railways the third class coaches are not divided into compartments. They
are left open, so that one sees everybody, as down a room. The
attractive saddle-bags, _bercole_, were disposed anywhere, and the bulk
of the people settled down to a lively _conversazione_. It is much
nicest, on the whole, to travel third class on the railway. There is
space, there is air, and it is like being in a lively inn, everybody in
good spirits.
At our end was plenty of room. Just across the gangway was an elderly
couple, like two children, coming home very happily. He was fat, fat all
over, with a white moustache and a little not-unamiable frown. She was a
tall lean, brown woman, in a brown full-skirted dress and black apron,
with huge pocket. She wore no head covering, and her iron grey hair was
parted smoothly. They were rather pleased and excited being in the
train. She took all her money out of her big pocket, and counted it and
gave it to him: all the ten Lira notes, and the five Lira and the two
and the one, peering at the dirty scraps of pink-backed one-lira notes
to see if they were good. Then she gave him her half-pennies. And he
stowed them away in the trouser pocket, standing up to push them down
his fat leg. And then one saw, to one's amazement, that the whole of his
shirt-tail was left out behind, like a sort of apron worn backwards.
Why--a mystery. He was one of those fat, good-natured, unheeding men
with a little masterful frown, such as usually have tall, lean,
hard-faced, obedient wives.
They were very happy. With amazement he watched us taking hot tea from
the Thermos flask. I think he too had suspected it might be a bomb. He
had blue eyes and standing-up white eyebrows.
"Beautiful hot--!" he said, seeing the tea steam. It is the inevitable
exclamation. "Does it do you good?"
"Yes," said the q-b. "Much good." And they both nodded complacently.
They were going home.
* * * * *
The train was running over the malarial-looking sea-plain--past the
down-at-heel palm trees, past the mosque-looking buildings. At a level
crossing the woman crossing-keeper darted out vigorously with her red
flag. And we rambled into the first village. It was built of sun-dried
brick-adobe houses, thick adobe garden-walls, with tile ridges to keep
off the rain. In the enclosures were dark orange trees. But the
clay-coloured villages, clay-dry, looked foreign: the next thing to mere
earth they seem, like fox-holes or coyote colonies.
Looking back, one sees Cagliari bluff on her rock, rather fine, with the
thin edge of the sea's blade curving round. It is rather hard to believe
in the real sea, on this sort of clay-pale plain.
* * * * *
But soon we begin to climb to the hills. And soon the cultivation begins
to be intermittent. Extraordinary how the heathy, moor-like hills come
near the sea: extraordinary how scrubby and uninhabited the great spaces
of Sardinia are. It is wild, with heath and arbutus scrub and a sort of
myrtle, breast-high. Sometimes one sees a few head of cattle. And then
again come the greyish arable-patches, where the corn is grown. It is
like Cornwall, like the Land's End region. Here and there, in the
distance, are peasants working on the lonely landscape. Sometimes it is
one man alone in the distance, showing so vividly in his black-and-white
costume, small and far-off like a solitary magpie, and curiously
distinct. All the strange magic of Sardinia is in this sight. Among the
low, moor-like hills, away in a hollow of the wide landscape one
solitary figure, small but vivid black-and-white, working alone, as if
eternally. There are patches and hollows of grey arable land, good for
corn. Sardinia was once a great granary.
Usually, however, the peasants of the South have left off the costume.
Usually it is the invisible soldiers' grey-green cloth, the Italian
khaki. Wherever you go, wherever you be, you see this khaki, this
grey-green war-clothing. How many millions of yards of the thick,
excellent, but hateful material the Italian government must have
provided I don't know: but enough to cover Italy with a felt carpet, I
should think. It is everywhere. It cases the tiny children in stiff and
neutral frocks and coats, it covers their extinguished fathers, and
sometimes it even encloses the women in its warmth. It is symbolic of
the universal grey mist that has come over men, the extinguishing of all
bright individuality, the blotting out of all wild singleness. Oh
democracy! Oh khaki democracy!
