Why, then, must one go? Why not stay? Ah, what a mistress, this Etna!with her strange winds prowling round her like Circe's panthers, someblack, some white. With her strange, remote communications and herterrible dynamic exhalations. She makes men mad. Such terriblevibrations of wicked and beautiful electricity she throws about her,like a deadly net! Nay, sometimes, verily, one can feel a new current ofher demon magnetism seize one's living tissue and change the peacefullife of one's active cells. She makes a storm in the living plasm and anew adjustment. And sometimes it is like a madness.
This timeless Grecian Etna, in her lower-heaven loveliness, so lovely,so lovely, what a torturer! Not many men can really stand her, withoutlosing their souls. She is like Circe. Unless a man is very strong,[Pg 14] shetakes his soul away from him and leaves him not a beast, but anelemental creature, intelligent and soulless. Intelligent, almostinspired, and soulless, like the Etna Sicilians. Intelligent daimons,and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on earth. Ach,horror! How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight? It was shewho broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gavethe Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, theItalians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour andbroke their souls.
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Perhaps it is she one must flee from. At any rate, one must go: and atonce. After having come back only at the end of October, already onemust dash away. And it is only the third of January. And one cannotafford to move. Yet there you are: at the Etna bidding one goes.
Where does one go? There is Girgenti by the south. There is Tunis athand. Girgenti, and the sulphur spirit and the Greek guarding temples,to make one madder? Never. Neither Syracuse and the madness of its greatquarries. Tunis? Africa? Not yet, not yet. Not the Arabs, not yet.Naples, Rome, Florence? No good at all. Where then?
Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia.[Pg 15] Sardinia, which islike nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, nooffering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans nor Phoenicians,Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside thecircuit of civilisation. Like the Basque lands. Sure enough, it isItalian now, with its railways and its motor-omnibuses. But there is anuncaptured Sardinia still. It lies within the net of this Europeancivilisation, but it isn't landed yet. And the net is getting old andtattered. A good many fish are slipping through the net of the oldEuropean civilisation. Like that great whale of Russia. And probablyeven Sardinia. Sardinia then. Let it be Sardinia.
The dreary black morning, the candle-light, the house lookingnight-dismal. Ah, well, one does all these things for one's pleasure. Solight the charcoal fire and put the kettle on. The queen bee shiveringround half dressed, fluttering her unhappy candle.
Under the lid of the half-cloudy night sky, far away at the rim of theIonian sea, the first light, like metal fusing. So swallow the cup oftea and the bit of toast. Hastily wash up, so that we can find the housedecent when we come back. Shut the door-windows of the upper terrace andgo down. Lock the door: the upper half of the house made fast.
The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red gape.Looking across from the veranda at it, one shivers. Not that it is cold.The morning is not at all cold. But the ominousness of it: that long redslit between a dark sky and a dark Ionian sea, terrible old bivalvewhich has held life between its lips so long. And here, at this house,we are ledged so awfully above the dawn, naked to it.
Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark stillthe garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa treeinvisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. Thebroken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fallon me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah, dark garden, dark garden,with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and manyalmond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I amleaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of thetall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, bigeucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, Ihave got so far.
So jolt, and drop, and jolt down the old road that winds on the cliffface. Etna across there is smothered quite low, quite low in a denseputher of ink-black clouds. Playing some devilry in private, no doubt.The dawn is angry red, and yellow above, the sea takes strange colors. Ihate the station, pigmy, drawn out there beside the sea. On this steepface, especially in the windless nooks, the almond blossom is alreadyout. In little puffs and specks and stars, it looks very like bits ofsnow scattered by winter. Bits of snow, bits of blossom, fourth day ofthe year 1921. Only[Pg 20] blossom. And Etna indescribably cloaked andsecretive in her dense black clouds. She has wrapped them quite roundher, quite low round her skirts.
Humanity is, externally, too much alike. Internally there areinsuperable differences. So one sits and thinks, watching the people onthe station: like a line of caricatures between oneself and the nakedsea and the uneasy, clouding dawn.
You would look in vain this morning for the swarthy feline southerner ofromance. It might, as far as features are concerned, be an early morningcrowd[Pg 21] waiting for the train on a north London suburb station. As far asfeatures go. For some are fair and some colorless and none raciallytypical. The only one that is absolutely like a race caricature is atall stout elderly fellow with spectacles and a short nose and abristling moustache, and he is the German of the comic papers of twentyyears ago. But he is pure Sicilian.
