it any whiter than _this_--the Mandas rock. Yes, it is a little whiter.
At which they gloom again. For it is a very sore point, this bread.
Bread means a great deal to an Italian: it is verily his staff of life.
He practically lives on bread. And instead of going by taste, he now,
like all the world, goes by eye. He has got it into his head that bread
should be white, so that every time he fancies a darker shade in the
loaf a shadow falls on his soul. Nor is he altogether wrong. For
although, personally, I don't like white bread any more, yet I do like
my brown bread to be made of pure, unmixed flour. The peasants in
Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown
bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and _clean_ their loaf
seems, so perfumed as home-bread used all to be before the war. Whereas
the bread of the commune, the regulation supply, is hard, and rather
coarse and rough, so rough and harsh on the palate. One gets tired to
death of it. I suspect myself the maize meal mixed in. But I don't know.
And finally the bread varies immensely from town to town, from commune
to commune. The so-called just and equal distribution is all my-eye. One
place has abundance of good sweet bread, another scrapes along, always
stinted, on an allowance of harsh coarse stuff. And the poor suffer
bitterly, really, from the bread-stinting, because they depend so on
this one food. They say the inequality and the injustice of distribution
comes from the Camorra--la grande Camorra--which is no more nowadays
than a profiteering combine, which the poor hate. But for myself, I
don't know. I only know that one town--Venice, for example--seems to
have an endless supply of pure bread, of sugar, of tobacco, of
salt--while Florence is in one continual ferment of irritation over the
stinting of these supplies--which are all government monopoly, doled out
accordingly.
We said Good-night to our three railway friends, and went up to bed. We
had only been in the room a minute or two, when the brown woman tapped:
and if you please, the black-cap had sent us one of his little white
loaves. We were really touched. Such delicate little generosities have
almost disappeared from the world.
It was a queer little bread--three-cornered, and almost as hard as ships
biscuit, made of starch flour. Not strictly bread at all.
* * * * *
The night was cold, the blankets flat and heavy, but one slept quite
well till dawn. At seven o'clock it was a clear, cold morning, the sun
not yet up. Standing at the bedroom window looking out, I could hardly
believe my eyes it was so like England, like Cornwall in the bleak
parts, or Derbyshire uplands. There was a little paddock-garden at the
back of the Station, rather tumble-down, with two sheep in it. There
were several forlorn-looking out-buildings, very like Cornwall. And then
the wide, forlorn country road stretched away between borders of grass
and low, drystone walls, towards a grey stone farm with a tuft of trees,
and a naked stone village in the distance. The sun came up yellow, the
bleak country glimmered bluish and reluctant. The low, green hill-slopes
were divided into fields, with low drystone walls and ditches. Here and
there a stone barn rose alone, or with a few bare, windy trees attached.
Two rough-coated winter horses pastured on the rough grass, a boy came
along the naked, wide, grass-bordered high-road with a couple of milk
cans, drifting in from nowhere: and it was all so like Cornwall, or a
part of Ireland, that the old nostalgia for the Celtic regions began to
spring up in me. Ah, those old, drystone walls dividing the fields--pale
and granite-blenched! Ah, the dark, sombre grass, the naked sky! the
forlorn horses in the wintry morning! Strange is a Celtic landscape, far
more moving, disturbing than the lovely glamor of Italy and Greece.
Before the curtains of history lifted, one feels the world was like
this--this Celtic bareness and sombreness and _air_. But perhaps it is
not Celtic at all: Iberian. Nothing is more unsatisfactory than our
conception of what is Celtic and what is not Celtic. I believe there
never were any Celts, as a race.--As for the Iberians--!
[Illustration: TONARA]
Wonderful to go out on a frozen road, to see the grass in shadow bluish
with hoar-frost, to see the grass in the yellow winter-sunrise beams
melting and going cold-twinkly. Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and
things standing up in cold distance. After two southern winters, with
roses blooming all the time, this bleakness and this touch of frost in
the ringing morning goes to my soul like an intoxication. I am so glad,
on this lonely naked road, I don't know what to do with myself. I walk
down in the shallow grassy ditches under the loose stone walls, I walk
on the little ridge of grass, the little bank on which the wall is
built, I cross the road across the frozen cow-droppings: and it is all
so familiar to my _feet_, my very feet in contact, that I am wild as if
I had made a discovery. And I realize that I hate lime-stone, to live on
lime-stone or marble or any of those limey rocks. I hate them. They are
dead rocks, they have no life--thrills for the feet. Even sandstone is
much better. But granite! Granite is my favorite. It is so live under
the feet, it has a deep sparkle of its own. I like its roundnesses--and
I hate the jaggy dryness of lime-stone, that burns in the sun, and
withers.
