ITALIAN SEAS
Let us return to happier themes!
Many and enchanting books have been written about Italian cities and
Italian country, but none about our Italian seas. People who look at
the map may think this a limited subject; there is the Mediterranean,
and there is the Adriatic—what more can be said? _Amici miei_, to a
sea-lover there are as many seas as ports; the dear salt water and
the sunrise and the sunset know it, and have a separate caress for
each. They make—or fit into—the thousand moods of mind that colour a
pilgrim’s life, and the pictures of them in my gallery of remembrance
are clearer than any of my landscapes and more helpful—because they
never hurt.
The landscapes, all except the loveliest ones where the spirit poised
for one longing instant—like a bird on the topmast of a ship, and,
like the bird, was given no more than time to take breath and wing
away again—are mostly inhabited. Here your friend quarrelled with you;
there your true love kissed you and betrayed; farther on your child
was sick and every aspect of the most beautiful scenery in the world
brings back only the poignant watches when a flush of colour in the
little face sent you crazy with joy, and something wrong again with
the little pulse froze your heart with fear. On land we cannot get
away from ourselves and others; earth is greedily dominant, monstrously
exacting. But the sea repudiates all individual ties. You must be empty
of yourself, or it will not speak to you at all. Its laws are not our
laws, and the first thing it does, if you are docile to its magic, is
to wash out your personality, and oh, how glad some of us are—or would
be—if we only could utterly forget that irritant, insistent factor of
existence!
In our long wanderings most paths, as we look back on them, show the
little red stains where we cut our feet; we have left shreds of our
soul’s garments on many a thorn by the way; but for me, and I fancy
for some of you others, the breath and the sound and the touch of the
sea have been nothing but coolness and healing, a sunbath for life’s
chillinesses, a fountain of strength in its languors. I think I should
know now the right point to make for, according to the distemper that
might be assailing me; and though twenty years ago I sought and loved
the onslaught of the Atlantic and the Valhalla of the March tides in
the Channel, to-day I would fare no farther than my home seas, those
that lap and sing on the Italian shores.
I was sailing up into the Bay of Naples once just as the morning
had conquered the last star; the sky was a faint milky blue and the
mountains were cowled outlines, very dark and still. Not a breath
stirred the sea, not a sound came from the land. Suddenly from the
shadows that were neither land nor sea, I saw coming towards me a tall,
glorious form, floating on the water, pointing to the sky, clothed in
long, straight robes of white, making for open sea with the steady rush
of a seabird on rested pinions. It took all the growing daylight to
itself—it _was_ the daylight, for a few breathless seconds—a vision of
the Immaculate Conception, it seemed to me; then the music of ripple
on prow whispered across the water, the sun leapt up behind Sant’
Angelo; I rubbed my eyes, and lo, a slender vessel with snowy sails,
tall and narrow, from some strange port, such sails as our seamen never
unfurled. She brought the wind as she had taken the daylight, and a
moment later she swept past in her immaculate pride and was gone.
I always rather resented the advent of battleships and royal yachts
and gaudy truck of that kind in our southern waters, but the private
yachts inspired us with a pleasant mysterious interest that was not
unwelcome. Once, when we were watching anxiously for my brother,
during his venturesome sail from New York to Naples, and the children
were cruising round the Bay not far from Naples, a large, beautiful
yacht was seen to come in and cast anchor off Santa Lucia, and at once
the greatest excitement prevailed on the Crawford felucca. Was that
the _Alda_? Oh, surely it must be! At once the _Margherita_ headed
for the port, and the nearer she came to the new arrival, the surer
was everybody that the _Alda_—which none of them had seen, as Marion
had just bought her—had reached port at last. How well she had stood
the voyage! No sign of the heavy weather mentioned in the wire from
Gibraltar! No sign of the Padrone either, but, of course, he would have
had to go on shore to report himself and get his harbour papers from
the Consul. What was this? Dark-faced sailors in fezes? How like Marion
to pick up a Lascar crew in New York! Let us row round her and hail
somebody. Good heavens! The first shout brought a dozen lovely Turkish
ladies to the cabin windows, smiling, interested, only too ready to ask
the pretty boatful on board. The children stared open-mouthed! Then a
burst of uncontrollable laughter shook the _Margherita_ from stem to
stern. Papa had certainly not brought a harem from New York! “A casa,”
came the order to the grinning sailors, and the _Margherita_ turned
tail and ran for home.
