standing under St. Francis’s tree--the old gnarled umbrella-pine which
hung over the convent-wall above the water by the island’s edge. His
back was toward me, and he was looking out over the blue stretch of
lagoon into the distance, where Venice lay like a moving cloud at the
horizon’s edge; but a mist hid her from his eyes, and while I watched
him he turned back to the garden-bed and began pulling out weeds. The
gondoliers were already at the tiny pier when I came out.
“_Per Bacco_, Signore!” the elder explained. “Let us hasten back to
Venice and make up for the Lent we have had here. The brothers gave
us all they had, the holy ones--a little wine, a little bread, cheese
that couldn’t fatten one’s grandmother, and no macaroni--not so much as
would go round a baby’s tongue! For my part, I shall wait till I get to
heaven to fast, and pay some attention to my stomach while I have one.”
And he spat on his hands and looked toward Venice.
“And not an image in the chapel!” agreed the younger man. “Why, there
is nothing to pray to but the Signore Dio Himself! _Veramente_,
Signore, you are a witness that I speak nothing but the truth.”
The father superior and Leo appeared at this moment down the path
between the cypresses. The father gave me thanks and spoke in a
friendly way to the gondoliers, who for their part expressed a very
pretty gratitude in their broad Venetian patois, one of them saying
that the hospitality of the monks had been like paradise itself, and
the other hasting to agree with him.
The two monks did not speak to each other, but as the gondolier turned
the huge prow toward Venice, a long look passed between them--such a
look as a father and son might exchange if the son were going out to
war, while his father, remembering old campaigns, was yet bound to stay
at home.
It was a glorious day in early June; the last traces of the storm had
vanished from the serene, still waters; a vague curtain of heat and
mist hung and shimmered between ourselves and Venice; far away lay the
little islands in the lagoon, growing out of the water like strange
sea-flowers. Behind us stood San Francesco del Deserto, with long
reflections of its one pink tower and arrowy, straight cypresses, soft
under the blue water.
The father superior walked slowly back to the convent, his brown-clad
figure a shining shadow between the two black rows of cypresses.
Brother Leo waited till he had disappeared, then turned his eager eyes
toward Venice.
As we approached the city the milky sea of mist retreated, and her
towers sprang up to greet us. I saw a look in Brother Leo’s eyes that
was not fear or wholly pleasure; yet there was in it a certain awe and
a strange, tentative joy, as if something in him stretched out to greet
the world. He muttered half to himself:
“What a great world, and how many children _il Signore Dio_ has!”
When we reached the piazzetta, and he looked up at the amazing splendor
of the ducal palace, that building of soft yellow, with its pointed
arches and double loggias of white marble, he spread out both his hands
in an ecstasy.
“But what a miracle!” he cried. “What a joy to God and to His angels!
How I wish my brothers could see this! Do you not imagine that some
good man was taken to paradise to see this great building and brought
back here to copy it?”
“Chi lo sa?” I replied guardedly, and we landed by the column of the
Lion of St. Mark’s. That noble beast, astride on his pedestal, with
wings outstretched, delighted the young monk, who walked round and
round him.
“What a tribute to the saint!” he exclaimed. “Look, they have his
wings, too. Is not that faith?”
“Come,” I said, “let us go on to Saint Mark’s. I think you would like
to go there first; it is the right way to begin our pilgrimage.”
The piazza was not very full at that hour of the morning, and its
emptiness increased the feeling of space and size. The pigeons wheeled
and circled to and fro, a dazzle of soft plumage, and the cluster of
golden domes and sparkling minarets glittered in the sunshine like
flames. Every image and statue on St. Mark’s wavered in great lines of
light like a living pageant in a sea of gold.
Brother Leo said nothing as he stood in front of the three great
doorways that lead into the church. He stood quite still for a while,
and then his eyes fell on a beggar beside the pink and cream of the new
campanile, and I saw the wistfulness in his eyes suddenly grow as deep
as pain.
“Have you money, Signore?” he asked me. That seemed to him the only
question. I gave the man something, but I explained to Brother Leo that
he was probably not so poor as he looked.
“They live in rags,” I explained, “because they wish to arouse pity.
