But it is half-past six. We are at Palermo, capital of Sicily. The hunter slings his gun over his shoulder, I my knapsack, and in the throng we all disappear, into the Via Maqueda.
Palermo has two great streets, the Via Maqueda, and the Corso, which cross each other at right-angles. The Via Maqueda is narrow, with narrow little pavements, and is always choked with carriages and foot-passengers.
It had ceased raining. But the narrow road was paved with large, convex slabs of hard stone, inexpressibly greasy. To cross the Via Maqueda therefore was a feat. However, once accomplished, it was done. The near end of the street was rather dark, and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables — piles of white-and-green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes, nodding their buds, piles of big radishes, scarlet and bluey purple, carrots, long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a last slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshnesses. A mountain of black-purple cauliflowers, like niggers’ heads, and a mountain of snow-white ones next to them. How the dark, greasy, night-stricken street seems to beam with these vegetables, all this fresh delicate flesh of luminous vegetables piled there in the air, and in the recesses of the windowless little caverns of the shops, and gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps. The q-b at once wants to buy vegetables. “Look! Look at the snow-white broccoli. Look at the huge finocchi. Why don’t we get them? I must have some. Look at those great clusters of dates — ten francs a kilo, and we pay sixteen. It’s monstrous. Our place is simply monstrous.”
For all that, one doesn’t buy vegetables to take to Sardinia.
Cross the Corso at that decorated maelstrom and deathtrap of the Quattro Canti. I, of course, am nearly knocked down and killed. Somebody is nearly knocked down and killed every two minutes. But there — the carriages are light, and the horses curiously aware creatures. They would never tread on one.
The second part of the Via Maqueda is the swell part: silks and plumes, and an infinite number of shirts and ties and cufflinks and mufflers and men’s fancies. One realises here that man-drapery and man-underwear are quite as important as woman’s, if not more.
I, of course, in a rage. The q-b stares at every rag and stitch, and crosses and re-crosses this infernal dark stream of a Via Maqueda, which, as I have said, is choked solid with strollers and carriages. Be it remembered that I have on my back the brown knapsack, and the q-b carries the kitchenino. This is enough to make a travelling menagerie of us. If I had my shirt sticking out behind, and if the q-b had happened merely to catch up the table-cloth and wrap it round her as she came out, all well and good. But a big brown knapsack! And a basket with thermos flask, etc.! No, one could not expect such things to pass in a southern capital.
But I am case-hardened. And I am sick of shops. True, we have not been in a town for three months. But can I care for the innumerable fantasias in the drapery line? Every wretched hit of would-be-extra chic is called a fantasia. The word goes lugubriously to my bowels.
Suddenly I am aware of the q-b darting past me like a storm. Suddenly I see her pouncing on three giggling young hussies just in front — the inevitable black velveteen tarn, the inevitable white curly muffler, the inevitable lower-class flappers. “Did you want something? Have you something to say? Is there something that amuses you? Oh-h! You must laugh, must you? Oh — laugh! Oh-h! Why? Why? You ask why? Haven’t I heard you! Oh — you spik Ingleesh! You spik Ingleesh! Yes — why! That’s why! Yes, that’s why.”
The three giggling young hussies shrink together as if they would all hide behind one another, after a vain uprearing and a demand why? Madam tells them why. So they uncomfortably squeeze together under the unexpected strokes of the q-b’s sledge-hammer Italian and more than sledge-hammer retaliation, there full in the Via Maqueda. They edge round one another, each attempting to get behind the other, away from the looming q-b. I perceive that this rotary motion is equivalent to a standstill, so feel called upon to say something in the manly line.
“Beastly Palermo bad-manners,” I say, and throw a nonchalant “Ignoranti” at the end, in a tone of dismissal.
Which does it. Off they go down-stream, still huddling and shrinking like boats that are taking sails in, and peeping to see if we are coming. Yes, my dears, we are coming.
“Why do you bother?” say I to the q-b, who is towering with rage.
“They’ve followed us the whole length of the street — with their sacco militare and their parlano inglese and their you spik Ingleesh, and their jeering insolence. But the English are fools. They always put up with this Italian impudence.”
