goddess?”
“Ah, there you go!” he burst out again, with flashing eyes. “That is
just like a cold-blooded materialist. I hate your modern Shylock, who
can see a pound of flesh cut from a human heart with no care for the
hot blood that follows. Have you no sympathy deep down in your soul
for a woman when she realizes for the first time that her hold on the
world is slipping? Can you not understand the agony of the awakening
from a long dream of security and supremacy, when she finds that others
are taking her place? The daily watching for the loss of color, the
fullness of the waist, the penciling of care-lines about the eyes?
We men have bodily force and mental vigor, and sometimes lifelong
integrity, to commend us, and as we grow older and the first two fail,
the last serves us best of all; but what has a woman like the Contessa
left? I am not talking of an ordinary woman, nor of all the good
daughters, good wives, and good mothers in the world. You expect in
such women the graces of virtue, duty, and resignation. I am talking of
a superb creature whom the good God created just to show the world what
the angels looked like. I insist that before you laugh you must put
yourself in the place of this noble Contessa whom all Venice adored,
whose reign for fifteen years had been supreme, whose beauty was to
her something tangible, a weapon, a force, an atmosphere. She had all
the other charms that adorned the women of her day, good-humor, a rich
mind, charity, and wit, but so had a hundred other Venetians of her
class. I insist that before censuring her, you enter the _salon_ and
watch with her the faces of her guests, noting her eagerness to detect
the first glance of delight or disappointment, and her joy or chagrin
as she reads the verdict in their eyes. Can you not realize that in a
beauty such as hers there is an essence, a spirit, a something divine
and ethereal? A something like the bloom on these grapes, adding the
exquisite to their lusciousness; like the pure color of the diamond,
intensifying its flash? A something that, in addition to all her other
qualities, makes a woman transcendent and should make her immortal?
We men long for this divine quality, adore it, go mad over it; and
yet when it has faded, with an inconstancy and neglect which to me is
one of the enigmas of human nature, we shrug our shoulders, laugh,
and pass on. Believe me, _mon ami_, when that gondolier confirmed the
looking-glass of the Contessa, his words fell upon her ears like earth
upon her coffin.”
If the Professor’s emotion at the close of the story was a surprise to
me, this frenzied outburst, illogical and quixotic as it seemed, was
equally unexpected. I could hardly realize that this torrent of fiery
passion and pent-up energy had burst from the frail, plain little body
before me. Again and again, as I looked at him, the thought ran through
my mind, Whom had he loved like that? What had come between himself and
his own Contessa? Why was this man an exile--this cheery, precise, ever
courteous dignified old thoroughbred, with his dry, crackling exterior,
and his volcano of a heart beneath? Or was it Venice, with her wealth
of traditions,--traditions he had made his own,--that had turned his
head?
Long after the Professor left the garden, I sat looking about me,
noting the broken walls overhung with matted vines, and the little
lizards darting in and out. Then I strolled on and entered the doorway
of the old château, and looked long and steadily at the ruined balcony,
half buried in a tangle of roses, the shadows of their waving blossoms
splashing the weather-stained marble; and thence to the apartment
above, where these same blossoms thrust themselves far into its gloom,
as if they too would search for the vision of loveliness that had
vanished. Then I wandered into an alcove sheltering the remains of an
altar and font--the very chapel, no doubt, where the good priest had
married her; on through the unkept walks bordered on each side by rows
of ancient box, with here and there a gap where the sharp tooth of some
winter more cruel than the rest had bitten deep, and so out again into
the open garden, where I sat down under a great tree that sheltered
the head of a Madonna built into the wall--the work of Canova, the
Professor had told me.
Despite my own convictions, I seem to feel the presence of these
spirits of the past that the Professor, in his simple, earnest way, had
conjured up before me, and to see on every hand evidences of their long
life of happiness. The ruined balcony, with its matted rose vines, had
now a deeper meaning. How often had the beautiful Venetian leaned over
this same iron grating and watched her lover in the garden below! On
how many nights, made glorious by the radiance of an Italian moon, had
they listened to the soft music of passing gondolas beyond the garden
walls?
