Chapter V: Nights: in Paris 225 (2)

Like all talkers who know too much, Forepaugh had, what Carlyle called, a terrible faculty for developing into a bore. Some of our little group would run when they saw him at the door, others took malicious pleasure in interrupting him and suddenly changing the conversation in the hope to catch him tripping. But out of all such tests he came triumphantly. I never thought him more wonderful than the evening when somebody abruptly began to talk about Theosophy in the middle of one of his confidences about the Italian Court. It was no use. Without stopping to take breath, at once Forepaugh began to tell us the most marvellous theosophical adventures, which he knew not by hearsay, but because he had passed through them himself. We might express an opinion: he stated facts. And it seemed that he had no more intimate friend than Sinnett, and that to Sinnett he had confessed his scepticism, asking for a sign, a manifestation, and that one afternoon when they were smoking over their coffee and cognac after lunch in Sinnett's chambers, then on the third floor of a house near the Oxford Street end of Bond Street--Forepaugh was carefully exact in his details--Sinnett smiled mysteriously but said nothing except to warn him to hold on tight to the table. And up rose the table, with the litter of coffee cups, cigars, and cognac, up rose the two chairs, one at either end with Sinnett and Forepaugh sitting on them, and away they floated out of the open window--it was a June afternoon--and along Bond Street, above the carriages and the hansoms and omnibuses and the people as far as Piccadilly, and round the lamp post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window. "Hold on," said Sinnett, and "I never held on to anything as tight in my life as I did to that table," said Forepaugh in conclusion.

He always reminded me of the man who so annoyed my Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or bigger than anybody else. "Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant in my back yard," my Uncle used to say, "he would at once invite me to see the mastodon in his." Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for everybody else's elephant.

V

If Forepaugh gave us a great deal of information we had no possible use for and talked us to despair, he was really a good fellow whom we should have missed from our table. And it was through him J. and I were first made welcome in that one house open to us, to which I have been all this time in coming. For it was Forepaugh who told Vedder we were in Rome, and Vedder, once he knew it, would not hear of our shutting his door in our own faces, nor would Mrs. Vedder, whatever the condition of our wardrobe.

Vedder may have revealed many things in his recent _Digressions_, but not the extent of the hospitality he and his wife showed to the American who was a stranger in Rome, where, even then, they had been long at home. Mrs. Vedder carried her amiability to the point of climbing our six flights of stairs and calling on me in the rooms that suited us admirably for our work but were less adapted to afternoon receptions, and she would have gone further and shown me how to adapt them by moving every bit of furniture from where it was and arranging it all over again. Not the least part of her friendliness was not to mind when I did not fall in with her plans, as I couldn't, since so long as the sun shone in at the windows all was right with the rooms as far as I could see. I was in the absurd stage of industry when I did not care where my Roman furniture stood so long as my Roman tasks got done. Even our _padrona_ told me her surprise that, foreigner as I was, I seemed to do as much work as she did, which I accepted as a compliment. After that first attempt Mrs. Vedder did not return to climb our six flights, but she would not let us off from climbing her four or five.

Often as we took advantage of their hospitality, we never found the Vedders alone and, chiefly American as was the group at their fireside, it was never without a foreigner or two. The first person we were introduced to on the first visit was the Englishman who would have deserted us in the _Ghetto_ had we let him have his way, and who, when he saw us, looked as if he wished the Vedders had learned to be less indiscriminate in their hospitality. We had the satisfaction of knowing that we made him supremely uncomfortable. He frowned upon us then as he continued to all through the winter. He could not forgive us for having found him out and was evidently afraid we were going to tell everybody about it. He was something very learned and was occupied in writing a book on Ancient Rome; later he became something more important at South Kensington. But no degree of learning and importance helped him to forget, or anyway to forgive. At chance meetings years afterwards in London he frowned, as no doubt he would still had he not long since gone to the land where I hope all frowns are smoothed from his frowning brow.

If he frowned, there was another Englishman who smiled: an elderly man with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddha. He also had written books, I believe. I remember articles by him, with art for subject, in the _Portfolio_ at a time when everybody had taken to writing about art, and I think his name was Davies. But it would be more in character to forget that he ever worked or had a name. When I was in Rome he had risen above activity and toil to the contemplative life and, I suppose, to the income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to me. Men could not be happy without sunshine, he thought. The sun was house, food, clothes, furniture, identity, everything, and as most of the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any price, he had come to live in Rome where almost all the year it was his for nothing. He sat on the Pincian or in other gardens during the day, doing nothing in the sunshine--that was living. And he urged me to follow his example and not to wait until half my life had been wasted in the pursuit of happiness where it was not to be found. He may have been right, but I never needed to become a philosopher to value the virtue of indolence,--my trouble is that I have never had the money to pay for it. Any man has the ability to do nothing, a great authority has said, and I can answer for one woman who has more than her fair share of it. I have always envied the North American Indians for their enjoyment of what it seems Burke attributed to them: "the highest boon of Heaven, supreme and perpetual indolence."

