Naked they were equals. That was the way they came into the world and
that's the way they would go out. And yet within the hour my lord would
be back to his muffins and silver service, with two flunkies behind
his chair, and William would be swabbing out a boat or poling me home
through the pond lilies.
But why?--I kept asking myself. A totally idiotic and illogical
question, of course. Both were of an age; both would be a joy to a
sculptor looking for modern gods with which to imitate the Greek ones.
Both were equal in the sight of their Maker. Both had served their
country--my lord, I learned later, being one of the first to draw a bead
on Spion Kop close enough to be of any use--and both were honest--at
least William was--and the lord must have been.
There is no answer--never can be. And yet the picture of the two as they
stood glistening in the sunlight continues to rise in my memory, and
with it always comes this same query--one which will never down--Why
should there be the difference?
*****
But the summer is moving on apace. There is another Inn and another
William--or rather, there was one several hundred years ago before he
went off crusading. It is an old resort of mine. Seven years now has
old Leah filled my breakfast cup with a coffee that deserves a hymn of
praise in its honor. I like it hot--boiling, blistering hot, and the
old woman brings it on the run, her white sabots clattering across the
flower-smothered courtyard. During all these years I have followed
with reverent fingers not only the slopes of its roof but the loops of
swinging clematis that crowd its balconies and gabies as well. I say
“my” because I have known this Inn of William the Conqueror long
enough to include it in the list of the many good ones I frequent
over Europe--the Bellevue, for instance, at Dordrecht, over against
Papendrecht (I shall be there in another month). And the Britannia in
Venice, and I hope still a third in unknown Athens--unknown to me--my
objective point this year.
This particular Inn with the roof and the clematis, is at Dives, twenty
miles from Trouville on the coast. You never saw anything like it, and
you never will again. I hold no brief for my old friend Le Remois, the
proprietor, but the coffee is not the only thing over which grateful
men chant hymns. There is a kitchen, resplendent in polished brass,
with three French chefs in attendance, and a two-century-old spit for
roasting. There is the wine-cellar, in which cobwebs and not labels
record the age and the vintage; there is a dining-room--three of
them--with baronial fireplaces, sixteenth-century furniture, and linen
and glass to match--to say nothing of tapestries, Spanish leathers,
shrines, carved saints, ivories, and pewter--the whole a sight to turn
bric-a-brac fiends into burglars--not a difficult thing by the way--and
then, of course--there is the bill!
“Where have you been, M. Le Rémois?” asked a charming woman.
“To church, Madame.”
“Did you say your prayers?”
“Yes, Madame,” answered this good boni-face, with a twinkle.
“What did you pray for?”
“I said--'Oh, Lord!--do not make me rich, but place me _next_ to the
rich'”--and he kept on his way rubbing his hands and chuckling. And yet
I must say it is worth the price.
I have no need of a William here--nor of anybody else. The water for my
cups is within my reach; convenient umbrellas on movable pedestals can
be shoved into place; a sheltered back porch hives for the night all my
paraphernalia and unfinished sketches, and a step or two brings me to
a table where a broiled lobster fresh from the sea and a peculiar peach
ablaze in a peculiar sauce--the whole washed down by a pint of--(No--you
can't have the brand--there were only seven bottles left when I paid my
bill)--and besides I am going back--help to ease the cares that beset a
painter's life.
But even this oasis of a garden, hemmed about as if by the froth of
Trouville and the suds of Cabourg; through which floats the gay life
of Paris resplendent in toilets never excelled or _exceeded_
anywhere--cannot keep me from Holland very long. And it is a pity too,
for of late years I have been looked upon as a harmless fixture at the
Inn--so much so that men and women pass and repass my easel, or
look over my shoulder while I work without a break in their
confidences--quite as if I was a deaf, dumb, and blind waiter, or
twin-brother to old Coco the cockatoo, who has surveyed the same scene
from his perch near the roof for the past thirty years.
None of these unconscious ear-droppings am I going to
betray--delightful, startling--_improper_, if you must have it--as some
of them were. Not the most interesting, at all events, for I promised
her I wouldn't--but there is no question as to the diversion obtained by
keeping the latch-string of your ears on the outside.
None of all this ever drips into my auricles in Holland. A country so
small that they build dikes to keep the inhabitants from being spilt
off the edge, is hardly the place for a scandal--certainly not in stolid
Dordrecht or in that fly-speck of a Papendrecht, whose dormer windows
peer over the edge of the dike as if in mortal fear of another
inundation. And yet, small as it is, it is still big enough for me to
approach it--the fly-speck, of course--by half a dozen different routes.
I can come by boat from Rotterdam. Fop Smit owns and runs it--(no kin of
mine, more's the pity)--or by train from Amsterdam; or by carriage from
any number of 'dams, 'drechts, and 'bergs. Or I can tramp it on foot, or
be wheeled in on a dog-wagon. I have tried them all, and know. Being now
a staid old painter and past such foolishness, I take the train.
