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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.