As regular a visitor was a huge long-bearded Norwegian who looked a prophet and was an artist, and who spent most of the winter in the study of Marion Crawford's novels, I cannot imagine why, as they roused him to fury.

"Marion Crawford," he would thunder at us as if somehow we were responsible, "Bah! He is a weak imitator of Bulwer, that is all, and he has not Bulwer's power of construction. He is not Bulwer. No. He is a weakling. Bah!"

My only quarrel with Marion Crawford's books was that they never excited strong emotion in me, one way or the other, and I was so puzzled by his excitement that I remember I went to the trouble of getting out _Mr. Isaacs_ and _A Roman Singer_ from Piali's Library in the _Piazza di Spagna_, that centre of learning and literature for the English in Rome where, one day when I asked for Pepys's Diary, they offered me Marcus Ward's. A new course of Marion Crawford left me as puzzled as ever for the reason of the Norwegian's rage, and I was the more impressed with the possibilities of a temperament that could heat itself to such a degree at so lukewarm a fire.

We were as certain to find this fiery Norseman and the two Englishmen any night we called as Vedder himself. Other men came and went, amongst them a few Italians and Frenchmen and more Americans, Coleman for one among them, but none could have appeared as regularly, so much fainter is the impression they have left with me. Naturally, they were mostly artists and at Vedder's, as at the _café_, the talk was chiefly of art. There was little of his work to see, for his studio was some distance from his apartment. But it was enough to see Vedder himself or, for that matter, enough to hear him. In his own house he led the talk, even Forepaugh having small chance against him. He was as prolific, a splendidly determined and animated talker. It was stimulating just to watch him talk. He was never still, he rarely sat down, he was always moving about, walking up and down, at times breaking into song and even dance. He was then in his prime, large, with a fine expressive face, and as American in his voice, in his manner, in his humour as if he had never crossed the Atlantic. The true American never gets Europeanized, nor does he want to, however long he may stay on the wrong side of the Atlantic. When I was with Vedder, Broadway always seemed nearer than the _Corso_.

He had recently finished the illustrations for the _Rubaiyat_ and the book was published while we were in Rome. It was never long out of his talk. He would tell us the history of every design and of every model or pot in it. He exulted in the stroke of genius by which he had invented a composition or a pose. I have heard him describe again and again how he drew the flight of a spirit from a model, outstretched and flopping up and down on a feather bed laid upon the studio floor, until she almost fainted from fatigue, while he worked from a hammock slung just above. I recall his delight when a friend of Fitzgerald's sent him Fitzgerald's photograph with many compliments, asking for his in return. And he rejoiced in the story of Dr. Chamberlain filling a difficult tooth for the Queen and all the while singing the praises of the _Rubaiyat_ until she ordered a copy of the _édition de luxe_. In looking back, I always seem to see Mrs. Vedder pasting notices into a scrap book, and to hear Vedder declaiming Omar's quatrains and describing his own drawings. There was one evening when he came to a dead stop in his walk and his talk, and shaking a dramatic finger at us all, said:

"I tell you what it is. I am not Vedder. I am Omar Khayyam!"

"No," drawled the voice of a disgusted artist who had not got a word in for more than an hour, "No, you're not. You're the Great I Am!"

Vedder laughed with the rest of us, but I am not sure he liked it. He could and did enjoy a joke, even if at his expense. I remember his delight one night in telling the story of an old lady who had visited his studio during the day and who sat so long in front of one of his pictures he thought it was having its effect, but whose only comment at the end of several minutes was: "That's a pretty frame you have there!" He was sensitive to criticism, however, though he carried it off with a laugh. Clarence Cook was one of the critics of his Omar who offended him.

"It's funny," Vedder said, "all my life I've hurt Clarence's feelings. He always has been sure I have done my work for no other reason than to irritate him, and now that's the way he feels about the Omar."

The laugh was not so ready when Andrew Lang--I think it was Lang--wrote that Vedder's Omar Khayyam was not of Persia, but of Skaneateles. And after I suggested that it was really of Rome, and some mistaken friend at home sent my article to Vedder, I never thought him quite so cordial.

VI

And so the winter passed. For us there was always a refuge from our cold rooms at the _café_ or at Vedder's, and it was seldom we did not profit by it.

Occasionally during our rambles we stumbled unexpectedly upon old friends "doing Italy" and genuinely glad to see us, as we were to see them, inviting us to their hotels at every risk of the disapproval of manager and porters and waiters; and so powerful was the influence of Rome and the _café_ that now the marvel was to sit and listen to talk about Philadelphia, and where everybody was going for the summer, and who was getting married, and who had died, and what Philadelphia was thinking and doing, as if, after all, there were still benighted people in the world who believed not in art, but in Philadelphia as of supreme importance.