* * * * *
After coming to a deep well in a grassy plot in a wide space of the
road, I go back, across the sunny naked upland country, towards the pink
station and its out-buildings. An engine is steaming its white clouds in
the new light. Away to the left there is even a row of small houses,
like a row of railway-mens' dwellings. Strange and familiar sight. And
the station precincts are disorderly and rather dilapidated. I think of
our Sicilian host.
The brown woman gives us coffee, and very strong, rich goats' milk, and
bread. After which the q-b and I set off once more along the road to the
village. She too is thrilled. She too breathes deep. She too feels
_space_ around her, and freedom to move the limbs: such as one does not
feel in Italy and Sicily, where all is so classic and fixed.
The village itself is just a long, winding, darkish street, in shadow,
of houses and shops and a smithy. It might almost be Cornwall: not
quite. Something, I don't know what, suggests the stark burning glare of
summer. And then, of course, there is none of the cosiness which
climbing roses and lilac trees and cottage shops and haystacks would
give to an English scene. This is harder, barer, starker, more dreary.
An ancient man in the black-and-white costume comes out of a hovel of a
cottage. The butcher carries a huge side of meat. The women peer at
us--but more furtive and reticent than the howling stares of Italy.
So we go on, down the rough-cobbled street through the whole length of
the village. And emerging on the other side, past the last cottage, we
find ourselves again facing the open country, on the gentle down-slope
of the rolling hill. The landscape continues the same: low, rolling
upland hills, dim under the yellow sun of the January morning: stone
fences, fields, grey-arable land: a man slowly, slowly ploughing with a
pony and a dark-red cow: the road trailing empty across the distance:
and then, the one violently unfamiliar note, the enclosed cemetery lying
outside on the gentle hill-side, closed in all round, very compact,
with high walls: and on the inside face of the enclosure wall the marble
slabs, like shut drawers of the sepulchres, shining white, the wall
being like a chest of drawers, or pigeon holes to hold the dead. Tufts
of dark and plumy cypresses rise among the flat graves of the enclosure.
In the south, cemeteries are walled off and isolated very tight. The
dead, as it were, are kept fast in pound. There is no spreading of
graves over the face of the country. They are penned in a tight fold,
with cypresses to fatten on the bones. This is the one thoroughly
strange note in the landscape. But all-pervading there is a strangeness,
that strange feeling as if the _depths_ were barren, which comes in the
south and the east, sun-stricken. Sun-stricken, and the heart eaten out
by the dryness.
"I like it! I like it!" cries the q-b.
"But could you live here?" She would like to say yes, but daren't.
We stray back. The q-b wants to buy one of those saddle-bag
arrangements. I say what for? She says to keep things in. Ach! but
peeping in the shops, we see one and go in and examine it. It is quite a
sound one, properly made: but plain, quite plain. On the white
cross-stripes there are no lovely colored flowers of rose and green and
magenta: the three favorite Sardinian colors: nor are there any of the
fantastic and griffin-like beasts. So it won't do. How much does it
cost? Forty-five francs.
There is nothing to do in Mandas. So we will take the morning train and
go to the terminus, to Sorgono. Thus, we shall cross the lower slopes of
the great central knot of Sardinia, the mountain knot called
Gennargentu. And Sorgono we feel will be lovely.
Back at the station we make tea on the spirit lamp, fill the thermos,
pack the knapsack and the kitchenino, and come out into the sun of the
platform. The q-b goes to thank the black-cap for the white bread,
whilst I settle the bill and ask for food for the journey. The brown
woman fishes out from a huge black pot in the background sundry hunks of
coarse boiled pork, and gives me two of these, hot, with bread and salt.
This is the luncheon. I pay the bill: which amounts to twenty-four
francs, for everything. (One says francs or liras, irrespective, in
Italy.) At that moment arrives the train from Cagliari, and men rush in,
roaring for the soup--or rather, for the broth. "Ready, ready!" she
cries, going to the black pot.
