CHAPTER XXI

THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE

"Then you'll never know my people in Venice," said John presently. He had suddenly remembered that there was nothing to tell the little old white-haired lady now. To all the thousand questions which she would whisper into his ears, only evasive answers could be given her.

"I told my mother about you," he went on slowly. "I told her how we met. I told her that you were praying to St. Joseph and she's been wondering ever since--like me"--the emotion rose in his throat--"she's been wondering what you could have had to ask."

He came back to the arm-chair--the arm-chair in which he did his work--and quietly sat down. Then, as quietly, as naturally as if she had done it a thousand times before, Jill seated herself on the floor at his feet and his arm wound gently round her neck.

"Did your mother know we met again?" she asked presently.

"Yes--I told her about the first time in Kensington Gardens. I haven't told her any more. I dared not."

"Dared not?" She looked up quickly.

"No--it's the hope of her life to see me happy--to see me married. They think I make more money than I do, because I won't take anything from them. They believe I'm in a position to marry and, in nearly every letter she writes, she makes some quaint sort of allusion to it. I believe already her mind is set on you. She's so awfully cute. She reads every single word between the lines, and sometimes sees more what has been in my mind when I wrote to her, than I even did myself."

Jill's interest wakened. Suddenly this old lady, far away in Venice, began to live for her.

"What is she like?" she asked--"Describe her. You've never told me what she's like."

Diffidently, John began. At first it seemed wasting their last moments together to be talking of someone else; but, word by word, he became more interested, more absorbed. It was entering Jill into his life, making her a greater part of it than she would have been had she gone away knowing nothing more of him than these rooms in Fetter Lane. At last the little old white-haired lady, with those pathetically powerless hands of hers, was there, alive, in the room with them.

Jill looked up at him with such eyes as concealed their tears.

"She means a lot to you," she said gently.

"Yes--she means a great deal."

"And yet, do you know, from your description of her, I seemed more to gather how much you meant to her. She lives in you."

"I know she does."

"And your father? Thomas Grey--of the port of Venice?" She tried to smile at the remembrance which that brought.

"Yes--he lives in me, too. They both of them do. He, for the work I shall do, carrying on where he left off; she, for the woman I shall love and the children I know she prays I may have before she dies. That is the essence of true fatherhood and true motherhood. They are perfectly content to die when they are once assured that their work and their love is going on living in their child."

She thought of it all. She tried in one grasp of her mind to hold all that that meant, but could only find herself wondering if the little old white-haired lady would be disappointed in her, would disapprove of the duty she was about to fulfil, if she knew.

After a long pause, she asked to be told where they lived; to be told all--everything about them; and in a mood of inspiration, John wove her a romance.

"You've got to see Venice," he began, "you've got to see a city of slender towers and white domes, sleeping in the water like a mass of water lilies. You've got to see dark water-ways, mysterious threads of shadow, binding all these flowers of stone together. You've got to hear the silence in which the whispers of lovers of a thousand years ago, and the cries of men, betrayed, all breathe and echo in every bush. These are the only noises in Venice--these and the plash of the gondolier's oar or his call--'Ohe!' as he rounds a sudden corner. You've got to see it all in the night--at night, when the great white lily flowers are blackened in shadow, and the darkened water-ways are lost in an impenetrable depth of gloom. You've got to hear the stealthy creeping of a gondola and the lapping of the water against the slimy stones as it hurries by. In every little burning light that flickers in a barred window up above, you must be able to see plotters at work, conspirators planning deeds of evil or a lover in his mistress' arms. You've got to see magic, mystery, tragedy, and romance, all compassed by grey stone and green water, to know the sort of place where my mother and father live, to know the place where I should have taken you, if--if things had been different."

"Should we have gone there together?" she said in a breath.

"Yes--I've always sort of dreamed, when I've thought of the woman with God's good gift of understanding, I've always sort of dreamed of what we should do together there."

She looked up into his face. The picture of it all was there in his eyes. She saw it as well. She saw the vision of all she was losing and, as you play with a memory that hurts, as a mother handles the tiny faded shoe of the baby she has lost, she wanted to see more of it.

"Should we have gone there together?" she whispered.

He smiled down at her--mock bravery--a smile that helped him bear the pain.

"Yes,--every year--as long as they lived and every year afterwards, if you wished. Every morning, we'd have got up early--you know those early mornings when the sun's white and all the shadows are sort of misty and the water looks cleaner and fresher than at any other time because the dew has purged it. We'd have got up early and come downstairs and outside in the little Rio, the gondolier would be blowing on his fingers, waiting for us. They can be cold those early mornings in Venice. Then we'd have gone to the Giudecca, where all the ships lie basking in the sun--all the ships that have come from Trieste, from Greece, from the mysterious East, up through the Adriatic, threading their way through the patchwork of islands, past Fort San Nicolo and Lido till they reach the Giudecca Canal. They lie there in the sun in the early mornings like huge, big water-spiders, and up from all the cabins you'll see a little curl of pale blue smoke where the sailors are cooking their breakfasts."

"And how early will that be?" asked Jill in a whisper.

"Oh--six o'clock, perhaps."

"Then I shall be awfully sleepy. I never wake up till eight o'clock and even then it's not properly waking up."

"Well, then, you'll put your head on my shoulder and you'll go to sleep. It's a wonderful place to sleep in, is a gondola. We'll go away down towards Lido and you can go to sleep."

"But the gondolier?"

