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.”