* * * * *
This is very different from Italian landscape. Italy is almost always
dramatic, and perhaps invariably romantic. There is drama in the plains
of Lombardy, and romance in the Venetian lagoons, and sheer scenic
excitement in nearly all the hilly parts of the peninsula. Perhaps it is
the natural floridity of lime-stone formations. But Italian landscape is
really eighteenth-century landscape, to be represented in that
romantic-classic manner which makes everything rather marvelous and very
topical: aqueducts, and ruins upon sugar-loaf mountains, and craggy
ravines and Wilhelm Meister water-falls: all up and down.
Sardinia is another thing. Much wider, much more ordinary, not
up-and-down at all, but running away into the distance. Unremarkable
ridges of moor-like hills running away, perhaps to a bunch of dramatic
peaks on the southwest. This gives a sense of space, which is so lacking
in Italy. Lovely space about one, and traveling distances--nothing
finished, nothing final. It is like liberty itself, after the peaky
confinement of Sicily. Room--give me room--give me room for my spirit:
and you can have all the toppling crags of romance.
So we ran on through the gold of the afternoon, across a wide, almost
Celtic landscape of hills, our little train winding and puffing away
very nimbly. Only the heath and scrub, breast-high, man-high, is too big
and brigand-like for a Celtic land. The horns of black, wild-looking
cattle show sometimes.
After a long pull, we come to a station after a stretch of loneliness.
Each time, it looks as if there were nothing beyond--no more
habitations. And each time we come to a station.
Most of the people have left the train. And as with men driving in a
gig, who get down at every public-house, so the passengers usually
alight for an airing at each station. Our old fat friend stands up and
tucks his shirt-tail comfortably in his trousers, which trousers all the
time make one hold one's breath, for they seem at each very moment to be
just dropping right down: and he clambers out, followed by the long,
brown stalk of a wife.
So the train sits comfortably for five or ten minutes, in the way the
trains have. At last we hear whistles and horns, and our old fat friend
running and clinging like a fat crab to the very end of the train as it
sets off. At the same instant a loud shriek and a bunch of shouts from
outside. We all jump up. There, down the line, is the long brown stork
of a wife. She had just walked back to a house some hundred yards off,
for a few words, and has now seen the train moving.
Now behold her with her hands thrown to heaven, and hear the wild shriek
"Madonna!" through all the hubbub. But she picks up her two skirt-knees,
and with her thin legs in grey stockings starts with a mad rush after
the train. In vain. The train inexorably pursues its course. Prancing,
she reaches one end of the platform as we leave the other end. Then she
realizes it is not going to stop for her. And then, oh horror, her long
arms thrown out in wild supplication after the retreating train: then
flung aloft to God: then brought down in absolute despair on her head.
And this is the last sight we have of her, clutching her poor head in
agony and doubling forward. She is left--she is abandoned.
The poor fat husband has been all the time on the little outside
platform at the end of the carriage, holding out his hand to her and
shouting frenzied scolding to her and frenzied yells for the train to
stop. And the train has not stopped. And she is left--left on that
God-forsaken station in the waning light.
So, his face all bright, his eyes round and bright as two stars,
absolutely transfigured by dismay, chagrin, anger and distress, he comes
and sits in his seat, ablaze, stiff, speechless. His face is almost
beautiful in its blaze of conflicting emotions. For some time he is as
if unconscious in the midst of his feelings. Then anger and resentment
crop out of his consternation. He turns with a flash to the long-nosed,
insidious, Phoenician-looking guard. Why couldn't they stop the train
for her! And immediately, as if someone had set fire to him, off flares
the guard. Heh!--the train can't stop for every person's convenience!
The train is a train--the time-table is a time-table. What did the old
woman want to take her trips down the line for? Heh! She pays the
penalty for her own inconsiderateness. Had _she_ paid for the
train--heh? And the fat man all the time firing off his unheeding and
unheeded answers. One minute--only one minute--if he, the conductor had
told the driver! if he, the conductor, had shouted! A poor woman! Not
another train! What was she going to do! Her ticket? And no money. A
poor woman--
There was a train back to Cagliari that night, said the conductor, at
which the fat man nearly burst out of his clothing like a bursting
seed-pod. He bounced on his seat. What good was that? What good was a
train back to Cagliari, when their home was in Snelli! Making matters
worse--
So they bounced and jerked and argued at one another, to their hearts'
content. Then the conductor retired, smiling subtly, in a way they have.
