basin, and dry that bit on a muslin veil which masquerades upon the
chair as a towel. The q-b contents herself with a dry wipe. And we go
downstairs in hopes of the last-night's milk.
There is no one to be seen. It is a cold, frost-strong, clear morning.
There is no one in the bar. We stumble down the dark tunnel passage. The
stanza is as if no man had ever set foot in it: very dark, the mats
against the wall, the fire-place grey with a handful of long dead ash.
Just like a dungeon. The dining-room has the same long table and eternal
table-cloth--and our serviettes, still wet, lying where we shovelled
them aside. So back again to the bar.
And this time a man is drinking _aqua vitae_, and the dirty-shirt is
officiating. He has no hat on: and extraordinary, he has no brow at all:
just flat, straight black hair slanting to his eyebrows, no forehead at
all.
Is there coffee?
No, there is no coffee.
Why?
Because they can't get sugar.
Ho! laughs the peasant drinking _aqua vitae_. You make coffee with
sugar!
Here, say I, they make it with nothing.--Is there milk?
No.
No milk at all?
No.
Why not?
Nobody brings it.
Yes, yes--there is milk if they like to get it, puts in the peasant. But
they want you to drink _aqua vitae_.
I see myself drinking _aqua vitae_. My yesterday's rage towers up again
suddenly, till it quite suffocates me. There is something in this
unsavoury, black, wine-dabbled, thick, greasy young man that does for
me.
"Why," say I, lapsing into the Italian rhetorical manner, "why do you
keep an inn? Why do you write the word Ristorante so large, when you
have nothing to offer people, and don't intend to have anything. Why do
you have the impudence to take in travellers? What does it mean, that
this is an inn? What, say, what does it mean? Say then--what does it
mean? What does it mean, your Ristorante Risveglio, written so large?"
Getting all this out in one breath, my indignation now stifled me. Him
of the shirt said nothing at all. The peasant laughed. I demanded the
bill. It was twenty-five francs odd. I picked up every farthing of the
change.
"Won't you leave any tip at all?" asks the q-b.
"Tip!" say I, speechless.
So we march upstairs and make tea to fill the thermos flask. Then, with
sack over my shoulder, I make my way out of the Risveglio.
* * * * *
It is Sunday morning. The frozen village street is almost empty. We
march down to the wider space where the bus stands: I hope they haven't
the impudence to call it a Piazza.
"Is this the Nuoro bus?" I ask of a bunch of urchins.
And even they begin to jeer. But my sudden up-starting flare quenches
them at once. One answers yes, and they edge away. I stow the sack and
the kitchenino in the first-class part. The first-class is in front: we
shall see better.
There are men standing about, with their hands in their pockets,--those
who are not in costume. Some wear the black-and-white. All wear the
stocking caps. And all have the wide shirt-breasts, white, their
waistcoats being just like evening dress waistcoats. Imagine one of
these soft white shirt fronts well slobbered, and you have mine host of
the Risveglio. But these lounging, static, white-breasted men are
snowily clean, this being Sunday morning. They smoke their pipes on the
frosty air, and are none too friendly.
* * * * *
The bus starts at half-past nine. The campanile is clanging nine. Two or
three girls go down the road in their Sunday costume of purplish brown.
We go up the road, into the clear, ringing frosty air, to find the lane.
And again, from above, how beautiful it is in the sharp morning! The
whole village lies in bluish shadow, the hills with their thin pale oak
trees are in bluish shadow still, only in the distance the frost-glowing
sun makes a wonderful, jewel-like radiance on the pleasant hills, wild
and thinly-wooded, of this interior region. Real fresh wonder-beauty
all around. And such humanity.
Returning to the village we find a little shop and get biscuits and
cigarettes. And we find our friends the bus-men. They are shy this
morning. They are ready for us when we are ready. So in we get,
joyfully, to leave Sorgono.
One thing I say for it, it must be an honest place. For people leave
their sacks about without a qualm.
* * * * *
Up we go, up the road. Only to stop, alas, at the Risveglio. The little
conductor goes down the lane towards the station. The driver goes and
has a little drink with a comrade. There is quite a crowd round the
dreary entrances of the inn. And quite a little bunch of people to
clamber up into the second class, behind us.
