But it is at evening that the Mare Ligure takes you and holds you with a spell of its own. At sunset the wind generally dies down, and then the sun sinks slowly over a softly-moving but untroubled sea. The sky clears of its dancing clouds and becomes—not sky, somehow, but a fathomless infinity of breathing rose and topaz, transparent and liquid like jewelled wine. And every ripple and dimple of the water soaks up the transcendent flush, swaying rhythmically, and smoothing out into vast pools of melting mother-of-pearl, in which that living wet crimson seems to lie like a transparent veil over deeper tints that float beneath. When the sun is gone, the red deepens to the velvet of a dark June rose, and the western sky is flame, not light; but hurrying night has chilled the east behind you, and now every ripple is violet blue on its hither side, the golden glow recedes further and further towards the west, is sucked away in the trail of the sun at last, and then nothing is left of the day but a forsaken sweep of primrose and the wraith of a new-born star.
For sheer splurge of colour and light one must go further north and be out in the Bay of Spezia some September noon, when the harbour is full of white battleships all beaconed with signals like strung flowers, and the bands are playing madly and salutes are crashing through the music for some royal holiday. The white town and the green hills behind it seem to thrill visibly in unison, and the sea is cobalt that would make your eyes ache but for the fringe of feathery white ripples that the breeze combs up all over its surface, and the sky is transparent turquoise, and night seems a thousand years away. Further on yet Genoa the Superb has a sea as blue, sky as stainless, but she dominates in her white and emerald loveliness so that her setting is almost effaced. One forgets to notice the steps of the throne where Sovereign Beauty queens it so royally.
Then cross the plain to Venice, the witch who holds East and West in her soft hands and plays with their riches as a millionaire’s child might slip a rain of gold pieces from one palm to another, in idleness, recking nothing of their value. Sea and sky, priceless palace and empty island—it is all hers—she can never exhaust her past, and our century, jejune and vulgar as it is, only seems to touch her to a scornful smile. But Venice can tremble still. Once in many years there sweeps down on her one of Nature’s handfuls of retribution—a storm that makes her quake to her artificial incredible foundations. I saw one such. It was in May, Venice’s most perfect month. We had been out to the Lido that morning, bathing in water smooth as cream; there was not a cloud in the sky. We had barely got home when inky darkness descended, and out of it burst a gale that lashed the Grand Canal to fury, and a machine-gun fire of hail was flung against the windows, to result, an instant later, in a crash of broken glass and tumbling bricks that was truly appalling. Through the tumult came shrieks and cries. Every window in the Ducal Palace was smashed, and most of the others in the town; when it was over—the whole thing did not last more than twenty minutes—I went out on our balcony and picked up, from the thick layer lying there, hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs. The next day we went out again to the Lido, and where a long green pergola of vines had shaded the way to the bathing establishment now stood a bare tracery of dry branches. Not a single leaf was left.
But generally the Adriatic waits on Venice with subservient calm, and one can float over those vast yet not unpictured lagoons in still assurance that one’s reveries will not be disturbed. I doubt whether such lengths of languorous idling be good for young strong people, but as a rest-cure for tired ones there can be nothing more complete. The shape and build of the gondola (what a perfect name for the gliding sinuous thing!) was evolved by an artist in comfort; the enormous leather cushions let you sink into their thickness as far as you please without ever touching the limit of their pleasant elasticity. Whether cowled in to keep off the sun’s rays in the day or uncovered to give you all the coolness of the evening, the gondola seat relieves you of all responsibility for your body; it holds you as an experienced nurse holds a tired child; and in its silent swan-like rush through the water you get just the sense of motion necessary to keep your nerves employed yet soothed. With the right companion, what talks are possible, as you glide out in the last flush of evening towards the more distant lagoons and wait for the moon to come up out of Istria, across the sea! Your gondolier, silent as Charon, is behind you and you forget his existence. And all the rest is behind, too, but very far behind: daily life with its horrid strident claims and calculations that won’t even leave honeymooning couples alone! Time has ceased, and the world is standing still to let you look at life in its beauty and kiss its face in its peace. When at last you say, without turning your head, “A casa, Sandruccio!” your black swan quivers an instant from low stern to dark arched prow, swings round in the smallest space any boat did ever turn in, and you float back to the regular rhythm of Sandruccio’s twenty-foot oar, till a necklace of lights lies low on the land and the faintest of songs—a very mist of music—is wafted over the water. “Alla Pizzetta?” enquires Sandruccio, speaking for the first time and in a voice expressing much amused indulgence for dreaming lovers. A few minutes later he is imperiously ordering fellow-gondoliers out of his way to the steps, is holding the side of the swan the eighth of an inch off the grind of the stone, and you and your other self dance on shore to become light-hearted young people, keeping time surreptitiously to the gay waltz of the band and laughing at everything and nothing because all the festive crowd around you is doing the same thing.
Witch and tyrant as she is—and perhaps for that very reason, since tyrants must know how to yield as well as how to rule—Venice will meet you in almost all your moods, and create new ones for you if you have none of your own.
