In our long wanderings most paths, as we look back on them, show the little red stains where we cut our feet; we have left shreds of our soul’s garments on many a thorn by the way; but for me, and I fancy for some of you others, the breath and the sound and the touch of the sea has been nothing but coolness and healing, a sunbath for life’s chillinesses, a fountain of strength in its languors. I think I should know now the right point to make for, according to the distemper that might be assailing me; and, though twenty years ago I sought and loved the onslaught of the Atlantic and the Valhalla of the March tides in the Channel, to-day I would fare no further than my home seas, those that lap and sing on the Italian shores.
I was sailing up into, the Bay of Naples once, just as the morning had conquered the last star; the sky was a faint milky blue, and the mountains were cowled outlines, very dark and still. Not a breath stirred the sea, not a sound came from the land. Suddenly from the shadows that were neither land nor sea, I saw coming towards me a tall glorious form, floating on the water, pointing to the sky, clothed in long straight robes of white, making for open sea with the steady rush of a seabird on rested pinions. It took all the growing daylight to itself—it was the daylight, for a few breathless seconds—a vision of the Immaculate Conception, it seemed to me; then the music of ripple on prow whispered across the water, the sun leapt up behind Sant’ Angelo; I rubbed my eyes and, lo, a slender vessel with snowy sails, tall and narrow, from some strange port, such sails as our seamen never unfurled. She brought the wind as she had taken the daylight, and a moment later she swept past in her immaculate pride and was gone.
I always rather resented the advent of battleships and royal yachts and gaudy truck of that kind in our Southern waters, but the private yachts inspired us with a pleasant, mysterious interest that was not unwelcome. Once, when we were watching anxiously for my brother, during his venturesome sail from New York to Naples, the children were cruising round the Bay not far from Naples. A large beautiful yacht was seen to come in and cast anchor off Santa Lucia, and at once the greatest excitement prevailed on the Crawford felucca. Was that the Alda? Oh, surely it must be! At once the Margherita headed for the port, and the nearer she came to the new arrival the surer was everybody that the Alda—which none of them had seen, as Marion had just bought her—had reached port at last. How well she had stood the voyage! No sign of the heavy weather mentioned in the wire from Gibraltar! No sign of the Padrone either, but, of course, he would have had to go on shore to report himself and get his harbour papers from the Consul. What was this? Dark-faced sailors in fezes? How like Marion to pick up a Lascar crew in New York! Let us row round her and hail somebody—good Heavens! The first shout brought a dozen lovely Turkish ladies to the cabin windows, smiling, interested, only too ready to ask the pretty boatful on board. The children stared, open-mouthed! Then a burst of uncontrollable laughter shook the Margherita from stem to stern. Papa had certainly not brought a harem from New York! “A casa,” came the order to the grinning sailors, and the Margherita turned tail and ran for home.
There is a busy unromantic seaport called Livorno, a long way up the coast from Naples, a Tuscan town of white streets and shadeless squares, all alive with commerce, and, until I came to years of reason, represented to me by the huge flapping straw hats, fine as silk and pale gold in colour, which we children regarded as signals of summer when, on the first hot day, the ribbons that held them were tied under our chins, and we were admonished, on pain of sunstrokes and spankings, not to take them off. I had among my possessions a toy Swiss cottage all made of the same pretty straw, and I imagined that “Leghorn” was a straw city with bunches of red poppies and blue ribbons on the house-tops for ornament. It was rather a blow to discover, on being taken there when I was seven years old, to find that the only traces of my toy city were the thin golden strings which most of the women were plaiting with lightning quickness as they walked in the streets or sat in the doorways. After that, as I grew older, Leghorn meant just the sea in some of its most enchanting aspects, for it was very rarely that we missed our few weeks of bathing there in September, if we had spent the summer in the North. It was the beginning of the autumn homecoming; we took an apartment on the long bright boulevard that faces the sea, the cook and one or two of the servants came up from Rome to look after us, and, always, we had a royally good time. The last, I think, was the best of all, happening after a memorable summer in the Bagni de Lucca, which I have described elsewhere. My sister had just become engaged, and her fiancé, Erich von Rabe, of course followed us to Leghorn. Hugh Fraser was there, occupied mostly, it seemed to me, in saving the Paget children from getting drowned, since they would attempt to follow their indomitable young mother in her long swims out in the deep. Lady Paget did everything beautifully; she was built like a goddess and could not do anything else, whether she rode or danced or glided about in great old rooms or flowery gardens; but she never seemed more of a goddess than when she stood for an instant in her clinging draperies with her arms above her head and then leapt, like a curved arrow, out and down into the sun-kissed waves. One held one’s breath while they engulfed her—and then, yards beyond, up came that proud small head, and away she would go, with long easy strokes, a being at one with the sun and the sea—a joy to behold.
