rooms, and the fog lifted, and the sun shone, and we looked out of our
windows with all Venice in our faces, and J. took me to see the town, my
impressions were still foggy with sleep. For, from Pompeii, where there
had been work, to Venice where there was to be more, we had hurried by
one of those day-and-night flights to which J. has never accustomed me,
the hurried, crowded pauses at Naples and Orvieto and Florence and Pisa
and Lucca and Pistoia turning the journey into a beautiful nightmare of
which all I was now seeing became but a part: the _Riva_, canals, sails,
_Bersaglieri_, the Ducal Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, St. Mark's, the
_Piazza_, _gondolas_, women in black, white sunlight, pigeons, tourists,
the _Campanile_, following one upon another with the inconsequence of
troubled dreams. And then we were on the _Rialto_ and J. was saying "Of
course you know that?" and I was answering "Of course, the Bridge of
Sighs!" and the many years between have not blunted the edge of his
disgust or my remorse. But my disgrace drove me back to the _Casa
Kirsch_, to sleep for fifteen blessed hours before looking at one other
beautiful thing or troubling my head about what we were to do with our
days and our nights in Venice.
II
What we were to do with our days settled itself the next morning as soon
as I woke. For Venice, out of my window, was rising from the sea with
the dawn, everything it ought to have been the morning before, and I had
no desire to move from a room that looked down upon the _Riva_, and
across to _San Giorgio_, and beyond the island--and sail-strewn lagoon
to the low line of the _Lido_, and above to the vastness of the
Venetian sky.
Nor was there trouble in providing for our nights. Before I left home a
romantic friend had pictured me in Venice, wrapped in black lace,
forever floating in a _gondola_ under the moon. But my Roman winter had
taught me how much more likely the gas-light of some little _trattoria_
and _café_ was to shine upon me in my well-worn tweeds, my education
having got so far advanced that any other end to my day of work could
not seem possible. The only question was upon which of the many little
_trattorie_ and _cafés_ in Venice our choice should fall, and this was
decided for us by Duveneck, whom we ran across that same morning in the
_Piazza_, and who told us that he slept in the _Casa Kirsch_, dined at
the _Antica Panada_, and drank coffee at the _Orientale_, which was as
much as to say that we might too if we liked. And of course we liked,
for it is a great compliment when a man in Venice, or any Italian
town,--especially if he is of the importance and distinction to which
Duveneck had already attained,--makes you free to join him at dinner and
over after-dinner coffee. It is more than a compliment. It launches you
in Venice as to be presented at court launches you in London.
[Illustration: Painting by Joseph R. De Camp
FRANK DUVENECK]
We began that night to dine at the _Panada_ and drink coffee at the
_Orientale_, and we kept on dining at the _Panada_ and drinking coffee
at the _Orientale_ every night we were in Venice; except when it was a
_festa_ and we followed Duveneck to the _Calcino_, where various Royal
Academicians sustained the respectability Ruskin gave it by his
patronage and Symonds tried to live up to; or when there was music in
the _Piazza_ and, happy to do whatever Duveneck did, we went with him to
the _Quadri_ or _Florian's_; or when it stormed, as it can in March, and
all day from my window I had looked down upon the dripping _Riva_ and
the wind-waved Lagoon and lines of fishing boats moored to the banks,
and no living creatures except the gulls, and the little white woolly
dogs on the fishing boats covered with sails, and the sailors miserably
huddled together, and gondoliers in yellow oilskins, and the
_Bersaglieri_ in hoods--what the _Bersaglieri_ were doing there even in
sunshine was one of the mysteries of Venice;--then we went with Duveneck
no further than the kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_, for he hated, as we
hated, the _table d'hôte_ from which, there as everywhere, German
tourists were talking away every other nationality.
