Far-away Stories

by William John Locke

VII

Few English-speaking and, stranger still, few German-speaking guests stay at the Albergo Tonelli in Venice. For one thing, it has not many rooms; for another, it is far from the Grand Canal; and for yet another, the fat proprietor Ettore Tonelli and his fatter wife are too sluggish of body and brain to worry about forestieri who have to be communicated with in outlandish tongues, and, for their supposed comfort, demand all sorts of exotic foolishness such as baths, punctuality, and information as to the whereabouts of fusty old pictures and the exact tariff of gondolas. The house was filled from year's end to year's end with Italian commercial travellers; and Ettore's ways and their ways corresponded to a nicety. The Albergo Tonelli was a little red-brick fifteenth-century palazzo, its Lombardic crocketed windows gaily picked out in white, and it dominated the campiello wherein it was situated. In the centre of the tiny square was a marble well-head richly carved, and by its side a pump from which the inhabitants of the vague tumble-down circumambient dwellings drew the water to wash the underlinen which hung to dry from the windows. A great segment of the corner diagonally opposite the Albergo was occupied by the bare and rudely swelling brick apse of a seventeenth-century church. Two inconsiderable thoroughfares, calle five foot wide, lead from the campiello to the wide world of Venice.

It was hither that Sir Hildebrand Oates, after a week of nerve-shattering tumult at one of the great Grand Canal hotels, and after horrified examination of the question of balance of expenditure over income, found his way through the kind offices of a gondolier to whom he had promised twenty francs if he could conduct him to the forgotten church, the memorable scene of the adventure of the beggar and the two-franc piece. With unerring instinct the gondolier had rowed him to Santa Maria Formosa, the very spot. Sir Hildebrand troubled himself neither with the church nor the heart-easing wonder of Palma Vecchio's Santa Barbara within, but, with bent brow, traced the course of the lame beggar from the step to the fondamenta, and the course of the rolling coin from his Eliza's hand into the canal. Then he paused for a few moments deep in thought, and finally drew a two-lire piece from his pocket, and, recrossing the Campo, handed it gravely to a beggar-woman, the successor of the lame man, who sat sunning herself on the spacious marble seat by the side of the great door. When he returned to the hotel he gave the gondolier his colossal reward and made a friend for life. Giuseppe delighted at finding an English gentleman who could converse readily hi Italian—for Sir Hildebrand, a man of considerable culture, possessed a working knowledge of three or four European languages—expressed his gratitude on subsequent excursions, by overflowing with picturesque anecdote, both historical and personal. A pathetic craving for intercourse with his kind and the solace of obtaining it from one remote from his social environment drew Sir Hildebrand into queer sympathy with a genuine human being. Giuseppe treated him with a respectful familiarity which he had never before encountered in a member of the lower classes. One afternoon, on the silent lagune side of the Giudecca, turning round on his cushions, he confided to the lean, bronzed, rhythmically working figure standing behind him, something of the puzzledom of his soul. Guiseppe, in the practical Italian way, interpreted the confidences as a desire to escape from the tourist-agitated and fantastically expensive quarters of the city into some unruffled haven. That evening he interviewed the second cousin of his wife, the Signora Tonelli of the Albergo of that name, and the next day Sir Hildebrand took possession of the front room overlooking the campiello, on the piano nobile or second floor of the hotel.

