narrow valleys, with trees, and brown-legged cork trees. Across the
other side a black and white peasant is working alone on a tiny terrace
of the hill-side, a small, solitary figure, for all the world like a
magpie in the distance. These people like being alone--solitary--one
sees a single creature so often isolated among the wilds. This is
different from Sicily and Italy, where the people simply cannot be
alone. They _must_ be in twos and threes.
But it is Sunday morning, and the worker is exceptional. Along the road
we pass various pedestrians, men in their black sheepskins, boys in
their soldiers' remains. They are trudging from one village to another,
across the wild valleys. And there is a sense of Sunday morning freedom,
of roving, as in an English countryside. Only the one old peasant works
alone: and a goatherd watching his long-haired, white goats.
Beautiful the goats are: and so swift. They fly like white shadows along
the road from us, then dart down-hill. I see one standing on a bough of
an oak-tree, right in the tree, an enormous white tree-creature
complacently munching up aloft, then rearing on her hind legs, so
lengthy, and putting her slim paws far away on an upper, forward branch.
* * * * *
Whenever we come to a village we stop and get down, and our little
conductor disappears into the post-office for the post-bag. This last is
usually a limp affair, containing about three letters. The people crowd
round--and many of them in very ragged costume. They look poor, and not
attractive: perhaps a bit degenerate. It would seem as if the Italian
instinct to get into rapid touch with the world were the healthy
instinct after all. For in these isolated villages, which have been
since time began far from any life-centre, there is an almost sordid
look on the faces of the people. We must remember that the motor-bus is
a great innovation. It has been running for five weeks only. I wonder
for how many months it will continue.
For I am sure it cannot pay. Our first-class tickets cost, I believe,
about twenty-seven francs each. The second class costs about
three-quarters the first. Some parts of the journey we were very few
passengers. The distance covered is so great, the population so thin,
that even granted the passion for getting out of their own villages,
which possesses all people now, still the bus cannot earn much more than
an average of two hundred to three hundred francs a day. Which, with two
men's wages, and petrol at its enormous price, and the cost of
wear-and-tear, cannot possibly pay.
I asked the driver. He did not tell me what his wages were: I did not
ask him. But he said the company paid for the keep and lodging for
himself and mate at the stopping-places. This being Sunday, fewer people
were travelling: a statement hard to believe. Once he had carried fifty
people all the way from Tonara to Nuoro. Once! But it was in vain he
protested. Ah well, he said, the bus carried the post, and the
government paid a subsidy of so many thousands of lire a year: a goodly
number. Apparently then the government was the loser, as usual. And
there are hundreds, if not thousands of these omnibuses running the
lonely districts of Italy and Sicily--Sardinia had a network of systems.
They are splendid--and they are perhaps an absolute necessity for a
nervous restless population which simply cannot keep still, and which
finds some relief in being whirled about even on the _autovie_, as the
bus-system is called.
The autovie are run by private companies, only subsidised by the
government.
* * * * *
On we rush, through the morning--and at length see a large village, high
on the summit beyond, stony on the high upland. But it has a magical
look, as these tiny summit-cities have from the distance. They recall to
me always my childish visions of Jerusalem, high against the air, and
seeming to sparkle, and built in sharp cubes.
It is curious what a difference there is between the high, fresh, proud
villages and the valley villages. Those that crown the world have a
bright, flashing air, as Tonara had. Those that lie down below, infolded
in the shadow, have a gloomy, sordid feeling and a repellent population,
like Sorgono and other places at which we had halted. The judgment may
be all wrong: but this was the impression I got.
We were now at the highest point of the journey. The men we saw on the
road were in their sheepskins, and some were even walking with their
faces shawl-muffled. Glancing back, we saw up the valley clefts the snow
of Gennargentu once more, a white mantle on broad shoulders, the very
core of Sardinia. The bus slid to a standstill in a high valley, beside
a stream where the road from Fonni joined ours. There was waiting a
youth with a bicycle. I would like to go to Fonni. They say it is the
highest village in Sardinia.