We wait and wait. Then in climbs an old peasant, in full black-and-white
costume, smiling in the pleased, naive way of the old. After him climbs
a fresh-faced young man with a suit-case.
"Na!" said the young man. "Now you are in the automobile."
And the old man gazes round with the wondering, vacant, naive smile.
"One is all right here, eh?" the young citizen persists, patronizing.
But the old man is too excited to answer. He gazes hither and thither.
Then he suddenly remembers he had a parcel, and looks for it in fear.
The bright-faced young man picks it from the floor and hands it him. Ah,
it is all right.
I see the little conductor in his dashing, sheep-lined, short military
overcoat striding briskly down the little lane with the post-bag. The
driver climbs to his seat in front of me. He has a muffler round his
neck and his hat pulled down to his ears. He pips at the horn, and our
old peasant cranes forward to look how he does it.
And so, with a jerk and a spurt, we start uphill.
"Eh--what's that?" said the peasant, frightened.
"We're starting," explained the bright-faced young man.
"Starting! Didn't we start before?"
The bright face laughs pleasedly.
"No," he said. "Did you think we had been going ever since you got in?"
"Yes," says the old man, simply, "since the door was shut."
The young citizen looks at us for our joyful approval.
VI.
TO NUORO.
These automobiles in Italy are splendid. They take the steep, looping
roads so easily, they seem to run so naturally. And this one was
comfortable, too.
The roads of Italy always impress me. They run undaunted over the most
precipitous regions, and with curious ease. In England almost any such
road, among the mountains at least, would be labelled three times
dangerous and would be famous throughout the land as an impossible
climb. Here it is nothing. Up and down they go, swinging about with
complete sang-froid. There seems to have been no effort in their
construction. They are so good, naturally, that one hardly notices what
splendid gestures they represent. Of course, the surface is now often
intolerably bad. And they are most of them roads which, with ten years'
neglect, will become ruins. For they are cut through overhanging rock
and scooped out of the sides of hills. But I think it is marvellous how
the Italians have penetrated all their inaccessible regions, of which
they have so many, with great high-roads: and how along these high-roads
the omnibuses now keep up a perfect communication. The precipitous and
craggily-involved land is threaded through and through with roads. There
seems to be a passion for high-roads and for constant communication. In
this the Italians have a real Roman instinct, _now_. For the roads are
new.
The railways too go piercing through rock for miles and miles, and
nobody thinks anything of it. The coast railway of Calabria, down to
Reggio, would make us stand on our heads if we had it in England. Here
it is a matter of course. In the same way I always have a profound
admiration for their driving--whether of a great omnibus or of a
motor-car. It all seems so easy, as if the man were part of the car.
There is none of that beastly grinding, uneasy feeling one has in the
north. A car behaves like a smooth, live thing, sensibly.
All the peasants have a passion for a high-road. They want their land
opening out, opening out. They seem to hate the ancient Italian
remoteness. They all want to be able to get out at a moment's notice, to
get away--quick, quick. A village which is two miles off the high-road,
even if it is perched like a hawk's nest on a peak, still chafes and
chafes for the great road to come to it, chafes and chafes for the
daily motor-bus connection with the railway. There is no placidity, no
rest in the heart of the land. There is a fever of restless irritation
all the time.
And yet the permanent way of almost every railway is falling into bad
disrepair, the roads are shocking. And nothing seems to be done. Is our
marvellous, mechanical era going to have so short a bloom? Is the
marvellous openness, the opened-out wonder of the land going to collapse
quite soon, and the remote places lapse back into inaccessibility again?
Who knows! I rather hope so.
* * * * *
The automobile took us rushing and winding up the hill, sometimes
through cold, solid-seeming shadow, sometimes across a patch of sun.
There was thin, bright ice in the ruts, and deep grey hoar-frost on the
grass. I cannot tell how the sight of the grass and bushes heavy with
frost, and wild--in their own primitive wildness charmed me. The slopes
of the steep wild hills came down shaggy and bushy, with a few berries
lingering, and the long grass-stalks sere with the frost. Again the dark
valley sank below like a ravine, but shaggy, bosky, unbroken. It came
upon me how I loved the sight of the blue-shadowed, tawny-tangled winter
with its frosty standstill. The young oaks keep their brown leaves. And
doing so, surely they are best with a thin edge of rime.