Toot! Toot!--and I am out on the platform, through the door of the
station and aboard the one-horse tram that wiggles and swings over the
cobble-scoured streets of Dordrecht, and so on to the Bellevue.
Why I stop at the Bellevue (apart from it being one of my Inns) is that
from its windows I cannot only watch the life of the tawny-colored,
boat-crowded Maas, but see every curl of smoke that mounts from the
chimneys of Papendrecht strung along its opposite bank. My dear friend,
Herr Boudier, of years gone by, has retired from its ownership, but
his successor, Herr Teitsma, is as hearty in his welcome. Peter, my old
boatman, too, pulled his last oar some two years back, and one “Bop”
takes his place. There is another “p” and an “e” tacked on to Bop, but I
have eliminated the unnecessary and call him “Bob” for short. They
made Bob out of what was left of Peter, but they left out all trace of
William.
This wooden-shod curiosity is anywhere from seventy to one hundred and
fifty years old, gray, knock-kneed, bent in the back, and goes to sleep
standing up--_and stays asleep_. He is the exact duplicate of the
tramp in the comic opera of “Miss Hook of Holland”--except that the
actor-sleeper occasionally topples over and has to be braced up. Bob is
past-master of the art and goes it alone, without propping of any kind.
He is the only man in Dordrecht, or Papendrecht, or the country round
about, who can pull a boat and speak English. He says so, and I am
forced not only to believe him, but to hire him. He wants it in advance,
too--having had some experience with “painter-man,” he explains to Herr
Teitsma.
I shall, of course, miss my delightful William, but I am accustomed to
that. And, then, again, while Bob asleep is an interesting physiological
study, Bob awake adds to the gayety of nations, samples of which crowd
about my easel, Holland being one of the main highways of the earth.
I have known Dort and the little 'drecht across the way for some fifteen
years, five of which have slipped by since I last opened my umbrella
along its quaint quays. To my great joy nothing has changed. The old
potato boat still lies close to the quay, under the overhanging elms.
The same dear old man and his equally dear old wife still make their
home beneath its hipped roof. I know, for it is here I lunch, the cargo
forming the chief dish, followed by a saucer of stewed currants, a cup
of coffee--(more hymns here)--and a loaf of bread from the baker's. The
old Groote Kirk still towers aloft--the highest building in Holland,
they say; the lazy, red-sailed luggers drift up and down, their decks
gay with potted plants; swiss curtains at the cabin windows, the wife
holding the tiller while the man trims the sail. The boys still clatter
over the polished cobbles--an aggressive mob when school lets out--and a
larger crop, I think, than in the years gone by, and with more noise--my
umbrella being the target. Often a spoilt fish or half a last week's
cabbage comes my way, whereupon Bob awakes to instant action with a
consequent scattering, the bravest and most agile making faces from
behind wharf spiles and corners. Peter used to build a fence of oars
around me to keep them off, but Bob takes it out in swearing.
Only once did he silence them. They were full grown, this squad, and had
crowded the old man against a tree under which I had backed as shelter
from a passing shower. There came a blow straight from the shoulder, a
sprawling boy, and Bob was in the midst of them, his right sleeve rolled
up, showing a full-rigged ship tattooed in India ink. What poured from
him I learned afterward was an account of his many voyages to the Arctic
and around the Horn, as the label on his arm proved--an experience
which, he shouted, would be utilized in pounding them up into fish bait
if they did not take to their heels. After that he always went to sleep
with one eye open, the boys keeping awake with two--and out of my way--a
result which interested me the more.
If my Luigi was not growing restless in my beloved Venice (it is
wonderful how large a portion of the earth I own) I would love to pass
the rest of my summer along these gray canals, especially since Bob's
development brings a daily surprise. Only to-day I caught sight of him
half hidden in an angle of a wall, surrounded by a group of little tots
who were begging him for paper pin-wheels which a vender had stopped to
sell, an infinitesimal small coin the size of a cuff button purchasing
a dozen or more. When I again looked up from a canvas each tot had a
pin-wheel, and later on Bob, that much poorer in pocket, sneaked back
and promptly went to sleep.
But even Bob's future beatification cannot hold me. I yearn for the
white, blinding light and breathless lagoons, and all that makes Venice
the Queen City of the World.
Luigi meets me _inside_ the station. It takes a _soldo_ to get in, and
Luigi has but few of them, but he is always there. His gondola is
moored to the landing steps outside--a black swan of a boat, all morocco
cushions and silk fringes; the product of a thousand years of tinkering
by the most fastidious and luxurious people of ancient or modern times,
and still to-day the most comfortable conveyance known to man.'