V.
TO SORGONO.
The various trains in the junction squatted side by side and had long,
long talks before at last we were off. It was wonderful to be running in
the bright morning towards the heart of Sardinia, in the little train
that seemed so familiar. We were still going third class, rather to the
disgust of the railway officials at Mandas.
At first the country was rather open: always the long spurs of hills,
steep-sided, but not high. And from our little train we looked across
the country, across hill and dale. In the distance was a little town, on
a low slope. But for its compact, fortified look it might have been a
town on the English downs. A man in the carriage leaned out of the
window holding out a white cloth, as a signal to someone in the far off
town that he was coming. The wind blew the white cloth, the town in the
distance glimmered small and alone in its hollow. And the little train
pelted along.
It was rather comical to see it. We were always climbing. And the line
curved in great loops. So that as one looked out of the window, time and
again one started, seeing a little train running in front of us, in a
diverging direction, making big puffs of steam. But lo, it was our own
little engine pelting off around a loop away ahead. We were quite a long
train, but all trucks in front, only our two passenger coaches hitched
on behind. And for this reason our own engine was always running fussily
into sight, like some dog scampering in front and swerving about us,
while we followed at the tail end of the thin string of trucks.
I was surprised how well the small engine took the continuous steep
slopes, how bravely it emerged on the sky-line. It is a queer railway. I
would like to know who made it. It pelts up hill and down dale and round
sudden bends in the most unconcerned fashion, not as proper big railways
do, grunting inside deep cuttings and stinking their way through
tunnels, but running up the hill like a panting, small dog, and having a
look round, and starting off in another direction, whisking us behind
unconcernedly. This is much more fun than the tunnel-and-cutting system.
They told me that Sardinia mines her own coal: and quite enough for her
own needs: but very soft, not fit for steam-purposes. I saw heaps of it:
small, dull, dirty-looking stuff. Truck-loads of it too. And
truck-loads of grain.
At every station we were left ignominiously planted, while the little
engines--they had gay gold names on their black little bodies--strolled
about along the side-lines, and snuffed at the various trucks. There we
sat, at every station, while some truck was discarded and some other
sorted out like a branded sheep, from the sidings and hitched on to us.
It took a long time, this did.
* * * * *
All the stations so far had had wire netting over the windows. This
means malaria-mosquitoes. The malaria climbs very high in Sardinia. The
shallow upland valleys, moorland with their intense summer sun and the
riverless, boggy behaviour of the water breed the pest inevitably. But
not very terribly, as far as one can make out: August and September
being the danger months. The natives don't like to admit there is any
malaria: a tiny bit, they say, a tiny bit. As soon as you come to the
_trees_ there is no more. So they say. For many miles the landscape is
moorland and down-like, with no trees. But wait for the trees. Ah, the
woods and forests of Gennargentu: the woods and forests higher up: no
malaria there!
The little engine whisks up and up, around its loopy curves as if it
were going to bite its own tail: we being the tail: then suddenly dives
over the sky-line out of sight. And the landscape changes. The famous
woods begin to appear. At first it is only hazel-thickets, miles of
hazel-thickets, all wild, with a few black cattle trying to peep at us
out of the green myrtle and arbutus scrub which forms the undergrowth;
and a couple of rare, wild peasants peering at the train. They wear the
black sheepskin tunic, with the wool outside, and the long stocking
caps. Like cattle they too peer out from between deep bushes. The myrtle
scrub here rises man-high, and cattle and men are smothered in it. The
big hazels rise bare above. It must be difficult getting about in these
parts.
Sometimes, in the distance one sees a black-and-white peasant riding
lonely across a more open place, a tiny vivid figure. I like so much the
proud instinct which makes a living creature distinguish itself from its
background. I hate the rabbity khaki protection-colouration. A
black-and-white peasant on his pony, only a dot in the distance beyond
the foliage, still flashes and dominates the landscape. Ha-ha! proud
mankind! There you ride! But alas, most of the men are still
khaki-muffled, rabbit-indistinguishable, ignominious. The Italians look
curiously rabbity in the grey-green uniform: just as our sand-colored
khaki men look doggy. They seem to scuffle rather abased, ignominious
on the earth. Give us back the scarlet and gold, and devil take the
hindmost.