There is a busy, unromantic seaport called Livorno, a long way up
the coast from Naples, a Tuscan town of white streets and shadeless
squares, all alive with commerce, and, until I came to years of reason,
represented to me by the huge flapping straw hats, fine as silk and
pale gold in colour, which we children regarded as signals of summer,
when, on the first hot day, the ribbons that held them were tied under
our chins, and we were admonished, on pain of sunstrokes and spankings,
not to take them off. I had among my possessions a toy Swiss cottage
all made of the same pretty straw, and I imagined that “Leghorn”
was a straw city with bunches of red poppies and blue ribbons on the
house-tops for ornament. It was rather a blow to discover, on being
taken there when I was seven years old, that the only traces of my toy
city were the thin golden strings which most of the women were plaiting
with lightning quickness as they walked in the streets or sat in the
doorways.
[Illustration: LIVORNO. Photo by Brogi.]
After that, as I grew older, Leghorn meant just the sea in some of
its most enchanting aspects, for it was very rarely that we missed our
few weeks of bathing there in September, if we had spent the summer in
the north. It was the beginning of the autumn homecoming; we took an
apartment on the long, bright boulevard that faces the sea, the cook
and one or two of the servants came up from Rome to look after us,
and, always, we had a royally good time. The last, I think, was the
best of all, happening after a memorable summer in the Bagni de Lucca,
which I have described elsewhere. My sister had just become engaged,
and her fiancé, Erich von Rabe, of course followed us to Leghorn. Hugh
Fraser was there, occupied mostly, it seemed to me, in saving the Paget
children from getting drowned, since they would attempt to follow their
indomitable young mother in her long swims out into the deep.
Lady Paget did everything beautifully; she was built like a goddess and
could not do anything else, whether she rode or danced or glided about
in great old rooms or flowery gardens; but she never seemed more of a
goddess than when she stood for an instant in her clinging draperies
with her arms above her head and then leapt, like a curved arrow, out
and down into the sun-kissed waves. One held one’s breath while they
engulfed her—and then, yards beyond, up came that proud, small head,
and away she would go, with long, easy strokes, a being at one with the
sun and the sea—a joy to behold.
All that was in the morning when the spaces under the big tents on the
outrunning piers of the _stabilimenti_ were crowded to the very edge
with cheery, chattering groups, the ladies embroidering as fast as they
talked, the children romping, the young men making love, and the old
people, who would not face the cold joy of a plunge, smiling benignly
on it all. The piers were low, and a sudden gust of wind would fling
the salt water up without warning; then there were shrieks mingled with
laughter, flurrying of skirts and scraping of chairs and snatching
up of babies, and all the fun of settling down again, only to renew
the game at the next shower. This gathering only took place in the
morning. As soon as the sun was right overhead, the ladies packed their
fancy-work into their reticules, wiped the remains of _ciambelle_ from
the children’s mouths, straightened their hats—all with an incessant
fire of chatter like that of a tree full of roosting sparrows suddenly
disturbed—and away everybody trailed along the blazing white boulevard
for home, midday dinner, and the rapturous quiet of the siesta
afterwards.
I believe I was a little jealous, even then, of the kind of official
ownership which the Ambassador and his family seemed to claim in the
man who, though neither of us dreamed it yet, was very soon to be my
husband. Anyway, I permitted myself an occasional mood of pleasant
melancholy towards evening when my own dear people, like all the others
who had any deference at all for public opinion, were driving round
and round the public gardens, listening to the band. Two of our party
had agreed to slap public opinion quite brutally in the face; these
were my erratic sister and her equally erratic fiancé. They hired a
little sailing boat, and day after day, towards 4 o’clock, went off
by themselves, unchaperoned save by the boatman, for long expeditions,
whence they returned, gloriously happy and hungry, just in time for a
very late dinner.