The kitchen was a huge room, with high ceiling, and brass and copper
pots and pans on the whitewashed walls, and a dim light about the
cooking stove, and dark shadowy corners. The _padrona_ laid the cloth
for us in an alcove opposite the great fireplace, while she and her
family sat at a table against the wall to the right, and the old cook
ate at a bare table in the middle, and the maid-servant sat on a stool
by the fire with her plate in her lap, and the man-servant stood in the
corner with his plate on the dresser. Having thus expressed their
respect for class distinctions, they felt no further obligation, but
they all helped equally in cooking and serving, talked together the
whole time, quarrelled, called each other names, and laughed at the old
man's stories told in the Venetian which I only wish I had understood
then as well as I did a few weeks later, when it was too late, for, with
the coming of spring, there were no storms to keep us from the _Panada_.
Just where the _Panada_ was I would not attempt to say; not from any
desire to keep it secret, which would be foolish, for Baedeker long
since found it out; but simply because I could not very well show the
way to a place I never could find for myself. I knew it was somewhere
round the corner from the _Piazza_, but I never rounded that corner
alone without becoming involved in a labyrinth of little _calli_. Nor
would I attempt to say why the artists chose it and why, because they
did, we should, for it was then the dirtiest, noisiest, and most crowded
_trattoria_ in Venice, though the last time I was there, years
afterwards, it was so spick and span, with another room and more waiters
to relieve the congestion, that I could not believe it really was the
_Panada_ and, with the inconsistency natural under the circumstances,
did not like it half so well.
No matter whether we got there early or late, the _Panada_ was always
full. As soon as we sat down we began our dinner by wiping our glasses,
plates, forks, spoons, and knives on our napkins, making such a habit of
it that I remember afterwards at a dinner-party in London catching
myself with my glass in my hand and stopping only just in time, while
Duveneck, on another occasion, got as far as the silver before he was
held up by the severe eye of his hostess. Probably it was because nobody
could hear what anybody said that everybody talked together. I cannot
recall a moment when stray musicians were not strumming on guitars and
mandolins, and the oyster man was not shrieking: "_Ostreche!_ _Fresche!
Ostreche!_" though nobody paid the least attention to him or ever bought
one of his oysters. And above the uproar was the continuous cry: "_Ecco
me! Vengo subito! Mezzo Verona! Due Calomai! Vengo subito! Ecco me!_" of
the waiters, who, though they never ceased to announce their coming,
were so slow to come that many diners brought a course or two in their
pockets to occupy them during the intervals.
The little Venetian at the next table was sure to produce a bunch of
radishes while he waited for his soup; on market days, when there was
more of a crowd than ever, few of the many baked potatoes eaten at
almost every table had seen the inside of the _Panada's_ oven; often the
shops that fill the Venetian _calli_ with the perpetual smell of frying
and where the brasses and the blue-and-white used to shine, were
patronized on the way--if dinner has to be collected in the streets, no
town, even in Italy, offers such facilities as Venice. From _Minestra_
to fruit and cheese, the Venetian in a few minutes' walk may pick up a
substantial dinner and carry it to the rooms or the street corner where
it is his habit to dine. Vance, the painter, who sometimes favoured us
at our table with his company, went further and, after he had taken off
his coat and put on his hat and emptied his pockets, seldom troubled the
establishment to provide him with more than a glass, a plate, a knife,
and a fork, for the price of a _quinto_ of Verona. His first, and as it
turned out his last, more extravagant order, was the event of the
season. The _padrone_ discussed it with him and a message was sent to
the cook that the dish was _di bistecca_. When it came it was not cooked
enough to suit Vance. A second was cooked too much. The third was done
to a turn. In the bill, however, were the three, and voices were
lowered, mandolins and guitars were stilled, the oyster man forgot his
shriek, during the five awful minutes when Vance and the _padrone_ had
it out. After that Vance made another _trattoria_ the richer by his
daily _quinto_.
J. and I had our five minutes with the _padrone_ later on once when
Rossi, our waiter, was so slow that our patience gave out and we shook
the dust of the _Panada_ from our feet. But we could not shake off
Rossi. He had arrived with our dinner just as we were vanishing from the
door and was made to pay for it. After that his leisure was spent in
trying to make us pay him back and he would appear at our bedroom door,
or waylay us on the _Riva_, or follow us into the _Orientale_, or run
us down in the _Piazza_, demanding the money as a right, begging for it
as a charity, reducing it by a _centesimo_ every time until we had only
to wait long enough for the debt to be wiped out. But this was at the
end of our stay in Venice, and months of dining at the _Panada_ had
passed before then.
