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!