I used to get dazzled with all the splendour of palaces and Churches; these last are so full of the glorification of great men—the monuments and ornamentation are so obtrusive that there seems scarcely any room for prayer. San Marco itself, dream of beauty as it is, inspires less devotion than many a humble country Church without a single work of art to recommend it. Without the ineffable Presence in the Tabernacle I should have felt more piously disposed at the foot of the lonely shrine out in the Lagoon, where the Blessed Madonna’s picture smiles down from its tall tarred post on the flowers that one or other of her children brings there every day. The water laps gently at her feet, the sky arches blue overhead, and one can dream very good and happy dreams as one gazes up at her. But in San Marco, just as in the Doges’ Palace, one is teased by two things—the necessity of thought and appreciation, and that horrid sense one has in so many places in Italy, of all the prying irreverence that expert—sceptic—heretics of the Ruskin tribe have brought to bear on it—as if the cleverest ant that ever crawled and builded underground could measure the courses of the stars!
To forget, and rest from, other people’s thoughts, I used to walk a good deal through those narrow, noiseless streets where never hoof or wheel comes to break the stillness, where old houses lean close to share old secrets, and the shadows lie clear and cool through most of the daylight hours. When the sun does strike down he turns the grey to gold, seems to gather up all the perfume of the small hidden gardens and fling it to you with a laugh on a spray of jessamine that has tossed itself over some ancient wall, or a tangle of red carnations spilling down through the scrollwork of a balcony projecting the wide curve of its iron bars far overhead, above the street. Through a half-open portone, dull green, like the narrow canals in the shade, you catch a glimpse of a courtyard deep sunk between high walls that are dimpled and lichened to indescribable richness of colour, and gleaming here and there with some lovely fragment of bas-relief. Cupid with one wing gone and half a bow—a row of bursting pomegranates trailing off into nothing—a few letters of some once pompous inscription—who knows, who cares? They served out their own uses centuries ago and were stuck in here to corner a window frame, to key an arch, to replace a brick, but the sun and the rain and the salt sweetness of Adriatic airs have fused and mellowed them to the gold-white tint of fresh curds, smoothed their marbled surface to the velvet uniformity of magnolia petals. There is a fountain in the courtyard, of course, a rough half shell of stone set into the wall, where a slow jet trickles all day long and is just now spilling over the brim of the red copper “conca” that some woman has set a-tilt below it—and forgotten, perhaps, to run upstairs and pull in the wire that dangles overhead between two windows, flapping with garments of many colours like a string of signals at sea. For there are windows that look into the courtyard, row above row—and there she is, looking out of one, a red-haired, brown-eyed young creature with broad shoulders and sunburnt throat, a strapping baby trying to wriggle out of its swaddling bands in her arms. In a minute she comes down, and clatters over the broad damp stones in her wooden clogs with yellow velvet toe-caps—and the sight of them sets me dreaming of the Venetian ladies three hundred years ago, picking their way to Mass through the narrow twisting “calle” on clogs, too, but such clogs! A narrow stein, twelve or fourteen inches high, resting on a base not more than two inches wide, and spreading at the top into a pretty little slipper, lined with velvet, and the whole thing was covered with crimson velvet and gold lace held in place by dozens of gold-headed nails! How any grown woman ever balanced herself on these stilts is a mystery to me still. My father at one time collected ancient footgear, and then forgot all about it; so it came to pass that in a corner of our old nursery at the Villa Negroni there lay the strangest heap of toys that any modern child ever had to play with—several pairs of these exquisitely ornamented “sabots” tumbled in with pink and scarlet silk slippers of the Watteau period—and later. One pair, I remember, with heels like knitting pins, so high that only the very point of the foot touched the ground at all. But, oh, how the little feet that wore them must have suffered! They had certainly walked in such shoes from childhood, for the foot had sunk down and lost shape until, pathetically small as the little slipper was, it was as lumpy and shapeless as a clenched fist and almost as broad as it was long.
By the time I remembered her again, after my mental excursion, my Giorgione beauty had twisted a towel into a turban, placed it on her red hair, and, lifting the “conca” on to her head with a turn of the hand and without spilling a drop, had disappeared up the dark stairway, all in less time than it takes to tell. Then, after stealing one fat, pink oleander blossom from the tree in the corner, I went on my way, sniffing its nutty sweetness, to lose myself in the silent labyrinth of those little-trodden alleys and then be suddenly brought to a standstill by a deep narrow canal, unbridged, green, silent, serving as the water door to the rooms of dark old houses that frowned at each other across it. At every few yards stone steps led down, the water lapping confidentially over the lowest ones. From far away comes the long warning cry, “O, Premí”—that has puzzled generations of etymologists unable to give even a guess at its derivation. But everybody knows its meaning—you hear it a hundred times a day at every angle of the canals, telling those whom it concerns that a gondola is coming round the corner. The next moment it has swung into sight, the long, sinuous black thing cutting through the water so smoothly and imperiously, pulling up suddenly without jerk or sound beside the steps to let its fare slip on shore or its gondolier deliver a message—in the soft lisping dialect that sounds like insects’ wings in a summer noon—to some one waiting for it on a balcony above.
It is the little things that are so real and charming in Venice, I think; the glimpses of life among the unchanging, persistent, common people, who live as they have always lived in the discreet still atmosphere of the back streets and the forgotten waterways.