.
IV.
MANDAS.
The coach was fairly full of people, returning from market. On these
railways the third class coaches are not divided into compartments. They
are left open, so that one sees everybody, as down a room. The
attractive saddle-bags, _bercole_, were disposed anywhere, and the bulk
of the people settled down to a lively _conversazione_. It is much
nicest, on the whole, to travel third class on the railway. There is
space, there is air, and it is like being in a lively inn, everybody in
good spirits.
At our end was plenty of room. Just across the gangway was an elderly
couple, like two children, coming home very happily. He was fat, fat all
over, with a white moustache and a little not-unamiable frown. She was a
tall lean, brown woman, in a brown full-skirted dress and black apron,
with huge pocket. She wore no head covering, and her iron grey hair was
parted smoothly. They were rather pleased and excited being in the
train. She took all her money out of her big pocket, and counted it and
gave it to him: all the ten Lira notes, and the five Lira and the two
and the one, peering at the dirty scraps of pink-backed one-lira notes
to see if they were good. Then she gave him her half-pennies. And he
stowed them away in the trouser pocket, standing up to push them down
his fat leg. And then one saw, to one's amazement, that the whole of his
shirt-tail was left out behind, like a sort of apron worn backwards.
Why--a mystery. He was one of those fat, good-natured, unheeding men
with a little masterful frown, such as usually have tall, lean,
hard-faced, obedient wives.
They were very happy. With amazement he watched us taking hot tea from
the Thermos flask. I think he too had suspected it might be a bomb. He
had blue eyes and standing-up white eyebrows.
"Beautiful hot--!" he said, seeing the tea steam. It is the inevitable
exclamation. "Does it do you good?"
"Yes," said the q-b. "Much good." And they both nodded complacently.
They were going home.
* * * * *
The train was running over the malarial-looking sea-plain--past the
down-at-heel palm trees, past the mosque-looking buildings. At a level
crossing the woman crossing-keeper darted out vigorously with her red
flag. And we rambled into the first village. It was built of sun-dried
brick-adobe houses, thick adobe garden-walls, with tile ridges to keep
off the rain. In the enclosures were dark orange trees. But the
clay-coloured villages, clay-dry, looked foreign: the next thing to mere
earth they seem, like fox-holes or coyote colonies.
Looking back, one sees Cagliari bluff on her rock, rather fine, with the
thin edge of the sea's blade curving round. It is rather hard to believe
in the real sea, on this sort of clay-pale plain.
* * * * *
But soon we begin to climb to the hills. And soon the cultivation begins
to be intermittent. Extraordinary how the heathy, moor-like hills come
near the sea: extraordinary how scrubby and uninhabited the great spaces
of Sardinia are. It is wild, with heath and arbutus scrub and a sort of
myrtle, breast-high. Sometimes one sees a few head of cattle. And then
again come the greyish arable-patches, where the corn is grown. It is
like Cornwall, like the Land's End region. Here and there, in the
distance, are peasants working on the lonely landscape. Sometimes it is
one man alone in the distance, showing so vividly in his black-and-white
costume, small and far-off like a solitary magpie, and curiously
distinct. All the strange magic of Sardinia is in this sight. Among the
low, moor-like hills, away in a hollow of the wide landscape one
solitary figure, small but vivid black-and-white, working alone, as if
eternally. There are patches and hollows of grey arable land, good for
corn. Sardinia was once a great granary.
Usually, however, the peasants of the South have left off the costume.
Usually it is the invisible soldiers' grey-green cloth, the Italian
khaki. Wherever you go, wherever you be, you see this khaki, this
grey-green war-clothing. How many millions of yards of the thick,
excellent, but hateful material the Italian government must have
provided I don't know: but enough to cover Italy with a felt carpet, I
should think. It is everywhere. It cases the tiny children in stiff and
neutral frocks and coats, it covers their extinguished fathers, and
sometimes it even encloses the women in its warmth. It is symbolic of
the universal grey mist that has come over men, the extinguishing of all
bright individuality, the blotting out of all wild singleness. Oh
democracy! Oh khaki democracy!
* * * * *
This is very different from Italian landscape. Italy is almost always
dramatic, and perhaps invariably romantic. There is drama in the plains
of Lombardy, and romance in the Venetian lagoons, and sheer scenic
excitement in nearly all the hilly parts of the peninsula. Perhaps it is
the natural floridity of lime-stone formations. But Italian landscape is
really eighteenth-century landscape, to be represented in that
romantic-classic manner which makes everything rather marvelous and very
topical: aqueducts, and ruins upon sugar-loaf mountains, and craggy
ravines and Wilhelm Meister water-falls: all up and down.
Sardinia is another thing. Much wider, much more ordinary, not
up-and-down at all, but running away into the distance. Unremarkable
ridges of moor-like hills running away, perhaps to a bunch of dramatic
peaks on the southwest. This gives a sense of space, which is so lacking
in Italy. Lovely space about one, and traveling distances--nothing
finished, nothing final. It is like liberty itself, after the peaky
confinement of Sicily. Room--give me room--give me room for my spirit:
and you can have all the toppling crags of romance.
So we ran on through the gold of the afternoon, across a wide, almost
Celtic landscape of hills, our little train winding and puffing away
very nimbly. Only the heath and scrub, breast-high, man-high, is too big
and brigand-like for a Celtic land. The horns of black, wild-looking
cattle show sometimes.