Occasionally we made new friends outside of our pleasant _café_ life. I have forgotten how, though I have not forgotten it was in Rome, thanks to a letter of introduction from Dr. Garnett of the British Museum, that we first met Miss Harriet Waters Preston, who, for her part, had already introduced me to Mistral--how many Americans had heard of Mistral before she translated _Mirèio_?--and who now accepted us, cycling tweeds and all, notwithstanding the shock they must have been to the admirably appointed _pension_ where she stayed. She also climbed our six flights, her niece and collaborator, Miss Louise Dodge, with her, probably both busy that winter collecting facts for their _Private Life of the Romans_, and where could they have found a more perfect background for the past they were studying than when they looked down from our windows over Rome, to the _Campagna_ beyond, and upon the horizon the shining line that we knew was the Mediterranean,--over all the beauty that has not changed in the meanwhile, though old streets and old villas and old slums have vanished. And at these times, in the talk, not Philadelphia, but literature was for a while art's rival.

And there were days when we played truant and climbed down in the morning's first freshness from the high room overlooking Rome and the work that had to be done in it, and loafed all day in Roman galleries and at Roman ceremonies, or strayed to places further afield--Tivoli, Albano, Ostia, Marino, Rocca di Papa,--getting back to Rome with feet too tired to take us anywhere except up our six flights again. And there were nights when the affairs of Rome drew us from the _café_. I remember once our little group interrupted their interminable arguments long enough to see the Tiber in flood, down by the _Ripetta_, where people were going about in boats, and Rome looked like the Venice to which I had then never been, and we met King Humbert and Queen Margherita in his American trotting wagon driving down alone so as to show their sympathy, for, whatever they may not have done, they always appeared in person when their people were in trouble: not so many weeks before we had watched the enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted King Humbert on his return from visiting the cholera-stricken town of Naples. And I remember on _Befana_ Night we adjourned to the _Piazza Navona_ to blow horns and reed whistles into other people's ears and to have them blown into ours. For the humours of the Carnival there was no need to leave the _café_, where one _Pulcinello_ after another broke into our talk with witticisms that kept the _café_ in an uproar, and for me destroyed whatever sentiment there might have been in the thought that this was my last night in Rome--the last of the friendly nights of talk in the _Nazionale_ to which we always returned no matter how far we might occasionally stray from it--the friendly nights of talk when I learned my folly in ever having believed that anything in the world mattered, that anything in the world existed, save art.

_Pulcinello_, the newest of our Roman friends, went with us from Rome, following us to Naples, a familiar face to lighten our homesickness for the rooms full of sunshine at the top of the high house on the top of the high hill, and for the blue plush and the gilding and the mirrors and the talk of the _Nazionale_.

And _Pulcinello_ went with us to Pompeii, reappearing during our nights at the _Albergo del Sole_, that most delightful and impossible of all the inns that ever were. It may have vanished in the quarter of a century that has passed since the February day I came to it, when the sky was as blue as the sea, and a soft cloud hung over Vesuvius, and flowers were sweet in the land--can anyone who ever smelt it forget the sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of Naples? But Pompeii could never be the same without the _Sole_. And it was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom without lock or latch and with a mirror cracked from side to side like the Lady of Shalott's, though for other reasons; the dining-room with earthen floor, walls decorated by a modern-primitive fresco of the _padrone_ holding a plate of _maccheroni_ in one hand and a flask of _Lachrima Christi_ in the other, a central column spreading out branches like a tree and bearing for fruit row upon row of still unopened bottles, a door free to all the stray monks and beggars of Pompeii--to all the fowls too, including the gorgeous peacock that strolled in after its evening walk with the young Swiss artist on the flat roof of the inn where, together, they went before dinner to watch the sunset.

Throughout dinner, at the head of the long table where we sat with the Swiss artist and an old German professor of art and an older Italian archæologist, the talk, as at the _Nazionale_, was of art, so that it also, like _Pulcinello_, crying his jests through the window or at our elbow, made me feel at home. While we helped ourselves from that amazing dish into which you stuck a fork and pulled out a bit of chicken or duck or beef or mutton or sausage; while the old professor and archæologist absent-mindedly stretched a hand to the column behind them, and plucked from it bottle after bottle of wine; while the beggars whined at the open door, and the monks begged at our side, and _Pulcinello_ capered and jested and sang; while the American tourists at the other end of the table deplored the disorder and noise until we sent them the longest and most expensive way up Vesuvius to get rid of them; while the fowls fought for the crumbs;--the talk was still of art and again of art, in the end as in the beginning. I might not understand half of it, coming as it did in a confused torrent of German, Italian, French, and English, but the nights at the _Sole_, like the nights at the _Nazionale_, made this one truth clear: that nothing matters in the world, that nothing exists in the world, save art.