* * * * *
The landscape really begins to change. The hillsides tilt sharper and
sharper. A man is ploughing with two small red cattle on a craggy,
tree-hanging slope as sharp as a roof-side. He stoops at the small
wooden plough, and jerks the ploughlines. The oxen lift their noses to
heaven, with a strange and beseeching snake-like movement, and taking
tiny little steps with their frail feet, move slantingly across the
slope-face, between rocks and tree-roots. Little, frail, jerky steps the
bullocks take, and again they put their horns back and lift their
muzzles snakily to heaven, as the man pulls the line. And he skids his
wooden plough round another scoop of earth. It is marvellous how they
hang upon that steep, craggy slope. An English labourer's eyes would
bolt out of his head at the sight.
There is a stream: actually a long tress of a water-fall pouring into a
little gorge, and a stream-bed that opens a little, and shows a
marvellous cluster of naked poplars away below. They are like ghosts.
They have a ghostly, almost phosphorescent luminousness in the shadow of
the valley, by the stream of water. If not phosphorescent, then
incandescent: a grey, goldish-pale incandescence of naked limbs and
myriad cold-glowing twigs, gleaming strangely. If I were a painter I
would paint them: for they seem to have living, sentient flesh. And the
shadow envelopes them.
Another naked tree I would paint is the gleaming mauve-silver fig, which
burns its cold incandescence, tangled, like some sensitive creature
emerged from the rock. A fig tree come forth in its nudity gleaming over
the dark winter-earth is a sight to behold. Like some white, tangled sea
anemone. Ah, if it could but answer! or if we had tree-speech!
* * * * *
Yes, the steep valley sides become almost gorges, and there are trees.
Not forests such as I had imagined, but scattered, grey, smallish oaks,
and some lithe chestnuts. Chestnuts with their long whips, and oaks with
their stubby boughs, scattered on steep hillsides where rocks crop out.
The train perilously winding round, half way up. Then suddenly bolting
over a bridge and into a completely unexpected station. What is more,
men crowd in--the station is connected with the main railway by a post
motor-omnibus.
An unexpected irruption of men--they may be miners or navvies or
land-workers. They all have huge sacks: some lovely saddle-bags with
rose-coloured flowers across the darkness. One old man is in full
black-and-white costume, but very dirty and coming to pieces. The others
wear the tight madder-brown breeches and sleeved waistcoats. Some have
the sheepskin tunic, and all wear the long stocking cap. And how they
smell! of sheep-wool and of men and goat. A rank scent fills the
carriage.
They talk and are very lively. And they have mediaeval faces, _ruse_,
never really abandoning their defences for a moment, as a badger or a
pole-cat never abandons its defences. There is none of the brotherliness
and civilised simplicity. Each man knows he must guard himself and his
own: each man knows the devil is behind the next bush. They have never
known the post-Renaissance Jesus. Which is rather an eye-opener.
Not that they are suspicious or uneasy. On the contrary, noisy,
assertive, vigorous presences. But with none of that implicit belief
that everybody will be and ought to be good to them, which is the mark
of our era. They don't expect people to be good to them: they don't want
it. They remind me of half-wild dogs that will love and obey, but which
won't be handled. They won't have their heads touched. And they won't be
fondled. One can almost hear the half-savage growl.
The long stocking caps they wear as a sort of crest, as a lizard wears
his crest at mating time. They are always moving them, settling them on
their heads. One fat fellow, young, with sly brown eyes and a young
beard round his face folds his stocking-foot in three, so that it rises
over his brow martial and handsome. The old boy brings his stocking-foot
over the left ear. A handsome fellow with a jaw of massive teeth pushes
his cap back and lets it hang a long way down his back. Then he shifts
it forward over his nose, and makes it have two sticking-out points,
like fox-ears, above his temples. It is marvellous how much expression
these caps can take on. They say that only those born to them can wear
them. They seem to be just long bags, nearly a yard long, of black
stockinette stuff.
The conductor comes to issue them their tickets. And they all take out
rolls of paper money. Even a little mothy rat of a man who sits opposite
me has quite a pad of ten-franc notes. Nobody seems short of a hundred
francs nowadays: nobody.
They shout and expostulate with the conductor. Full of coarse life they
are: but so coarse! The handsome fellow has his sleeved waistcoat open,
and his shirt-breast has come unbuttoned. Not looking, it seems as if he
wears a black undervest. Then suddenly, one sees it is his own hair. He
is quite black inside his shirt, like a black goat.
