_Voi non mi amate ed io non vi amo. Pure
qualche dolcezza è ne la nostra vita
da ieri_....
--Gabriele D’Annunzio: POEMA PARADISIACO.
That business of yours, Gimlet, of a thing falling so exactly on the
tick, was rather curious. I have an idea, though, that it happens
oftener than people might think. I’ve seen some queer examples of it
myself. I remember one in particular. Not that it’s anything of a
story. It’s merely a whiff of a story: you make it up to suit yourself.
And the coincidence, now that I stop and think, was perhaps the least
of it! But--
I was up in Alaska at the time. I’ve poked about a bit in my day, you
know, and I took into my head once to poke up there. I’d been reading
Bret Harte, that sort of thing, and I had an idea I’d do it over
again for my generation! Maybe you don’t know that I used to have a
scribbling bee in my bonnet. I imagine that’s really what spoiled my
work. I thought if the Renaissance people practised ten or a dozen arts
equally well, I might make a stab at two. We get these ideas when we
are young, sometimes. Moreover I didn’t know that it took more than
miners and mountains, plus a pinch of sentiment, to make a Bret Harte.
And if I did him over again you didn’t happen to hear about it, did
you? However, I had a good time, all the same!
That country took me tremendously. Norway used to be one of my
favourite stamping grounds. I was particularly fond of going up there
after Italy--only I used to wish there were a subway under Germany
when I did it! The contrast was so extraordinary--in colour, line,
atmosphere, people, everything. Then simply to breathe in Italy, for
me, was such a _volupté_ that it bordered on debauch! So after it
Norway would come like a cool repentance. And there was a simplicity up
there, a silence, a loneliness, that rather upset me after the South.
It called out all the things with which the South has nothing to do.
There’s no use trying to describe it. It’s the obverse, don’t you know,
of _kennst Du das Land_.
Well, Alaska was like a bigger Norway--a Norway with longer fiords,
with taller cliffs rising out of greener water, with bluer glaciers,
with whiter and louder waterfalls. And it had, proportionately, a
greater loneliness and a greater impression of contrast with the
rest of the world. If Norway has its Sagas, if nightfall in some
wild fiord-end seems literally a dusk of the gods, the silence
of Alaska--the sense of its having been there for centuries by
itself with no one to hear the grind of the ice and thunder of the
waterfalls--takes you back farther yet. And then Norway, after all,
is too accessible to be quite what it should be. Tourists may be as
_bête_ as you please; but they do have a way, after all, of pouncing
on the very places you would like yourself if they didn’t exist. The
philosophy of the beaten track has yet to be written. Alaska, however,
hasn’t reached that stage yet. She will come to it in time. She can’t
help it. More and more people go every year. But they live on the
country even less than they do in Norway. They sit on decks and say Oh
and Ah as things sail by. They really don’t meddle very much.
So in the meantime the sense of contrast is one that you can cultivate
at your leisure--if you have any. Not many of them do up there--the
real people, I mean. Life is too lively, even if they had the
inclination. And they are the very ones who bring the contrasts most
sharply to you. Heaven, the types you see! The people from every
country under the sun, the people of every imaginable social condition,
the people with stories to them a mile long--and not all of them
printable! Of course that’s chiefly in the mining places, and in the
coast places leading to the mining places, where they come and go
like ants in a trail, outwardly as much alike as flannel shirts and
nondescript kits can make them, inwardly impersonating every race and
passion of the world, and all spinning out the great epic of Gold. It’s
the modern version of the Ring and the Sagas.
However, I wasn’t going to give you a ten-minute talk on Alaska. I
was going to tell you about my friend the hotel-keeper in Skagway.
Although the name almost sets me off again--on the subject of those
flimsy wooden settlements sitting unconcernedly in the shadow of those
solemn mountains, and the bizarreness of them, and the romance of them,
and the tragedy of them! He went by the name of Chatty Charley, did
the hotel-keeper--Chat for short--on the principle of _lucus a non
lucendo_. He was never known to utter a word without being asked for
it, and he didn’t always favour then. Who he was or where he came from
nobody knew. Not that anybody cared. They’re not long on gossip up
there: they have other things to do. Moreover, there is a sort of tacit
understanding in the matter of antecedents--or the lack of them. But
there was generally some tag by which you could place a man. It didn’t
take you long to make up your mind that he would be a bar-keep in San
Francisco, or a drummer in Chicago, or a sophomore in Harvard. Not that
those exhausted the possibilities by any means.