Many of them need not beg at all.”
“Is it possible?” asked Brother Leo, gravely; then he followed me under
the brilliant doorways of mosaic which lead into the richer dimness of
St. Mark’s.
When he found himself within that great incrusted jewel, he fell on
his knees. I think he hardly saw the golden roof, the jeweled walls,
and the five lifted domes full of sunshine and old gold, or the dark
altars, with their mysterious, rich shimmering. All these seemed to
pass away beyond the sense of sight; even I felt somehow as if those
great walls of St. Mark’s were not so great as I had fancied. Something
greater was kneeling there in an old habit and with bare feet, half
broken-hearted because a beggar had lied.
I found myself regretting the responsibility laid on my shoulders.
Why should I have been compelled to take this strangely innocent,
sheltered boy, with his fantastic third-century ideals, out into the
shoddy, decorative, unhappy world? I even felt a kind of anger at the
simplicity of his soul. I wished he were more like other people; I
suppose because he had made me wish for a moment that I was less like
them.
“What do you think of Saint Mark’s?” I asked him as we stood once more
in the hot sunshine outside, with the strutting pigeons at our feet and
wheeling over our heads.
Brother Leo did not answer for a moment, then he said:
“I think Saint Mark would feel it a little strange. You see, I do not
think he was a great man in the world, and the great in paradise--”
He stooped and lifted a pigeon with a broken foot nearer to some corn
a passer-by was throwing for the birds. “I cannot think,” he finished
gravely, “that they care very much for palaces in paradise: I should
think every one had them there or else--nobody.”
I was surprised to see the pigeons that wheeled away at my approach
allow the monk to handle them, but they seemed unaware of his touch.
“Poverino!” he said to the one with the broken foot. “Thank God that He
has given you wings!”
Brother Leo spoke to every child he met, and they all answered him as
if there was a secret freemasonry between them; but the grown-up people
he passed with troubled eyes.
“It seems strange to me,” he said at last, “not to speak to these
brothers and sisters of ours, and yet I see all about me that they do
not salute one another.”
“They are many, and they are all strangers,” I tried to explain.
“Yes, they are very many,” he said a little sadly. “I had not known
that there were so many people in the world, and I thought that in a
Christian country they would not be strangers.”
I took another gondola by the nearest bridge, and we rowed to the
Frari. I hardly knew what effect that great church, with its famous
Titian, would have upon him. A group of tourists surrounded the
picture. I heard a young lady exclaiming:
“My! but I’d like her veil! Ain’t she cute, looking round it that way?”
[Illustration: Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by C. W.
Chadwick
“HE STOOD QUITE STILL FOR A WHILE, AND THEN HIS EYES FELL ON A BEGGAR”]
Brother Leo did not pause; he passed as if by instinct toward the
chapel on the right which holds the softest, tenderest of Bellinis.
There, before the Madonna with her four saints and two small attendant
cherubs, he knelt again, and his eyes filled with tears. I do not think
he heard the return of the tourists, who were rather startled at seeing
him there. The elder lady remarked that he might have some infectious
disease, and the younger that she did not think much of Bellini, anyway.
He knelt for some time, and I had not the heart to disturb him; indeed,
I had no wish to, either, for Bellini’s “Madonna” is my favorite
picture, and that morning I saw in it more than I had ever seen before.
It seemed to me as if that triumphant, mellow glow of the great master
was an eternal thing, and as if the saints and their gracious Lady,
with the stalwart, standing Child upon her knee, were more real than
flesh and blood, and would still be more real when flesh and blood had
ceased to be. I never have recaptured the feeling; perhaps there was
something infectious about Brother Leo, after all. He made no comment
on the Madonna, nor did I expect one, for we do not need to assert that
we find the object of our worship beautiful; but I was amused at his
calm refusal to look upon the great Titian as a Madonna at all.
“No, no,” he said firmly. “This one is no doubt some good and gracious
lady, but the Madonna! Signore, you jest. Or, if the painter thought
so, he was deceived by the devil. Yes, that is very possible. The
father has often told us that artists are exposed to great temptations:
their eyes see paradise before their souls have reached it, and that is
a great danger.”