III

NIGHTS

IN VENICE

IN VENICE

I

We reached Venice at an unearthly hour of a March morning and the first thing I knew of it somebody was shouting, "_Venezia!_" and I was startled from a sound sleep, and porters were scrambling for our bags, and we were stumbling after them, up a long platform, between a crowd of men in hotel caps yelling: "_Danieli!_" "_Britannia!_" and I hardly heard what, out into a fog as impenetrable as night or London. The muffled, ghostly cries of "_gundola! gundola!_" from invisible gondoliers on invisible waters would have sent me back into the station even had there been a chance to find so modest a hotel as the _Casa Kirsch_ open so preposterously early, and my first impressions of Venice were gathered in the freezing, foggy station restaurant where J. and I drank our coffee and yawned, and I would have thought Ruskin a fraud with his purple passage describing the traveller's arrival in Venice upon which I had based my expectations, had I been wide enough awake to think of anything at all, and the hours stretched themselves into centuries before a touch of yellow in the fog suggested a sun shining in some remote world, and we crawled under the cover of one of the dim black boats that emerged vaguely, a shadow from the shadows.

I had looked forward to my first _gondola_ ride for that "little first Venetian thrill" that Venice owes to the stranger. But I did not thrill, I shivered with cold and damp and fog as the _gondola_ pushed through the yellow gloom in the sort of silence you can feel, and tall houses towered suddenly and horribly above us, and strange yells broke the stillness before and behind, when another black boat with a black figure at the stern, came out of the gloom, scraped and bumped our side, and was swallowed up again.

And after we were on the landing of the _Casa Kirsch_, and up in our rooms, and the fog lifted, and the sun shone, and we looked out of our windows with all Venice in our faces, and J. took me to see the town, my impressions were still foggy with sleep. For, from Pompeii, where there had been work, to Venice where there was to be more, we had hurried by one of those day-and-night flights to which J. has never accustomed me, the hurried, crowded pauses at Naples and Orvieto and Florence and Pisa and Lucca and Pistoia turning the journey into a beautiful nightmare of which all I was now seeing became but a part: the _Riva_, canals, sails, _Bersaglieri_, the Ducal Palace, the Bridge of Sighs, St. Mark's, the _Piazza_, _gondolas_, women in black, white sunlight, pigeons, tourists, the _Campanile_, following one upon another with the inconsequence of troubled dreams. And then we were on the _Rialto_ and J. was saying "Of course you know that?" and I was answering "Of course, the Bridge of Sighs!" and the many years between have not blunted the edge of his disgust or my remorse. But my disgrace drove me back to the _Casa Kirsch_, to sleep for fifteen blessed hours before looking at one other beautiful thing or troubling my head about what we were to do with our days and our nights in Venice.

II

What we were to do with our days settled itself the next morning as soon as I woke. For Venice, out of my window, was rising from the sea with the dawn, everything it ought to have been the morning before, and I had no desire to move from a room that looked down upon the _Riva_, and across to _San Giorgio_, and beyond the island--and sail-strewn lagoon to the low line of the _Lido_, and above to the vastness of the Venetian sky.

Nor was there trouble in providing for our nights. Before I left home a romantic friend had pictured me in Venice, wrapped in black lace, forever floating in a _gondola_ under the moon. But my Roman winter had taught me how much more likely the gas-light of some little _trattoria_ and _café_ was to shine upon me in my well-worn tweeds, my education having got so far advanced that any other end to my day of work could not seem possible. The only question was upon which of the many little _trattorie_ and _cafés_ in Venice our choice should fall, and this was decided for us by Duveneck, whom we ran across that same morning in the _Piazza_, and who told us that he slept in the _Casa Kirsch_, dined at the _Antica Panada_, and drank coffee at the _Orientale_, which was as much as to say that we might too if we liked. And of course we liked, for it is a great compliment when a man in Venice, or any Italian town,--especially if he is of the importance and distinction to which Duveneck had already attained,--makes you free to join him at dinner and over after-dinner coffee. It is more than a compliment. It launches you in Venice as to be presented at court launches you in London.

We began that night to dine at the _Panada_ and drink coffee at the _Orientale_, and we kept on dining at the _Panada_ and drinking coffee at the _Orientale_ every night we were in Venice; except when it was a _festa_ and we followed Duveneck to the _Calcino_, where various Royal Academicians sustained the respectability Ruskin gave it by his patronage and Symonds tried to live up to; or when there was music in the _Piazza_ and, happy to do whatever Duveneck did, we went with him to the _Quadri_ or _Florian's_; or when it stormed, as it can in March, and all day from my window I had looked down upon the dripping _Riva_ and the wind-waved Lagoon and lines of fishing boats moored to the banks, and no living creatures except the gulls, and the little white woolly dogs on the fishing boats covered with sails, and the sailors miserably huddled together, and gondoliers in yellow oilskins, and the _Bersaglieri_ in hoods--what the _Bersaglieri_ were doing there even in sunshine was one of the mysteries of Venice;--then we went with Duveneck no further than the kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_, for he hated, as we hated, the _table d'hôte_ from which, there as everywhere, German tourists were talking away every other nationality.