The whole romance, in spite of its improbability and my thoughtless
laughter, had affected me deeply. Why, I could not tell. Perhaps it
was the Professor’s enthusiasm; perhaps his reverence for the beauty of
woman, as well as for the Contessa herself. Perhaps he had really been
recalling a chapter out of his own past, before exile and poverty had
made him a wanderer and a dreamer. Perhaps!--Yes, perhaps it was the
thought of the long, quiet life of the Contessa with her lover in this
garden.
AMONG THE FISHERMEN
I KNOW best the fishing quarter of Ponte Lungo and the district near
by, from the wooden bridge to the lagoon, with the side canal running
along the _Fondamenta della Pallada_. This to me is not only the most
picturesque quarter of Venice, but quite the most picturesque spot I
know in Europe, except, perhaps, Scutari on the Golden Horn.
This quality of the picturesque saturates Venice. You find it in
her stately structures; in her spacious Piazza, with its noble
Campanile, clock tower, and façade of San Marco; in her tapering
towers, deep-wrought bronze, and creamy marble; in her cluster of
butterfly sails on far-off, wide horizons; in her opalescent dawns,
flaming sunsets, and star-lit summer nights. You find it in the
gatherings about her countless bridges spanning dark water-ways;
in the ever-changing color of crowded markets; in lazy gardens
lolling over broken walls; in twisted canals, quaint doorways, and
soggy, ooze-covered landing-steps. You find it, too, in many a dingy
palace--many a lop-sided old palace--with door-jambs and windows
askew, with lintels craning their heads over the edge, ready to plunge
headlong into the canal below.
The little devils of rot and decay, deep down in the water, are at the
bottom of all this settling and toppling of jamb and lintel. They are
really the guardians of the picturesque.
Search any façade in Venice, from flowline to cornice, and you
cannot find two lines plumb or parallel. This is because these imps
of destruction have helped the teredo to munch and gnaw and bore,
undermining foundation pile, grillage, and bed-stone. If you listen
some day over the side of your gondola, you will hear one of these
old piles creak and groan as he sags and settles, and then up comes a
bubble, as if all the fiends below had broken into a laugh at their
triumph.
This change goes on everywhere. No sooner does some inhabitant of the
earth build a monstrosity of right-angle triangles, than the little
imps set to work. They know that Mother Nature detests a straight line,
and so they summon all the fairy forces of sun, wind, and frost, to
break and bend and twist, while they scuttle and bore and dig, until
some fine morning after a siege of many years, you stumble upon their
victim. The doge who built it would shake his head in despair, but you
forgive the tireless little devils--they have made it so delightfully
picturesque.
To be exact, there are really fewer straight lines in Venice than in
any place in Europe. This is because all the islands are spiked full
of rotting piles, holding up every structure within their limits. The
constant settling of these wooden supports has dropped the Campanile
nearly a foot out of plumb on the eastern façade, threatened the
destruction of the southwest corner of the Doges’ Palace, rolled the
exquisite mosaic pavement of San Marco into waves of stone, and almost
toppled into the canal many a church tower and garden wall.
Then again there are localities about Venice where it seems that every
other quality except that of the picturesque has long since been
annihilated. You feel it especially in the narrow side canal of the
Public Garden, in the region back of the Rialto, through the Fruit
Market, and in the narrow streets beyond--so narrow that you can touch
both sides in passing, the very houses leaning over like gossiping
old crones, their foreheads almost touching. You feel it too in the
gardens along the Giudecca, with their long arbors and tangled masses
of climbing roses; in the interiors of many courtyards along the Grand
Canal, with _pozzo_ and surrounding pillars supporting the rooms above;
in the ship and gondola repair-yards of the lagoons and San Trovaso,
and more than all in the fishing quarters, the one beyond Ponte Lungo
and those near the Arsenal, out towards _San Pietro di Castello_.
