Part 5
“Little by little, the story came out. It appeared that immediately after the ball she had moved to this château, a part of her own estates, which had been quietly fitted up and restored. It was then remembered that soon after the château had been finished, a certain Marquis, well known in France, who had adored the Contessa for years, and was really the only man she ever loved, had disappeared from Paris. He was traced at the time to Milan and Genoa, and finally to Venice. There all trace of him was lost. Such disappearances were not uncommon in those days, and it was often safer even for one’s relatives to shrug their shoulders and pass on. Further confirmation came from the gondolier, who had landed him the night of his arrival at the water-gate of this garden,--just where we landed an hour ago,--and who, on hearing of his supposed murder, had kept silent upon his share in the suspected crime. Inquiries conducted by the State corroborated these facts.
“Look around you, _mon ami_,” exclaimed the Professor suddenly. “Underneath this very arbor have they sat for hours, and in the window of that crumbling balcony have they listened to the low sound of each other’s voice in the still twilight, the world shut out, the vine-covered wall their only horizon. Here, as the years passed unheeded, they dreamed their lives away. _L’amour, l’amour, vous êtes tout puissant!_”
The Professor stopped, turned as if in pain, and rested his head on his arm. For some moments neither of us spoke. Was the romance to which I had listened only the romance of the Contessa, or had he unconsciously woven into its meshes some of the silken threads of his own past? When he raised his head I said: “But, Professor, you have not told me the secret she kept from the priest. Why did she shut herself up? What was it that altered the whole course of her life?”
“Did I not tell you? Then listen. She had overheard her gondolier say, as she stepped into her gondola on the fatal night of the great fête at the Foscari, ‘The Contessa is growing old; she is no longer as beautiful as she was.’”
I looked at the old fellow to see if he were really in earnest, and, throwing back my head, laughed heartily. For the first time in all my intercourse with him I saw the angry color mount to his cheeks.
He turned quickly, looked at me in astonishment, as if unable to believe his ears, and said sharply, knitting his brows, “Why do you laugh?”
“It seems so absurd,” I replied. “What did she expect; to be always a 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.
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.