My most intimate friend, while in Venice, was Horatio Brown, a gentleman who knows the city probably better than any other foreigner, and much more intimately than many of the Venetians themselves. His book, "Life on the Lagoons," is the best book about the town that I know, and I have rummaged through a number. Mr. Howell's "Venetian Life," like everything he writes, is very artistic and instructive, but I was never able to find the Venice that he knows.
I must thank Arthur Symons for persuading Brown to be kind to me, and I fancy that he told him the truth—that I was a young Wanderlust victim. The result was that, although I had to live pretty scrimpingly, Brown's home on the Zattere became a magnificent retreat, where, at least once a week, I could brush up my manners a little, and enjoy an Anglo-Saxon atmosphere and undisguised comfort.
I think it was Monday evenings that Brown generally received his friends. There were many interesting persons to meet on these occasions, literary and otherwise, but a good illustration of the vagaries of fancy and memory is the fact that an Austrian admiral stands out strongest in my recollections of the Monday evenings that I recall. I suppose it was because he had been through a great many adventures out of my line, and was not quite my height. Any one smaller than I am who has projected his personality into more alluring wanderings than I have becomes immediately to me a person to look up to. Tall men and their achievements, fiendish or angelic, are so out of my range of vision that I have never tried to wonder much about them. Napoleon I could have listened to by the month without a murmur; Bismarck would have made me look dreamily at the ceiling at times.
The admiral told me how Garibaldi once gave him a scare, when the Italians were freeing themselves of Austrian rule. It seems that Garibaldi kept the enemy guessing at sea quite as much as on shore, and the admiral received word, one day, that Garibaldi was coming up the coast toward Venice with a formidable force. As a matter of fact, he was doing nothing of the kind, being busy in very different quarters. "But how was I to know?" the admiral said to me. "He was jumping about from place to place like a frog, and I had no reason to believe that the rumor might not be true. I decided to take no chances, and commandeered two Austrian-Lloyd steamers and sunk them in the Malamocco Strait. I felt able to guard the other end of the Lido. But Garibaldi fooled me, as he did a great many others, and the two steamers were sunk for nothing."
During a part of my stay in and about Venice, I lived alone in an empty house at San Nicoletto on the Lido. Within a stone's throw was the military prison, dreaming about which, in the empty house, after a luxurious gratuitous dinner, sometimes made night life rather gloomy. I got my non-gratuitous meals at an osteria near-by. I wonder whether the asthmatic little steamer that used to run from the Riva to San Nicoletto is still afloat? It was owned and captained by a conte, who also collected the fares. I patronized his craft for a while, and then in partnership with a corporale, stationed at the San Nicoletto marine signal station, invested in a canoe.
The adventures that we had with this canoe were many and varied. On one occasion, for instance, the canoe and I were suspected of being spies, and came very near being bombarded. I had spent the afternoon in Venice, leaving the canoe near the Giardino Pubblico. It was darker than usual when I was ready to return to the Lido, and I carried no light; but I set out for home undaunted. I had been paddling along serenely enough for fifteen minutes or so, when, on nearing the powder magazine island, or whatever it is between Venice and San Nicoletto that is guarded by a sentry, I was partly awakened from my dreaming by a strenuous "Chi va la?" on my left. I say partly awakened advisedly, because I paid no attention to the challenge, and paddled on. It seemed impossible that anybody could want to learn who I was out there on the water. Again the words rang out, clear and sharp, and again I failed to heed them. The third time the challenge was accompanied by an ominous click of a gun. I came out of my dream like a shot. Why I should be challenged was absolutely unintelligible to me, but that suggestive click jogged my work-a-day senses back into action.
"Amico! Amico!" I yelled.
"Well, draw up here to the landing and let me look at you."
I put about and paddled over to the island, where the sentry detained me nearly half an hour, making me explain how harmless and innocent I was. I must needs tell him who my landlord was on the Lido, which room I occupied in the empty house, why in the name of Maria I lived on the Lido at all, and by what maladetto right I dared cruise in those waters without lights. He finally let me pass on, with the warning that my craft stood a good chance of being sent to the bottom if she passed that way again at night without the proper illumination.
One day this canoe foundered near the Giardino Pubblico, and the accident brought to light a typical Italian trait in the corporale. I thought that it was an exhibition of simple stubbornness at the time, but Brown assured me later that I was mistaken. I was trying to manage things when the canoe put her nose into the mud bank, and the corporale was in the garden, I think, looking on. He was slicked up in his best uniform and looked very fine, but, as a sailor and part owner of the canoe, I thought he should come to her aid in such a case of signal distress. At first he also thought that he ought to bestir himself in the matter, and carefully looked about to see if anybody was watching. Then he picked his way more like a woman with fine lace skirts on than like a man, let alone a sailor, to a dry spot within perhaps thirty feet of the canoe. There he spent himself utterly in telling me how to do what he could do a hundred times better from the shore. All the canoe needed was a good, big shove, which he could have given her without any great inconvenience. I urged him in spotless Italian to get a real genuine move on and send me seaward.