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