III
[Illustration: Etching by Joseph Pennell
THE CAFÉ ORIENTALE, VENICE]
I would be as puzzled to explain the attraction of the _Orientale_ on
the _Riva_, unless it was the opportunity it offered for economy. In the
_Piazza_, at the _Quadri_ and _Florian's_, which are to the other
_cafés_ of Venice what St. Mark's is to the other churches, coffee was
twenty _centesimi_ and the waiter expected five more, but at the
_Orientale_ it was eighteen and the waiter was satisfied with the change
from twenty, which meant for us the saving every night of almost half a
cent. The _Orientale_ was by comparison as quiet and deserted as the
_Panada_ was crowded and noisy. Outside, tables looked upon the Lagoon
and the façade of _San Giorgio_, white in the night. In a big, new,
gilded room sailors and sergeants played checkers and more serious
Venetians worked out dismal problems in chess. But Duveneck's corner was
in the older, shabby, stuffy, low-ceilinged room, and having once
settled there we never wanted to move. As a rule we shared it with only
an elderly Englishman and his son who read the _Standard_ in the
opposite corner--after our race with them to the _café_, the winners
getting the one English paper first--and we were seldom intruded upon or
interrupted except by the occasional visit of the _caramei_ man with his
brass tray of candied fruit, impaled on thin sticks, like little birds
on a skewer, which led us into our one extravagance.
Had the old room been seedier and duller--dull our company never was--I
still would have seen it through the glamour of youth and thought it the
one place in which to study Venice and Venetian life. But nobody who
ever sat there with us could have complained of dulness so long as
Duveneck presided at our table. In Duveneck's case I cannot help
breaking my golden rule never to speak in print of the living--rules
were made to be broken. And why shouldn't I? I might as well not write
at all about our nights in Venice as to leave him out of them, he who
held them together and fashioned them into what they were. In the
_Atlantic_, as a makeshift, I called him Inglehart, the disguise under
which he figures in one of Howells's novels. But why not call him
boldly by his name when Inglehart is the thinnest and flimsiest of
masks, as friends of his were quick to tell me, and Duveneck means so
much more to all who know--and all who do not know are not worth
bothering about. It was only yesterday at San Francisco that the artists
of America gave an unmistakable proof of what their opinion of Duveneck
is now. In the Eighties "the boys" already thought as much of him and a
hundred times more.
Duveneck, as I remember him then--I have seen him but once since--was
large, fair, golden-haired, with long drooping golden moustache, of a
type apt to suggest indolence and indifference. As he lolled against the
red velvet cushions smoking his Cavour, enjoying the talk of others as
much as his own or more--for he had the talent of eloquent silence when
he chose to cultivate it--his eyes half shut, smiling with casual
benevolence, he may have looked to a stranger incapable of action, and
as if he did not know whether he was alone or not, and cared less. And
yet he had a big record of activity behind him, young as he was; he
always inspired activity in others, he was rarely without a large and
devoted following. He it was who drew "the boys" to Munich, then from
Munich to Florence, and then from Florence to Venice, and "the boys"
have passed into the history of American Art and the history of
Venice--wouldn't that give me away and explain who he was if I called
him Inglehart dozens of times over? And he also it was who packed them
off again before they learnt how easy it is to be content in Venice
without doing anything at all, though I used to fancy that he would have
been rather glad to indulge in that content himself. How far he was from
the pleasant Venetian habit of idling all day, his Venetian etchings, at
which he was working that spring--the etchings that on their appearance
in London were the innocent cause of a stirring chapter in _The Gentle
Art_--are an enduring proof. And I knew a good deal of what was going on
in his studio at the time, for J. spent many busy hours with him there,
while I, left to my own devices, stared industriously from the windows
of the _Casa Kirsch_, making believe I was gathering material, or
strolled along the _Riva_ pretending it was to market for my midday
meal, though the baker was almost next door, and the man from whom I
bought the little dried figs that nowhere are so dried and shrivelled up
as in Venice, was seldom more than a minute away. I can see now, when I
consider how my Venetian days were spent, that I came perilously near
to sinking to the deepest depths of Venetian idleness myself.