Once and once only they lured me out, why, I could not imagine at the
moment, as I was a bad sailor in those days and did not in the least
want to go. But I soon found out their wicked motive. I had taken it
upon myself to order the meals while we were at Leghorn, as my mother
thought it would be good practice for me. Now there was one dish which
we all, except Annie and Erich, particularly disliked, a fry of very
bony, very rank-smelling crayfish, called _spannocchi_. After one trial
I had steadily refused to have it brought to the table. But those two
young monsters liked _spannocchi_, and they laid their plot quite
cleverly, and everything turned out just as they intended. We beat
out to sea, the weather was squally, and in a short time I was lying,
a sea-sick heap, in the bottom of the boat, begging with tears to be
taken home. This was what they had been waiting for. “Not unless you
promise us _spannocchi_ for dinner to-morrow!” they exclaimed in a
breath, grinning down at me in my misery. They looked as big and wicked
as the pictures of the demon lover in our old ballad book, when he is
sailing the faithless wife to hell!
Of course I promised—and was a most unpopular person with the rest of
the family at dinner time the next night. But their boatman avenged
me in the end. The day before we returned to Rome they took leave
of him with a little present, and he, who had all along imagined
them to be a young married couple, because they came unaccompanied,
testified his gratitude and goodwill in true Italian fashion, by crying
enthusiastically, “Heaven bless you, my good Signori, and may it be _a
fine boy_!”
Annie put her head down and ran for home, and Erich was not allowed to
come to dinner that night.
Livorno is an anomaly—an Italian city with no history, no ancient
monuments, no works of art. In fact it always seemed to me less Italian
than any spot I knew in the whole country, but in the days when we
used to frequent it I took that, as one took everything else in that
cheerful age, for granted, and it was only long afterwards that I
gave myself the trouble to hunt up the cause of the phenomenon. Then
I learnt that down to the days of the Medici it was a small fishing
village with a few hundred inhabitants, bearing for some unknown reason
the name of another tiny place farther north, Livorno Vercellese. The
Medici first noted its possibilities, and set to work to make it the
real port of Florence, till then largely dependent for such a commodity
on Pisa, a little farther up the coast.
Pisa, the ancient rival of Genoa and Venice, still sick with memories
of her past greatness, and, since 1405, the bought-and-paid-for fief
of Florence, was always seething with disaffection and conspiracy.
Its last desperate effort at retrieving its independence was made
in 1494, and the Florentines were put to the trouble of besieging it
and taking it by force. It was some sixty or seventy years later (I
think during the reign of Francesco, the father of Marie de Medici)
that Livorno recommended itself to the Ruler of the Republic as a fine
spot for a port that would have no disturbing memories of independence
to interfere with its usefulness. In order to ensure this they did
not colonize it with Italians at all, but craftily invited the more
commercially minded among the malcontents of all Europe to come and
open up trading houses there. The invitation was eagerly accepted;
persecuted Catholics from England and Germany, Moors from Spain,
Jews in great numbers from all parts, came, settled, and flourished,
the Jews of course outnumbering all the rest, so that the Leghorn
population is largely Jewish to this day. But there are also several
old English merchant houses, that, while still affecting to regard
England as “home,” are deeply rooted in the bright little city on the
Ligurian Sea, and very kind and hospitable were their representatives
to us. I remember certain commodities—great chests of tea, rolls of
English flannel, and fine table linen—my mother always sent for to
one of these Leghorn merchants, and I fancy it is due to the little
English-speaking community that the town is generally known by that
barbarous travesty of its Italian name.
In our times it has of course all the unsightly riches of a great
modern military and commercial centre—foundries, docks, shipyards,
fortifications, naval arsenals, and all the rest of it, but its real
attractions lie in the marvellous freshness of its air and its unbroken
sea-line, changing in tint at every hour of the day and taking on
certain splendours that I never remember seeing elsewhere. Livorno
always seems cool, for when the sun is shining his hottest the breeze
never fails, and the billows roll in and break in laughter and thunder
on the rocks and toss their spray almost to the windows of your room,
where the light comes up in a glow of green and gold through the
Venetians and the wind plays games with the clean white curtains all
day long.
But it is at evening that the Mare Ligure takes you and holds you
with a spell of its own. At sunset the wind generally dies down, and
then the sun sinks slowly over a softly moving but untroubled sea. The
sky clears of its dancing clouds, and becomes not sky, somehow, but a
fathomless infinity of breathing rose and topaz, transparent and liquid
like jewelled wine. And every ripple and dimple of the water soaks up
the transcendent flush, swaying rhythmically, and smoothing out into
vast pools of melting mother-of-pearl in which that living wet crimson
seems to lie like a transparent veil over deeper tints that float
beneath. When the sun is gone, the red deepens to the velvet of a dark
June rose, and the western sky is flame, not light; but hurrying night
has chilled the east behind you, and now every ripple is violet blue on
its hither side, the golden glow recedes farther and farther towards
the west, is sucked away in the trail of the sun at last, and then
nothing is left of the day but a forsaken sweep of primrose and the
wraith of a new-born star.