And here Sir Hildebrand Oates, Knight, once Member of Parliament, Lord of the Manor, Chairman of Quarter Sessions, Director of great companies, orchid rival of His Grace the Duke of Dunster, important and impeccable personage, the exact temperature of whose bath water had been to a trembling household a matter of as much vital concern as the salvation of their own souls—entered upon a life of queer discomfort, privation and humility. For the first time in his life he experienced the hugger-mugger makeshift of the bed-sitting room—a chamber, too, cold and comfortless, with one scraggy rug by the bedside to mitigate the rigour of an inlaid floor looking like a galantine of veal, once the pride of the palazzo, and meagrely furnished with the barest objects of necessity, and these of monstrous and incongruous ugliness; and he learned in the redolent restaurant downstairs, the way to eat spaghetti like a contented beast and the relish of sour wine and the overrated importance of the cleanliness of cutlery. In his dignified acceptance of surroundings that to him were squalid, he manifested his essential breeding. The correct courtesy of his demeanour gained for the illustrissimo signore inglese the wholehearted respect of the Signore and Signora Tonelli. And the famous scourge nailed (symbolically) over his hard little bed procured him a terrible reputation for piety in the parrocchia. After a while, indeed, as soon as he had settled to his new mode of living, the inveterate habit of punctilio caused him, almost unconsciously, to fix by the clock his day's routine. Called at eight o'clock, a kind of eight conjectured by the good-humoured, tousled sloven of a chamber-maid, he dressed with scrupulous care. At nine he descended for his morning coffee to the chill deserted restaurant—for all the revolution in his existence he could not commit the immorality of breakfasting in his bedroom. At half-past he regained his room, where, till eleven, he wrote by the window overlooking the urchin-resonant campiello. Then with gloves and cane, to outward appearance the immaculate, the impeccable Sir Hildebrand Oates of Eresby Manor, he walked through the narrow, twisting streets and over bridges and across campi and campiello to the Piazza San Marco. As soon as he neared the east-end of the great square, a seller of corn and peas approached him, handed him a paper cornet, from which Sir Hildebrand, with awful gravity, fed the pigeons. And the pigeons looked for him, too; and they perched on his arms and his shoulders and even on the crown of his Homburg hat, the brim of which he had, by way of solemn rite, filled with grain, until the gaunt, grey, unsmiling man was hidden in fluttering iridescence. And tourists and idlers used to come every day and look at him, as at one of the sights of Venice. The supply finished, Sir Hildebrand went to the Café Florian on the south of the Piazza and ordering a sirop which he seldom drank, read the Corriere de la Sera, until the midday gun sent the pigeons whirring to their favourite cornices. Then Sir Hildebrand retraced his steps to the Albergo Tonelli, lunched, read till three, wrote till five, and again went out to take the air. Dinner, half an hour's courtly gossip in the cramped and smelly apology for a lounge, with landlord or a commercial traveller disinclined for theatre or music-hall, or the absorbing amusement of Venice, walking in the Piazza or along the Riva Schiavoni, and then to read or write till bedtime.

No Englishman of any social position can stand daily in the Piazza San Marco without now and then coming across acquaintances, least of all a man of such importance in his day as Sir Hildebrand Oates. He accepted the greetings of chance-met friends with courteous resignation.

"We're at the Hôtel de l'Europe. Where are you staying, Sir Hildebrand?"

"I live in Venice, I have made it my home. You see the birds accept me as one of themselves."

"You'll come and dine with us, won't you?"

"I should love to," Sir Hildebrand would reply; "but for the next month or so I am overwhelmed with work. I'm so sorry. If you have any time to spare, and would like to get off the beaten track, let me recommend you to wander through the Giudecca on foot. I hope Lady Elizabeth is well. I'm so glad. Will you give her my kindest regards? Good-bye." And Sir Hildebrand would make his irreproachable bow and take his leave. No one learned where he had made his home in Venice. In fact, no one but Messrs. Thomas Cook and Son knew his address. He banked with them and they forwarded his letters to the Albergo Tonelli.

It has been said that Sir Hildebrand occupied much of his time in writing, and he himself declared that he was overwhelmed with work. He was indeed engaged in an absorbing task of literary composition, and his reference library consisted in thirty or forty leather-covered volumes each fitted with a clasp and lock, of which the key hung at the end of his watch-chain; and every page of every volume was filled with his own small, precise handwriting. He made slow progress, for the work demanded concentrated thought and close reasoning. The rumour of his occupation having spread through the parrocchia, he acquired, in addition to that of a pietist, the reputation of an erudito. He became the pride of the campiello. When he crossed the little square, the inhabitants pointed him out to less fortunate out-dwellers. There was the great English noble who had made vows of poverty, and gave himself the Discipline and wrote wonderful works of Theology. And men touched their hats and women saluted shyly, and Sir Hildebrand punctiliously, and with a queer pathetic gratitude, responded. Even the children gave him a "Buon giorno, Signore," and smiled up into his face, unconscious of the pious scholar he was supposed to be, and of the almighty potentate that he had been. Once, yielding to an obscure though powerful instinct, he purchased in the Merceria a packet of chocolates, and on entering his campiello presented them, with stupendous gravity concealing extreme embarrassment, to a little gang of urchins. Encouraged by a dazzling success, he made it a rule to distribute sweetmeats every Saturday morning to the children of the campiello. After a while he learned their names and idiosyncrasies, and held solemn though kindly speech with them, manifesting an interest in their games and questioning them sympathetically as to their scholastic attainments. Sometimes gathering from their talk a notion of the desperate poverty of parents, he put a lire or two into grubby little fists, in spite of a lifelong conviction of the immorality of indiscriminate almsgiving; and dark, haggard mothers blessed him, and stood in his way to catch his smile. All of which was pleasant, though exceedingly puzzling to Sir Hildebrand Oates.