* * * * *
In front, on the broad summit, reared the towers of Gavoi. This was the
half-way halt, where the buses had their _coincidenza_, and where we
would stay for an hour and eat. We wound up and up the looping road, and
at last entered the village. Women came to the doors to look. They were
wearing the dark madder-brown costume. Men were hastening, smoking their
pipes, towards our stopping place.
We saw the other bus--a little crowd of people--and we drew up at last.
We were tired and hungry. We were at the door of the inn, and we entered
quickly. And in an instant, what a difference! At the clean little bar,
men were drinking cheerfully. A side door led into the common room. And
how charming it was. In a very wide chimney, white and stone-clean, with
a lovely shallow curve above, was burning a fire of long, clean-split
faggots, laid horizontally on the dogs. A clean, clear bright fire, with
odd little chairs in front, very low, for us to sit on. The funny, low
little chairs seem a specialty of this region.
The floor of this room was paved with round dark pebbles, beautifully
clean. On the walls hung brilliant copper fans, glittering against the
whitewash. And under the long, horizontal window that looked on the
street was a stone slab with sockets for little charcoal fires. The
curve of the chimney arch was wide and shallow, the curve above the
window was still wider, and of a similar delicate shallowness, the white
roof rose delicately vaulted. With the glitter of copper, the expanse of
dark, rose-coloured, pebbled floor, the space, the few low,
clean-gleaming faggots, it was really beautiful. We sat and warmed
ourselves, welcomed by a plump hostess and a pleasant daughter, both in
madder-brown dress and full white shirt. People strayed in and out,
through the various doors. The houses are built without any plan at all,
the rooms just happening, here or there. A bitch came from an inner
darkness and stood looking at the fire, then looked up at me, smiling in
her bitch-like, complacent fashion.
* * * * *
But we were dying with hunger. What was there to eat?--and was it nearly
ready? There was _cinghiale_, the pleasant, hard-cheeked girl told us,
and it was nearly ready. _Cinghiale_ being wild boar, we sniffed the
air. The girl kept tramping rather fecklessly back and forth, with a
plate or a serviette: and at last it was served. We went through the
dark inner place, which was apparently the windowless bit left over,
inside, when the hap-hazard rooms were made round about, and from thence
into a large, bare, darkish pebbled room with a white table and inverted
soup-plates. It was deathly cold. The window looked north over the
wintry landscape of the highlands, fields, stone walls, and rocks. Ah,
the cold, motionless air of the room.
But we were quite a party: the second bus-driver and his mate, a bearded
traveller on the second bus, with his daughter, ourselves, the
bright-faced citizen from Nuoro, and our driver. Our little dark-eyed
conductor did not come. It dawned on me later he could not afford to pay
for this meal, which was not included in his wage.
The Nuoro citizen conferred with our driver--who looked tired round the
eyes--and made the girl produce a tin of sardines. These were opened at
table with a large pocket-knife belonging to the second conductor. He
was a reckless, odd, hot-foot fellow whom I liked very much. But I was
terrified at the way he carved the sardine-box with his jack-knife.
However, we could eat and drink.
Then came the _brodo_, the broth, in a great bowl. This was boiling hot,
and very, very strong. It was perfectly plain, strong meat-stock,
without vegetables. But how good and invigorating it was, and what an
abundance! We drank it down, and ate the good, cold bread.
Then came the boar itself. Alas, it was a bowl of hunks of dark, rather
coarse boiled meat, from which the broth had been made. It was quite
dry, without fat. I should have been very puzzled to know what meat it
was, if I had not been told. Sad that the wild boar should have received
so little culinary attention. However, we ate the hunks of hot, dry meat
with bread, and were glad to get them. They were filling, at least. And
there was a bowl of rather bitter green olives for a condiment.
The Nuoro citizen now produced a huge bottle of wine, which he said was
_finissimo_, and refused to let us go on with the dark wine on the
table, of which every guest was served with a bottle. So we drank up,
and were replenished with the redder, lighter, finer Sorgono wine. It
was very good.