Hurry up, you who have never known a gondola or a Luigi! A
vile-smelling, chuggity-chug is forcing its way up every crooked canal,
no matter how narrow. Two Venetian shipyards are hammering away on their
hulls or polishing their motors. Soon the cost of production will drop
to that of a gondola. Then look out! There are eight thousand machinists
in the Arsenal earning but five francs a day, any one of whom can learn
to run a motor boat in a week, thus doubling their wages. Worse yet--the
world is getting keener every hour for speedy things. I may be wrong--I
hope and pray I am--but it seems to me that the handwriting is already
on the wall. “This way to the Museo Civico,” it reads--“if you want
to find a gondola of twenty-five years ago.” As for the Luigis and the
Esperos--they will then have given up the unequal struggle.
The only hope rests with the Venetians themselves. They have restored
the scarred Library, and are rebuilding the Campanile, with a reverence
for the things which made their past glorious that commands the respect
of the artistic world. The gondola is as much a part of Venice as its
sunsets, pigeons, and palaces. Let them by special license keep the
Tragfaetti intact, with their shuttles of gondolas crossing bade and
forth--then, perhaps, the catastrophe may be deferred for a few decades.
*****
As it was in Dort and Papendrecht so it is in Venice. Except these
beastly, vile-smelling boats there is nothing new, thank God. Everything
else is faded, weather-worn, and old, everything filled with sensuous
beauty--sky, earth, lagoon, garden wall, murmuring ripples--the same
wonderful Venice that thrills its lovers the world over.
And the old painters are still here--Walter Brown, Bunce, Bompard,
Faulkner, and the rest--successors of Ziem and Rico--men who have loved
her all their lives. And with them a new band of devotees--Monet
and Louis Aston Knight among them. “For a few days,” they said in
explanation, but it was weeks before they left--only to return, I
predict, as Jong as they can hold a brush.
As for Luigi and me--we keep on our accustomed way, leading our
accustomed lives. Seventeen years now since he bent to his oar behind my
cushions--twenty-six in all since I began to idle about her canals. It
is either the little canal next the Public Garden, or up the Giudecca,
or under the bronze horses of San Marco; or it may be we are camped out
in the Piazzetta before the Porta della Carta; or perhaps up the narrow
canal of San Rocco, or in the Fruit Market near the Rialto while the
boats unload their cargoes.
All old subjects and yet ever new; each has been painted a thousand
times, and in as many different lights and perspectives. And yet each
canvas differs from its fellows as do two ripples or two morning skies.
For weeks we drift about. One day Carlotta, the fishwife up the
Fondamenta della Pallada, makes us our coffee; the next Luigi buys it
of some smart café on the Piazza. This with a roll, a bit of Gorgonzola,
and a bunch of grapes, or half a dozen figs, is our luncheon, to which
is added two curls of blue smoke, one from Luigi's pipe and the other
from my cigarette. Then we fall to work again.
But this will never do! While I have been loafing with Luigi not only
has the summer slipped away, but the cool winds of October have crept
down from the Alps. There are fresh subjects to tackle--some I have
never seen. Athens beckons to me. The columns of the Parthenon loom up!
*****
If there are half a dozen ways of getting into Papendrecht--there is
only one of reaching Athens--that is, if you start from Venice. Trieste
first, either by rail or boat, and then aboard one of the Austrian
Lloyds, and so on down the Adriatic to Patras.
It is October, remember--when every spear of grass from a six months'
drought--the customary dry spell--is burnt to a crisp. It will rain
to-morrow, or next week, they will tell you--but it doesn't--never has
in October--and never will. Strange to say, you never miss it--neither
in the color of the mountains flanking the Adriatic or in any of the
ports on the way down, or in Patras itself. The green note to which I
have been accustomed--which I have labored over all my life--is lacking,
and a new palette takes its place--of mauve, violet, indescribable
blues, and evanescent soap-bubble reds. The slopes of the hills are
mother-of-pearl, their tops melting into cloud shadows so delicate in
tone that you cannot distinguish where one leaves off and the other
begins.
And it is so in Patras, except for a riotous, defiant pine--green as a
spring cabbage or a newly painted shutter--that sucks its moisture from
nobody knows where--hasn't any, perhaps, and glories in its shame. All
along the railroad from the harbor of Patras to the outskirts of Athens
it is the same--bare fields, bare hills, streets and roads choked with
dust. And so, too, when you arrive at the station and take the omnibus
for the Grand Bretagne.
By this time you are accustomed to it--in fact you rather enjoy it.
If you have a doubt of it, step out on the balcony at the front of the
hotel and look up!
Hanging in the sky--in an air of pure ether, set in films of silver
grays in which shimmer millions of tones, delicate as the shadings of
a pearl, towers the Acropolis, its crest fringed by the ruins of the
greatest temples the world possesses.