We were never alone with Duveneck at the _Orientale_. The American
Consul was sure to drop in, as he had for so many years that half his
occupation would have gone if he hadn't dropped in any longer. Martin
joined us because he loved to argue anybody into a temper and, as he was
an awful bore, succeeded with most people. He could drive me to proving
that white was black, to overturning all my most cherished idols, or to
forgetting my timidity and laying down the law upon any point of art he
might bring up. Duveneck alone refused to be roused and Martin, who
could not understand or accept his failure, was forever coming back,
making himself a bigger bore than ever, by trying again. But Shinn was
the only man I ever knew to put Duveneck into something like a temper,
and that was by asking him deferentially one night if he did not think
St. Mark's a very fine church--the next minute, however, calming him
down by inviting him out "in my gandler."
Arnold was as regular in attendance. He found the _café_ as comfortable
a place to sleep in as any other. Like Sancho Panza he had a talent for
sleeping. He had made his name and fame as one of the Harvard baseball
team in I will not say what year, and sleep had been his chief
occupation ever since. No end of stories were going the round of the
studios and _cafés_--he invited them without wanting it or meaning to.
He was supposed to be in Venice to study with Duveneck, at whose studio
he was said to arrive regularly at the same hour every morning. And as
regularly he was snoring before he had been sitting in front of his
easel for ten minutes. During his nap, Duveneck would come round and
shake him and before he slept again put a touch to the study and, as
Arnold promptly dozed off, would work on it until it was finished, and
unless it slid down the canvas with the quantity of bitumen Arnold
used--there was one story of the beautiful eyes in a beautiful portrait,
before they could be stopped, sliding into the chin of the pretty girl
who was posing--Arnold, waking up eventually, would carry off the
painting unconscious that he had not finished it himself. Nobody can say
how many Duvenecks are masquerading at home as Arnolds while their
owners wonder why Arnold has never since done any work a tenth as good.
The one thing that roused him was baseball, and he was in fine form on
the afternoons when he and a few other enthusiasts spent an hour or so
on the Lido for practice. The Englishmen did not believe in the
prodigies they heard of him as a baseball player. It wasn't easy for
anybody to believe that a man who was always tumbling off to sleep on
the slightest provocation could play anything decently. But I was told
that one day he was wide enough awake to be irritated, and he bet them a
dinner he could pitch the swell British cricketer among them three balls
not any one of which the Briton could catch. And on Easter Monday they
all went over to the Lido. The Briton asked for a high ball: it skimmed
along near the ground and then rose over his head as he stooped for it.
He asked for a low one: it came straight for his nose and, when he
dodged it, dropped and went between his legs. He asked for a medium one:
it curved away out to the right, he rushed for it, it curved back again
and took him in his manly bosom. The rest of the Britons and "the boys,"
they say, enjoyed the dinner more than he did. Such was the affair as it
was described to me and confirmed by gossip. I pretend to no authority
on a subject I understand so little as balls and the pitching of them.