The kitchen was a huge room, with high ceiling, and brass and copper pots and pans on the whitewashed walls, and a dim light about the cooking stove, and dark shadowy corners. The _padrona_ laid the cloth for us in an alcove opposite the great fireplace, while she and her family sat at a table against the wall to the right, and the old cook ate at a bare table in the middle, and the maid-servant sat on a stool by the fire with her plate in her lap, and the man-servant stood in the corner with his plate on the dresser. Having thus expressed their respect for class distinctions, they felt no further obligation, but they all helped equally in cooking and serving, talked together the whole time, quarrelled, called each other names, and laughed at the old man's stories told in the Venetian which I only wish I had understood then as well as I did a few weeks later, when it was too late, for, with the coming of spring, there were no storms to keep us from the _Panada_.

Just where the _Panada_ was I would not attempt to say; not from any desire to keep it secret, which would be foolish, for Baedeker long since found it out; but simply because I could not very well show the way to a place I never could find for myself. I knew it was somewhere round the corner from the _Piazza_, but I never rounded that corner alone without becoming involved in a labyrinth of little _calli_. Nor would I attempt to say why the artists chose it and why, because they did, we should, for it was then the dirtiest, noisiest, and most crowded _trattoria_ in Venice, though the last time I was there, years afterwards, it was so spick and span, with another room and more waiters to relieve the congestion, that I could not believe it really was the _Panada_ and, with the inconsistency natural under the circumstances, did not like it half so well.

No matter whether we got there early or late, the _Panada_ was always full. As soon as we sat down we began our dinner by wiping our glasses, plates, forks, spoons, and knives on our napkins, making such a habit of it that I remember afterwards at a dinner-party in London catching myself with my glass in my hand and stopping only just in time, while Duveneck, on another occasion, got as far as the silver before he was held up by the severe eye of his hostess. Probably it was because nobody could hear what anybody said that everybody talked together. I cannot recall a moment when stray musicians were not strumming on guitars and mandolins, and the oyster man was not shrieking: "_Ostreche!_ _Fresche! Ostreche!_" though nobody paid the least attention to him or ever bought one of his oysters. And above the uproar was the continuous cry: "_Ecco me! Vengo subito! Mezzo Verona! Due Calomai! Vengo subito! Ecco me!_" of the waiters, who, though they never ceased to announce their coming, were so slow to come that many diners brought a course or two in their pockets to occupy them during the intervals.

The little Venetian at the next table was sure to produce a bunch of radishes while he waited for his soup; on market days, when there was more of a crowd than ever, few of the many baked potatoes eaten at almost every table had seen the inside of the _Panada's_ oven; often the shops that fill the Venetian _calli_ with the perpetual smell of frying and where the brasses and the blue-and-white used to shine, were patronized on the way--if dinner has to be collected in the streets, no town, even in Italy, offers such facilities as Venice. From _Minestra_ to fruit and cheese, the Venetian in a few minutes' walk may pick up a substantial dinner and carry it to the rooms or the street corner where it is his habit to dine. Vance, the painter, who sometimes favoured us at our table with his company, went further and, after he had taken off his coat and put on his hat and emptied his pockets, seldom troubled the establishment to provide him with more than a glass, a plate, a knife, and a fork, for the price of a _quinto_ of Verona. His first, and as it turned out his last, more extravagant order, was the event of the season. The _padrone_ discussed it with him and a message was sent to the cook that the dish was _di bistecca_. When it came it was not cooked enough to suit Vance. A second was cooked too much. The third was done to a turn. In the bill, however, were the three, and voices were lowered, mandolins and guitars were stilled, the oyster man forgot his shriek, during the five awful minutes when Vance and the _padrone_ had it out. After that Vance made another _trattoria_ the richer by his daily _quinto_.

J. and I had our five minutes with the _padrone_ later on once when Rossi, our waiter, was so slow that our patience gave out and we shook the dust of the _Panada_ from our feet. But we could not shake off Rossi. He had arrived with our dinner just as we were vanishing from the door and was made to pay for it. After that his leisure was spent in trying to make us pay him back and he would appear at our bedroom door, or waylay us on the _Riva_, or follow us into the _Orientale_, or run us down in the _Piazza_, demanding the money as a right, begging for it as a charity, reducing it by a _centesimo_ every time until we had only to wait long enough for the debt to be wiped out. But this was at the end of our stay in Venice, and months of dining at the _Panada_ had passed before then.