After a long pull, we come to a station after a stretch of loneliness.
Each time, it looks as if there were nothing beyond--no more
habitations. And each time we come to a station.
Most of the people have left the train. And as with men driving in a
gig, who get down at every public-house, so the passengers usually
alight for an airing at each station. Our old fat friend stands up and
tucks his shirt-tail comfortably in his trousers, which trousers all the
time make one hold one's breath, for they seem at each very moment to be
just dropping right down: and he clambers out, followed by the long,
brown stalk of a wife.
So the train sits comfortably for five or ten minutes, in the way the
trains have. At last we hear whistles and horns, and our old fat friend
running and clinging like a fat crab to the very end of the train as it
sets off. At the same instant a loud shriek and a bunch of shouts from
outside. We all jump up. There, down the line, is the long brown stork
of a wife. She had just walked back to a house some hundred yards off,
for a few words, and has now seen the train moving.
Now behold her with her hands thrown to heaven, and hear the wild shriek
"Madonna!" through all the hubbub. But she picks up her two skirt-knees,
and with her thin legs in grey stockings starts with a mad rush after
the train. In vain. The train inexorably pursues its course. Prancing,
she reaches one end of the platform as we leave the other end. Then she
realizes it is not going to stop for her. And then, oh horror, her long
arms thrown out in wild supplication after the retreating train: then
flung aloft to God: then brought down in absolute despair on her head.
And this is the last sight we have of her, clutching her poor head in
agony and doubling forward. She is left--she is abandoned.
The poor fat husband has been all the time on the little outside
platform at the end of the carriage, holding out his hand to her and
shouting frenzied scolding to her and frenzied yells for the train to
stop. And the train has not stopped. And she is left--left on that
God-forsaken station in the waning light.
So, his face all bright, his eyes round and bright as two stars,
absolutely transfigured by dismay, chagrin, anger and distress, he comes
and sits in his seat, ablaze, stiff, speechless. His face is almost
beautiful in its blaze of conflicting emotions. For some time he is as
if unconscious in the midst of his feelings. Then anger and resentment
crop out of his consternation. He turns with a flash to the long-nosed,
insidious, Phoenician-looking guard. Why couldn't they stop the train
for her! And immediately, as if someone had set fire to him, off flares
the guard. Heh!--the train can't stop for every person's convenience!
The train is a train--the time-table is a time-table. What did the old
woman want to take her trips down the line for? Heh! She pays the
penalty for her own inconsiderateness. Had _she_ paid for the
train--heh? And the fat man all the time firing off his unheeding and
unheeded answers. One minute--only one minute--if he, the conductor had
told the driver! if he, the conductor, had shouted! A poor woman! Not
another train! What was she going to do! Her ticket? And no money. A
poor woman--
There was a train back to Cagliari that night, said the conductor, at
which the fat man nearly burst out of his clothing like a bursting
seed-pod. He bounced on his seat. What good was that? What good was a
train back to Cagliari, when their home was in Snelli! Making matters
worse--
So they bounced and jerked and argued at one another, to their hearts'
content. Then the conductor retired, smiling subtly, in a way they have.
Our fat friend looked at us with hot, angry, ashamed, grieved eyes and
said it was a shame. Yes, we chimed, it _was_ a shame. Whereupon a
self-important miss who said she came from some Collegio at Cagliari
advanced and asked a number of impertinent questions in a tone of pert
sympathy. After which our fat friend, left alone, covered his clouded
face with his hand, turned his back on the world, and gloomed.
It had all been so dramatic that in spite of ourselves we laughed, even
while the q-b shed a few tears.
* * * * *
Well, the journey lasted hours. We came to a station, and the conductor
said we must get out: these coaches went no further. Only two coaches
would proceed to Mandas. So we climbed out with our traps, and our fat
friend with his saddle-bag, the picture of misery.
The one coach into which we clambered was rather crowded. The only other
coach was most of it first-class. And the rest of the train was freight.
We were two insignificant passenger wagons at the end of a long string
of freight-vans and trucks.
There was an empty seat, so we sat on it: only to realize after about
five minutes, that a thin old woman with two children--her
grandchildren--was chuntering her head off because it was _her_
seat--why she had left it she didn't say. And under my legs was her
bundle of bread. She nearly went off her head. And over my head, on the
little rack, was her bercola, her saddle-bag. Fat soldiers laughed at
her good-naturedly, but she fluttered and flipped like a tart,
featherless old hen. Since she had another seat and was quite
comfortable, we smiled and let her chunter. So she clawed her bread
bundle from under my legs, and, clutching it and a fat child, sat tense.
* * * * *
It was getting quite dark. The conductor came and said that there was no
more paraffin. If what there was in the lamps gave out, we should have
to sit in the dark. There was no more paraffin all along the line.--So
he climbed on the seats, and after a long struggle, with various boys
striking matches for him, he managed to obtain a light as big as a pea.
We sat in this _clair-obscur_, and looked at the sombre-shadowed faces
round us: the fat soldier with a gun, the handsome soldier with huge
saddle-bags, the weird, dark little man who kept exchanging a baby with
a solid woman who had a white cloth tied round her head, a tall
peasant-woman in costume, who darted out at a dark station and returned
triumphant with a piece of chocolate: a young and interested young man,
who told us every station. And the man who spat: there is always one.