Our fat friend looked at us with hot, angry, ashamed, grieved eyes and
said it was a shame. Yes, we chimed, it _was_ a shame. Whereupon a
self-important miss who said she came from some Collegio at Cagliari
advanced and asked a number of impertinent questions in a tone of pert
sympathy. After which our fat friend, left alone, covered his clouded
face with his hand, turned his back on the world, and gloomed.
It had all been so dramatic that in spite of ourselves we laughed, even
while the q-b shed a few tears.
* * * * *
Well, the journey lasted hours. We came to a station, and the conductor
said we must get out: these coaches went no further. Only two coaches
would proceed to Mandas. So we climbed out with our traps, and our fat
friend with his saddle-bag, the picture of misery.
The one coach into which we clambered was rather crowded. The only other
coach was most of it first-class. And the rest of the train was freight.
We were two insignificant passenger wagons at the end of a long string
of freight-vans and trucks.
There was an empty seat, so we sat on it: only to realize after about
five minutes, that a thin old woman with two children--her
grandchildren--was chuntering her head off because it was _her_
seat--why she had left it she didn't say. And under my legs was her
bundle of bread. She nearly went off her head. And over my head, on the
little rack, was her bercola, her saddle-bag. Fat soldiers laughed at
her good-naturedly, but she fluttered and flipped like a tart,
featherless old hen. Since she had another seat and was quite
comfortable, we smiled and let her chunter. So she clawed her bread
bundle from under my legs, and, clutching it and a fat child, sat tense.
* * * * *
It was getting quite dark. The conductor came and said that there was no
more paraffin. If what there was in the lamps gave out, we should have
to sit in the dark. There was no more paraffin all along the line.--So
he climbed on the seats, and after a long struggle, with various boys
striking matches for him, he managed to obtain a light as big as a pea.
We sat in this _clair-obscur_, and looked at the sombre-shadowed faces
round us: the fat soldier with a gun, the handsome soldier with huge
saddle-bags, the weird, dark little man who kept exchanging a baby with
a solid woman who had a white cloth tied round her head, a tall
peasant-woman in costume, who darted out at a dark station and returned
triumphant with a piece of chocolate: a young and interested young man,
who told us every station. And the man who spat: there is always one.
Gradually the crowd thinned. At a station we saw our fat friend go by,
bitterly, like a betrayed soul, his bulging saddle-bag hanging before
and after, but no comfort in it now--no comfort. The pea of light from
the paraffin lamp grew smaller. We sat in incredible dimness, and the
smell of sheeps-wool and peasant, with only our fat and stoic young man
to tell us where we were. The other dusky faces began to sink into a
dead, gloomy silence. Some took to sleep. And the little train ran on
and on, through unknown Sardinian darkness. In despair we drained the
last drop of tea and ate the last crusts of bread. We knew we must
arrive some time.
* * * * *
It was not much after seven when we came to Mandas. Mandas is a junction
where these little trains sit and have a long happy chat after their
arduous scramble over the downs. It had taken us somewhere about five
hours to do our fifty miles. No wonder then that when the junction at
last heaves in sight everybody bursts out of the train like seeds from
an exploding pod, and rushes somewhere for something. To the station
restaurant, of course. Hence there is a little station restaurant that
does a brisk trade, and where one can have a bed.
A quite pleasant woman behind the little bar: a brown woman with brown
parted hair and brownish eyes and brownish, tanned complexion and tight
brown velveteen bodice. She led us up a narrow winding stone stair, as
up a fortress, leading on with her candle, and ushered us into the
bedroom. It smelled horrid and sourish, as shutup bedrooms do. We threw
open the window. There were big frosty stars snapping ferociously in
heaven.
The room contained a huge bed, big enough for eight people, and quite
clean. And the table on which stood the candle actually had a cloth. But
imagine that cloth! I think it had been originally white: now, however,
it was such a web of time-eaten holes and mournful black inkstains and
poor dead wine stains that it was like some 2000 B.C. mummy-cloth. I
wonder if it could have been lifted from that table: or if it was
mummified on to it! I for one made no attempt to try. But that
table-cover impressed me, as showing degrees I had not imagined.--A
table-cloth.