"Oh"--he laughed gently. "The hood's up--he stands behind the hood. He can't see. And if he can, what does that matter? He understands. A gondolier is not a London cabby. He plies that oar of his mechanically. He's probably dreaming, too, miles away from us. There are some places in the world where it is natural for a man to love a woman, where it isn't a spectacle, as it is here, exciting sordid curiosity, and Venice is one of them. Well, then, you'll go to sleep, with your head on my shoulder. And when we're coming back again, I shall wake you up--how shall I wake you?"

He leant over her. Her eyes were in Venice already. Her head was on his shoulder. She was asleep. How should he wake her? He bent still lower, till his face touched hers.

"I shall kiss you," he whispered--"I shall kiss your eyes, and they'll open." And he kissed her eyes--and they closed.

"We'll go back to breakfast, then," he went on, scarcely noticing how subtly the tense had changed since he had begun. "What do you think you'd like for breakfast?"

"Oh--anything--it doesn't matter much what one eats, does it?"

"Then we'll eat anything," he smiled--"whatever they give us. But we shall be hungry, you know. We shall be awfully hungry."

"Well," said Jill under her breath--"I'm sure they'll give us enough. And what do we do then?"

"After breakfast?"

"Yes."

"Well--I finish just one moment before you do, and then I get up, pretending that I'm going to the window."

She looked up surprised.

"Pretending? What for?"

"Because I want to get behind your chair."

"But why?"

"Because I want to put my arms round your neck and kiss you again."

He showed her how. He showed her what he meant. She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes once more.

"When, without complaint, you take whatever is given you, that's the only grace for such a meal as that. Well--when we've said grace--then out we go again."

"In the garden?"

"Yes--to the Palazzo Capello in the Rio Marin."

"That's where your people live?"

"Yes. Well, perhaps, we take them out, or we go and sit in the garden. I expect father will want us to go and sit in the garden and see the things he's planted; and mother of course'll consent, though she'll be longing to go out to the Piazza San Marco and look at the lace in the shops under the Arcade."

"Well, then, I'll go out with her----" said Jill.

"If you go, I go," said John.

She laughed, and forced him to a compromise. He would stay in the garden for half an hour; it need not be more.

"There might be things we wanted to buy in the shops," she said--"shops where you might not be allowed to come." So he could understand that it ought to be half an hour. But it must not be more.

"And then--what then?" she asked.

"Well, then, directly after lunch, we'd take a gondola once more and set off for Murano."

"Directly after? Wouldn't it be cruel to leave them so soon? If we only go for a month every year, wouldn't it be cruel?"

This is where a man is selfish. This is where a woman is kind. It was natural enough, but he had not thought so much of them.

He consented that they should stay till tea-time was over--tea in those little, wee cups without any handles, which the little old white-haired lady could just manage to grasp in her twisted hands, and accordingly, loved so much because they did not jeer at her powerlessness as did the many things which she had once been able to hold.

"You didn't want not to come out with me--did you?" he asked when the tea-time picture had passed before his eyes.

"Not--not want--but you'd get tired, perhaps, if you saw too much of me alone."

"Get tired!"

Three score years and ten were the utmost that a man might hope for in this life. Get tired!

Well, then, tea was over at last. The light of a pearl was creeping into the sky. That was the most wonderful time of all to cross the Lagoon to Murano.

"Then it was much better we stayed to tea," she whispered.

Much better, since the shadows were deepening under the arches, and he could take her head in his hands and kiss her--as he kissed her then--without being seen. Oh--it was much better that they had stayed to tea.

Now they had started, past the Chiesa San Giacomo into the Grand Canal, down the broad waterway, past the Ca' d'Oro, which the Contarini built, to the narrow Rio di Felice; then out into the Sacca della Misericordia, and there, before them, the broad stretch of the silent Lagoon--a lake of opal water that never ended, but as silently became the sky, with no line of light or shade to mark the alchemy of change.

"And across this," said John,--"with their hour glasses spilling out the sand, come the gondolas with the dead, to the cemetery that lies in the water in the midst of the Lagoon. They churn up the water with the speed they go, and if you ask a gondolier why they go so fast, he will tell you it is because the dead cannot pay for that last journey of theirs. That is their humour in the city they call _La citta del riso sangue_. But we shall creep through the water--we can pay--at least----" he thought of his two quarters' rent--"I suppose we can. We shall steer through the water like the shadow of a little cloud gliding across the sea. Oh----" he pressed his hands to his eyes--"but it would be wonderful there with you! And at night, when the whole city is full of darkness--strange, silent, mysterious darkness--where every lighted taper that burns and every lamp that is lit seems to illuminate a deed of mystery, we would go out into the Grand Canal, when we had said good-night to those dear old people of mine and we'd listen to them singing--and, oh,--they sing so badly, but it sounds so wonderful there. At last--one by one, the lights would begin to flicker out. The windows that were alive and awake would close their eyes and hide in the mysterious darkness; a huge white lamp of a moon would glide up out of the breast of the Adriatic, and then----"

"Then?" she whispered.

"Then we should turn back to the little room amongst all those other little rooms in the great darkness--the gondolier would row home, and I should be left alone with my arms tight round you and my head resting on the gentlest place in the world."

He lifted his hands above his head--he laughed bitterly with the unreality of it all.

"What beautiful nonsense all this is," said he.

She looked up with the tears burning in her eyes. She looked up and her glance fell upon a picture that his father had painted and given him--a picture of the Rialto lifting with its white arches over the green water. She pointed to it. He followed with his eyes the white line of her finger.

"Then that," said Jill, and her voice quivered--"that's the City--the City of Beautiful Nonsense."