Gradually the crowd thinned. At a station we saw our fat friend go by,
bitterly, like a betrayed soul, his bulging saddle-bag hanging before
and after, but no comfort in it now--no comfort. The pea of light from
the paraffin lamp grew smaller. We sat in incredible dimness, and the
smell of sheeps-wool and peasant, with only our fat and stoic young man
to tell us where we were. The other dusky faces began to sink into a
dead, gloomy silence. Some took to sleep. And the little train ran on
and on, through unknown Sardinian darkness. In despair we drained the
last drop of tea and ate the last crusts of bread. We knew we must
arrive some time.
* * * * *
It was not much after seven when we came to Mandas. Mandas is a junction
where these little trains sit and have a long happy chat after their
arduous scramble over the downs. It had taken us somewhere about five
hours to do our fifty miles. No wonder then that when the junction at
last heaves in sight everybody bursts out of the train like seeds from
an exploding pod, and rushes somewhere for something. To the station
restaurant, of course. Hence there is a little station restaurant that
does a brisk trade, and where one can have a bed.
A quite pleasant woman behind the little bar: a brown woman with brown
parted hair and brownish eyes and brownish, tanned complexion and tight
brown velveteen bodice. She led us up a narrow winding stone stair, as
up a fortress, leading on with her candle, and ushered us into the
bedroom. It smelled horrid and sourish, as shutup bedrooms do. We threw
open the window. There were big frosty stars snapping ferociously in
heaven.
The room contained a huge bed, big enough for eight people, and quite
clean. And the table on which stood the candle actually had a cloth. But
imagine that cloth! I think it had been originally white: now, however,
it was such a web of time-eaten holes and mournful black inkstains and
poor dead wine stains that it was like some 2000 B.C. mummy-cloth. I
wonder if it could have been lifted from that table: or if it was
mummified on to it! I for one made no attempt to try. But that
table-cover impressed me, as showing degrees I had not imagined.--A
table-cloth.
We went down the fortress-stair to the eating-room. Here was a long
table with soup-plates upside down and a lamp burning an uncanny naked
acetylene flame. We sat at the cold table, and the lamp immediately
began to wane. The room--in fact the whole of Sardinia--was stone cold,
stone, stone cold. Outside the earth was freezing. Inside there was no
thought of any sort of warmth: dungeon stone floors, dungeon stone walls
and a dead, corpse-like atmosphere, too heavy and icy to move.
The lamp went quite out, and the q-b gave a cry. The brown woman poked
her head through a hole in the wall. Beyond her we saw the flames of the
cooking, and two devil-figures stirring the pots. The brown woman came
and shook the lamp--it was like a stodgy porcelain mantelpiece
vase--shook it well and stirred up its innards, and started it going
once more. Then she appeared with a bowl of smoking cabbage soup, in
which were bits of macaroni: and would we have wine? I shuddered at the
thought of death-cold red wine of the country, so asked what else there
was. There was malvagia--malvoisie, the same old malmsey that did for
the Duke of Clarence. So we had a pint of malvagia, and were comforted.
At least we were being so, when the lamp went out again. The brown woman
came and shook and smacked it, and started it off again. But as if to
say "Shan't for you", it whipped out again.
Then came the host with a candle and a pin, a large, genial Sicilian
with pendulous mustaches. And he thoroughly pricked the wretch with the
pin, shook it, and turned little screws. So up flared the flame. We were
a little nervous. He asked us where we came from, etc. And suddenly he
asked us, with an excited gleam, were we Socialists. Aha, he was going
to hail us as citizens and comrades. He thought we were a pair of
Bolshevist agents: I could see it. And as such he was prepared to
embrace us. But no, the q-b disclaimed the honor. I merely smiled and
shook my head. It is a pity to rob people of their exciting illusions.
"Ah, there is too much socialism everywhere!" cried the q-b.
"Ma--perhaps, perhaps--" said the discreet Sicilian. She saw which way
the land lay, and added:
"Si vuole un _pocchetino_ di Socialismo: one wants a tiny bit of
socialism in the world, a tiny bit. But not much. Not much. At present
there is too much."
Our host, twinkling at this speech which treated of the sacred creed as
if it were a pinch of salt in the broth, believing the q-b was throwing
dust in his eyes, and thoroughly intrigued by us as a pair of deep ones,
retired. No sooner had he gone than the lamp-flame stood up at its full
length, and started to whistle. The q-b drew back. Not satisfied by
this, another flame suddenly began to whip round the bottom of the
burner, like a lion lashing its tail. Unnerved, we made room: the q-b
cried again: in came the host with a subtle smile and a pin and an air
of benevolence, and tamed the brute.
What else was there to eat? There was a piece of fried pork for me, and
boiled eggs for the q-b. As we were proceeding with these, in came the
remainder of the night's entertainment: three station officials, two in
scarlet peaked caps, one in a black-and-gold peaked cap. They sat down
with a clamour, in their caps, as if there was a sort of invisible
screen between us and them. They were young. The black cap had a lean
and sardonic look: one of the red-caps was little and ruddy, very young,
with a little mustache: we called him the _maialino_, the gay little
black pig, he was so plump and food-nourished and frisky. The third was
rather puffy and pale and had spectacles. They all seemed to present us
the blank side of their cheek, and to intimate that no, they were not
going to take their hats off, even if it were dinner-table and a strange
_signora_. And they made rough quips with one another, still as if we
were on the other side of the invisible screen.