This district of Ponte Lungo--the one I love most--lies across the
Giudecca, on the “Island of the Giudecca,” as it is called, and is
really an outskirt, or rather a suburb of the Great City. There are no
grand palaces here. Sometimes, tucked away in a garden, you will find
an old château, such as the Contessa occupied, and between the bridge
and the _fondamenta_ there is a row of great buildings, bristling
with giant chimneys, that might once have been warehouses loaded with
the wealth of the East, but which are now stuffed full of old sails,
snarled seines, great fish-baskets, oars, fishermen, fisher-wives,
fisher-children, rags, old clothes, bits of carpet, and gay, blossoming
plants in nondescript pots. I may be wrong about these old houses being
_stuffed full_ of these several different kinds of material, from
their damp basement floors to the fourth story garrets under baking red
tiles; but they certainly look so, for all these things, including the
fisher-folk themselves, are either hanging out or thrust out of window,
balcony, or doorway, thus proving conclusively the absurdity of there
being even standing room inside.
Fronting the doors of these buildings are little rickety platforms of
soggy planks, and running out from them foot-walks of a single board,
propped up out of the wet on poles, leading to fishing-smacks with
sails of orange and red, the decks lumbered with a miscellaneous lot
of fishing-gear and unassorted sea-truck--buckets, seines, booms,
dip-nets, and the like.
Aboard these boats the fishermen are busily engaged in scrubbing the
sides and rails, and emptying the catch of the morning into their great
wicker baskets, which either float in the water or are held up on poles
by long strings of stout twine.
All about are more boats, big and little; row-boats; storage-boats
piled high with empty crab baskets, or surrounded with a circle of
other baskets moored to cords and supported by a frame of hop-poles,
filled with fish or crabs; _barcos_ from across the lagoon, laden with
green melons; or lighters on their way to the Dogana from the steamers
anchored behind the Giudecca.
Beyond and under the little bridge that leads up the Pallada, the
houses are smaller and only flank one side of the narrow canal. On the
other side, once an old garden, there is now a long, rambling wall,
with here and there an opening through which, to your surprise, you
catch the drooping figure of a poor, forlorn mule, condemned for some
crime of his ancestors to go round and round in a treadmill, grinding
refuse brick. Along the quay or _fondamenta_ of this narrow canal,
always shady after ten o’clock, lie sprawled the younger members of
these tenements--the children, bareheaded, barefooted, and most of them
barebacked; while their mothers and sisters choke up the doorways,
stringing beads, making lace, sitting in bunches listening to a story
by some old crone, or breaking out into song, the whole neighborhood
joining in the chorus.
[Illustration: THE CATCH OF THE MORNING]
Up at the farther end of the Pallada and under another wooden bridge,
where two slips of canals meet, there is a corner that has added
more sketches to my portfolio than any single spot in Venice. An old
fisherman lives here, perhaps a dozen old fishermen; they come and
go all the time. There is a gate with a broken door, and a neglected
garden trampled down by many feet, a half-ruined wall with fig-trees
and oleanders peeping over from the garden next door, a row of ragged,
straggling trees lining the water’s edge, and more big fish and crab
baskets scattered all about,--baskets big as feather-beds,--and
festoons of nets hung to the branches of the trees or thrown over
the patched-up fences,--every conceivable and inconceivable kind of
fishing plunder that could litter up the premises of a _pescatore_ of
the lagoon. In and out of all this débris swarm the children, playing
baby-house in the big baskets, asleep under the overturned boat with
the new patch on her bottom, or leaning over the wall catching little
crabs that go nibbling along a few inches below the water-line.
In this picturesque spot, within biscuit-throw of this very corner, I
have some very intimate and charming friends--little Amelia, the child
model, and young Antonio, who is determined to be a gondolier when
he grows up, and who, perhaps, could earn a better living by posing
for some sculptor as a Greek god. Then, too, there is his mother, the
Signora Marcelli, who sometimes reminds me of my other old friend,
the “Grand Duchess of the Riva,” who keeps the caffè near the _Ponte
Veneta Marina_.