Chatty, however, I had no idea about. Or perhaps it would be truer to
say I had a hundred. He would have fitted in anywhere--except Alaska.
He was the last man I expected to find up there. Not that he had
so much the air of a tenderfoot. And I don’t mean any of your high
melodrama business--a Lost Heir or a Blighted Being or any of that. It
was merely that he was rather a slight man, and wonderfully meek to
look upon. He got on wonderfully well, though. He had a name for being
square, which in a society like that goes rather farther than it does
in ours, I fancy. You could be as much of a tenderfoot as you pleased;
but if you took what was coming to you, and didn’t shoot too much bull,
and played a square game, they’d be pretty sure to let you through.
So Chatty did a roaring business. And we were great cronies from the
start. It was so much so that the others thought we knew rather more
about each other than we let on. There may have been something in it--I
don’t know. However, the reason of it was rather funny. The first time
I went into his place--and it was a place, too: if I once began telling
you about it, and the things you saw!--the first time I went into his
place I noticed right off, among the newspaper cartoons and wild odds
and ends which he or the boys had tacked up around the walls, some
pictures of Venice--some of those photogravures they get out, you know.
Well, I never thought much of them as works of art, although I’ve seen
them in rather unexpected places. But this was the most unexpected of
all. The contrast of it hit me like a bullet--that wonderful old town
with its perfection of a flower and its hundreds of years--and such
years!--behind it, and this wild new raw scrambling place huddled under
unknown mountains on the edge of an unknown sea! It knocked me all of a
heap. I went staring around like a boob, not noticing much else, until
I happened to notice a peaceful person behind the bar who was looking
at me.
“Where the devil did these things come from?” I demanded of him rather
abruptly, less by way of conversation than of uttering the question
that was uppermost in my mind.
“Oh, I picked them up,” replied the peaceful person, who turned out to
be Chatty.
“Been there?” I pursued.
“Yes,” he answered.
It was a mild enough remark, heaven knows. And there was nothing in the
way he made it, except a certain matter-of-courseness. But that was
just what knocked me all of a heap again. How should anybody in Alaska,
most of all how should anybody in Skagway, have been to Venice except
myself? And then I’m clean dotty on the place, anyway. It gets into
your blood, you know, and it got into mine before anything else did. I
go back there whenever I get a chance, and I can forgive much of a man
who betrays a weakness for it. That is one of two or three touchstones
I keep in my pocket! So I fell on Chatty and began talking about his
pictures, and the place they came from, and he seemed to know all about
it. He even knew what I never knew any one else to know--the islands
in the lagoon. The Venetians themselves don’t know them. They are
tremendous landlubbers, gondoliers and all, and apparently make it a
point to learn as little as possible of the shallow green sea in which
they swim. While as for the tourists, poor dears, they go to the Lido,
and Chioggia, and San Lazzaro, and Murano, and Burano, and Torcello,
and possibly San Francesco in Deserto, and _basta_. Chatty also knew
Italian, I incidentally discovered. Indeed there came times, once or
twice, when we found it rather convenient. You couldn’t be sure of not
getting caught, though. There are too many funny things prowling around
up there under miners’ hats for you to trust to no one’s understanding
your lingo.
Well, for such a short acquaintance we got fairly chummy, Chatty and
I. It was so to a degree that made the boys horse him for actually
chatting. Not that he really did chat much. He evidently liked to
listen to my chatter though, and once in a while, when nobody in
particular was around, he would say something about some palace, some
garden, some island, that we both knew. It was rather amusing--in
Skagway. But the real nature of our relation was still more amusing.
I never knew a man so well and so little. For all our chumminess we
never had one word on any earthly subject except Venice. I never even
got a hint of what he had been up to there, or when, or how, or why,
or anything. I had no more idea than the cat on the stairs what part
Venice played in the scheme of his existence--any more than I had an
idea, above the immediate and obvious one of the hotel, what part
Skagway played. He had an absolutely impersonal way of talking, if he
talked at all, that left nothing to take hold of. And I never could
quite make out whether it was modesty or design--or whether, perhaps,
nothing but Venice had ever happened to him.
Of course, after the first surprise--there were various degrees of it
as the character of our queer little bond came out--I used to wonder a
good deal. But I finally settled down to a sense of the picturesqueness
of the business. Our queer little bond, after all, was quite a bond.