Determined however, to remove this invisible screen, I said
Good-evening, and it was very cold. They muttered Good-evening, and yes,
it was fresh. An Italian never says it is cold: it is never more than
_fresco_. But this hint that it was cold they took as a hint at their
caps, and they became very silent, till the woman came in with the
soup-bowl. Then they clamoured at her, particularly the _maialino_, what
was there to eat. She told them--beef-steaks of pork. Whereat they
pulled faces. Or bits of boiled pork. They sighed, looked gloomy,
cheered up, and said beef-steaks, then.
And they fell on their soup. And never, from among the steam, have I
heard a more joyful trio of soup-swilkering. They sucked it in from
their spoons with long, gusto-rich sucks. The _maialino_ was the
treble--he trilled his soup into his mouth with a swift, sucking
vibration, interrupted by bits of cabbage, which made the lamp start to
dither again. Black-cap was the baritone; good, rolling spoon-sucks. And
the one in spectacles was the bass: he gave sudden deep gulps. All was
led by the long trilling of the _maialino_. Then suddenly, to vary
matters, he cocked up his spoon in one hand, chewed a huge mouthful of
bread, and swallowed it down with a smack-smack-smack! of his tongue
against his palate. As children we used to call this "clapping".
"Mother, she's clapping!" I would yell with anger, against my sister.
The German word is schmatzen.
So the _maialino_ clapped like a pair of cymbals, while baritone and
bass rolled on. Then in chimed the swift bright treble.
At this rate however, the soup did not last long. Arrived the
beef-steaks of pork. And now the trio was a trio of castanet smacks and
cymbal claps. Triumphantly the _maialino_ looked around. He out-smacked
all.
The bread of the country is rather coarse and brown, with a hard, hard
crust. A large rock of this is perched on every damp serviette. The
_maialino_ tore his rock asunder, and grumbled at the black-cap, who had
got a weird sort of three-cornered loaf-roll of pure white bread--starch
white. He was a swell with this white bread.
Suddenly black-cap turned to me. Where had we come from, where were we
going, what for? But in laconic, sardonic tone.
"I _like_ Sardinia," cried the q-b.
"Why?" he asked sarcastically. And she tried to find out.
"Yes, the Sardinians please me more than the Sicilians," said I.
"Why?" he asked sarcastically.
"They are more open--more honest." He seemed to turn his nose down.
"The padrone is a Sicilian," said the _maialino_, stuffing a huge block
of bread into his mouth, and rolling his insouciant eyes of a gay,
well-fed little black pig towards the background. We weren't making much
headway.
"You've seen Cagliari?" the black-cap said to me, like a threat.
"Yes! oh Cagliari pleases me--Cagliari is beautiful!" cried the q-b,
who travels with a vial of melted butter ready for her parsnips.
"Yes--Cagliari is _so-so_--Cagliari is very fair," said the black cap.
"_Cagliari e discreto._" He was evidently proud of it.
"And is Mandas nice?" asked the q-b.
"In what way nice?" they asked, with immense sarcasm.
"Is there anything to see?"
"Hens," said the _maialino_ briefly. They all bristled when one asked if
Mandas was nice.
"What does one do here?" asked the q-b.
"_Niente!_ At Mandas one does _nothing_. At Mandas one goes to bed when
it's dark, like a chicken. At Mandas one walks down the road like a pig
that is going nowhere. At Mandas a goat understands more than the
inhabitants understand. At Mandas one needs socialism...."
They all cried out at once. Evidently Mandas was more than flesh and
blood could bear for another minute to these three conspirators.
"Then you are very bored here?" say I.
"Yes."
And the quiet intensity of that naked yes spoke more than volumes.
"You would like to be in Cagliari?"
"Yes."
Silence, intense, sardonic silence had intervened. The three looked at
one another and made a sour joke about Mandas. Then the black-cap turned
to me.
"Can you understand Sardinian?" he said.
"Somewhat. More than Sicilian, anyhow."
"But Sardinian is more difficult than Sicilian. It is full of words
utterly unknown to Italian--"
"Yes, but," say I, "it is spoken openly, in plain words, and Sicilian is
spoken all stuck together, none of the words there at all."
He looks at me as if I were an imposter. Yet it is true. I find it quite
easy to understand Sardinian. As a matter of fact, it is more a question
of human approach than of sound. Sardinian seems open and manly and
downright. Sicilian is gluey and evasive, as if the Sicilian didn't want
to speak straight to you. As a matter of fact, he doesn't. He is an
over-cultured, sensitive, ancient soul, and he has so many sides to his
mind that he hasn't got any definite one mind at all. He's got a dozen
minds, and uneasily he's aware of it, and to commit himself to anyone of
them is merely playing a trick on himself and his interlocutor. The
Sardinian, on the other hand, still seems to have one downright mind. I
bump up against a downright, smack-out belief in Socialism, for
example. The Sicilian is much too old in our culture to swallow
Socialism whole: much too ancient and ruse not to be sophisticated about
any and every belief. He'll go off like a squib: and then he'll smoulder
acridly and sceptically even against his own fire. One sympathizes with
him in retrospect. But in daily life it is unbearable.
"Where do you find such white bread?" say I to the black cap, because he
is proud of it.