I said no more, and we passed out into the street again. I felt ashamed
to say that I wanted my luncheon, but I did say so, and it did not seem
in the least surprising to Brother Leo; he merely drew out a small
wallet and offered me some bread, which he said the father had given
him for our needs.
I told him that he must not dream of eating that; he was to come and
dine with me at my hotel. He replied that he would go wherever I
liked, but that really he would prefer to eat his bread unless indeed
we were so fortunate as to find a beggar who would like it. However,
we were not so fortunate, and I was compelled to eat my exceedingly
substantial five-course luncheon while my companion sat opposite me and
ate his half-loaf of black bread with what appeared to be appetite and
satisfaction.
He asked me a great many questions about what everything in the room
was used for and what everything cost, and appeared very much surprised
at my answers.
“This, then,” he said, “is not like all the other houses in Venice? Is
it a special house--perhaps for the English only?”
I explained to him that most houses contained tables and chairs; that
this, being a hotel, was in some ways even less furnished than a
private house, though doubtless it was larger and was arranged with a
special eye to foreign requirements.
“But the poor--they do not live like this?” Leo asked. I had to own
that the poor did not. “But the people here are rich?” Leo persisted.
“Well, yes, I suppose so, tolerably well off,” I admitted.
“How miserable they must be!” exclaimed Leo, compassionately. “Are they
not allowed to give away their money?”
This seemed hardly the way to approach the question of the rich and the
poor, and I do not know that I made it any better by an after-dinner
exposition upon capital and labor. I finished, of course, by saying
that if the rich gave to the poor to-day, there would still be rich
and poor to-morrow. It did not sound very convincing to me, and it did
nothing whatever to convince Brother Leo.
“That is perhaps true,” he said at last. “One would not wish, however,
to give all into unready hands like that poor beggar this morning who
knew no better than to pretend in order to get more money. No, that
would be the gift of a madman. But could not the rich use their money
in trust for the poor, and help and teach them little by little till
they learned how to share their labor and their wealth? But you know
how ignorant am I who speak to you. It is probable that this is what
is already being done even here now in Venice and all over the world.
It would not be left to a little one like me to think of it. What an
idea for the brothers at home to laugh at!”
[Illustration: Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by R.
Varley
“‘IT SEEMS STRANGE TO ME NOT TO SPEAK TO THESE BROTHERS AND SISTERS’”]
“Some people do think these things,” I admitted.
“But do not all?” asked Brother Leo, incredulously.
“No, not all,” I confessed.
“Andiamo!” said Leo, rising resolutely. “Let us pray to the Madonna.
What a vexation it must be to her and to all the blessed saints to
watch the earth! It needs the patience of the Blessed One Himself, to
bear it.”
In the Palazzo Giovanelli there is one of the loveliest of Giorgiones.
It is called “His Family,” and it represents a beautiful nude woman
with her child and her lover. It seemed to me an outrage that this
young brother should know nothing of the world, of life. I was
determined that he should see this picture. I think I expected Brother
Leo to be shocked when he saw it. I know I was surprised that he
looked at it--at the serene content of earth, its exquisite ultimate
satisfaction--a long time. Then he said in an awed voice:
“It is so beautiful that it is strange any one in all the world can
doubt the love of God who gave it.”
“Have you ever seen anything more beautiful; do you believe there is
anything more beautiful?” I asked rather cruelly.
“Yes,” said Brother Leo, very quietly; “the love of God is more
beautiful, only that cannot be painted.”
After that I showed him no more pictures, nor did I try to make him
understand life. I had an idea that he understood it already rather
better than I did.
When I took him back to the piazza, it was getting on toward sunset,
and we sat at one of the little tables at Florian’s, where I drank
coffee. We heard the band and watched the slow-moving, good-natured
Venetian crowd, and the pigeons winging their perpetual flight.
All the light of the gathered day seemed to fall on the great golden
church at the end of the piazza. Brother Leo did not look at it very
much; his attention was taken up completely in watching the faces of
the crowd, and as he watched them I thought to read in his face what
he had learned in that one day in Venice--whether my mission had been
a success or a failure; but, though I looked long at that simple and
childlike face, I learned nothing.