The second bus-conductor also did not eat the inn meal. He produced a
vast piece of bread, good, home-made bread, and at least half of a roast
lamb, and a large paper of olives. This lamb he insisted on sending
round the table, waving his knife and fork with dramatic gestures at
every guest, insisting that every guest should take a hunk. So one by
one we all helped ourselves to the extraordinarily good cold roast lamb,
and to the olives. Then the bus-conductor fell to as well. There was a
mass of meat still left to him.
It is extraordinary how generous and, from the inside, well-bred these
men were. To be sure the second conductor waved his knife and fork and
made bitter faces if one of us took only a little bit of the lamb. He
wanted us to take more. But the _essential_ courtesy in all of them was
quite perfect, so manly and utterly simple. Just the same with the q-b.
They treated her with a sensitive, manly simplicity, which one could not
but be thankful for. They made none of the odious politenesses which are
so detestable in well-brought-up people. They made no advances and did
none of the hateful homage of the adulating male. They were quiet, and
kind, and sensitive to the natural flow of life, and quite without airs.
I liked them extremely. Men who can be quietly kind and simple to a
woman, without wanting to show off or to make an impression, they are
men still. They were neither humble nor conceited. They did not show
off. And oh God, what a blessed relief, to be with people who don't
bother to show off. We sat at that table quietly and naturally as if we
were by ourselves, and talked or listened to their talk, just as it
happened. When we did not want to talk, they took no notice of us. And
that I call good manners. Middle-class, showing off people would have
found them uncouth. I found them almost the only really well-bred people
I have met. They did not show off in any way at all, not even a show of
simplicity. They knew that in the beginning and in the end a man stands
alone, his soul is alone in itself, and all attributes are nothing--and
this curious final knowledge preserved them in simplicity.
When we had had coffee and were going out, I found our own conductor in
a little chair by the fire. He was looking a bit pathetic. I had enough
sense to give him a coffee, which brightened him. But it was not till
afterwards, putting things together, that I realized he had wanted to be
with us all at table, but that his conductor's wages probably did not
allow him to spend the money. My bill for the dinner was about fifteen
francs, for the two of us.
* * * * *
In the bus again, we were quite crowded. A peasant girl in Nuoro costume
sat facing me, and a dark-bearded, middle-aged man in a brown velveteen
suit was next me and glowering at her. He was evidently her husband. I
did not like him: one of the jealous, carping sort. She, in her way, was
handsome: but a bit of a devil as well, in all probability. There were
two village women become fine, in town dress and black silk scarves over
their heads, fancying themselves. Then there was a wild scuffle, and
three bouncing village lasses were pushed in, laughing and wild with
excitement. There were wild farewells, and the bus rolled out of Gavoi
between the desolate mountain fields and the rocks, on a sort of
table-land. We rolled on for a mile or so: then stopped, and the excited
lasses got down. I gathered they had been given a little ride for a
Sunday treat. Delighted they were. And they set off, with other
bare-headed women in costume, along a bare path between flat,
out-cropping rocks and cold fields.
* * * * *
The girl facing me was a study. She was not more than twenty years old I
should say: or was she? Did the delicate and fine complication of lines
against her eyes mean thirty-five? But anyhow she was the wife of the
velveteen man. He was thick-set and had white hairs in his coarse black
beard, and little, irritable brown eyes under his irritable brows. He
watched her all the time. Perhaps, she was after all a young, new
girl-wife. She sat with that expressionless look of one who is watched
and who appears not to know it. She had her back to the engine.
[Illustration: GAVOI]
She wore her black head-cloth from her brow and her hair was taken tight
back from her rather hard, broad, well-shaped forehead. Her dark
eyebrows were very finely drawn above her large, dark-grey, pellucid
eyes, but they were drawn with a peculiar obstinate and irritating lift.
Her nose was straight and small, her mouth well-shut. And her big,
rather hostile eyes had a withheld look in them, obstinate. Yet, being
newly wed and probably newly-awakened, her eyes looked sometimes at me
with a provoking look, curious as to what I was in the husband line,
challenging rather defiantly with her new secrets, obstinate in
opposition to the male authority, and yet intrigued by the very fact
that one was man. The velveteen husband--his velveteens too had gone
soft and gold-faded, yet somehow they made him look ugly, common--he
watched her with his irritable, yellow-brown eyes, and seemed to fume in
his stiff beard.