One begins to realize how old the real Italy is, how man-gripped, and
how withered. England is far more wild and savage and lonely, in her
country parts. Here since endless centuries man has tamed the impossible
mountain side into terraces, he has quarried the rock, he has fed his
sheep among the thin woods, he has cut his boughs and burnt his
charcoal, he has been half domesticated even among the wildest
fastnesses. This is what is so attractive about the remote places, the
Abruzzi, for example. Life is so primitive, so pagan, so strangely
heathen and half-savage. And yet it is human life. And the wildest
country is half humanized, half brought under. It is all conscious.
Wherever one is in Italy, either one is conscious of the present, or of
the mediaeval influences, or of the far, mysterious gods of the early
Mediterranean. Wherever one is, the place has its conscious genus. Man
has lived there and brought forth his consciousness there and in some
way brought that place to consciousness, given it its expression, and,
really, finished it. The expression may be Proserpine, or Pan, or even
the strange "shrouded gods" of the Etruscans or the Sikels, none the
less it is an expression. The land has been humanised, through and
through: and we in our own tissued consciousness bear the results of
this humanisation. So that for us to go to Italy and to _penetrate_ into
Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery--back, back down
the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and
vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.
And then--and then--there is a final feeling of sterility. It is all
worked out. It is all known: _connu, connu!_
This Sunday morning, seeing the frost among the tangled, still savage
bushes of Sardinia, my soul thrilled again. This was not all known. This
was not all worked out. Life was not only a process of rediscovering
backwards. It is that, also: and it is that intensely. Italy has given
me back I know not what of myself, but a very, very great deal. She has
found for me so much that was lost: like a restored Osiris. But this
morning in the omnibus I realize that, apart from the great rediscovery
backwards, which one _must_ make before one can be whole at all, there
is a move forwards. There are unknown, unworked lands where the salt has
not lost its savour. But one must have perfected oneself in the great
past first.
* * * * *
If one travels one eats. We immediately began to munch biscuits, and the
old peasant in his white, baggy breeches and black cuirass, his old
face smiling wonderingly under his old stocking cap, although he was
only going to Tonara, some seven or eight miles, began to peel himself a
hard-boiled egg, which he got out of his parcel. With calm wastefulness
he peeled away the biggest part of the white of the egg with the
shell--because it came away so. The citizen of Nuoro, for such the
bright-faced young man was, said to him--"But see how you waste
it."--"Ha!" said the old peasant, with a reckless indifferent wave of
the hand. What did he care how much he wasted, since he was _en voyage_
and riding for the first time in his life in an automobile.
The citizen of Nuoro told us he had some sort of business in Sorgono, so
he came back and forth constantly. The peasant did some work or other
for him--or brought him something down from Tonara. He was a pleasant,
bright-eyed young man, and he made nothing of eight hours in a
motor-bus.
He told us there was still game among these hills: wild boars which were
hunted in big hunts, and many hares. It was a curious and beautiful
sight, he said, to see a hare at night fascinated by the flare of the
lamps of the automobile, racing ahead with its ears back, always keeping
in front, inside the beam, and flying like mad, on and on ahead, till
at some hill it gathered speed and melted into the dark.
* * * * *
We descended into a deep, narrow valley to the road-junction and the
canteen-house, then up again, up and up sharp to Tonara, our village we
had seen in the sun yesterday. But we were approaching it from the back.
As we swerved into the sunlight, the road took a long curve on to the
open ridge between two valleys. And there in front we saw a glitter of
scarlet and white. It was in slow motion. It was a far-off procession,
scarlet figures of women, and a tall image moving away from us, slowly,
in the Sunday morning. It was passing along the level sunlit ridge above
a deep, hollow valley. A close procession of women glittering in
scarlet, white and black, moving slowly in the distance beneath the
grey-yellow buildings of the village on the crest, towards an isolated
old church: and all along this narrow upland saddle as on a bridge of
sunshine itself.