For sheer splurge of colour and light one must go farther north and be
out in the Bay of Spezia some September noon, when the harbour is full
of white battleships all beaconed with signals like strung flowers,
and the bands are playing madly and salutes are crashing through the
music for some royal holiday. The white town and the green hills behind
it seem to thrill visibly in unison, and the sea is cobalt, that would
make your eyes ache but for the fringe of feathery white ripples that
the breeze combs up all over its surface, and the sky is transparent
turquoise, and night seems a thousand years away. Farther on yet Genoa
the Superb has a sea as blue, a sky as stainless, but she dominates in
her white and emerald loveliness so that her setting is almost effaced.
One forgets to notice the steps of the throne where Sovereign Beauty
queens it so royally.
Then cross the plain to Venice, the witch who holds east and west in
her soft hands and plays with their riches as a millionaire’s child
might slip a rain of gold pieces from one palm to another, in idleness,
recking nothing of their value. Sea and sky, priceless palace and empty
island—it is all hers—she can never exhaust her past; and our century,
jejune and vulgar as it is, only seems to touch her to a scornful
smile.
But Venice can tremble still. Once in many years there sweeps down
on her one of Nature’s handfuls of retribution—a storm that makes her
quake to her artificial incredible foundations. I saw one such. It was
in May, Venice’s most perfect month. We had been out to the Lido that
morning, bathing in water smooth as cream; there was not a cloud in the
sky. We had barely got home when inky darkness descended, and out of
it burst a gale that lashed the Grand Canal to fury, and a machine-gun
fire of hail was flung against the windows, to result, an instant
later, in a crash of broken glass and tumbling bricks that was truly
appalling. Through the tumult came shrieks and cries. Every window in
the Ducal Palace was smashed, and most of the others in the town. When
it was over—the whole thing did not last more than twenty minutes—I
went out on our balcony and picked up, from the thick layer lying
there, hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs. The next day we went out
again to the Lido, and where a long, green pergola of vines had shaded
the way to the bathing establishment now stood a bare tracery of dry
branches. Not a single leaf was left.
But generally the Adriatic waits on Venice with subservient calm,
and one can float over those vast yet not unpictured lagoons in still
assurance that one’s reveries will not be disturbed. I doubt whether
such lengths of languorous idling be good for young, strong people, but
as a rest-cure for tired ones there can be nothing more complete. The
shape and build of the gondola (what a perfect name for the gliding,
sinuous thing!) was evolved by an artist in comfort; the enormous
leather cushions let you sink into their thickness as far as you please
without ever touching the limit of their pleasant elasticity. Whether
cowled in to keep off the sun’s rays in the day, or uncovered to give
you all the coolness of the evening, the gondola seat relieves you of
all responsibility for your body; it holds you as an experienced nurse
holds a tired child; and in its silent, swan-like rush through the
water you get just the sense of motion necessary to keep your nerves
employed yet soothed.
With the right companion, what talks are possible, as you glide out
in the last flush of evening towards the more distant lagoons and wait
for the moon to come up out of Istria across the sea! Your gondolier,
silent as Charon, is behind you and you forget his existence. And all
the rest is behind too, but very far behind—daily life with its horrid
strident claims and calculations that won’t even leave honey-mooning
couples alone! Time has ceased, and the world is standing still to
let you look at life in its beauty and kiss its face in its peace.
When at last you say, without turning your head, “A casa, Sandruccio,”
your black swan quivers an instant from low stern to dark-arched prow,
swings round in the smallest space any boat did ever turn in, and you
float back to the regular rhythm of Sandruccio’s twenty-foot oar, till
a necklace of light lies low on the land, and the faintest of songs—a
very mist of music—is wafted over the water.
“Alla Pizzetta?” inquires Sandruccio, speaking for the first time, and
in a voice expressing much amused indulgence for dreaming lovers. A few
minutes later he is imperiously ordering fellow-gondoliers out of his
way to the steps, is holding the side of the swan the eighth of an inch
off the grind of the stone, and you and your other self dance on shore
to become light-hearted young people, keeping time surreptitiously
to the gay waltz of the band and laughing at everything and nothing
because all the festive crowd around you is doing the same thing.