What is so mysterious as the eyes of a child?
But I was not destined to part from Brother Leo wholly in ignorance.
It was as if, in his open kindliness of nature, he would not leave me
with any unspoken puzzle between us. I had been his friend and he told
me, because it was the way things seemed to him, that I had been his
teacher.
We stood on the piazzetta. I had hired a gondola with two men to row
him back; the water was like beaten gold, and the horizon the softest
shade of pink.
“This day I shall remember all my life,” he said, “and you in my
prayers with all the world--always, always. Only I should like to tell
you that that little idea of mine, which the father told me he had
spoken to you about, I see now that it is too large for me. I am only
a very poor monk. I should think I must be the poorest monk God has in
all His family of monks. If He can be patient, surely I can. And it
came over me while we were looking at all those wonderful things, that
if money had been the way to save the world, Christ himself would have
been rich. It was stupid of me. I did not remember that when he wanted
to feed the multitude, he did not empty the great granaries that were
all his, too; he took only five loaves and two small fishes; but they
were enough.
“We little ones can pray, and God can change His world. Speriamo!” He
smiled as he gave me his hand--a smile which seemed to me as beautiful
as anything we had seen that day in Venice. Then the high-prowed, black
gondola glided swiftly out over the golden waters with the little brown
figure seated in the smallest seat. He turned often to wave to me, but
I noticed that he sat with his face away from Venice.
He had turned back to San Francesco del Deserto, and I knew as I looked
at his face that he carried no single small regret in his eager heart.
[Illustration: EX-SENATOR GEORGE F. EDMUNDS
Born in Vermont February 1, 1828: Member of the Vermont Legislature
1854-59 and 1861-62; United States Senator from Vermont 1866-91; only
surviving member of the Electoral Commission formed in 1877 to settle
the disputed Hayes-Tilden election.]
[Illustration: THE CENTURY’S AFTER-THE-WAR SERIES]
ANOTHER VIEW OF “THE HAYES-TILDEN CONTEST”
A REPLY TO COLONEL WATTERSON IN THE MAY “CENTURY”
BY EX-SENATOR GEORGE F. EDMUNDS
The sole surviving member of the Electoral Commission
The rather astonishing article of Mr. Henry Watterson in the May number
of ~The Century~ opens to me the opportunity and the duty of
giving my recollections of such of the inside history, as well as of
the outside, as came to my knowledge at the time, in connection with
the Hayes-Tilden contest for the Presidency. I believe that the time
_has_ come when, among fair-minded and intelligent Americans who will
investigate the public and printed documents and papers in existence
on the subject, there will be few divergent opinions touching the
justice and lawfulness of the election of Mr. Hayes. They will find
that he was lawfully elected and instituted to the office by fair and
lawful means. I wish that such investigators could have the benefit
of the correspondence and other papers to which Mr. Watterson refers,
as well as of all other documents and papers touching the subject.
All the papers relating to the action of the Senate committee on the
Electoral Bill, and of our conferences with the House committee, are
in my possession and are open to the examination of the student, the
politician, and the historian.
In the year 1876 many of the States which had been engaged in the war
for secession were still in a condition of unrest, and their Negro
citizens, as well as many whites who had supported the United States
and were lawfully in those of the Southern States under consideration
(and opprobriously called “carpet-baggers”), were under great
apprehension of personal danger. The Negro citizens in many instances
had suffered, and they were continually in danger of violence from the
efforts of a secret association known as “the Ku-Klux Klan” to prevent
their voting as they were entitled to do under the provisions of the
Fifteenth Amendment. In this state of things small detachments of the
army of the United States were stationed in various places where the
greatest danger of intimidation and violence appeared to exist. The
civil operations of the Government required the presence of these
troops in such places, not only to assist the state authorities in
preserving the peace at a national election when there should be one,
but also to protect the operations of the United States in carrying on
its share of the civil government, such as customs, internal revenues,
post-offices, etc. I suppose everybody will agree that the army of the
United States must be somewhere, and has a right to be somewhere within
the country; and nobody has yet maintained that any State has a right
to exclude their presence. I think not a soldier interfered with any
right or peaceable conduct, or was present at any polling-place in the
late “Confederate States” in the election of 1876. When the elections
came on nothing but violence could prevent either whites or Negroes
who were lawfully entitled to vote from doing so in peace, as in most
instances they did. In the States where Negro citizens were in great
majority the Hayes ticket, naturally, should have prevailed. In some of
them it did prevail, and the necessary certificates of the result were
sent to the president of the Senate, as required by the Constitution.
