The gondola stops near a small flight of stone steps protected by huge poles striped with blue and red. Other gondolas are debarking. A stout porter in gold lace steadies yours as you alight.
“Monsieur’s rooms are quite ready. They are over the garden; the one with the balcony overhanging the water.”
The hall is full of people (it is the Britannia, the best hotel in Venice), grouped about the tables, chatting or reading, sipping coffee or eating ices. Beyond, from an open door, comes the perfume of flowers. You pass out, cross a garden, cool and fresh in the darkening shadows, and enter a small room opening on a staircase. You walk up and through the cosy apartments, push back a folding glass door, and step out upon a balcony of marble.
How still it all is! Only the plash of the water about the bows of the gondolas, and the little waves snapping at the water-steps. Even the groups of people around the small iron tables below, partly hidden by the bloom of oleanders, talk in half-heard whispers.
You look about you,—the stillness filling your soul, the soft air embracing you,—out over the blossoms of the oleanders, across the shimmering water, beyond the beautiful dome of the Salute, glowing like a huge pearl in the clear evening light. No, it is not the Venice of your childhood; not the dream of your youth. It is softer, more mellow, more restful, more exquisite in its harmonies.
Suddenly a strain of music breaks upon your ear—a soft, low strain. Nearer it comes, nearer. You lean forward over the marble rail to catch its meaning. Far away across the surface of the beautiful sea floats a tiny boat. Every swing of the oar leaves in its wake a quivering thread of gold. Now it rounds the great red buoy, and is lost behind the sails of a lazy lugger drifting with the tide. Then the whole broad water rings with the melody. In another instant it is beneath you—the singer standing, holding his hat for your pennies; the chorus seated, with upturned, expectant faces.
Into the empty hat you pour all your store of small coins, your eyes full of tears.
GONDOLA DAYS
THAT first morning in Venice! It is the summer, of course—never the winter. This beautiful bride of the sea is loveliest when bright skies bend tenderly over her, when white mists fall softly around her, and the lagoons about her feet are sheets of burnished silver: when the red oleanders thrust their blossoms exultingly above the low, crumbling walls: when the black hoods of winter felsi are laid by at the traghetti, and gondolas flaunt their white awnings: when the melon-boats, with lifeless sails, drift lazily by, and the shrill cry of the fruit vender floats over the water: when the air is steeped, permeated, soaked through and through with floods of sunlight—quivering, brilliant, radiant; sunlight that blazes from out a sky of pearl and opal and sapphire; sunlight that drenches every old palace with liquid amber, kissing every moulding awake, and soothing every shadow to sleep; sunlight that caresses and does not scorch, that dazzles and does not blind, that illumines, irradiates, makes glorious, every sail and tower and dome, from the instant the great god of the east shakes the dripping waters of the Adriatic from his face until he sinks behind the purple hills of Padua.