All that was in the morning, when the spaces under the big tents on the outrunning piers of the “stabilimenti” were crowded to the very edge with cheery, chattering groups, the ladies embroidering as fast as they talked, the children romping, the young men making love, and the old people, who would not face the cold joy of a plunge, smiling benignly on it all. The piers were low, and a sudden gust of wind would fling the salt water up without warning; then there were shrieks mingled with laughter, flurrying of skirts and scraping of chairs and snatching up babies, and all the fun of settling down again, only to renew the game at the next shower. This gathering only took place in the morning. As soon as the sun was right overhead, the ladies packed their fancy work into their reticules, wiped the remains of “ciambelle” from the children’s mouths, straightened their hats—all with an incessant fire of chatter like that of a tree full of roosting sparrows suddenly disturbed—and away everybody trailed along the blazing white boulevard for home, mid-day dinner, and the rapturous quiet of the siesta afterwards.
I believe I was a little jealous, even then, of the kind of official ownership which the Ambassador and his family seemed to claim in the man who, though neither of us dreamed it yet, was very soon to be my husband. Anyway, I permitted myself an occasional mood of pleasant melancholy towards evening when my own dear people, like all the others who had any deference at all for public opinion, were driving round and round the public gardens, listening to the band. Two of our party had agreed to slap public opinion quite brutally in the face; these were my erratic sister and her equally erratic fiancé. They hired a little sailing boat, and day after day, towards four o’clock, went off by themselves, unchaperoned save by the boatman, for long expeditions, whence they returned, gloriously happy and hungry, just in time for a very late dinner. Once and once only they lured me out—why, I could not imagine at the moment, as I was a bad sailor in those days and did not in the least want to go, but I soon found out their wicked motive. I had taken it upon myself to order the meals while we were at Leghorn, as my mother thought it would be good practice for me. Now there was one dish which we all, except Annie and Erich, particularly disliked, a fry of very bony, very rank-smelling crayfish, called “spannocchi.” After one trial I had steadily refused to have it brought to the table. But those two young monsters liked “spannocchi,” and they laid their plot quite cleverly and everything turned out just as they intended. We beat out to sea, the weather was squally, and in a short time I was lying, a seasick heap, in the bottom of the boat, begging with tears to be taken home. This was what they had been waiting for. “Not unless you promise us spannocchi for dinner to-morrow!” they exclaimed in a breath, grinning down at me in my misery. They looked as big and wicked as the pictures of the demon lover in our old ballad book, when he is sailing the faithless wife to hell!
Of course I promised—and was a most unpopular person with the rest of the family at dinner-time the next night. But their boatman avenged me in the end. The day before we returned to Rome they took leave of him with a little present, and he, who had all along imagined them to be a young married couple, because they came unaccompanied, testified his gratitude and good-will in true Italian fashion, by crying enthusiastically: “Heaven bless you, my good Signori, and may it be a fine boy!”
Annie put her head down and ran for home, and Erich was not allowed to come to dinner that night.
Livorno is an anomaly, an Italian city with no history, no ancient monuments, no works of art. In fact, it always seemed to me less Italian than any spot I knew in the whole country, but in the days when we used to frequent it I took that, as one took everything else in that cheerful age, for granted, and it was only long afterwards that I gave myself the trouble to hunt up the causes of the phenomenon. Then I learnt that down to the days of the Medici it was a small fishing village with a few hundred inhabitants, bearing, for some unknown reason, the name of another tiny place further north, Livorno Vercellese. The Medici first noted its possibilities, and set to work to make it the real port of Florence, till then largely dependent for such a commodity on Pisa, a little further up the coast. Pisa, the ancient rival of Genoa and Venice, still sick with memories of her past greatness and, since 1405, the bought-and-paid-for fief of Florence, was always seething with disaffection and conspiracy. Its last desperate effort at retrieving its independence was made in 1494, and the Florentines were put to the trouble of besieging it and taking it by force. It was some sixty or seventy years later (I think during the reign of Francesco, the father of Marie de Medici) that Livorno recommended itself to the ruler of the Republic as a fine spot for a port that would have no disturbing memories of independence to interfere with its usefulness. In order to insure this they did not colonise it with Italians at all, but craftily invited the more commercially-minded among the malcontents of all Europe to come and open up trading houses there. The invitation was eagerly accepted: persecuted Catholics from England and Germany, Moors from Spain, Jews in great numbers from all parts came, settled, and flourished, the Jews of course outnumbering all the rest, so that the Leghorn population is largely Jewish to this day. But there are also several old English merchant houses that, while still affecting to regard England as “home,” are deeply rooted in the bright little city on the Ligurian Sea, and very kind and hospitable were their representatives to us. I remember certain commodities—great chests of tea, rolls of English flannel, and fine table linen—my mother always sent for to one of these Leghorn merchants, and I fancy it is due to the little English-speaking community that the town is generally known by that barbarous travesty of its Italian name. In our times it has, of course, all the unsightly riches of a great modern military and commercial centre—foundries, docks, ship-yards, fortifications, naval arsenals, and all the rest of it—but its real attractions lie in the marvellous freshness of its air and its unbroken sea-line, changing in tint at every hour of the day and taking on certain splendours that I never remember seeing elsewhere. Livorno always seems cool, for when the sun is shining his hottest the breeze never fails, and the billows roll in and break in laughter and thunder on the rocks and toss their spray almost to the windows of your room, where the light comes up in a glow of green and gold through the Venetians and the wind plays games with the clean white curtains all day long.