V
Casa Rosa, May 22
I am like the schoolgirl who wrote home from Venice: “I am sitting on the edge of the Grand Canal drinking it all in, and life never seemed half so full before.” Was ever the city so beautiful as last night on the arrival of foreign royalty? It was a memorable display and unique in its peculiar beauty. The palaces that line the canal were bright with flags; windows and water-steps were thronged, the broad centre of the stream was left empty. Presently, round the bend below the Rialto, swept into view a double line of gondolas—long, low, gleaming with every hue of brilliant colour, most of them with ten, some with twelve, gondoliers in resplendent liveries, red, blue, green, white, orange, all bending over their oars with the precision of machinery and the grace of absolute mastery of their craft. In the middle, between two lines, came one small and beautifully modelled gondola, rowed by four men in red and black, while on the white silk cushions in the stern sat the Prince and Princess. There was no splash of oar or rattle of rowlock; swiftly, silently, with an air of stately power and pride, the lovely pageant came, passed, and disappeared under the shining evening sky and the gathering shadows of “the dim, rich city.” I never saw, or expect to see, anything of its kind so beautiful.
I stay for hours in the gondola, writing my letters or watching the thousand and one sights of the streets, for I often allow Salemina and the Little Genius to tread their way through the highways and byways of Venice while I stay behind and observe life from beneath the grateful shade of the black felze.
The women crossing the many little bridges look like the characters in light opera; the young girls, with their hair bobbed in a round coil, are sometimes bareheaded and sometimes have a lace scarf over their dark, curly locks. A little fan is often in their hands, and one remarks the graceful way in which the crepe shawl rests upon the women’s shoulders, remembering that it is supposed to take generations to learn to wear a shawl or wield a fan.
My favourite waiting-place is near the Via del Paradiso, just where some scarlet pomegranate blossoms hang out over the old brick walls by the canal-side, and where one splendid acanthus reminds me that its leaves inspired some of the most beautiful architecture in the world; where, too, the ceaseless chatter of the small boys cleaning crabs with scrubbing-brushes gives my ear a much-needed familiarity with the language.
Now a girl with a red parasol crosses the Ponte del Paradiso, making a brilliant silhouette against the blue sky. She stops to prattle with the man at the bell-shop just at the corner of the little calle. There are beautiful bells standing in rows in the window, one having a border of finely traced crabs and sea-horses at the base; another has a top like a Doge’s cap, while the body of another has a delicately wrought tracery, as if a fish-net had been thrown over it.
Sometimes the children crowd about me as the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco struggle for the corn flung to them by the tourists. If there are only three or four, I sometimes compromise with my conscience and give them something. If one gets a lira put into small coppers, one can give them a couple of centesimi apiece without feeling that one is pauperizing them, but that one is fostering the begging habit in young Italy is a more difficult sin to face.
To-day when the boys took off the tattered hats from their bonny little heads, all black waves and riotous curls, and with disarming dimples and sparkling eyes presented them to me for alms, I looked at them with smiling admiration, thinking how like Raphael’s cherubs they were, and then said in my best Italian: “Oh, yes, I see them; they are indeed most beautiful hats. I thank you for showing them to me, and I am pleased to see you courteously take them off to a lady.”
This American pleasantry was passed from mouth to mouth gleefully, and so truly enjoyed that they seemed to forget they had been denied. They ran, still laughing and chattering, to the wood-carver’s shop near-by and told him the story, or so I judged, for he came to his window and smiled benignly upon me as I sat in the gondola with my writing-pad on my knees. I was pleased at the friendly glance, for he is the hero of a pretty little romance, and I long to make his acquaintance.
It seems that, some years ago, the Queen, with one lady-in-waiting in attendance, came to his shop quite early in the morning. Both were plainly dressed in cotton gowns, and neither made any pretensions. He was carving something that could not be dropped, a cherub’s face that had to be finished while his thought of it was fresh. Hurriedly asking pardon, he continued his work, and at end of an hour raised his eyes, breathless and apologetic, to look at his visitors. The taller lady had a familiar appearance. He gazed steadily, and then, to his surprise and embarrassment, recognized the Queen. Far from being offended, she respected his devotion to his art, and before she left the shop she gave him a commission for a royal staircase. I am going to ask the Little Genius to take me to see his work, but, alas! there will be an unsurmountable barrier between us, for I cannot utter in my new Italian anything but the most commonplace and conventional statements.