Witch and tyrant as she is—and perhaps for that very reason, since
tyrants must know how to yield as well as how to rule—Venice will meet
you in almost all your moods, and create new ones for you if you have
none of your own.
I used to get dazzled with all the splendour of palaces and churches;
these last are so full of the glorification of great men—the monuments
and ornamentation are so obtrusive that there seems scarcely any room
for prayer. San Marco itself, dream of beauty as it is, inspires less
devotion than many a humble country church without a single work of
art to recommend it. Without the ineffable Presence in the Tabernacle
I should have felt more piously disposed at the foot of the lonely
shrine out in the lagoon, where the Blessed Madonna’s picture smiles
down from its tall tarred post on the flowers that one or other of her
children brings there every day. The water laps gently at her feet, the
sky arches blue overhead, and one can dream very good and happy dreams
as one gazes up at her. But in San Marco, just as in the Doges’ Palace,
one is teased by two things—the necessity of thought and appreciation,
and that horrid sense one has in so many places in Italy of all the
prying irreverence that expert—sceptic—heretics have brought to bear
on it—as if the cleverest ant that ever crawled and builded underground
could measure the courses of the stars!
To forget, and rest from, other people’s thoughts, I used to walk a
good deal through those narrow noiseless streets where never hoof or
wheel comes to break the stillness, where old houses lean close to
share old secrets, and the shadows lie clear and cool through most of
the daylight hours. When the sun does strike down he turns the grey to
gold, seems to gather up all the perfume of the small hidden gardens
and fling it to you with a laugh on a spray of jasmine that has tossed
itself over some ancient wall, or a tangle of red carnations spilling
down through the scroll-work of a balcony projecting the wide curve of
its iron bars far overhead, above the street.
Through a half-open _portone_, dull green like the narrow canals
in the shade, you catch a glimpse of a courtyard deep-sunk between
high walls that are dimpled and lichened to indescribable richness
of colour, and gleaming here and there with some lovely fragment
of bas-relief. Cupid with one wing gone and half a bow, a row of
bursting pomegranates trailing off into nothing, a few letters of some
once-pompous inscription—who knows, who cares? They served out their
own uses centuries ago and were stuck in here to corner a window-frame,
to key an arch, to replace a brick, but the sun and the rain and the
salt sweetness of Adriatic airs have fused and mellowed them to the
gold-white tint of fresh curds, smoothed their marbled surface to the
velvet uniformity of magnolia petals.
There is a fountain in the courtyard, of course, a rough half-shell of
stone set into the wall, where a slow jet trickles all day long, and
is just now spilling over the brim of the red copper _conca_ that some
woman has set atilt below it—and forgotten, perhaps to run upstairs and
pull in the wire that dangles overhead between two windows, flapping
with garments of many colours like a string of signals at sea. For
there are windows that look into the courtyard, row above row—and there
she is, looking out of one, a red-haired, brown-eyed young creature,
with broad shoulders and sunburnt throat, a strapping baby, trying to
wriggle out of its swaddling bands, in her arms. In a minute she comes
down, and clatters over the broad, damp stones in her wooden clogs
with yellow-velvet toe-caps—and the sight of them sets me dreaming
of the Venetian ladies three hundred years ago, picking their way to
Mass through the narrow twisting _calle_ on clogs too, but such clogs!
A narrow stem, twelve or fourteen inches high, resting on a base not
more than two inches wide, and spreading at the top into a pretty
little slipper, lined with velvet, and the whole thing was covered with
crimson velvet and gold lace held in place by dozens of gold-headed
nails! How any woman grown ever balanced herself on those stilts is a
mystery to me still.
My father at one time collected ancient footgear and then forgot
all about it; so it came to pass that in a corner of our old nursery
at the Villa Negroni there lay the strangest heap of toys that any
modern child ever had to play with—several pairs of these exquisitely
ornamented _sabots_ tumbled in with pink and scarlet silk slippers of
the Watteau period, and later. One pair I remember, with heels like
knitting-pins, so high that only the very point of the foot touched
the ground at all. But oh, how the little feet that wore them must have
suffered! They had certainly walked in such shoes from childhood, for
the foot had sunk down and lost shape until, pathetically small as the
little slipper was, it was as lumpy and shapeless as a clenched fist
and almost as broad as it was long.