Which is perhaps true. — But this knapsack! It might be full of bronze-roaring geese, it would not attract more attention!
However, and however, it is seven o’clock, and the shops are beginning to shut. No more shop-gazing. Only one lovely place: raw ham, boiled ham, chickens in aspic, chicken vol-au-vents, sweet curds, curd cheese, rustic cheese-cake, smoked sausages, beautiful fresh mortadella, huge Mediterranean red lobsters, and those lobsters without claws. “So good! So good!” We stand and cry it aloud.
But this shop too is shutting. I ask a man for the Hotel Pantechnico. And treating me in that gentle, strangely tender southern manner, he takes me and shows me. He makes me feel such a poor, frail, helpless leaf. A foreigner, you know. A bit of an imbecile, poor dear. Hold his hand and show him the way.
To sit in the room of this young American woman, with its blue hangings, and talk and drink tea till midnight! All these naïve Americans — they are a good deal older and shrewder than we, once it nears the point. And they all seem to feel as if the world were coming to an end. And they are so truly generous of their hospitality, in this cold world.
II. THE SEA
The fat old porter knocks. Ah me, once more it is dark. Get up again before dawn. A dark sky outside, cloudy. The thrilling tinkle of innumerable goat-bells as the first flock enters the city, such a rippling sound. Well, it must be morning, even if one shivers at it. And at least it does not rain.
That pale, bluish, theatrical light outside, of the first dawn. And a cold wind. We come on to the wide, desolate quay, the curve of the harbour Panormus. That horrible dawn-pallor of a cold sea out there. And here, port mud, greasy: and fish: and refuse. The American girl is with us, wrapped in her sweater. A coarse, cold, black-slimy world, she seems as if she would melt away before it. But these frail creatures, what a lot they can go through!
Across the great, wide, badly paved, mud-greasy, despairing road of the quay side, and to the sea. There lies our steamer, over there in the dawn-dusk of the basin, half visible. “That one who is smoking her cigarette,” says the porter. She looks little, beside the huge City of Trieste who is lying up next her.
Our row-boat is hemmed in by many empty boats, huddled to the side of the quay. She works her way out like a sheepdog working his way out of a flock of sheep, or like a boat through pack-ice. We are on the open basin. The rower stands up and pushes the oars from him. He gives a long, melancholy cry to someone on the quay. The water goes chock-chock against the urging bows. The wind is chill. The fantastic peaks behind Palermo show half-ghostly in a half-dark sky. The dawn seems reluctant to come. Our steamer still smokes her cigarette — meaning the funnel-smoke — across there. So, one sits still, and crosses the level space of half-dark water. Masts of sailing-ships, and spars, cluster on the left, on the undarkening sky.
Climb up, climb up, this is our ship. Up we go up the ladder. “Oh, but!” says the American girl. “Isn’t she small! Isn’t she impossibly small! Oh, my, will you go in such a little thing? Oh, dear! Thirty-two hours in such a little boat? Why no, I wouldn’t care for it at all.”
A bunch of stewards, cooks, waiters, engineers, pan-cleaners and what-not, mostly in black canvas jackets. Nobody else on the ship. A little black bunch of loutish crew with nothing to do, and we the first passengers served up to be jeered at. There you are, in the g
rey light.
“Who is going?”
“We two — the signorina is not going.”
“Tickets!”
These are casual proletarian manners.
We are taken into the one long room with a long table and many maple-golden doors, alternate panels having a wedge-wood blue-and-white picture inserted — a would-be Goddess of white marble on a blue ground, like a health-salts Hygeia advertisement. One of the plain panels opens — our cabin.
“Oh, dear! Why it isn’t as big as a china-closet. However will you get in!” cries the American girl.
“One at a time,” says I.
“But it’s the tiniest place I ever saw.”
It really was tiny. One had to get into a bunk to shut the door. That did not matter to me, I am no Titanic American. I pitched the knapsack on one bunk, the kitchenino on the other, and we shut the door. The cabin disappeared into a maple-wood panel of the long, subterranean state-room.
“Why, is this the only place you’ve got to sit in?” cried the American girl. “But how perfectly awful! No air, and so dark, and smelly. Why I never saw such a boat! Will you really go? Will you really?”
