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 stalk 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 realises 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 saddlebag, 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 realise 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-ohscur, 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 saddlebag 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 shut up 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 t
o 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 moustaches. 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 honour. 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 pochettino 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 moustache: 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 — beefsteaks of pork. Whereat they pulled faces. Or bits of boiled pork. They sighed, looked gloomy, cheered up, and said beefsteaks, 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 beefsteaks of pork. And now the trio was a trio of castanet smacks and cymbal claps. Triumphantly the maialino looked round. 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 è discreta_.” 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 ful
l 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 impostor. 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 any one 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 rosé 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 sympathises with him in retrospect. But in daily life it is unbearable.
“Where do you find such white bread?” say I to the blackcap, because he is proud of it.
“It comes from my home.” And then he asks about the bread of Sicily. Is 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 come from the Camorra — le 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.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 781