Were we not going to see any more? The bus turned again and rushed along
the now level road and then veered. And there beyond, a little below, we
saw the procession _coming_. The bus faded to a standstill, and we
climbed out. Above us, old and mellowed among the smooth rocks and the
bits of flat grass was the church, tanging its bell. Just in front,
above, were old, half-broken houses of stone. The road came gently
winding up to us, from what was evidently two villages ledged one above
the other upon the steep summit of the south slope. Far below was the
south valley, with a white puff of engine steam.
And slowly chanting in the near distance, curving slowly up to us on the
white road between the grass came the procession. The high morning was
still. We stood all on this ridge above the world, with the deeps of
silence below on the right. And in a strange, brief, staccato monody
chanted the men, and in quick, light rustle of women's voices came the
responses. Again the men's voices! The white was mostly men, not women.
The priest in his robes, his boys near him, was leading the chanting.
Immediately behind him came a small cluster of bare-headed, tall,
sunburnt men, all in golden-velveteen corduroy, mountain-peasants,
bowing beneath a great life-size seated image of Saint Anthony of Padua.
After these a number of men in the costume, but with the white linen
breeches hanging wide and loose almost to the ankles, instead of being
tucked into the black gaiters. So they seemed very white beneath the
back kilt frill. The black frieze body-vest was cut low, like an evening
suit, and the stocking caps were variously perched. The men chanted in
low, hollow, melodic tones. Then came the rustling chime of the women.
And the procession crept slowly, aimlessly forward in time with the
chant. The great image rode rigid, and rather foolish.
After the men was a little gap--and then the brilliant wedge of the
women. They were packed two by two, close on each other's heels,
chanting inadvertently when their turn came, and all in brilliant,
beautiful costume. In front were the little girl-children, two by two,
immediately following the tall men in peasant black-and-white. Children,
demure and conventional, in vermilion, white and green--little
girl-children with long skirts of scarlet cloth down to their feet,
green-banded near the bottom: with white aprons bordered with vivid
green and mingled colour: having little scarlet, purple-bound, open
boleros over the full white shirts: and black head-cloths folded across
their little chins, just leaving the lips clear, the face framed in
black. Wonderful little girl-children, perfect and demure in the
stiffish, brilliant costume, with black head-dress! Stiff as Velasquez
princesses! The bigger girls followed, and then the mature women, a
close procession. The long vermilion skirts with their green bands at
the bottom flashed a solid moving mass of colour, softly swinging, and
the white aprons with their band of brilliant mingled green seemed to
gleam. At the throat the full-bosomed white shirts were fastened with
big studs of gold filigree, two linked filigree globes: and the great
white sleeves billowed from the scarlet, purplish-and-green-edged
boleros. The faces came nearer to us, framed all round in the dark
cloths. All the lips still sang responses, but all the eyes watched us.
So the softly-swaying coloured body of the procession came up to us. The
poppy-scarlet smooth cloth rocked in fusion, the bands and bars of
emerald green seemed to burn across the red and the showy white, the
dark eyes peered and stared at us from under the black snood, gazed back
at us with raging curiosity, while the lips moved automatically in
chant. The bus had run into the inner side of the road, and the
procession had to press round it, towards the sky-line, the great valley
lying below.
The priest stared, hideous St. Anthony cockled a bit as he passed the
butt end of the big grey automobile, the peasant men in gold-coloured
corduroy, old, washed soft, were sweating under the load and still
singing with opened lips, the loose white breeches of the men waggled as
they walked on with their hands behind their backs, turning again, to
look at us. The big, hard hands, folded behind black kilt-frill! The
women, too, shuffled slowly past, rocking the scarlet and the bars of
green, and all twisting as they sang, to look at us still more. And so
the procession edged past the bus, and was trailing upwards, curved
solid against the sky-line towards the old church. From behind, the
geranium scarlet was intense, one saw the careful, curiously cut backs
of the shapen boleros, poppy-red, edged with mauve-purple and green, and
the white of the shirt just showing at the waist. The full sleeves
billowed out, the black head-cloths hung down to a point. The pleated
skirts swing slowly, the broad band of green accentuating the motion.