The state-room was truly rather subterranean and stuffy, with nothing but a long table and an uncanny company of screw-pin chairs seated thereat, and no outlet to the air at all, but it was not so bad otherwise, to me who have never been out of Europe. Those maple-wood panels and ebony curves — and those Hygeias! They went all round, even round the curve at the dim, distant end, and back up the near side. Yet how beautiful old, gold-coloured maple-wood is! how very lovely, with the ebony curves of the door arch! There was a wonderful old-fashioned, Victorian glow in it, and a certain splendour. Even one could bear the Hygeias let in under glass — the colour was right, that wedgewood and white, in such lovely gold lustre. There was a certain homely grandeur still in the days when this ship was built: a richness of choice material. And health-salts Hygeias, wedgewood Greek goddesses on advertisement placards! Yet they weren’t advertisements. That was what really worried me. They never had been. Perhaps Weego’s Health Salts stole her later.
We have no coffee — that goes without saying. Nothing doing so early. The crew still stands in a gang, exactly like a gang of louts at a street-corner. And they’ve got the street all to themselves — this ship. We climb to the upper deck.
She is a long, slender, old steamer with one little funnel. And she seems so deserted, now that one can’t see the street-corner gang of the casual crew. They are just below. Our ship is deserted.
The dawn is wanly blueing. The sky is a curdle of cloud, there is a bit of pale gold eastwards, beyond Monte Pellegrino. The wind blows across the harbour. The hills behind Palermo prick up their ears on the sky-line. The city lies unseen, near us and level. There — a big ship is coming in: the Naples boat.
And the little boats keep putting off from the near quay, and coming to us. We watch. A stout officer, cavalry, in greyey-green, with a big dark-blue cloak lined with scarlet. The scarlet lining keeps flashing. He has a little beard, and his uniform is not quite clean. He has big wooden chests, tied with rope, for luggage. Poor and of no class. Yet that scarlet, splendid lining, and the spurs. It seems a pity they must go second-class. Yet so it is, he goes forward when the dock porter has hoisted those wooden boxes. No fellow-passenger yet.
Boats still keep coming. Ha-ha! Here is the commissariat! Various sides of kid, ready for roasting: various chickens: fennel like celery: wine in a bottiglione: new bread: packages! Hand them up, hand them up. “Good food!” cries the q-b in anticipation.
It must be getting near time to go. Two more passengers — young thick men in black broadcloth standing up in the stern of a little boat, their hands in their pockets, looking a little cold about the chin. Not quite Italian, too sturdy and manly. Sardinians from Cagliari, as a matter of fact.
We go down from the chill upper-deck. It is growing full day. Bits of pale gold are flying among delicate but cold flakes of cloud from the east, over Monte Pellegrino, bits of very new turquoise sky come out. Palermo on the left crouches upon her all-harbour — a little desolate, disorderly, end-of-the-world, endof-the-sea, along her quay front. Even from here we can see the yellow carts rattling slowly, the mules nodding their high weird plumes of scarlet along the broad weary harbour-side. Oh painted carts of Sicily, with all history on your panels!
Arrives an individual at our side. “The captain fears it will not be possible to start. There is much wind outside. Much wind!”
How they love to come up with alarming, disquieting, or annoying news! The joy it gives them. What satisfaction on all the faces: of course all the other loafers are watching us, the street-corner loungers of this deck. But we have been many times bitten.
“Ah, ma!” say I, looking at the sky, “not so much wind as all that.”
An air of quiet, shrugging indifference is most effectual: as if you knew all about it, a good deal more than they knew.
“Ah, si! Molto vento! Molto vento! Outside! Outside!”
With a long face and a dramatic gesture he points out of the harbour, to the grey sea. I too look out of the harbour at the pale line of sea beyond the mole. But I do not trouble to answer, and my eye is calm. So he goes away, only half triumphant.
“Things seem to get worse and worse!” cries the American friend. “What will you do on such a boat if you have an awful time out in the Mediterranean here? Oh, no — will you risk it, really? Won’t you go from Cività Vecchia?”