But there is a gulf between oneself and them. They have no inkling of
our crucifixion, our universal consciousness. Each of them is pivoted
and limited to himself, as the wild animals are. They look out, and they
see other objects, objects to ridicule or mistrust or to sniff curiously
at. But "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" has never entered
their souls at all, not even the thin end of it. They might love their
neighbour, with a hot, dark, unquestioning love. But the love would
probably leave off abruptly. The fascination of what is beyond them has
not seized on them. Their neighbour is a mere external. Their life is
centripetal, pivoted inside itself, and does not run out towards others
and mankind. One feels for the first time the real old mediaeval life,
which is enclosed in itself and has no interest in the world outside.
And so they lie about on the seats, play a game, shout, and sleep,
and settle their long stocking-caps: and spit. It is wonderful in
them that at this time of day they still wear the long stocking-caps
as part of their inevitable selves. It is a sign of obstinate and
powerful tenacity. They are not going to be broken in upon by
world-consciousness. They are not going into the world's common clothes.
Coarse, vigorous, determined, they will stick to their own coarse dark
stupidity and let the big world find its own way to its own enlightened
hell. Their hell is their own hell, they prefer it unenlightened.
And one cannot help wondering whether Sardinia will resist right
through. Will the last waves of enlightenment and world-unity break over
them and wash away the stocking-caps? Or is the tide of enlightenment
and world-unity already receding fast enough?
Certainly a reaction is setting in, away from the old universality,
back, away from cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Russia, with her
Third International, is at the same time reacting most violently away
from all other contact, back, recoiling on herself, into a fierce,
unapproachable Russianism. Which motion will conquer? The workman's
International, or the centripetal movement into national isolation? Are
we going to merge into one grey proletarian homogeneity?--or are we
going to swing back into more-or-less isolated, separate, defiant
communities?
Probably both. The workman's International movement will finally break
the flow towards cosmopolitanism and world-assimilation, and suddenly in
a crash the world will fly back into intense separations. The moment has
come when America, that extremist in world-assimilation and
world-oneness, is reacting into violent egocentricity, a truly
Amerindian egocentricity. As sure as fate we are on the brink of
American empire.
For myself, I am glad. I am glad that the era of love and oneness is
over: hateful homogeneous world-oneness. I am glad that Russia flies
back into savage Russianism, Scythism, savagely self-pivoting. I am glad
that America is doing the same. I shall be glad when men hate their
common, world-alike clothes, when they tear them up and clothe
themselves fiercely for distinction, savage distinction, savage
distinction against the rest of the creeping world: when America kicks
the billy-cock and the collar-and-tie into limbo, and takes to her own
national costume: when men fiercely react against looking all alike and
being all alike, and betake themselves into vivid clan or
nation-distinctions.
The era of love and oneness is over. The era of world-alike should be at
an end. The other tide has set in. Men will set their bonnets at one
another now, and fight themselves into separation and sharp distinction.
The day of peace and oneness is over, the day of the great fight into
multifariousness is at hand. Hasten the day, and save us from
proletarian homogeneity and khaki all-alikeness.
I love my indomitable coarse men from mountain Sardinia, for their
stocking-caps and their splendid, animal-bright stupidity. If only the
last wave of all-alikeness won't wash those superb crests, those caps,
away.
* * * * *
We are struggling now among the Gennargentu spurs. There is no single
peak--no Etna of Sardinia. The train, like the plough, balances on the
steep, steep sides of the hill-spurs, and winds around and around. Above
and below the steep slopes are all bosky. These are the woods of
Gennargentu. But they aren't woods in my sense of the word. They are
thin sprinkles of oaks and chestnuts and cork-trees over steep
hill-slopes. And cork-trees! I see curious slim oaky-looking trees that
are stripped quite naked below the boughs, standing brown-ruddy,
curiously distinct among the bluey grey pallor of the others. They
remind me, again and again, of glowing, coffee-brown, naked aborigines
of the South Seas. They have the naked suavity, skin-bare, and an
intense coffee-red colour of unclothed savages. And these are the
stripped cork-trees. Some are much stripped, some little. Some have the
whole trunk and part of the lower limbs ruddy naked, some only a small
part of the trunk.
* * * * *