A better contrast to Arnold could not have been found than the artist
with the part Spanish, part German name who called himself a Frenchman,
and who aimed to give his pose the mystery that crept, or bounded when
encouraged, into his incessant talk. I am afraid his chief encouragement
came from me. The others were as irritated by his dabbling in magic as
most of us had been in Rome by Forepaugh's theosophic adventures. But he
amused me; he did not deal in the prose of his brand of magic, the
Black, of which so much was beginning to be heard, and still more was to
be heard, in Paris. He was all innuendo and strange hints and whispered
secrets, and I-could-if-I-woulds. One of my recent winters had been
devoted, not to dabbling in magic, for which I have not the temperament,
but to reading the literature of magic or of all things psychical, and I
could then, though I could not now, have passed a fairly good
examination in the modern authorities, from Madame Blavatsky to Louis
Jacolliot. Therefore I proved a sympathetic listener and heard, for my
pains, of the revival of old religions, and above all of old rites, and
of his dignity as high-priest, a figure of mystery and command moving
here and there among shadowy disciples in shadowy sanctuaries. For one
sunk such fathoms deep in mystery he was surprisingly concerned for the
outward sign. Like Huysmans's hero, he believed in the significance of
the material background, entertaining me with a detailed description of
his apartment in Paris, and I have not yet lost the vision he permitted
me of a bedroom hung and painted with scarlet, and of himself enshrined
in it, magnificent in scarlet silk pajamas. Probably it was to deceive
the world that he carried a tiny paint-box. I never saw him open it.
But most constant of our little party was Jobbins, our one Englishman,
who came in late to the _Orientale_--where, or if, he dined none of us
could say--with the stool and canvas and paint-box he had been carrying
about all day from one _campo_, or _calle_, or _canale_, to another, in
search of a subject. Jobbins's trouble was that he had passed too
brilliantly through South Kensington to do the teaching for which he was
trained, or to be willing to do anything but paint great pictures the
subjects for which he could never find; his mistake was to want to paint
them in Venice where there is nothing to paint that has not been painted
hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times before; and his misfortune
was not to seek in adversity the comfort and hope which the philosopher
believes to be its reward. He had become, as a consequence, the weariest
man who breathed. It made me tired to look at him. Later, he was forced
to abandon his high ambition and he accepted a good post as teacher
somewhere in India. But he lived a short time to enjoy it and I am sure
he was homesick for Venice, and the search after the impossible, and the
old days when he was so abominably hard up that even J. and I were
richer. Of the complete crash by which we all gained--including the man
who got the Whistler painted on the back of a Jobbins panel--I still
have reminders in a brass plaque and bits of embroideries hung up on our
walls and brocades made into screens, which J. bought from him to save
the situation, at the risk of creating a new one from which somebody
would have to save us.
For all his weariness, Jobbins looked ridiculously young. He insisted
that this was what lost him his one chance of selling a picture. He was
painting in the Frari a subject which he vainly hoped was his own, when
an American family of three came and stared over his shoulder.
"Why, it's going to be a picture!" the small child discovered.
"And he such a boy too!" the mother marvelled.
"Then it can't be of any value," the father said in the loud cheerful
voice in which American and English tourists in Venice make their most
personal comments, convinced that nobody can understand, though every
other person they meet is a fellow countryman. A story used to be told
of Bunney at work in the _Piazza_, on his endless study of St. Mark's
for Ruskin, one bitter winter morning, when three English girls, wrapped
in furs, passed. One stopped behind him:
"Oh Maud! Ethel!" she called, "do come back and see what this poor
shivering old wretch is doing."
The talk in our corner of the _Orientale_ kept us in the past until I
began to fear that, just as some people grow prematurely grey, so J. and
I, not a year married, had prematurely reached the time for creeping in
close about the fire--or a _café_ table--and telling grey tales of what
we had been. It was a very different past from that which tourists were
then bullied by Ruskin into believing should alone concern them in
Venice--indeed, my greatest astonishment in this astonishing year was
that, while the people who were not artists but posed as knowing all
about art did nothing but quote Ruskin, artists never quoted him, and
never mentioned him except to show how little use they had for him. But
then, as I was beginning to find out, it is the privilege of the artist
to think what he knows and to say what he thinks. We were none of us
tourists at our little table, we were none of us seeing sights, being
far too busy doing the work we were in Venice to do; and no matter what
Ruskin and Baedeker taught, "the boys" gave the date which overshadowed
for us every other in Venetian history. Nothing that had happened in
Venice before or after counted, though "the boys" themselves were in
their turn a good deal overshadowed by Whistler, who had been there with
them for a while.