"It comes from my home." And then he asks about the bread of Sicily. Is
it any whiter than _this_--the Mandas rock. Yes, it is a little whiter.
At which they gloom again. For it is a very sore point, this bread.
Bread means a great deal to an Italian: it is verily his staff of life.
He practically lives on bread. And instead of going by taste, he now,
like all the world, goes by eye. He has got it into his head that bread
should be white, so that every time he fancies a darker shade in the
loaf a shadow falls on his soul. Nor is he altogether wrong. For
although, personally, I don't like white bread any more, yet I do like
my brown bread to be made of pure, unmixed flour. The peasants in
Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown
bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and _clean_ their loaf
seems, so perfumed as home-bread used all to be before the war. Whereas
the bread of the commune, the regulation supply, is hard, and rather
coarse and rough, so rough and harsh on the palate. One gets tired to
death of it. I suspect myself the maize meal mixed in. But I don't know.
And finally the bread varies immensely from town to town, from commune
to commune. The so-called just and equal distribution is all my-eye. One
place has abundance of good sweet bread, another scrapes along, always
stinted, on an allowance of harsh coarse stuff. And the poor suffer
bitterly, really, from the bread-stinting, because they depend so on
this one food. They say the inequality and the injustice of distribution
comes from the Camorra--la grande Camorra--which is no more nowadays
than a profiteering combine, which the poor hate. But for myself, I
don't know. I only know that one town--Venice, for example--seems to
have an endless supply of pure bread, of sugar, of tobacco, of
salt--while Florence is in one continual ferment of irritation over the
stinting of these supplies--which are all government monopoly, doled out
accordingly.
We said Good-night to our three railway friends, and went up to bed. We
had only been in the room a minute or two, when the brown woman tapped:
and if you please, the black-cap had sent us one of his little white
loaves. We were really touched. Such delicate little generosities have
almost disappeared from the world.
It was a queer little bread--three-cornered, and almost as hard as ships
biscuit, made of starch flour. Not strictly bread at all.
* * * * *
The night was cold, the blankets flat and heavy, but one slept quite
well till dawn. At seven o'clock it was a clear, cold morning, the sun
not yet up. Standing at the bedroom window looking out, I could hardly
believe my eyes it was so like England, like Cornwall in the bleak
parts, or Derbyshire uplands. There was a little paddock-garden at the
back of the Station, rather tumble-down, with two sheep in it. There
were several forlorn-looking out-buildings, very like Cornwall. And then
the wide, forlorn country road stretched away between borders of grass
and low, drystone walls, towards a grey stone farm with a tuft of trees,
and a naked stone village in the distance. The sun came up yellow, the
bleak country glimmered bluish and reluctant. The low, green hill-slopes
were divided into fields, with low drystone walls and ditches. Here and
there a stone barn rose alone, or with a few bare, windy trees attached.
Two rough-coated winter horses pastured on the rough grass, a boy came
along the naked, wide, grass-bordered high-road with a couple of milk
cans, drifting in from nowhere: and it was all so like Cornwall, or a
part of Ireland, that the old nostalgia for the Celtic regions began to
spring up in me. Ah, those old, drystone walls dividing the fields--pale
and granite-blenched! Ah, the dark, sombre grass, the naked sky! the
forlorn horses in the wintry morning! Strange is a Celtic landscape, far
more moving, disturbing than the lovely glamor of Italy and Greece.
Before the curtains of history lifted, one feels the world was like
this--this Celtic bareness and sombreness and _air_. But perhaps it is
not Celtic at all: Iberian. Nothing is more unsatisfactory than our
conception of what is Celtic and what is not Celtic. I believe there
never were any Celts, as a race.--As for the Iberians--!
[Illustration: TONARA]
Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish
with hoar-frost, to see the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams
melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and
things standing up in cold distance. After two southern winters, with
roses blooming all the time, this bleakness and this touch of frost in
the ringing morning goes to my soul like an intoxication. I am so glad,
on this lonely naked road, I don't know what to do with myself. I walk
down in the shallow grassy ditches under the loose stone walls, I walk
on the little ridge of grass, the little bank on which the wall is
built, I cross the road across the frozen cow-droppings: and it is all
so familiar to my _feet_, my very feet in contact, that I am wild as if
I had made a discovery. And I realize that I hate lime-stone, to live on
lime-stone or marble or any of those limey rocks. I hate them. They are
dead rocks, they have no life--thrills for the feet. Even sandstone is
much better. But granite! Granite is my favorite. It is so live under
the feet, it has a deep sparkle of its own. I like its roundnesses--and
I hate the jaggy dryness of lime-stone, that burns in the sun, and
withers.
* * * * *
After coming to a deep well in a grassy plot in a wide space of the
road, I go back, across the sunny naked upland country, towards the pink
station and its out-buildings. An engine is steaming its white clouds in
the new light. Away to the left there is even a row of small houses,
like a row of railway-mens' dwellings. Strange and familiar sight. And
the station precincts are disorderly and rather dilapidated. I think of
our Sicilian host.
The brown woman gives us coffee, and very strong, rich goats' milk, and
bread. After which the q-b and I set off once more along the road to the
village. She too is thrilled. She too breathes deep. She too feels
_space_ around her, and freedom to move the limbs: such as one does not
feel in Italy and Sicily, where all is so classic and fixed.