By the time I remembered her again, after my mental excursion, my
Giorgione beauty had twisted a towel into a turban, placed it on
her red hair, and, lifting the _conca_ on to her head with a turn of
the hand, and without spilling a drop, had disappeared up the dark
stairway, all in less time than it takes to tell. Then, after stealing
one fat pink oleander blossom from the tree in the corner, I went on
my way, sniffing its nutty sweetness, to lose myself in the silent
labyrinth of those little-trodden alleys, and then be suddenly brought
to a standstill by a deep, narrow canal, unbridged, green, silent,
serving as the water door to the rooms of dark old houses that frowned
at each other across it. At every few yards stone steps led down, the
water lapping confidentially over the lowest ones.
[Illustration: TORCELLO. THE CATHEDRAL AND THE CHURCH OF ST.
FOSCA. Photo by Alinari.]
From far away comes the long warning cry, “_O, Premí_,” that has
puzzled generations of etymologists unable to give even a guess at its
derivation. But everybody knows its meaning—you hear it a hundred times
a day at every angle of the canals, telling those whom it concerns that
a gondola is coming round the corner. The next moment it has swung
into sight, the long, sinuous black thing cutting through the water
so smoothly and imperiously, pulling up suddenly without jerk or sound
beside the steps to let its fare slip on shore or its gondolier deliver
a message—in the soft, lisping dialect that sounds like insects’ wings
in a summer noon—to some one waiting for it on a balcony above.
It is the little things that are so real and charming in Venice, I
think—the glimpses of life among the unchanging, persistent common
people, who live as they have always lived in the discreet, still
atmosphere of the back streets and the forgotten waterways.
Sometimes grown-up Venice is a little overpowering; one feels called
upon to note every turn and building for fear of missing some
exquisite bit of architecture, some play of light and shade that
must be remembered. Then one is glad to get away to one or another
of the islands that lie around her, the nurseries where she played,
and dreamed of the future, a thousand years ago. The dearest of them
all to me is Torcello. We rowed out there one morning in August, when
the sea was very calm and the sun a little veiled by clouds sweeping
slowly up from the south. As we approached the island it seemed as if
its few buildings were flush with the water; so low does it lie that
the grasses and wild roses on the shore were dipping in the wash of
the ripples. Some peasants had been cutting the grass, the scent of
new-mown hay filled the air, and two great boats pushed out from some
inlet and passed between us and the land, laden ten feet high with a
cargo of fragrant green gold. As they met the breeze, up went the tawny
sails, and they skimmed away over the blue water like bees heavy with
pollen.
Then there was the cool rush of the turning prow, our gondola ran in
softly to the strand, some one held up an arm and I sprang on shore—to
find myself in another age and another clime. I had to wait a few
minutes to realize what it all meant, for the _ambiente_ was new to my
senses. A stretch of turf and wild roses—that explained itself—youth
and roses never need introduction—but the still white church, so
long and low, with its slender columns like altar candles, its grave
Byzantine lines—that made me pause. It seemed as if some saint had
turned from his prayers to ask me what I came for, and I could only
reply, “You must tell me: there is nothing here that I have a name for,
but there is something that was mine—give it back to me!”
When I walk through a familiar room in the dark, a peculiar warning
like a ghostly touch is laid on my forehead as I come near any object
on a level with it, and that same feeling came to me there at Torcello,
I remember. It seemed as if it all were known to me, as if every flower
and blade of grass called out, “We were here with you before!”—as if
the small forsaken basilica had meant the heart of home in some lapsed
period that life, as I knew it, could in no way account for. Its
loveliness was so removed, so ascetic, that one held one’s breath for
fear of disturbing its peace: the marble seats, the central throne,
seemed all peopled by grave shades of presbyters, surrounding their
Bishop, their long, straight vestments marked with the gold cross from
shoulder to shoulder and from neck to feet: I could almost fancy I
heard their deep chant, first from this side of the mounting tribune
and then from that, echoing in the cold spaces overhead and dying away
down the nave among the columns.
