He lost no time in going to work in the Marcian Library, and he early
applied to the Austrian authorities for leave to have transcripts made
in the archives. The permission was negotiated by the American consul
(then a young painter of the name of Ferris), who reported a mechanical
facility on the part of the authorities,--as if, he said, they were used
to obliging American historians of Venice. The foreign tyranny which
cast a pathetic glamour over the romantic city had certainly not
appeared to grudge such publicity as Elmore wished to give her heroic
memories, though it was then at its most repressive period, and formed a
check upon the whole life of the place. The tears were hardly yet dry in
the despairing eyes that had seen the French fleet sail away from the
Lido, after Solferino, without firing a shot in behalf of Venice; but
Lombardy, the Duchies, the Sicilies, had all passed to Sardinia, and the
Pope alone represented the old order of native despotism in Italy. At
Venice the Germans seemed tranquilly awaiting the change which should
destroy their system with the rest; and in the meantime there had
occurred one of those impressive pauses, as notable in the lives of
nations as of men, when, after the occurrence of great events, the
forces of action and endurance seem to be gathering themselves against
the stress of the future. The quiet was almost consciously a truce and
not a peace; and this local calm had drawn into it certain elements that
picturesquely and sentimentally heightened the charm of the place. It
was a refuge for many exiled potentates and pretenders; the gondolier
pointed out on the Grand Canal the palaces of the Count of Chambord, the
Duchess of Parma, and the Infante of Spain; and one met these fallen
princes in the squares and streets, bowing with distinct courtesy to any
that chose to salute them. Every evening the Piazza San Marco was filled
with the white coats of the Austrian officers, promenading to the
exquisite military music which has ceased there forever; the patrol
clanked through the footways at all hours of the night, and the lagoon
heard the cry of the sentinel from fort to fort, and from gunboat to
gunboat. Through all this the demonstration of the patriots went on,
silent, ceaseless, implacable, annulling every alien effort at gayety,
depopulating the theatres, and desolating the ancient holidays.
There was something very fine in this, as a spectacle, Elmore said to
his young wife, and he had to admire the austere self-denial of a people
who would not suffer their tyrants to see them happy; but they secretly
owned to each other that it was fatiguing. Soon after coming to Venice
they had made some acquaintance among the Italians through Mr. Ferris,
and had early learned that the condition of knowing Venetians was not to
know Austrians. It was easy and natural for them to submit,
theoretically. As Americans, they must respond to any impulse for
freedom, and certainly they could have no sympathy with such a system as
that of Austria. By whatever was sacred in our own war upon slavery,
they were bound to abhor oppression in every form. But it was hard to
make the application of their hatred to the amiable-looking people whom
they saw everywhere around them in the quality of tyrants, especially
when their Venetian friends confessed that personally they liked the
Austrians. Besides, if the whole truth must be told, they found that
their friendship with the Italians was not always of the most
penetrating sort, though it had a superficial intensity that for a while
gave the effect of lasting cordiality. The Elmores were not quite able
to decide whether the pause of feeling at which they arrived was through
their own defect or not. Much was to be laid to the difference of race,
religion, and education; but something, they feared, to the personal
vapidity of acquaintances whose meridional liveliness made them yawn,
and in whose society they did not always find compensation for the
sacrifices they made for it.
"But it is right," said Elmore. "It would be a sort of treason to
associate with the Austrians. We owe it to the Venetians to let them see
that our feelings are with them."
"Yes," said his wife pensively.
"And it is better for us, as Americans abroad, during this war, to be
retired."
"Well, we are retired," said Mrs. Elmore.
"Yes, there is no doubt of that," he returned.
They laughed, and made what they could of chance American acquaintances
at the _caffès_. Elmore had his history to occupy him, and doubtless he
could not understand how heavy the time hung upon his wife's hands. They
went often to the theatre, and every evening they went to the Piazza,
and ate an ice at Florian's. This was certainly amusement; and routine
was so pleasant to his scholarly temperament that he enjoyed merely
that. He made a point of admitting his wife as much as possible into his
intellectual life; he read her his notes as fast as he made them, and he
consulted her upon the management of his theme, which, as his research
extended, he found so vast that he was forced to decide upon a much
lighter treatment than he had at first intended. He had resolved upon a
history which should be presented in a series of biographical studies,
and he was so much interested in this conclusion, and so charmed with
the advantages of the form as they developed themselves, that he began
to lose the sense of social dulness, and ceased to imagine it in his
wife.
A sort of indolence of the sensibilities, in fact, enabled him to endure
_ennui_ that made her frantic, and he was often deeply bored without
knowing it at the time, or without a reasoned suffering. He suffered as
a child suffers, simply, almost ignorantly: it was upon reflection that
his nerves began to quiver with retroactive anguish. He was also able to
idealize the situation when his wife no longer even wished to do so. His
fancy cast a poetry about these Venetian friends, whose conversation
displayed the occasional sparkle of Ollendorff-English on a dark ground
of lagoon-Italian, and whose vivid smiling and gesticulation she
wearied herself in hospitable efforts to outdo. To his eyes their
historic past clothed them with its interest, and the long patience of
their hope and hatred under foreign rule ennobled them, while to hers
they were too often only tiresome visitors, whose powers of silence and
of eloquence were alike to be dreaded. It did not console her as it did
her husband to reflect that they probably bored the Italians as much in
their turn. When a young man, very sympathetic for literature and the
Americans, spent an evening, as it seemed to her, in crying nothing but
"Per Bácco!" she owned that she liked better his oppressor, who once
came by chance, in the figure of a young lieutenant, and who unbuckled
his wife, as he called his sword, and, putting her in a corner, sat up
on a chair in the middle of the room and sang like a bird, and then told
ghost-stories. The songs were out of Heine, and they reminded her of her
girlish enthusiasm for German. Elmore was troubled at the lieutenant's
visit, and feared it would cost them all their Italian friends; but she
said boldly that she did not care; and she never even tried to believe
that the life they saw in Venice was comparable to that of their little
college town at home, with its teas and picnics, and simple, easy social
gayeties. There she had been a power in her way; she had entertained,
and had helped to make some matches: but the Venetians ate nothing, and
as for young people, they never saw each other but by stealth, and their
matches were made by their parents on a money-basis. She could not adapt
herself to this foreign life; it puzzled her, and her husband's
conformity seemed to estrange them, as far as it went. It took away her
spirit, and she grew listless and dull. Even the history began to lose
its interest in her eyes; she doubted if the annals of such a people as
she saw about her could ever be popular.
There were other things to make them melancholy in their exile. The war
at home was going badly, where it was going at all. The letters now
never spoke of any term to it; they expressed rather the dogged patience
of the time when it seemed as if there could be no end, and indicated
that the country had settled into shape about it, and was pushing
forward its other affairs as if the war did not exist. Mrs. Elmore felt
that the America which she had left had ceased to be. The letters were
almost less a pleasure than a pain, but she always tore them open, and
read them with eager unhappiness. There were miserable intervals of days
and even weeks when no letters came, and when the Reuter telegrams in
the Gazette of Venice dribbled their vitriolic news of Northern
disaster through a few words or lines, and Galignani's long columns were
filled with the hostile exultation and prophecy of the London press.