They are mostly young fellows going up the line to Messina to their job:not artizans, lower middle class. And externally, so like any otherclerks and shop-men, only rather more shabby, much less sociallyself-conscious. They are lively, they throw their arms round oneanother's necks, they all but kiss. One poor chap has had earache, so ablack kerchief is tied round his face, and his black hat is perchedabove, and a comic sight he looks. No one seems to think so, however.Yet they view my arrival with a knapsack on my back with colddisapprobation, as unseemly as if I had arrived riding on a pig. I oughtto be in a carriage, and the knapsack ought to be a new suit-case. Iknow it, but am inflexible.
That is how they are. Each one thinks he is as handsome as Adonis, andas "fetching" as Don Juan. Extraordinary! At the same time, all flesh isgrass, and if a few trouser-buttons are missing or if a black hatperches above a thick black face-muffle and a long[Pg 22] excruciated face, itis all in the course of nature. They seize the black-edged one by thearm, and in profound commiseration: "Do you suffer? Are you suffering?"they ask.
And that also is how they are. So terribly physically all over oneanother. They pour themselves one over the other like so much meltedbutter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with atender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tendernessinto each other's face. Never in the world have I seen such melting gaytenderness as between casual Sicilians on railway platforms, whetherthey be young lean-cheeked Sicilians or huge stout Sicilians.
There must be something curious about the proximity of a volcano. Naplesand Catania alike, the men are hugely fat, with great macaroni paunches,they are expansive and in a perfect drip of casual affection and love.But the Sicilians are even more wildly exuberant and fat and all overone another than the Neapolitans. They never leave off being amorouslyfriendly with almost everybody, emitting a relentless physicalfamiliarity that is quite bewildering to one not brought up near avolcano.
It is only thirty miles to Messina, but the train takes two hours. Itwinds and hurries and stops beside the lavender grey morning sea. Aflock of goats trail over the beach near the lapping wave's edge,dismally. Great wide deserts of stony river-beds run down to the sea,and men on asses are picking their way across, and women are kneeling bythe small stream-channel washing clothes. The lemons hang pale andinnumerable in the thick lemon groves. Lemon trees, like Italians, seemto be happiest when they are touching one another all round. Solidforests of not very tall lemon trees lie between the steep mountains andthe sea, on the strip of plain. Women, vague in the orchardunder-shadow, are picking the lemons, lurking as if in the undersea.There are heaps of pale yellow lemons under the trees. They look likepale, primrose-smouldering fires. Curious how like fires the heaps oflemons look, under the shadow of foliage, seeming to give off a pallidburning amid the suave, naked, greenish trunks. When there comes acluster of orange trees, the oranges are red like coals among the darkerleaves. But lemons, lemons, innumerable, speckled like innumerable tinystars in the green firmament of leaves. So many[Pg 24] lemons! Think of allthe lemonade crystals they will be reduced to! Think of America drinkingthem up next summer.
The sky is all grey. The Straits are grey. Reggio, just across thewater, is white looking, under the great dark toe of Calabria, the toeof Italy. On Aspromonte there is grey cloud. It is going to rain. Aftersuch marvelous ringing blue days, it is going to rain. What luck!
Aspromonte! Garibaldi! I could always cover my[Pg 25] face when I see it,Aspromonte. I wish Garibaldi had been prouder. Why did he go off sohumbly, with his bag of seed-corn and a flea in his ear, when HisMajesty King Victor Emmanuel arrived with his little short legs on thescene. Poor Garibaldi! He wanted to be a hero and a dictator of freeSicily. Well, one can't be a dictator and humble at the same time. Onemust be a hero, which he was, and proud, which he wasn't. Besides peopledon't nowadays choose proud heroes for governors. Anything but. Theyprefer constitutional monarchs, who are paid servants and who know it.That is democracy. Democracy admires its own servants and nothing else.And you couldn't make a real servant even of Garibaldi. Only of HisMajesty King Victor Emmanuel. So Italy chose Victor Emmanuel, andGaribaldi went off with a corn bag and a whack on the behind like ahumble ass. 152ee80cbc
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