The village itself is just a long, winding, darkish street, in shadow,
of houses and shops and a smithy. It might almost be Cornwall: not
quite. Something, I don't know what, suggests the stark burning glare of
summer. And then, of course, there is none of the cosiness which
climbing roses and lilac trees and cottage shops and haystacks would
give to an English scene. This is harder, barer, starker, more dreary.
An ancient man in the black-and-white costume comes out of a hovel of a
cottage. The butcher carries a huge side of meat. The women peer at
us--but more furtive and reticent than the howling stares of Italy.
So we go on, down the rough-cobbled street through the whole length of
the village. And emerging on the other side, past the last cottage, we
find ourselves again facing the open country, on the gentle down-slope
of the rolling hill. The landscape continues the same: low, rolling
upland hills, dim under the yellow sun of the January morning: stone
fences, fields, grey-arable land: a man slowly, slowly ploughing with a
pony and a dark-red cow: the road trailing empty across the distance:
and then, the one violently unfamiliar note, the enclosed cemetery lying
outside on the gentle hill-side, closed in all round, very compact,
with high walls: and on the inside face of the enclosure wall the marble
slabs, like shut drawers of the sepulchres, shining white, the wall
being like a chest of drawers, or pigeon holes to hold the dead. Tufts
of dark and plumy cypresses rise among the flat graves of the enclosure.
In the south, cemeteries are walled off and isolated very tight. The
dead, as it were, are kept fast in pound. There is no spreading of
graves over the face of the country. They are penned in a tight fold,
with cypresses to fatten on the bones. This is the one thoroughly
strange note in the landscape. But all-pervading there is a strangeness,
that strange feeling as if the _depths_ were barren, which comes in the
south and the east, sun-stricken. Sun-stricken, and the heart eaten out
by the dryness.
"I like it! I like it!" cries the q-b.
"But could you live here?" She would like to say yes, but daren't.
We stray back. The q-b wants to buy one of those saddle-bag
arrangements. I say what for? She says to keep things in. Ach! but
peeping in the shops, we see one and go in and examine it. It is quite a
sound one, properly made: but plain, quite plain. On the white
cross-stripes there are no lovely colored flowers of rose and green and
magenta: the three favorite Sardinian colors: nor are there any of the
fantastic and griffin-like beasts. So it won't do. How much does it
cost? Forty-five francs.
There is nothing to do in Mandas. So we will take the morning train and
go to the terminus, to Sorgono. Thus, we shall cross the lower slopes of
the great central knot of Sardinia, the mountain knot called
Gennargentu. And Sorgono we feel will be lovely.
Back at the station we make tea on the spirit lamp, fill the thermos,
pack the knapsack and the kitchenino, and come out into the sun of the
platform. The q-b goes to thank the black-cap for the white bread,
whilst I settle the bill and ask for food for the journey. The brown
woman fishes out from a huge black pot in the background sundry hunks of
coarse boiled pork, and gives me two of these, hot, with bread and salt.
This is the luncheon. I pay the bill: which amounts to twenty-four
francs, for everything. (One says francs or liras, irrespective, in
Italy.) At that moment arrives the train from Cagliari, and men rush in,
roaring for the soup--or rather, for the broth. "Ready, ready!" she
cries, going to the black pot.
V.
TO SORGONO.
The various trains in the junction squatted side by side and had long,
long talks before at last we were off. It was wonderful to be running in
the bright morning towards the heart of Sardinia, in the little train
that seemed so familiar. We were still going third class, rather to the
disgust of the railway officials at Mandas.
At first the country was rather open: always the long spurs of hills,
steep-sided, but not high. And from our little train we looked across
the country, across hill and dale. In the distance was a little town, on
a low slope. But for its compact, fortified look it might have been a
town on the English downs. A man in the carriage leaned out of the
window holding out a white cloth, as a signal to someone in the far off
town that he was coming. The wind blew the white cloth, the town in the
distance glimmered small and alone in its hollow. And the little train
pelted along.
It was rather comical to see it. We were always climbing. And the line
curved in great loops. So that as one looked out of the window, time and
again one started, seeing a little train running in front of us, in a
diverging direction, making big puffs of steam. But lo, it was our own
little engine pelting off around a loop away ahead. We were quite a long
train, but all trucks in front, only our two passenger coaches hitched
on behind. And for this reason our own engine was always running fussily
into sight, like some dog scampering in front and swerving about us,
while we followed at the tail end of the thin string of trucks.
I was surprised how well the small engine took the continuous steep
slopes, how bravely it emerged on the sky-line. It is a queer railway. I
would like to know who made it. It pelts up hill and down dale and round
sudden bends in the most unconcerned fashion, not as proper big railways
do, grunting inside deep cuttings and stinking their way through
tunnels, but running up the hill like a panting, small dog, and having a
look round, and starting off in another direction, whisking us behind
unconcernedly. This is much more fun than the tunnel-and-cutting system.
They told me that Sardinia mines her own coal: and quite enough for her
own needs: but very soft, not fit for steam-purposes. I saw heaps of it:
small, dull, dirty-looking stuff. Truck-loads of it too. And
truck-loads of grain.
At every station we were left ignominiously planted, while the little
engines--they had gay gold names on their black little bodies--strolled
about along the side-lines, and snuffed at the various trucks. There we
sat, at every station, while some truck was discarded and some other
sorted out like a branded sheep, from the sidings and hitched on to us.
It took a long time, this did.