We went down the fortress-stair to the eating-room. Here was a long
table with soup-plates upside down and a lamp burning an uncanny naked
acetylene flame. We sat at the cold table, and the lamp immediately
began to wane. The room--in fact the whole of Sardinia--was stone cold,
stone, stone cold. Outside the earth was freezing. Inside there was no
thought of any sort of warmth: dungeon stone floors, dungeon stone walls
and a dead, corpse-like atmosphere, too heavy and icy to move.
The lamp went quite out, and the q-b gave a cry. The brown woman poked
her head through a hole in the wall. Beyond her we saw the flames of the
cooking, and two devil-figures stirring the pots. The brown woman came
and shook the lamp--it was like a stodgy porcelain mantelpiece
vase--shook it well and stirred up its innards, and started it going
once more. Then she appeared with a bowl of smoking cabbage soup, in
which were bits of macaroni: and would we have wine? I shuddered at the
thought of death-cold red wine of the country, so asked what else there
was. There was malvagia--malvoisie, the same old malmsey that did for
the Duke of Clarence. So we had a pint of malvagia, and were comforted.
At least we were being so, when the lamp went out again. The brown woman
came and shook and smacked it, and started it off again. But as if to
say "Shan't for you", it whipped out again.
Then came the host with a candle and a pin, a large, genial Sicilian
with pendulous mustaches. And he thoroughly pricked the wretch with the
pin, shook it, and turned little screws. So up flared the flame. We were
a little nervous. He asked us where we came from, etc. And suddenly he
asked us, with an excited gleam, were we Socialists. Aha, he was going
to hail us as citizens and comrades. He thought we were a pair of
Bolshevist agents: I could see it. And as such he was prepared to
embrace us. But no, the q-b disclaimed the honor. I merely smiled and
shook my head. It is a pity to rob people of their exciting illusions.
"Ah, there is too much socialism everywhere!" cried the q-b.
"Ma--perhaps, perhaps--" said the discreet Sicilian. She saw which way
the land lay, and added:
"Si vuole un _pocchetino_ di Socialismo: one wants a tiny bit of
socialism in the world, a tiny bit. But not much. Not much. At present
there is too much."
Our host, twinkling at this speech which treated of the sacred creed as
if it were a pinch of salt in the broth, believing the q-b was throwing
dust in his eyes, and thoroughly intrigued by us as a pair of deep ones,
retired. No sooner had he gone than the lamp-flame stood up at its full
length, and started to whistle. The q-b drew back. Not satisfied by
this, another flame suddenly began to whip round the bottom of the
burner, like a lion lashing its tail. Unnerved, we made room: the q-b
cried again: in came the host with a subtle smile and a pin and an air
of benevolence, and tamed the brute.
What else was there to eat? There was a piece of fried pork for me, and
boiled eggs for the q-b. As we were proceeding with these, in came the
remainder of the night's entertainment: three station officials, two in
scarlet peaked caps, one in a black-and-gold peaked cap. They sat down
with a clamour, in their caps, as if there was a sort of invisible
screen between us and them. They were young. The black cap had a lean
and sardonic look: one of the red-caps was little and ruddy, very young,
with a little mustache: we called him the _maialino_, the gay little
black pig, he was so plump and food-nourished and frisky. The third was
rather puffy and pale and had spectacles. They all seemed to present us
the blank side of their cheek, and to intimate that no, they were not
going to take their hats off, even if it were dinner-table and a strange
_signora_. And they made rough quips with one another, still as if we
were on the other side of the invisible screen.
Determined however, to remove this invisible screen, I said
Good-evening, and it was very cold. They muttered Good-evening, and yes,
it was fresh. An Italian never says it is cold: it is never more than
_fresco_. But this hint that it was cold they took as a hint at their
caps, and they became very silent, till the woman came in with the
soup-bowl. Then they clamoured at her, particularly the _maialino_, what
was there to eat. She told them--beef-steaks of pork. Whereat they
pulled faces. Or bits of boiled pork. They sighed, looked gloomy,
cheered up, and said beef-steaks, then.
And they fell on their soup. And never, from among the steam, have I
heard a more joyful trio of soup-swilkering. They sucked it in from
their spoons with long, gusto-rich sucks. The _maialino_ was the
treble--he trilled his soup into his mouth with a swift, sucking
vibration, interrupted by bits of cabbage, which made the lamp start to
dither again. Black-cap was the baritone; good, rolling spoon-sucks. And
the one in spectacles was the bass: he gave sudden deep gulps. All was
led by the long trilling of the _maialino_. Then suddenly, to vary
matters, he cocked up his spoon in one hand, chewed a huge mouthful of
bread, and swallowed it down with a smack-smack-smack! of his tongue
against his palate. As children we used to call this "clapping".