She wore the costume: the full-gathered shirt fastened at the throat
with the two gold filigree globes, a little dark, braided, stiff bolero
just fastened at the waist, leaving a pretty pattern of white breast,
and a dark maroon skirt. As the bus rushed along she turned somewhat
pale, with the obstinate pinched look of a woman who is in opposition to
her man. At length she flung him a few words which I did not catch--and
her forehead seemed to go harder, as she drooped her lashes occasionally
over her wide, alert, obstinate, rather treacherous eyes. She must have
been a difficult piece of goods to deal with. And she sat with her knees
touching mine, rocking against mine as the bus swayed.
* * * * *
We came to a village on the road: the landscape had now become wider,
much more open. At the inn door the bus stopped, and the velveteen
husband and the girl got down. It was cold--but in a minute I got down
too. The bus conductor came to me and asked anxiously if the q-b were
ill. The q-b said no, why? Because there was a signora whom the motion
of the bus made ill. This was the girl.
There was a crowd and a great row at this inn. In the second dark room,
which was bare of furniture, a man sat in a corner playing an accordion.
Men in the close breeches were dancing together. Then they fell to
wrestling wildly, crashing about among the others, with shouts and
yells. Men in the black-and-white, but untidy, with the wide white
drawers left hanging out over the black gaiters, surged here and there.
All were rowdy with drink. This again was rather a squalid inn but
roaring with violent, crude male life.
The Nuoro citizen said that here was very good wine, and we must try it.
I did not want it, but he insisted. So we drank little glasses of merely
moderate red wine. The sky had gone all grey with the afternoon
curd-clouds. It was very cold and raw. Wine is no joy, cold, dead wine,
in such an atmosphere.
The Nuoro citizen insisted on paying. He would let me pay, he said, when
he came to England. In him, and in our bus men, the famous Sardinian
hospitality and generosity still lingers.
* * * * *
When the bus ran on again the q-b told the peasant girl who again had
the pinched look, to change places with me and sit with her face to the
engine. This the young woman did, with that rather hard assurance common
to these women. But at the next stop she got down, and made the
conductor come with us into the compartment, whilst she sat in front
between the driver and the citizen of Nuoro. That was what she wanted
all the time. Now she was all right. She had her back to the velveteen
husband, she sat close between two strange young men, who were condoling
with her. And velveteens eyed her back, and his little eyes went littler
and more pin-pointed, and his nose seemed to curl with irritation.
The costumes had changed again. There was again the scarlet, but no
green. The green had given place to mauve and rose. The women in one
cold, stony, rather humbled broken place were most brilliant. They had
the geranium skirts, but their sleeveless boleros were made to curl out
strangely from the waist, and they were edged with a puckered rose-pink,
a broad edge, with lines of mauve and lavender. As they went up between
the houses that were dark and grisly under the blank, cold sky, it is
amazing how these women of vermilion and rose-pink seemed to melt into
an almost impossible blare of colour. What a risky blend of colours! Yet
how superb it could look, that dangerous hard assurance of these women
as they strode along so blaring. I would not like to tackle one of them.
* * * * *
Wider and colder the landscape grew. As we topped a hill at the end of a
village, we saw a long string of wagons, each with a pair of oxen, and
laden with large sacks, curving upwards in the cold, pallid Sunday
afternoon. Seeing us, the procession came to a standstill at the curve
of the road, and the pale oxen, the pale low wagons, the pale full
sacks, all in the blenched light, each one headed by a tall man in
shirt-sleeves, trailing a static procession on the hill-side, seemed
like a vision: like a Dore drawing. The bus slid past, the man holding
the wagon-pole, while some oxen stood like rock, some swayed their
horns. The q-b asked the velveteener what they were carrying. For a long
time he took no notice of the question. Then he volunteered, in a snappy
voice, that it was the government grain being distributed to the
communes for bread. On Sunday afternoon too.
Oh this government corn! What a problem those sacks represent!