I believed the old story then, that Torcello had been the first
resting-place of the hunted exiles fleeing seaward from the Huns. It
was not that; I doubt whether the basilica was really built in the
seventh century as the guide books say; Rialto had its church long
before Torcello; but Rialto has been the artery of Venice’s throbbing
vitality too long for any associations to cling to it now, while
Torcello has stood aside, a recluse that has never wavered in its
loyalty to the Past, and the Past is enshrined there for all time. I
was surprised to find that it and I were friends. There are only two
of all the dead-and-gone centuries of Europe that seem really my own
besides the one I was born in—and they do not belong to the chaotic
times of Barbarian invasion and Byzantine supremacy. But the nameless
sweetness of the airs that play so gently over the forsaken island said
something that day that could never be forgotten, and the impression
was so strong and so perfect that I have never wished to tamper with it
by a second visit.
Strangely enough, Torcello dismissed us with contumely, for as we left
it in the late afternoon we encountered a fearful storm and came, I
think, very near to being swamped. The thunder simply hurled itself
from every quarter at once, the sea rose in inky billows of terrifying
dimensions, and between them and the rain we were drenched to the skin,
and very thankful when Sandruccio, who behaved splendidly, finally
landed us on the slippery steps of our hotel.
For a day or two after that we stayed within call, so to speak, and
had no fancy for putting out to the lagoons. There were mornings when
it was pleasant to be utterly and frankly frivolous and do nothing
but wander under the arcades of the Piazzetta and in and out of the
bewilderingly pretty shops. Such a spread of colour and glitter they
were, and so tempting was it to pick up some of the alluring trifles
for the new home we were going to make in Peking! The Murano glass
at Salviati’s I still think the most beautiful product of our own or
any other time. Every tint of sea and sky and jewel gleamed in the
ethereal beakers and vases; I remember a tall goblet of transparent
topaz shot with gold, that twisted and curled on its tendril stem like
a newly opened convolvulus, spreading at last into a cup too ethereal
for earthly lips to touch, so full of light that the most sparkling
wine would have darkened it; and all round, for handles, were blown
wreaths of milky, iridescent foam, so faint that it seemed as if they
must run down its sides and wet your fingers with salt spray. It was
like getting into the Sea-king’s palace under the sea to spend an hour
at Salviati’s; every lovely freak and fancy of sun and water, from
the brooding sapphire of secret caves to the last bubble of spray on a
curling wave, it was all there, caught and crystallized for mortals to
love and handle.
Those were the days of beads—one wore as many chains as one liked,
the more the better—and for years I went round with a little Venetian
rosary of blue and gold flecked with fairy roses round my neck. The
mother-of-pearl overcame me altogether—long garlands of the tiny
shells strung in fanciful patterns—each perfect in itself and shot with
rainbows through its moonlight sheen—but the dignity of a married woman
forbade the wearing of such things now. For years they lay about on my
dressing-table reflected in the depths of a Venetian mirror which also
accompanied me everywhere, a big oval set in a frame of translucent
flowers and leaves, neither white nor silver nor pearl, but just the
colour of the foam when the sun shines through it.
We went out to Murano once and saw all the processes of glass-blowing,
and they made a little vase for me while I was there; but the secrets
of those marvellous colours were not explained, and I came away with
one cherished illusion intact—I am still sure that the glass-blowers
have a tributary tribe of nymphs and fairies who gather their tints for
them out at sea, in nets woven of sunbeams and moonrays!
During that honeymoon summer, Venice indoors, with all its matchless
art treasures, appealed to me less than Venice out-of-doors. At the
time of my first stay there I was only sixteen, but mature enough
to appreciate what I was seeing, and my dear old step-father was
a splendid guide and allowed us to miss nothing. He was a strange
combination, dear man—an expert at explaining beauty of colour and
technique and stonily impervious to impression or atmosphere. All that
remained to him of his Calvinistic New England education was a giant
conscience, to which other people’s inclinations had to bow wherever
he took the lead, as he did, imperiously, in matters of sight-seeing.
Often I would have begged off some expedition, feeling surfeited
already with beauty and history, and longing to be healthily frivolous
for a few hours, as youth needs to be sometimes.