The Signora Marcelli, however, lacks most of the endearing qualities of
the Duchess; one in particular--a soft, musical voice. If the Signora
is in temporary want of the services of one of her brood of children,
it never occurs to her, no matter where she may be, to send another
member of the household in search of the missing child; she simply
throws back her head, fills her lungs, and begins a _crescendo_ which
terminates in a _fortissimo_, so shrill and far-reaching that it could
call her offspring back from the dead. Should her husband, the Signor
Marcelli, come in some wet morning late from the lagoon,--say at nine
o’clock, instead of an hour after daylight,--the Signora begins on
her _crescendo_ when she first catches sight of his boat slowly poled
along the canal. Thereupon the Signora fills the surrounding air with
certain details of her family life, including her present attitude of
mind toward the Signore, and with such volume and vim that you think
she fully intends breaking every bone under his tarpaulins when he
lands,--and she is quite able physically to do it,--until you further
notice that it makes about as much impression upon the Signore as the
rain upon his oilskins. It makes still less on his neighbors, who have
listened to similar outbursts for years, and have come to regard them
quite as they would the announcement by one of the Signora’s hens that
she had just laid an egg--an event of too much importance to be passed
over in silence.
When the Signor Marcelli arrives off the little wooden landing-ladder
facing his house, and, putting things shipshape about the boat, enters
his doorway, thrashing the water from his tarpaulin hat as he walks,
the Signora, from sheer loss of breath, subsides long enough to
overhaul a unique collection of dry clothing hanging to the rafters,
from which she selects a coat patched like Joseph’s of old, with
trousers to match. These she carries to the Signore, who puts them on
in dead silence, reappearing in a few moments barefooted but dry, a red
worsted cap on his head, and a short pipe in his mouth. Then he drags
up a chair, and, still silent as a graven image,--he has not yet spoken
a word,--continues smoking, looking furtively up at the sky, or leaning
over listlessly and watching the chickens that gather about his feet.
Now and again he picks up a rooster or strokes a hen as he would a
kitten. Nothing more.
Only then does the Signora subside, bringing out a fragment of
_polenta_ and a pot of coffee, which the fisherman divides with his
chickens, the greedy ones jumping on his knees. I feel assured that it
is neither discretion nor domestic tact, nor even uncommon sense, that
forbids a word of protest to drop from the Signore’s lips. It is rather
a certain philosophy, born of many dull days spent on the lagoon, and
many lively hours passed with the Signora Marcelli, resulting in some
such apothegm as, “Gulls scream and women scold, but fishing and life
go on just the same.”
There is, too, the other old fisherman, whose name I forget, who lives
in the little shed of a house next to the long wall, and who is forever
scrubbing his crab baskets, or lifting them up and down, and otherwise
disporting himself in an idiotic and most aggravating way. He happens
to own an old water-logged boat that has the most delicious assortment
of barnacles and seaweed clinging to its sides. It is generally piled
high with great baskets, patched and mended, with red splotches all
over them, and bits of broken string dangling to their sides or banging
from their open throats. There are also a lot of rheumatic, palsied old
poles that reach over this ruin of a craft, to which are tied still
more baskets of still more delicious qualities of burnt umber and
Hooker’s-green moss. Behind this boat is a sun-scorched wall of broken
brick, caressed all day by a tender old mother of a vine, who winds her
arms about it and splashes its hot cheeks with sprays of cool shadows.
When, some years ago, I discovered this combination of boat, basket,
and shadow-flecked wall, and in an unguarded moment begged the
fisherman to cease work for the morning at my expense, and smoke a
pipe of peace in his doorway, until I could transfer its harmonies to
my canvas, I spoke hurriedly and without due consideration; for since
that time, whenever this contemporary of the original _Bucentoro_ gets
into one of my compositions,--these old fish-boats last forever and are
too picturesque for even the little devils to worry over,--this same
fisherman immediately dries his sponge, secures his baskets, and goes
ashore, and as regularly demands backsheesh of _soldi_ and fine-cut.
Next summer I shall buy the boat and hire him to watch; it will be much
cheaper.
Then there are the two girls who live with their grandmother, in one
end of an old tumble-down, next to the little wooden bridge that
the boats lie under. She keeps a small cook-shop, where she boils
and then toasts, in thin strips, slices of green-skinned pumpkin,
which the girls sell to the fishermen on the boats, or hawk about the
_fondamenta_. As the whole pumpkin can be bought for a _lira_, you can
imagine what a wee bit of a copper coin it must be that pays for a
fragment of its golden interior, even when the skilled labor of the old
woman is added to the cost of the raw material.
