Penelope's Postscripts

IV

One of the pleasantest sights to be noted from our windows at breakfast time is Angelo making ready our private gondola for the day.  Angelo himself is not attractive to the eye by reason of the silliest possible hat for a man of forty-five whose hair is slightly grey.  It is a white straw sailor, with a turned-up brim, a blue ribbon encircling the crown, and a white elastic under the chin; such a hat as you would expect to see crowning the flaxen curls of mother’s darling boy of four.

I love to look at the gondola, with its solemn caracoling like that of a possible water-horse, of which the arched neck is the graceful ferro.  This is a strange, weird, beautiful thing when the black gondola sways a little from side to side in the moonlight.  Angelo keeps ours polished so that it shines like silver in the morning sun, and he has an exquisite conscientiousness in rubbing every trace of brass about his precious craft.  He has a little box under the prow full of bottles and brushes and rags.  The cushions are laid on the bank of the canal; the pieces of carpet are taken out, shaken, and brushed, and the narrow strips are laid over the curved wood ends of the gondola to keep the sun from cracking them.  The felze, or cabin, is freed of all dust, the tiny four-legged stools and the carved chair are wiped off, and occasionally a thin coat of black paint is needed here and there, and a touching-up of the gold lines which relieve the sombreness.  The last thing to be done is to polish the vases and run back into the garden for nosegays, and when these are disposed in their niches on each side of the felze, Angelo waves his infantile hat gaily to us at the window, and smiles his readiness to be off.

On other mornings we watch the loading and unloading of grain.  There are many small boats always in view, their orange sails patched with all sorts of emblems and designs in a still deeper colour, and day before yesterday a large ship appeared at our windows and attached itself to our very doorsteps, much to the wrath of Salemina, who finds the poetry of existence much disturbed under the new conditions.  All is life and motion now.  The men are stripped naked to the waist, with bright handkerchiefs on their heads, and, in many cases, others tied over their mouths.  Each has a thick wisp of short twine strings tucked into his waistband.  The bags are weighed by one, who takes out or puts in a shovelful of grain, as the case may be.  Then the carrier ties up his bag with one of the twine strings, two other men lift it to his shoulder, while a boy removes a pierced piece of copper from a long wire and gives it to him, this copper being handed in turn to still another man, who apparently keeps the account.  This not uninteresting, indeed, but sordid and monotonous operation began before eight yesterday morning and even earlier to-day, obliging Salemina to decline strawberries and eat her breakfast with her back to the window.

This afternoon at four the injured lady departed on a tour in Miss Palett’s gondola.  Miss Palett is a water-colourist who has lived in Venice for five years and speaks the language “like a native.”  (You are familiar with the phrase, and perhaps familiar, too, with the native like whom they speak.)

Returning after tea, Salemina was observed to radiate a kind of subdued triumph, which proved on investigation to be due to the fact that she had met the comandante of the offending ship and that he had gallantly promised to remove it without delay.  I cannot help feeling that the proper time for departure had come; but this destroys the story and robs the comandante of his reputation for chivalry.

As Miss Palett’s gondola neared the grain-ship, Salemina, it seems, spied the commanding officer pacing the deck.

“See,” she said to her companion, “there is a gang-plank from the side of the ship to that small flat-boat.  We could perfectly well step from our gondola to the flat-boat and then go up and ask politely if we may be allowed to examine the interesting grain-ship.  While you are interviewing the first officer about the foreign countries he has seen, I will ask the comandante if he will kindly tie his boat a little farther down on the island.  No, that won’t do, for he may not speak English; we should have an awkward scene, and I should defeat my own purposes.  You are so fluent in Italian, suppose you call upon him with my card and let me stay in the gondola.”

“What shall I say to the man?” objected Miss Palett.

“Oh, there’s plenty to say,” returned Salemina.  “Tell him that Penelope and I came over from the hotel on the Grand Canal only that we might have perfect quiet.  Tell him that if I had not unpacked my largest trunk, I should not stay an instant longer.  Tell him that his great, bulky ship ruins the view; that it hides the most beautiful church and part of the Doge’s Palace.  Tell him that I might as well have stayed at home and built a cottage on the dock in Boston Harbour.  Tell him that his steam-whistles, his anchor-droppings, and his constant loadings or unloadings give us headache.  Tell him that seven or eight of his sailormen brought clean garments and scrubbing brushes and took their bath at our front entrance.  Tell him that one of them, almost absolutely nude, instead of running away to put on more clothing, offered me his arm to assist me into the gondola.”