III

I would be as puzzled to explain the attraction of the _Orientale_ on the _Riva_, unless it was the opportunity it offered for economy. In the _Piazza_, at the _Quadri_ and _Florian's_, which are to the other _cafés_ of Venice what St. Mark's is to the other churches, coffee was twenty _centesimi_ and the waiter expected five more, but at the _Orientale_ it was eighteen and the waiter was satisfied with the change from twenty, which meant for us the saving every night of almost half a cent. The _Orientale_ was by comparison as quiet and deserted as the _Panada_ was crowded and noisy. Outside, tables looked upon the Lagoon and the façade of _San Giorgio_, white in the night. In a big, new, gilded room sailors and sergeants played checkers and more serious Venetians worked out dismal problems in chess. But Duveneck's corner was in the older, shabby, stuffy, low-ceilinged room, and having once settled there we never wanted to move. As a rule we shared it with only an elderly Englishman and his son who read the _Standard_ in the opposite corner--after our race with them to the _café_, the winners getting the one English paper first--and we were seldom intruded upon or interrupted except by the occasional visit of the _caramei_ man with his brass tray of candied fruit, impaled on thin sticks, like little birds on a skewer, which led us into our one extravagance.

Had the old room been seedier and duller--dull our company never was--I still would have seen it through the glamour of youth and thought it the one place in which to study Venice and Venetian life. But nobody who ever sat there with us could have complained of dulness so long as Duveneck presided at our table. In Duveneck's case I cannot help breaking my golden rule never to speak in print of the living--rules were made to be broken. And why shouldn't I? I might as well not write at all about our nights in Venice as to leave him out of them, he who held them together and fashioned them into what they were. In the _Atlantic_, as a makeshift, I called him Inglehart, the disguise under which he figures in one of Howells's novels. But why not call him boldly by his name when Inglehart is the thinnest and flimsiest of masks, as friends of his were quick to tell me, and Duveneck means so much more to all who know--and all who do not know are not worth bothering about. It was only yesterday at San Francisco that the artists of America gave an unmistakable proof of what their opinion of Duveneck is now. In the Eighties "the boys" already thought as much of him and a hundred times more.

Duveneck, as I remember him then--I have seen him but once since--was large, fair, golden-haired, with long drooping golden moustache, of a type apt to suggest indolence and indifference. As he lolled against the red velvet cushions smoking his Cavour, enjoying the talk of others as much as his own or more--for he had the talent of eloquent silence when he chose to cultivate it--his eyes half shut, smiling with casual benevolence, he may have looked to a stranger incapable of action, and as if he did not know whether he was alone or not, and cared less. And yet he had a big record of activity behind him, young as he was; he always inspired activity in others, he was rarely without a large and devoted following. He it was who drew "the boys" to Munich, then from Munich to Florence, and then from Florence to Venice, and "the boys" have passed into the history of American Art and the history of Venice--wouldn't that give me away and explain who he was if I called him Inglehart dozens of times over? And he also it was who packed them off again before they learnt how easy it is to be content in Venice without doing anything at all, though I used to fancy that he would have been rather glad to indulge in that content himself. How far he was from the pleasant Venetian habit of idling all day, his Venetian etchings, at which he was working that spring--the etchings that on their appearance in London were the innocent cause of a stirring chapter in _The Gentle Art_--are an enduring proof. And I knew a good deal of what was going on in his studio at the time, for J. spent many busy hours with him there, while I, left to my own devices, stared industriously from the windows of the _Casa Kirsch_, making believe I was gathering material, or strolled along the _Riva_ pretending it was to market for my midday meal, though the baker was almost next door, and the man from whom I bought the little dried figs that nowhere are so dried and shrivelled up as in Venice, was seldom more than a minute away. I can see now, when I consider how my Venetian days were spent, that I came perilously near to sinking to the deepest depths of Venetian idleness myself.

We were never alone with Duveneck at the _Orientale_. The American Consul was sure to drop in, as he had for so many years that half his occupation would have gone if he hadn't dropped in any longer. Martin joined us because he loved to argue anybody into a temper and, as he was an awful bore, succeeded with most people. He could drive me to proving that white was black, to overturning all my most cherished idols, or to forgetting my timidity and laying down the law upon any point of art he might bring up. Duveneck alone refused to be roused and Martin, who could not understand or accept his failure, was forever coming back, making himself a bigger bore than ever, by trying again. But Shinn was the only man I ever knew to put Duveneck into something like a temper, and that was by asking him deferentially one night if he did not think St. Mark's a very fine church--the next minute, however, calming him down by inviting him out "in my gandler."

Arnold was as regular in attendance. He found the _café_ as comfortable a place to sleep in as any other. Like Sancho Panza he had a talent for sleeping. He had made his name and fame as one of the Harvard baseball team in I will not say what year, and sleep had been his chief occupation ever since. No end of stories were going the round of the studios and _cafés_--he invited them without wanting it or meaning to. He was supposed to be in Venice to study with Duveneck, at whose studio he was said to arrive regularly at the same hour every morning. And as regularly he was snoring before he had been sitting in front of his easel for ten minutes. During his nap, Duveneck would come round and shake him and before he slept again put a touch to the study and, as Arnold promptly dozed off, would work on it until it was finished, and unless it slid down the canvas with the quantity of bitumen Arnold used--there was one story of the beautiful eyes in a beautiful portrait, before they could be stopped, sliding into the chin of the pretty girl who was posing--Arnold, waking up eventually, would carry off the painting unconscious that he had not finished it himself. Nobody can say how many Duvenecks are masquerading at home as Arnolds while their owners wonder why Arnold has never since done any work a tenth as good.