But it was of no use—go with him I must, and very glad I was of it
afterwards, for, returning in later years to the places where he had
piloted me about, I could make at once for the things I wanted to see
again, without troubling my head about the others. One of these, alas!
was gone when Hugh and I, just married, came to Venice. The St. Peter
Martyr of Titian had perished in a fire. I had lingered before it
long, as a girl, for there was something more than mere beauty in the
painting; one felt there was truth, relatively as absolute as that for
which the Saint gave his life—a picture not only of himself, but of
what he died for, loyalty to the unalterable essence of things as they
are.
It is as hard to describe a beloved picture as a beloved face, but
this one had been seldom copied or reproduced, and it is gone now, so I
will try. In a dark glade of the woods through which flamed red bars of
sunset, two ruffians were attacking the Saint and his companion; Peter
knelt between them in the foreground, looking up to heaven ere the last
blow fell, with a wonderful expression of mingled pain and joy. The
sweep of the drapery, the slight sinking to one side, showed that his
strength was gone already, but through the physical anguish on his face
there shone such radiance that one knew heaven was already opened to
his eyes—it was not trust, it was certainty. The assassins, great bulky
brutes, towered over him, but their figures were shadowed and dark and
formless as evil itself; all the light, all the reality, were centred
on the bending head, the dying eyes, the praying hands, the mystic
cross that barred the priestly garment. I think there were palms and
angels hovering overhead; but in a very old drawing, half life-size,
of this picture—to all appearance contemporary with the painting—that I
found among my dear father’s possessions, they were absent.
In the background lay the body of the martyr’s slain companion,
martyred too, but all the glory and the promise seemed to be for
Peter—none for him. As I have said, I was only sixteen then, and knew
less about Peter the Martyr than I did about Confucius or Genghis
Khan, and for many years I wondered why the other martyr had remained
nameless and unsainted. It shows the incompleteness of my education
when I confess that it was only a year or two ago that I pieced his
story together for myself. Let some one correct me if I am wrong,
but I _think_ the neglected companion was Conrad, the confessor of
Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, a man of high learning and much piety, but
to whom, on account of his harsh treatment of the “dear Saint,” the
Church refused the honours of canonization. But we know that Conrad was
murdered for the Faith, and may be equally sure that it was owing to
Saint Elizabeth’s prayers that Heaven allowed him to expiate his fault
by a heroic death.
The thirteenth century, so rich in Saints, was appallingly prolific
in heresies too, and of these the Manichæan, ancient as the devil
himself, was just then the most aggressive. It had gained much ground
in the north of Italy, and when Peter was born in Verona his whole
family had been led away by it. But the true Faith was still taught
in the schools, and by the time the boy was seven years old he had
learnt the Apostles’ Creed, and neither blows nor caresses at home
could shake him in his loyalty to it. Later he was sent to Bologna to
pursue the studies considered necessary for a gentleman in those days,
but Providence had other designs and uses for him. He was yet in his
teens when the call came; he answered it at once, renounced the world
and took the Habit of the Preachers, the sons and followers of Saint
Dominic. The Breviary says, “With great splendour did his virtues shine
in religion,” especially in his gifts of preaching, which brought the
strayed lambs back to the fold by thousands at a time. He had always
prayed for the crowning grace of martyrdom, and when it approached he
told those who loved him that his end was close at hand. The Manichæans
feared him as much as they hated him, for he was as stern with the
recalcitrant as he was tender to the contrite. He was returning, in the
exercise of his ministry, from Como to Milan when they murdered him.
With his last breath he repeated the Apostles’ Creed.
The antiphon for his Feast repeats the words used by Innocent IV in
the Bull of his canonization, which took place the year after his
death, an immense number of authentic miracles having already testified
to the honour and glory God had bestowed upon him in Paradise. “As
purest flame leaps up from the depths of smoke, as the rose blooms on
the thorny branch, so Peter, Teacher and Martyr, is born of faithless
parents.” “Soldier in the Preachers’ camp, he stands now in the ranks
of the warriors triumphant.” “His soul was all angelic, his tongue
fruitful, his life apostolic, and his death precious.” “The unconquered
athlete battles strong in death, professing aloud the Faith for which
he bleeds. It is thus that the martyr triumphs as he dies for the
Faith.”
To all but us benighted Catholics “the Faith,” in these latter days,
is a mere sun-myth, and the blackest heresy a disease that has lost
all its terrors—as harmless as chicken pox or a cold in the head. Let
us, who know better, at least have the grace to acknowledge our debt to
the great ones who fought for our heritage and kept it clean with their
blood!