* * * * *
The country became wider as we dropped lower. But it was bleak and
treeless once more. Stones cropped up in the wide, hollow dales. Men on
ponies passed forlorn across the distances. Men with bundles waited at
the cross-roads to pick up the bus. We were drawing near to Nuoro. It
was past three in the afternoon, cold with a blenched light. The
landscape seemed bare and stony, wide, different from any before.
We came to the valley where the branch-line runs to Nuoro. I saw little
pink railway-cabins at once, lonely along the valley bed. Turning sharp
to the right, we ran in silence over the moor-land-seeming slopes, and
saw the town beyond, clustered beyond, a little below, at the end of the
long declivity, with sudden mountains rising around it. There it lay, as
if at the end of the world, mountains rising sombre behind.
So, we stop at the Dazio, the town's customs hut, and velveteens has to
pay for some meat and cheese he is bringing in. After which we slip into
the cold high-street of Nuoro. I am thinking that this is the home of
Grazia Deledda, the novelist, and I see a barber's shop. De Ledda. And
thank heaven we are at the end of the journey. It is past four o'clock.
The bus has stopped quite close to the door of the inn: Star of Italy,
was it? In we go at the open door. Nobody about, free access to anywhere
and everywhere, as usual: testifying again to Sardinian honesty. We peer
through a doorway to the left--through a rough little room: ah, there in
a dark, biggish room beyond is a white-haired old woman with a long,
ivory-coloured face standing at a large table ironing. One sees only the
large whiteness of the table, and the long pallid face and the querulous
pale-blue eye of the tall old woman as she looks up questioning from the
gloom of the inner place.
"Is there a room, Signora?"
She looks at me with a pale, cold blue eye, and shouts into the dark for
somebody. Then she advances into the passage and looks us up and down,
the q-b and me.
"Are you husband and wife?" she demands, challenge.
"Yes, how shouldn't we be," say I.
A tiny maid, of about thirteen, but sturdy and brisk-looking, has
appeared in answer to the shout.
"Take them to number seven," says the old dame, and she turns back to
her gloom, and seizes the flat iron grimly.
We follow up two flights of cold stone stairs, disheartening narrow
staircase with a cold iron rail, and corridors opening off gloomily and
rather disorderly. These houses give the effect, inside, of never having
been properly finished, as if, long, long ago, the inmates had crowded
in, pig-sty fashion, without waiting for anything to be brought into
order, and there it had been left, dreary and chaotic.
Thumbelina, the little maid, threw open the door of number seven with
_eclat_. And we both exclaimed: "How fine!" It seemed to us palatial.
Two good, thick white beds, a table, a chest of drawers, two mats on the
tiled floor, and gorgeous oleographs on the wall--and two good
wash-bowls side by side--and all perfectly clean and nice. What were we
coming to! We felt we ought to be impressed.
* * * * *
We pulled open the latticed window doors, and looked down on the street:
the only street. And it was a river of noisy life. A band was playing,
rather terribly, round the corner at the end, and up and down the
street jigged endless numbers of maskers in their Carnival costume, with
girls and young women strolling arm-in-arm to participate. And how
frisky they all were, how bubbly and unself-conscious!
The maskers were nearly all women--the street was full of women: so we
thought at first. Then we saw, looking closer, that most of the women
were young men, dressed up. All the maskers were young men, and most of
these young men, _of course_, were masquerading as women. As a rule they
did not wear face-masks, only little dominoes of black cloth or green
cloth or white cloth coming down to the mouth. Which is much better. For
the old modelled half-masks with the lace frill, the awful proboscis
sticking forward white and ghastly like the beaks of corpse-birds--such
as the old Venice masks--these I think are simply horrifying. And the
more modern "faces" are usually only repulsive. While the simple little
pink half-masks with the end of black or green or white cloth, these
just form a human disguise.
It was quite a game, sorting out the real women from the false. Some
were easy. They had stuffed their bosoms, and stuffed their bustles, and
put on hats and very various robes, and they minced along with little
jigging steps, like little dolls that dangle from elastic, and they put
their heads on one side and dripped their hands, and danced up to flurry
the actual young ladies, and sometimes they received a good clout on the
head, when they broke into wild and violent gestures, whereat the
_actual_ young ladies scuffled wildly.