The one thing that roused him was baseball, and he was in fine form on the afternoons when he and a few other enthusiasts spent an hour or so on the Lido for practice. The Englishmen did not believe in the prodigies they heard of him as a baseball player. It wasn't easy for anybody to believe that a man who was always tumbling off to sleep on the slightest provocation could play anything decently. But I was told that one day he was wide enough awake to be irritated, and he bet them a dinner he could pitch the swell British cricketer among them three balls not any one of which the Briton could catch. And on Easter Monday they all went over to the Lido. The Briton asked for a high ball: it skimmed along near the ground and then rose over his head as he stooped for it. He asked for a low one: it came straight for his nose and, when he dodged it, dropped and went between his legs. He asked for a medium one: it curved away out to the right, he rushed for it, it curved back again and took him in his manly bosom. The rest of the Britons and "the boys," they say, enjoyed the dinner more than he did. Such was the affair as it was described to me and confirmed by gossip. I pretend to no authority on a subject I understand so little as balls and the pitching of them.

A better contrast to Arnold could not have been found than the artist with the part Spanish, part German name who called himself a Frenchman, and who aimed to give his pose the mystery that crept, or bounded when encouraged, into his incessant talk. I am afraid his chief encouragement came from me. The others were as irritated by his dabbling in magic as most of us had been in Rome by Forepaugh's theosophic adventures. But he amused me; he did not deal in the prose of his brand of magic, the Black, of which so much was beginning to be heard, and still more was to be heard, in Paris. He was all innuendo and strange hints and whispered secrets, and I-could-if-I-woulds. One of my recent winters had been devoted, not to dabbling in magic, for which I have not the temperament, but to reading the literature of magic or of all things psychical, and I could then, though I could not now, have passed a fairly good examination in the modern authorities, from Madame Blavatsky to Louis Jacolliot. Therefore I proved a sympathetic listener and heard, for my pains, of the revival of old religions, and above all of old rites, and of his dignity as high-priest, a figure of mystery and command moving here and there among shadowy disciples in shadowy sanctuaries. For one sunk such fathoms deep in mystery he was surprisingly concerned for the outward sign. Like Huysmans's hero, he believed in the significance of the material background, entertaining me with a detailed description of his apartment in Paris, and I have not yet lost the vision he permitted me of a bedroom hung and painted with scarlet, and of himself enshrined in it, magnificent in scarlet silk pajamas. Probably it was to deceive the world that he carried a tiny paint-box. I never saw him open it.

But most constant of our little party was Jobbins, our one Englishman, who came in late to the _Orientale_--where, or if, he dined none of us could say--with the stool and canvas and paint-box he had been carrying about all day from one _campo_, or _calle_, or _canale_, to another, in search of a subject. Jobbins's trouble was that he had passed too brilliantly through South Kensington to do the teaching for which he was trained, or to be willing to do anything but paint great pictures the subjects for which he could never find; his mistake was to want to paint them in Venice where there is nothing to paint that has not been painted hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times before; and his misfortune was not to seek in adversity the comfort and hope which the philosopher believes to be its reward. He had become, as a consequence, the weariest man who breathed. It made me tired to look at him. Later, he was forced to abandon his high ambition and he accepted a good post as teacher somewhere in India. But he lived a short time to enjoy it and I am sure he was homesick for Venice, and the search after the impossible, and the old days when he was so abominably hard up that even J. and I were richer. Of the complete crash by which we all gained--including the man who got the Whistler painted on the back of a Jobbins panel--I still have reminders in a brass plaque and bits of embroideries hung up on our walls and brocades made into screens, which J. bought from him to save the situation, at the risk of creating a new one from which somebody would have to save us.

For all his weariness, Jobbins looked ridiculously young. He insisted that this was what lost him his one chance of selling a picture. He was painting in the Frari a subject which he vainly hoped was his own, when an American family of three came and stared over his shoulder.

"Why, it's going to be a picture!" the small child discovered.

"And he such a boy too!" the mother marvelled.

"Then it can't be of any value," the father said in the loud cheerful voice in which American and English tourists in Venice make their most personal comments, convinced that nobody can understand, though every other person they meet is a fellow countryman. A story used to be told of Bunney at work in the _Piazza_, on his endless study of St. Mark's for Ruskin, one bitter winter morning, when three English girls, wrapped in furs, passed. One stopped behind him:

"Oh Maud! Ethel!" she called, "do come back and see what this poor shivering old wretch is doing."

