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.
Sometimes grown-up Venice is a little overpowering; one feels called upon to note every turn and building for fear of missing some exquisite bit of architecture, some play of light and shade that must be remembered. Then one is glad to get away to one or another of the islands that lie around her, the nurseries where she played, and dreamed of the future, a thousand years ago. The dearest of them all to me is Torcello. We rowed out there one morning in August, when the sea was very calm and the sun a little veiled by clouds sweeping slowly up from the south. As we approached the island it seemed as if its few buildings were flush with the water; so low does it lie that the grasses and wild roses on the shore were dipping in the wash of the ripples. Some peasants had been cutting the grass, the scent of new-mown hay filled the air, and two great boats pushed out from some inlet and passed between us and the land, laden ten feet high with a cargo of fragrant green gold. As they met the breeze, up went the tawny sails, and they skimmed away over the blue water like bees heavy with pollen.
Then there was the cool rush of the turning prow, our gondola ran in softly to the strand, some one held up an arm and I sprang on shore—to find myself in another age and another clime. I had to wait a few minutes to realize what it all meant, for the ambiente was new to my senses. A stretch of turf and wild roses—that explained itself—youth and roses never need introduction—but the still white church, so long and low, with its slender columns like altar candles, its grave Byzantine lines—that made me pause. It seemed as if some saint had turned from his prayers to ask me what I came for, and I could only reply, “You must tell me: there is nothing here that I have a name for, but there is something that was mine—give it back to me!”
When I walk through a familiar room in the dark, a peculiar warning like a ghostly touch is laid on my forehead as I come near any object on a level with it, and that same feeling came to me there at Torcello, I remember. It seemed as if it all were known to me, as if every flower and blade of grass called out, “We were here with you before!”—as if the small forsaken basilica had meant the heart of home in some lapsed period that life, as I knew it, could in no way account for. Its loveliness was so removed, so ascetic, that one held one’s breath for fear of disturbing its peace: the marble seats, the central throne, seemed all peopled by grave shades of presbyters, surrounding their Bishop, their long, straight vestments marked with the gold cross from shoulder to shoulder and from neck to feet: I could almost fancy I heard their deep chant, first from this side of the mounting tribune and then from that, echoing in the cold spaces overhead and dying away down the nave among the columns.
I believed the old story then, that Torcello had been the first resting-place of the hunted exiles fleeing seaward from the Huns. It was not that; I doubt whether the basilica was really built in the seventh century as the guide books say; Rialto had its church long before Torcello; but Rialto has been the artery of Venice’s throbbing vitality too long for any associations to cling to it now, while Torcello has stood aside, a recluse that has never wavered in its loyalty to the Past, and the Past is enshrined there for all time. I was surprised to find that it and I were friends. There are only two of all the dead-and-gone centuries of Europe that seem really my own besides the one I was born in—and they do not belong to the chaotic times of Barbarian invasion and Byzantine supremacy. But the nameless sweetness of the airs that play so gently over the forsaken island said something that day that could never be forgotten, and the impression was so strong and so perfect that I have never wished to tamper with it by a second visit.
Strangely enough, Torcello dismissed us with contumely, for as we left it in the late afternoon we encountered a fearful storm and came, I think, very near to being swamped. The thunder simply hurled itself from every quarter at once, the sea rose in inky billows of terrifying dimensions, and between them and the rain we were drenched to the skin, and very thankful when Sandruccio, who behaved splendidly, finally landed us on the slippery steps of our hotel.
For a day or two after that we stayed within call, so to speak, and had no fancy for putting out to the lagoons. There were mornings when it was pleasant to be utterly and frankly frivolous and do nothing but wander under the arcades of the Piazzetta and in and out of the bewilderingly pretty shops. Such a spread of colour and glitter they were, and so tempting was it to pick up some of the alluring trifles for the new home we were going to make in Peking! The Murano glass at Salviati’s I still think the most beautiful product of our own or any other time. Every tint of sea and sky and jewel gleamed in the ethereal beakers and vases; I remember a tall goblet of transparent topaz shot with gold, that twisted and curled on its tendril stem like a newly opened convolvulus, spreading at last into a cup too ethereal for earthly lips to touch, so full of light that the most sparkling wine would have darkened it; and all round, for handles, were blown wreaths of milky, iridescent foam, so faint that it seemed as if they must run down its sides and wet your fingers with salt spray. It was like getting into the Sea-king’s palace under the sea to spend an hour at Salviati’s; every lovely freak and fancy of sun and water, from the brooding sapphire of secret caves to the last bubble of spray on a curling wave, it was all there, caught and crystallized for mortals to love and handle.
Those were the days of beads—one wore as many chains as one liked, the more the better—and for years I went round with a little Venetian rosary of blue and gold flecked with fairy roses round my neck. The mother-of-pearl overcame me altogether—long garlands of the tiny shells strung in fanciful patterns—each perfect in itself and shot with rainbows through its moonlight sheen—but the dignity of a married woman forbade the wearing of such things now. For years they lay about on my dressing-table reflected in the depths of a Venetian mirror which also accompanied me everywhere, a big oval set in a frame of translucent flowers and leaves, neither white nor silver nor pearl, but just the colour of the foam when the sun shines through it.