* * * * *
All the stations so far had had wire netting over the windows. This
means malaria-mosquitoes. The malaria climbs very high in Sardinia. The
shallow upland valleys, moorland with their intense summer sun and the
riverless, boggy behaviour of the water breed the pest inevitably. But
not very terribly, as far as one can make out: August and September
being the danger months. The natives don't like to admit there is any
malaria: a tiny bit, they say, a tiny bit. As soon as you come to the
_trees_ there is no more. So they say. For many miles the landscape is
moorland and down-like, with no trees. But wait for the trees. Ah, the
woods and forests of Gennargentu: the woods and forests higher up: no
malaria there!
The little engine whisks up and up, around its loopy curves as if it
were going to bite its own tail: we being the tail: then suddenly dives
over the sky-line out of sight. And the landscape changes. The famous
woods begin to appear. At first it is only hazel-thickets, miles of
hazel-thickets, all wild, with a few black cattle trying to peep at us
out of the green myrtle and arbutus scrub which forms the undergrowth;
and a couple of rare, wild peasants peering at the train. They wear the
black sheepskin tunic, with the wool outside, and the long stocking
caps. Like cattle they too peer out from between deep bushes. The myrtle
scrub here rises man-high, and cattle and men are smothered in it. The
big hazels rise bare above. It must be difficult getting about in these
parts.
Sometimes, in the distance one sees a black-and-white peasant riding
lonely across a more open place, a tiny vivid figure. I like so much the
proud instinct which makes a living creature distinguish itself from its
background. I hate the rabbity khaki protection-colouration. A
black-and-white peasant on his pony, only a dot in the distance beyond
the foliage, still flashes and dominates the landscape. Ha-ha! proud
mankind! There you ride! But alas, most of the men are still
khaki-muffled, rabbit-indistinguishable, ignominious. The Italians look
curiously rabbity in the grey-green uniform: just as our sand-colored
khaki men look doggy. They seem to scuffle rather abased, ignominious
on the earth. Give us back the scarlet and gold, and devil take the
hindmost.
* * * * *
The landscape really begins to change. The hillsides tilt sharper and
sharper. A man is ploughing with two small red cattle on a craggy,
tree-hanging slope as sharp as a roof-side. He stoops at the small
wooden plough, and jerks the ploughlines. The oxen lift their noses to
heaven, with a strange and beseeching snake-like movement, and taking
tiny little steps with their frail feet, move slantingly across the
slope-face, between rocks and tree-roots. Little, frail, jerky steps the
bullocks take, and again they put their horns back and lift their
muzzles snakily to heaven, as the man pulls the line. And he skids his
wooden plough round another scoop of earth. It is marvellous how they
hang upon that steep, craggy slope. An English labourer's eyes would
bolt out of his head at the sight.
There is a stream: actually a long tress of a water-fall pouring into a
little gorge, and a stream-bed that opens a little, and shows a
marvellous cluster of naked poplars away below. They are like ghosts.
They have a ghostly, almost phosphorescent luminousness in the shadow of
the valley, by the stream of water. If not phosphorescent, then
incandescent: a grey, goldish-pale incandescence of naked limbs and
myriad cold-glowing twigs, gleaming strangely. If I were a painter I
would paint them: for they seem to have living, sentient flesh. And the
shadow envelopes them.
Another naked tree I would paint is the gleaming mauve-silver fig, which
burns its cold incandescence, tangled, like some sensitive creature
emerged from the rock. A fig tree come forth in its nudity gleaming over
the dark winter-earth is a sight to behold. Like some white, tangled sea
anemone. Ah, if it could but answer! or if we had tree-speech!
* * * * *
Yes, the steep valley sides become almost gorges, and there are trees.
Not forests such as I had imagined, but scattered, grey, smallish oaks,
and some lithe chestnuts. Chestnuts with their long whips, and oaks with
their stubby boughs, scattered on steep hillsides where rocks crop out.
The train perilously winding round, half way up. Then suddenly bolting
over a bridge and into a completely unexpected station. What is more,
men crowd in--the station is connected with the main railway by a post
motor-omnibus.
An unexpected irruption of men--they may be miners or navvies or
land-workers. They all have huge sacks: some lovely saddle-bags with
rose-coloured flowers across the darkness. One old man is in full
black-and-white costume, but very dirty and coming to pieces. The others
wear the tight madder-brown breeches and sleeved waistcoats. Some have
the sheepskin tunic, and all wear the long stocking cap. And how they
smell! of sheep-wool and of men and goat. A rank scent fills the
carriage.
They talk and are very lively. And they have mediaeval faces, _ruse_,
never really abandoning their defences for a moment, as a badger or a
pole-cat never abandons its defences. There is none of the brotherliness
and civilised simplicity. Each man knows he must guard himself and his
own: each man knows the devil is behind the next bush. They have never
known the post-Renaissance Jesus. Which is rather an eye-opener.
Not that they are suspicious or uneasy. On the contrary, noisy,
assertive, vigorous presences. But with none of that implicit belief
that everybody will be and ought to be good to them, which is the mark
of our era. They don't expect people to be good to them: they don't want
it. They remind me of half-wild dogs that will love and obey, but which
won't be handled. They won't have their heads touched. And they won't be
fondled. One can almost hear the half-savage growl.