Last of all are the boys; of no particular size, age, nationality, or
condition,--just boys; little rascally, hatless, shoeless, shirtless,
trouser--everything-less, except noise and activity. They yell like
Comanches; they crawl between the legs of your easel and look up
between your knees into your face; they steal your brushes and paints;
they cry “_Soldi, soldi, Signore_,” until life becomes a burden; they
spend their days in one prolonged whoop of hilarity, their nights in
concocting fresh deviltry, which they put into practice the moment you
appear in the morning. When you throw one of them into the canal, in
the vain hope that his head will stick in the mud and so he be drowned
dead, half a dozen jump in after him in a delirium of enjoyment. When
you turn one upside down and shake your own color-tubes out of his
rags, he calls upon all the saints to witness that the other fellow,
the boy Beppo or Carlo, or some other “o” or “i,” put them there, and
that up to this very moment he was unconscious of their existence;
when you belabor the largest portion of his surface with your folding
stool or T-square, he is either in a state of collapse from excessive
laughter or screaming with assumed agony, which lasts until he squirms
himself into freedom; then he goes wild, turning hand-springs and
describing no end of geometrical figures in the air, using his stubby
little nose for a centre and his grimy thumbs and outspread fingers for
compasses.
All these side scenes, however, constitute only part of the family life
of the Venetian fishermen. If you are up early in the morning you will
see their boats moving through the narrow canals to the fish market
on the Grand Canal above the Rialto, loaded to the water’s edge with
hundreds of bushels of crawling green crabs stowed away in the great
baskets; or piles of opalescent fish heaped upon the deck, covered with
bits of sailcloth, or glistening in the morning sun. Earlier, out on
the lagoon, in the gray dawn, you will see clusters of boats with the
seines widespread, the smaller dories scattered here and there, hauling
or lowering the spider-skein nets.
But there is still another and a larger fishing trade, a trade not
exactly Venetian, although Venice is its best market. To this belong
the fishermen of Chioggia and the islands farther down the coast. These
men own and man the heavier seagoing craft with the red and orange
sails that make the water life of Venice unique.
Every Saturday a flock of these boats will light off the wall of the
Public Garden, their beaks touching the marble rail. These are Ziem’s
boats--his for half a century; nobody has painted them in the afternoon
light so charmingly or so truthfully. Sunday morning, after mass, they
are off again, spreading their gay wings toward Chioggia. On other days
one or two of these gay-plumed birds will hook a line over the cluster
of spiles near the wall of the Riva, below the arsenal bridge, their
sails swaying in the soft air, while their captains are buying supplies
to take to the fleet twenty miles or more out at sea.
Again, sometimes in the early dawn or in the late twilight, you will
see, away out in still another fishing quarter, a single figure walking
slowly in the water, one arm towing his boat, the other carrying a bag.
Every now and then the figure bends over, feels about with his toes,
and then drops something into the bag. This is the mussel-gatherer of
the lagoon. In the hot summer nights these humble toilers of the sea,
with only straw mats for covering, often sleep in their boats, tethered
to poles driven into the yielding mud. They can wade waist-deep over
many square miles of water-space about Venice, although to one in a
gondola, skimming over the same glassy surfaces, there seems water
enough to float a ship.
These several grades of fishermen have changed but little, either in
habits, costume, or the handling of their craft, since the early days
of the republic. The boats, too, are almost the same in construction
and equipment, as can be seen in any of the pictures of Canaletto and
the painters of his time. The bows of the larger sea-craft are still
broad and heavily built, the rudders big and cumbersome, with the
long sweep reaching over the after-deck; the sails are loosely hung
with easily adjusted booms, to make room for the great seines which
are swung to the cross-trees of the foremast. The only boat of really
modern design, and this is rarely used as a fishing-boat, is the
_sandolo_, a shallow skiff drawing but a few inches of water, and with
both bow and stern sharp and very low, modeled originally for greater
speed in racing.
Whatever changes have taken place in the political and social economy
of Venice, they have affected but little these lovers of the lagoons.
What mattered it to whom they paid taxes,--whether to doge, Corsican,
Austrian, or king,--there were as good fish in the sea as had ever been
caught, and as long as their religion lasted, so long would people eat
fish and Friday come round every week in the year.
A GONDOLA RACE