“How awful it will be!” cries the q-b, looking round the grey harbour, the many masts clustering in the grey sky on the right; the big Naples boat turning her posterior to the quayside a little way off, and cautiously budging backwards: the almost entirely shut-in harbour: the bits of blue and flying white cloud overhead: the little boats like beetles scuttling hither and thither across the basin: the thick crowd on the quay come to meet the Naples boat.
* * * * *
Time! Time! The American friend must go. She bids us good-bye, more than sympathetically.
“I shall be awfully interested to hear how you get on.”
So down the side she goes. The boatman wants twenty francs — wants more — but doesn’t get it. He gets ten, which is five too much. And so, sitting rather small and pinched and cold-looking, huddled in her sweater, she bibbles over the ripply water to the distant stone steps. We wave farewell. But other traffic comes between us. And the q-b, feeling nervous, is rather cross because the American friend’s ideas of luxury have put us in such a poor light. We feel like the poorest of poor seafaring relations.
Our ship is hooting for all she’s worth. An important lastminuter comes surging up. The rope hawsers are being wound clankily in. Seagulls — they are never very many in the Mediterranean — seagulls whirl like a few flakes of snow in the upper chill air. Clouds spin. And without knowing it we are evaporating away from the shore, from our mooring, between the great City of Trieste and another big black steamer that lies like a wall. We breathe towards this second black wall of steamer: distinctly. And of course an individual in an official cap is standing on the bottom of our departure ladder just above the water, yelling Barca! Barca! — shouting for a boat. And an old man on the sea stands up to his oars and comes pushing his clumsy boat with gathering speed between us and the other black wall. There he stands away below there, small, firing his clumsy boat along, remote as if in a picture on the dark green water. And our black side insidiously and evilly aspires to the other huge black wall. He rows in the canyon between, and is nearly here.
When lo, the individual on the bottom step turns in the other direction. Another boat from the open basin is sweeping up: it is a race: she is near, she is nearer, she is up. With a curvet the boat from the open rounds up at the ladder. The boat between the gulf backs its oars. The official individual shouts and waves, the old man, backing his oars in the gulf below, yells expostulation, the boat from the open carries off its prey, our ship begins slowly to puddle
-puddle-puddle, working her screw, the man in the gulf of green water rows for his life — we are floating into the open basin.
Slowly, slowly we turn round: and as the ship turns, our hearts turn. Palermo fades from our consciousness: the Naples boat, the disembarking crowds, the rattling carriages to the land — the great City of Trieste — all fades from our heart. We see only the open gap of the harbour entrance, and the level, pale-grey void of the sea beyond. There are wisps of gleamy light — out there.
And out there our heart watches — though Palermo is near us, just behind. We look round, and see it all behind us — but already it is gone, gone from our heart. The fresh wind, the gleamy wisps of light, the running, open sea beyond the harbour bars.
And so we steam out. And almost at once the ship begins to take a long, slow, dizzy dip, and a fainting swoon upwards, and a long, slow, dizzy dip, slipping away from beneath one. The q-b turns pale. Up comes the deck in that fainting swoon backwards — then down it fades in that indescribable slither forwards. It is all quite gentle — quite, quite gentle. But oh, so long, and so slow, and so dizzy.
“Rather pleasant!” say I to the q-b.
“Yes. Rather lovely really,” she answers wistfully. To tell the truth there is something in the long, slow lift of the ship, and her long, slow slide forwards which makes my heart beat with joy. It is the motion of freedom. To feel her come up — then slide slowly forward, with a sound of the smashing of waters, is like the magic gallop of the sky, the magic gallop of elemental space. That long, slow, waveringly rhythmic rise and fall of the ship, with waters snorting as it were from her nostrils, oh, God, what a joy it is to the wild innermost soul. One is free at last — and lilting in a slow flight of the elements, winging outwards. Oh, God, to be free of all the hemmed-in life — the horror of human tension, the absolute insanity of machine persistence. The agony which a train is to me, really. And the long-drawn-out agony of a life among tense, resistant people on land. And then to feel the long, slow lift and drop of this almost empty ship, as she took the waters. Ah, God, liberty, liberty, elemental liberty. I wished in my soul the voyage might last forever, that the sea had no end, that one might float in this wavering, tremulous, yet long and surging pulsation while ever time lasted: space never exhausted, and no turning back, no looking back, even.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 775