Marriages have been made on less! And to have such a bond in such a
place--one was about as strange as the other. So I gave up any idea of
trying to draw the man out. I had made some rather idiotic attempts in
that direction. And I used to amuse myself by making the most of our
two points of view. I had gone up there for the sake of the wildness
and the coolness and the stillness, only to encounter this individual
who thought of nothing but Italy! He typified for me the reaching out
of the North for the South, the old restlessness of man for the things
he has not, which Goethe has put into “Wilhelm Meister.”
I don’t know whether I would ever have got any farther but for what
your story suggested--the rather odd coincidence. And I’m not sure
how far I got then. At all events, I was sitting one night at the
end of a pier there was down behind Chatty’s hotel, looking at the
fiord--the inlet, they call it there. It was late on a Saturday night
in July, about half past eleven or twelve. Things were rather nice in
the warm dusk of that northern summer, with the mountains standing up
purply-black against a sky that still had a glow in it. What I was
chiefly noticing, however, was a yacht that had been there a day or
two and was preparing to leave. The rattle of the anchor-chain in the
winch, and the splash of the water as the links came dripping up,
were loud against the Saturday night noises of the town. And on the
deck, where there was a blur of white, I could hear voices, and the
fingering of a guitar. I don’t know--it was too much for me. There is
something about a boat at night, anyway, with the lighted port-holes,
and everything.... And then I had been knocking about a good bit up
there, and I suppose I was ready to swing around to the other extreme.
Anyway, I was pretty near something like homesickness. Which was not at
all what I had been when I saw some of the yachters in the town that
morning.
As I was chewing it over I heard steps behind me on the pier, rather to
my disgust. It turned out to be Chatty, though.
“Hullo, Beau,” he remarked, kicking his heels off the end of the pier
beside me. “Celebrating _Redentor_?”
Do you know what _Redentor_ is? If you don’t, just let me tell you
that it is one of the last pieces of paganism left in the world. It’s
a midsummer _festa_ in Venice, when the whole town and most of the
adjoining mainland spend the evening in boats, eating and drinking and
singing under paper lanterns. Then they all go out to the Lido and
finish up the night dancing on the sands. And when the sun bobs over
the edge of the Adriatic they shout like heathen, and a lot of them
pull off their clothes and tear down into the water. It’s the most
pagan thing you ever saw. All this is really the eve of a religious
festival that comes on the Sunday. But that is a sad and sleepy
anticlimax--at best a mere excuse for prolonging the festivities, which
are of the crown of the Venetian year.
Well, I reckoned up and found that Chatty was right. It was, barring
differences of time, the night of _Redentor_. I wondered why I hadn’t
thought of it. And the sudden sense of contrast pressed upon me more
strongly than ever--the contrast between that palace-bordered canal
so far away on the other side of the world, with its flower-lanterns
blowing in the darkness, its catches of song, its breath of all that
is old and warm and human and I don’t know what, and this wild place
of the North in its unearthly dusk, so precisely the opposite! I’m not
much on the sentimental line; but there are times when I cave, and that
was one of them.
We both sat there, thinking the same things, I suppose, while the
windlass clinked in the silence. Then from the group of people on the
deck of the yacht, what do you suppose we heard? You couldn’t imagine.
It was the song, the very identical song about love and the sea, which
the Venetians sing on the night of _Redentor_! Distinctly to us over
the water, in a woman’s voice, to the accompaniment of a guitar, came
the Venetian words. In such a voice, too!
I looked at Chatty, and Chatty looked at me. It was incredible. It was
incredible enough that he and I should be there; but a third person,
and just on that night! At the moment, however, I didn’t have time to
take in how incredible it was, because as we sat staring at each other
the anchor came up with a big splash. Then the yacht began to circle
in a half moon off the head of the pier, and glided away like a great
white swan. We could hear the woman singing as she went. That was to me
even more than the coincidence--the rush of things I had been so long
without, those old common conventional things that we so hate when we
have them every day! I suppose I looked queer. Chatty did--for Chatty.
“Do you know her?” he asked.
“Know her!” I burst out. “How the devil should I know her? I only wish
I did. I’d be steaming down to Seattle instead of kicking my heels over
Chilkoot Inlet.”
He looked away toward the yacht.
“Oh!” he said. “You knew so many of the things, I thought--perhaps----”