The “grandfather” legislation had not yet been invented.
The election was very close; and immediately agents of the Democratic
party were sent to South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana for _some_
purpose. They were at first, apparently, under the direction of Colonel
Pelton, a nephew of Mr. Tilden, and by Pelton were authorized, in
substance and in effect, to bribe some of the canvassing boards to
make false returns of the choice of Tilden electors instead of those
electors who had been actually chosen on the Hayes ticket, or to bribe
some of the Republican electors. This scheme very early became known to
the Republican National Committee, and steps were immediately taken to
send Republican gentlemen, well known and of high standing, to those
States where, it was feared, efforts at bribery were being, or were
to be, attempted, in order to preserve, so far as lawfully could be
done, the real results of the election. Among these men so sent were,
as stated by Mr. Watterson, John Sherman, Stanley Matthews, James A.
Garfield, William M. Evarts, John A. Logan, and some others, one of
whom, as I remember, was Senator Howe of Wisconsin, a fine lawyer and
a man of absolutely upright private and public life. As everybody
knows who reads or remembers the history of those times, none of the
gentlemen mentioned would be directly or indirectly a party to intrigue
or dishonesty of any kind. They found on investigation that the Hayes
electors had been duly chosen and that, unless some one of them, after
being elected on the Hayes ticket, should be induced to dishonor
himself by Peltonian expedients, all would vote for President Hayes.
The corrupt dealers in canvassing boards and votes apparently sought a
market only with the Democrats, who, as Mr. Watterson says, declined to
buy.
When the Republicans before mentioned returned to Washington I
learned from more than one of them, in relating their experiences at
New Orleans, that the States had truly gone Republican and that the
only danger, if any, was the exertion of evil influences to change
the result. The actual experiences related by Mr. Watterson in this
connection illustrate and confirm what I have said. The political
“book-makers” were undoubtedly on hand, but that they were acting under
the authority of any of the Returning Board there was no proof. There
are speculators in politics as well as in stocks, and they often act
without having a principal behind them or any principle within them.
I remember an instance occurring in the Senate at Washington when a
bill of much financial importance was under consideration. I learned
afterward that a lobbyist whom I did not know had contracted my vote in
favor of the bill with one interest, and my vote against the same bill
in favor of the opposing interest. He had sold me to both sides, and
whichever side lost he would get his lobbyist reward.
Mr. Watterson quotes from a speech of Mr. Abram S. Hewitt, in which Mr.
Hewitt is made to say that the vote of Louisiana was offered to him
for money and that he declined to buy it. So far Mr. Hewitt of course
personally knew the truth of what he was saying; but when he says, “The
vote of that State was sold for money,” he could not have stated what
he personally knew, though he doubtless believed what he said. He was
careful not to say that he personally knew of the sale of the vote of
Louisiana, nor did he refer to any evidence of it. He was evidently at
New Orleans when, as he says, the vote of that State was offered him
for money. Why did he not, then and there, in the presence of the body
of the gentlemen of both parties mentioned by Mr. Watterson, make known
the guilty person, and so explode and destroy the corruption which was
contemplated and begun by Colonel Pelton, nephew of Mr. Tilden, at the
Democratic headquarters in New York and which compelled the sending of
Republican gentlemen to New Orleans?
I was invited to go there as one of the Republican Committee, but I
thought it better to remain in Washington and help to the best of my
ability in framing and passing a law in which the Democratic House
of Representatives and the Republican Senate could agree, and which
would execute the letter and spirit of the Constitution and preserve
the people of the whole United States from the apparent great danger
of disorder, tumult--and possibly anarchy--likely to arise from the
fire of party passion if a clear and exact law of procedure and final
determination should not be enacted speedily.