The talk in our corner of the _Orientale_ kept us in the past until I began to fear that, just as some people grow prematurely grey, so J. and I, not a year married, had prematurely reached the time for creeping in close about the fire--or a _café_ table--and telling grey tales of what we had been. It was a very different past from that which tourists were then bullied by Ruskin into believing should alone concern them in Venice--indeed, my greatest astonishment in this astonishing year was that, while the people who were not artists but posed as knowing all about art did nothing but quote Ruskin, artists never quoted him, and never mentioned him except to show how little use they had for him. But then, as I was beginning to find out, it is the privilege of the artist to think what he knows and to say what he thinks. We were none of us tourists at our little table, we were none of us seeing sights, being far too busy doing the work we were in Venice to do; and no matter what Ruskin and Baedeker taught, "the boys" gave the date which overshadowed for us every other in Venetian history. Nothing that had happened in Venice before or after counted, though "the boys" themselves were in their turn a good deal overshadowed by Whistler, who had been there with them for a while.

It was extraordinary how the Whistler tradition had developed and strengthened in the little more than four years since he had left Venice. I had never met him then, though J. had a few months before in London. I hardly hoped ever to meet him; I certainly could not expect that the day would come when he would be our friend, with us constantly, letting us learn far more about him and far more intimately than from all the talk at a _café_ table of those who already knew him, accepted him as a master, and loved him as a man. But had my knowledge of him come solely from those months in Venice I should still have realized the power of his personality and the force of his influence. He seemed to pervade the place, to colour the atmosphere. He had stayed in Venice only about a year. In the early Eighties little had been written of him except in contempt or ridicule. But to the artist he had become as essentially a part of Venice, his work as inseparable from its associations, as the Venetian painters like Carpaccio and Tintoretto who had lived and worked there all their lives and about whom a voluminous literature had grown up, culminating in the big and little volumes by Ruskin upon which the public crowding to Venice based their artistic creed. During those old nights I heard far more of the few little inches of Whistler's etchings and of Whistler's pastels than of the great expanse of Tintoretto's _Paradise_ or of Carpaccio's decorations in the little church of _San Giorgio degli Schiavoni_. The fact made and has left the greater impression because the winter in Rome had not worn off, for me, the novelty of artists' talk or quite accustomed me to their point of view, to their surprising independence in not accepting the current and easy doctrine that everything old is sacred, everything modern insignificant. Because a painter happened to paint a couple of hundred years or more ago did not place him above their criticism; because he happened to paint to-day was apt to make him more interesting to them.

At the _Orientale_ the talk could never keep very long from Whistler. It might be of art--question of technique, of treatment, of arrangement, of any or all the artist's problems--and sooner or later it would be referred to what Whistler did or did not. Or the talk might grow reminiscent and again it was sure to return to Whistler. Not only at the _Orientale_, but at any _café_ or restaurant or house or gallery where two or three artists were gathered together, Whistler stories were always told before the meeting broke up. It was then we first heard the gold-fish story, and the devil-in-the-glass story, and the Wolkoff-pastel story, and the farewell-feast story, and the innumerable stories labelled and pigeon-holed by "the boys" for future use, and so recently told by J. and myself in the greatest story of all--the story of his Life--that it is too soon for me to tell them again. Up till then I had shared the popular idea of him as a man who might be ridiculed, abused, feared, hated, anything rather than loved. But none of the men in Venice could speak of him without affection. "Not a bad chap," Jobbins would forget his weariness to say, "not half a bad chap!" and one night he told one of the few Whistler stories never yet told in print, except in the _Atlantic Monthly_ where this chapter was first published.

"He rather liked me," said Jobbins, "liked to have me about, and to help on Sundays when he showed his pastels. But that wasn't my game, you know, and I got tired of it, and one Sunday when lots of people were there and he asked me to bring out that drawing of a _calle_ with tall houses, and away up above clothes hung out to dry, and a pair of trousers in the middle, I said: 'Have you got a title for it, Whistler?' 'No,' he said. 'Well,' I said, 'call it an _Arrangement in Trousers_,' and everybody laughed. I'd have sneaked away, for he was furious. But he wouldn't let me, kept his eye on me, though he didn't say a word until they'd all gone. Then he looked at me rather with that Shakespeare fellow's _Et tu Brute_ look: 'Why, Jobbins, you, who are so amiable?' That was all. No, not half a bad chap."

Now and then talk of Whistler and "the boys" reminded Duveneck of his own student days, and would lead him into personal reminiscences, when the stories were of his adventures; sometimes on Bavarian roads, singing and fiddling his way from village to village, or in Bavarian convents, teaching drawing to pretty novices, receiving commissions from stern Reverend Mothers; and sometimes in American towns painting the earliest American mural decoration that prepared the way, through various stages, for the latest American series of all--at the San Francisco Exposition where Duveneck was acclaimed as the American master of to-day. But in his story, as he told it to us, he had not got as far as Florence when a new turn was given to his reminiscences and to our evening talk by the descent upon Venice of the men from Munich.

IV