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.