The long stocking caps they wear as a sort of crest, as a lizard wears
his crest at mating time. They are always moving them, settling them on
their heads. One fat fellow, young, with sly brown eyes and a young
beard round his face folds his stocking-foot in three, so that it rises
over his brow martial and handsome. The old boy brings his stocking-foot
over the left ear. A handsome fellow with a jaw of massive teeth pushes
his cap back and lets it hang a long way down his back. Then he shifts
it forward over his nose, and makes it have two sticking-out points,
like fox-ears, above his temples. It is marvellous how much expression
these caps can take on. They say that only those born to them can wear
them. They seem to be just long bags, nearly a yard long, of black
stockinette stuff.
The conductor comes to issue them their tickets. And they all take out
rolls of paper money. Even a little mothy rat of a man who sits opposite
me has quite a pad of ten-franc notes. Nobody seems short of a hundred
francs nowadays: nobody.
They shout and expostulate with the conductor. Full of coarse life they
are: but so coarse! The handsome fellow has his sleeved waistcoat open,
and his shirt-breast has come unbuttoned. Not looking, it seems as if he
wears a black undervest. Then suddenly, one sees it is his own hair. He
is quite black inside his shirt, like a black goat.
But there is a gulf between oneself and them. They have no inkling of
our crucifixion, our universal consciousness. Each of them is pivoted
and limited to himself, as the wild animals are. They look out, and they
see other objects, objects to ridicule or mistrust or to sniff curiously
at. But "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" has never entered
their souls at all, not even the thin end of it. They might love their
neighbour, with a hot, dark, unquestioning love. But the love would
probably leave off abruptly. The fascination of what is beyond them has
not seized on them. Their neighbour is a mere external. Their life is
centripetal, pivoted inside itself, and does not run out towards others
and mankind. One feels for the first time the real old mediaeval life,
which is enclosed in itself and has no interest in the world outside.
And so they lie about on the seats, play a game, shout, and sleep,
and settle their long stocking-caps: and spit. It is wonderful in
them that at this time of day they still wear the long stocking-caps
as part of their inevitable selves. It is a sign of obstinate and
powerful tenacity. They are not going to be broken in upon by
world-consciousness. They are not going into the world's common clothes.
Coarse, vigorous, determined, they will stick to their own coarse dark
stupidity and let the big world find its own way to its own enlightened
hell. Their hell is their own hell, they prefer it unenlightened.
And one cannot help wondering whether Sardinia will resist right
through. Will the last waves of enlightenment and world-unity break over
them and wash away the stocking-caps? Or is the tide of enlightenment
and world-unity already receding fast enough?
Certainly a reaction is setting in, away from the old universality,
back, away from cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Russia, with her
Third International, is at the same time reacting most violently away
from all other contact, back, recoiling on herself, into a fierce,
unapproachable Russianism. Which motion will conquer? The workman's
International, or the centripetal movement into national isolation? Are
we going to merge into one grey proletarian homogeneity?--or are we
going to swing back into more-or-less isolated, separate, defiant
communities?
Probably both. The workman's International movement will finally break
the flow towards cosmopolitanism and world-assimilation, and suddenly in
a crash the world will fly back into intense separations. The moment has
come when America, that extremist in world-assimilation and
world-oneness, is reacting into violent egocentricity, a truly
Amerindian egocentricity. As sure as fate we are on the brink of
American empire.
For myself, I am glad. I am glad that the era of love and oneness is
over: hateful homogeneous world-oneness. I am glad that Russia flies
back into savage Russianism, Scythism, savagely self-pivoting. I am glad
that America is doing the same. I shall be glad when men hate their
common, world-alike clothes, when they tear them up and clothe
themselves fiercely for distinction, savage distinction, savage
distinction against the rest of the creeping world: when America kicks
the billy-cock and the collar-and-tie into limbo, and takes to her own
national costume: when men fiercely react against looking all alike and
being all alike, and betake themselves into vivid clan or
nation-distinctions.
The era of love and oneness is over. The era of world-alike should be at
an end. The other tide has set in. Men will set their bonnets at one
another now, and fight themselves into separation and sharp distinction.
The day of peace and oneness is over, the day of the great fight into
multifariousness is at hand. Hasten the day, and save us from
proletarian homogeneity and khaki all-alikeness.
I love my indomitable coarse men from mountain Sardinia, for their
stocking-caps and their splendid, animal-bright stupidity. If only the
last wave of all-alikeness won't wash those superb crests, those caps,
away.
* * * * *
We are struggling now among the Gennargentu spurs. There is no single
peak--no Etna of Sardinia. The train, like the plough, balances on the
steep, steep sides of the hill-spurs, and winds around and around. Above
and below the steep slopes are all bosky. These are the woods of
Gennargentu. But they aren't woods in my sense of the word. They are
thin sprinkles of oaks and chestnuts and cork-trees over steep
hill-slopes. And cork-trees! I see curious slim oaky-looking trees that
are stripped quite naked below the boughs, standing brown-ruddy,
curiously distinct among the bluey grey pallor of the others. They
remind me, again and again, of glowing, coffee-brown, naked aborigines
of the South Seas. They have the naked suavity, skin-bare, and an
intense coffee-red colour of unclothed savages. And these are the
stripped cork-trees. Some are much stripped, some little. Some have the
whole trunk and part of the lower limbs ruddy naked, some only a small
part of the trunk.
* * * * *
It is well on in the afternoon. A peasant in black and
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/37206