Indeed that is what it must be for, this thick, rich band of jewel
green, to throw the wonderful horizontal motion back and forth, back and
forth, of the suave vermilion, and give that static, Demeta splendor to
a peasant motion, so magnificent in colour, geranium and malachite.
All the costumes were not exactly alike. Some had more green, some had
less. In some the sleeveless boleros were of a darker red, and some had
poorer aprons, without such gorgeous bands at the bottom. And some were
evidently old: probably thirty years old: still perfect and in keeping,
reserved for Sunday and high holidays. A few were darker, ruddier than
the true vermilion. This varying of the tone intensified the beauty of
the shuffling woman-host.
* * * * *
When they had filed into the grey, forlorn little church on the
ridge-top just above us, the bus started silently to run on to the
rest-point below, whilst we climbed back up the little rock-track to the
church. When we came to the side-door we found the church quite full.
Level with us as we stood in the open side doorway, we saw kneeling on
the bare stoneflags the little girl-children, and behind them all the
women clustered kneeling upon their aprons, with hands negligently
folded, filling the church to the further doorway, where the sun shone:
the bigger west-end doorway. In the shadow of the whitewashed, bare
church all these kneeling women with their colour and their black
head-cloths looked like some thick bed of flowers, geranium, black
hooded above. They all knelt on the naked, solid stone of the pavement.
There was a space in front of the geranium little girl-children, then
the men in corduroys, gold-soft, with dark round heads, kneeling
awkwardly in reverence; and then the queer, black cuirasses and full
white sleeves of grey-headed peasant men, many bearded. Then just in
front of them the priest in his white vestment, standing exposed, and
just baldly beginning an address. At the side of the altar was seated
large and important the modern, simpering, black-gowned Anthony of
Padua, nursing a boy-child. He looked a sort of male Madonna.
"Now," the priest was saying, "blessed Saint Anthony shows you in what
way you can be Christians. It is not enough that you are not Turks. Some
think they are Christians because they are not Turks. It is true you are
none of you Turks. But you have still to learn how to be good
Christians. And this you can learn from our blessed Saint Anthony. Saint
Anthony, etc., etc...."
The contrast between Turks and Christians is still forceful in the
Mediterranean, where the Mohammedans have left such a mark. But how the
word _cristiani_, _cristiani_, spoken with a peculiar priestly unction,
gets on my nerves. The voice is barren in its homily. And the women are
all intensely watching the q-b and me in the doorway, their folded hands
are very negligently held together.
"Come away!" say I. "Come away, and let them listen."
* * * * *
We left the church crowded with its kneeling host, and dropped down past
the broken houses towards the omnibus, which stood on a sort of level
out-look place, a levelled terrace with a few trees, standing silent
over the valley. It should be picketed with soldiers having arquebuses.
And I should have welcomed a few thorough-paced infidels, as a leaven
to this dreary Christianity of ours.
But it was a wonderful place. Usually, the life-level is reckoned as
sea-level. But here, in the heart of Sardinia, the life-level is high as
the golden-lit plateau, and the sea-level is somewhere far away, below,
in the gloom, it does not signify. The life-level is high up, high and
sun-sweetened and among rocks.
We stood and looked below, at the puff of steam, far down the wooded
valley where we had come yesterday. There was an old, low house on this
eagle-perching piazza. I would like to live there. The real village--or
rather two villages, like an ear-ring and its pendant--lay still beyond,
in front, ledging near the summit of the long, long, steep wooded slope,
that never ended till it ran flush to the depths away below there in
shadow.
And yesterday, up this slope the old peasant had come with his two
brilliant daughters and the pack-pony.
And somewhere in those ledging, pearly villages in front must be my
girovago and his "wife". I wish I could see their stall and drink aqua
vitae with them.
"How beautiful the procession!" says the q-b to the driver.
"Ah yes--one of the most beautiful costumes of Sardinia, this of
Tonara," he replied wistfully.
* * * * *
The bus sets off again--minus the old peasant. We retrace our road. A
woman is leading a bay pony past the church, striding with long strides,
so that her maroon skirt swings like a fan, and hauling the halter rope.
Apparently the geranium red costume is Sunday only, the week-day is this
maroon, or puce, or madder-brown.