"Mother, she's clapping!" I would yell with anger, against my sister.
The German word is schmatzen.
So the _maialino_ clapped like a pair of cymbals, while baritone and
bass rolled on. Then in chimed the swift bright treble.
At this rate however, the soup did not last long. Arrived the
beef-steaks of pork. And now the trio was a trio of castanet smacks and
cymbal claps. Triumphantly the _maialino_ looked around. He out-smacked
all.
The bread of the country is rather coarse and brown, with a hard, hard
crust. A large rock of this is perched on every damp serviette. The
_maialino_ tore his rock asunder, and grumbled at the black-cap, who had
got a weird sort of three-cornered loaf-roll of pure white bread--starch
white. He was a swell with this white bread.
Suddenly black-cap turned to me. Where had we come from, where were we
going, what for? But in laconic, sardonic tone.
"I _like_ Sardinia," cried the q-b.
"Why?" he asked sarcastically. And she tried to find out.
"Yes, the Sardinians please me more than the Sicilians," said I.
"Why?" he asked sarcastically.
"They are more open--more honest." He seemed to turn his nose down.
"The padrone is a Sicilian," said the _maialino_, stuffing a huge block
of bread into his mouth, and rolling his insouciant eyes of a gay,
well-fed little black pig towards the background. We weren't making much
headway.
"You've seen Cagliari?" the black-cap said to me, like a threat.
"Yes! oh Cagliari pleases me--Cagliari is beautiful!" cried the q-b,
who travels with a vial of melted butter ready for her parsnips.
"Yes--Cagliari is _so-so_--Cagliari is very fair," said the black cap.
"_Cagliari e discreto._" He was evidently proud of it.
"And is Mandas nice?" asked the q-b.
"In what way nice?" they asked, with immense sarcasm.
"Is there anything to see?"
"Hens," said the _maialino_ briefly. They all bristled when one asked if
Mandas was nice.
"What does one do here?" asked the q-b.
"_Niente!_ At Mandas one does _nothing_. At Mandas one goes to bed when
it's dark, like a chicken. At Mandas one walks down the road like a pig
that is going nowhere. At Mandas a goat understands more than the
inhabitants understand. At Mandas one needs socialism...."
They all cried out at once. Evidently Mandas was more than flesh and
blood could bear for another minute to these three conspirators.
"Then you are very bored here?" say I.
"Yes."
And the quiet intensity of that naked yes spoke more than volumes.
"You would like to be in Cagliari?"
"Yes."
Silence, intense, sardonic silence had intervened. The three looked at
one another and made a sour joke about Mandas. Then the black-cap turned
to me.
"Can you understand Sardinian?" he said.
"Somewhat. More than Sicilian, anyhow."
"But Sardinian is more difficult than Sicilian. It is full of words
utterly unknown to Italian--"
"Yes, but," say I, "it is spoken openly, in plain words, and Sicilian is
spoken all stuck together, none of the words there at all."
He looks at me as if I were an imposter. Yet it is true. I find it quite
easy to understand Sardinian. As a matter of fact, it is more a question
of human approach than of sound. Sardinian seems open and manly and
downright. Sicilian is gluey and evasive, as if the Sicilian didn't want
to speak straight to you. As a matter of fact, he doesn't. He is an
over-cultured, sensitive, ancient soul, and he has so many sides to his
mind that he hasn't got any definite one mind at all. He's got a dozen
minds, and uneasily he's aware of it, and to commit himself to anyone of
them is merely playing a trick on himself and his interlocutor. The
Sardinian, on the other hand, still seems to have one downright mind. I
bump up against a downright, smack-out belief in Socialism, for
example. The Sicilian is much too old in our culture to swallow
Socialism whole: much too ancient and ruse not to be sophisticated about
any and every belief. He'll go off like a squib: and then he'll smoulder
acridly and sceptically even against his own fire. One sympathizes with
him in retrospect. But in daily life it is unbearable.
"Where do you find such white bread?" say I to the black cap, because he
is proud of it.