Miss Palett demurred at the subject-matter of some of these remarks, and affirmed that she could not translate others into proper Italian.  She therefore proposed that Salemina should write a few dignified protests on her visiting-card, and her own part would be to instruct the man in the flat-boat to deliver it at once to his superior officer.  The comandante spoke no English,—of that fact the sailorman in the flat-boat was certain,—but as the gondola moved away, the ladies could see the great man pondering over the little piece of pasteboard, and it was plain that he was impressed.  Herein lies perhaps a seed of truth.  The really great thing triumphs over all obstacles, and reaches the common mind and heart in some way, delivering its message we know not how.

Salemina’s card teemed with interesting information, at least to the initiated.  Her surname was in itself a passport into the best society.  To be an X— was enough of itself, but her Christian name was one peculiar to the most aristocratic and influential branch of the X—s.  Her mother’s maiden name, engraved at full length in the middle, established the fact that Mr. X— had not married beneath him, but that she was the child of unblemished lineage on both sides.  Her place of residence was the only one possible to the possessor of three such names, and as if these advantages were not enough, the street and number proved that Salemina’s family undoubtedly possessed wealth; for the small numbers, and especially the odd numbers, on that particular street, could be flaunted only by people of fortune.

You have now all the facts in your possession, and I can only add that the ship weighed anchor at twilight, so Salemina again gazed upon the Doge’s Palace and slept tranquilly.

V

I am like the schoolgirl who wrote home from Venice: “I am sitting on the edge of the Grand Canal drinking it all in, and life never seemed half so full before.”  Was ever the city so beautiful as last night on the arrival of foreign royalty?  It was a memorable display and unique in its peculiar beauty.  The palaces that line the canal were bright with flags; windows and water-steps were thronged, the broad centre of the stream was left empty.  Presently, round the bend below the Rialto, swept into view a double line of gondolas—long, low, gleaming with every hue of brilliant colour, most of them with ten, some with twelve, gondoliers in resplendent liveries, red, blue, green, white, orange, all bending over their oars with the precision of machinery and the grace of absolute mastery of their craft.  In the middle, between two lines, came one small and beautifully modelled gondola, rowed by four men in red and black, while on the white silk cushions in the stern sat the Prince and Princess.  There was no splash of oar or rattle of rowlock; swiftly, silently, with an air of stately power and pride, the lovely pageant came, passed, and disappeared under the shining evening sky and the gathering shadows of “the dim, rich city.”  I never saw, or expect to see, anything of its kind so beautiful.

I stay for hours in the gondola, writing my letters or watching the thousand and one sights of the streets, for I often allow Salemina and the Little Genius to tread their way through the highways and byways of Venice while I stay behind and observe life from beneath the grateful shade of the black felze.

The women crossing the many little bridges look like the characters in light opera; the young girls, with their hair bobbed in a round coil, are sometimes bareheaded and sometimes have a lace scarf over their dark, curly locks.  A little fan is often in their hands, and one remarks the graceful way in which the crepe shawl rests upon the women’s shoulders, remembering that it is supposed to take generations to learn to wear a shawl or wield a fan.

My favourite waiting-place is near the Via del Paradiso, just where some scarlet pomegranate blossoms hang out over the old brick walls by the canal-side, and where one splendid acanthus reminds me that its leaves inspired some of the most beautiful architecture in the world; where, too, the ceaseless chatter of the small boys cleaning crabs with scrubbing-brushes gives my ear a much-needed familiarity with the language.

Now a girl with a red parasol crosses the Ponte del Paradiso, making a brilliant silhouette against the blue sky.  She stops to prattle with the man at the bell-shop just at the corner of the little calle.  There are beautiful bells standing in rows in the window, one having a border of finely traced crabs and sea-horses at the base; another has a top like a Doge’s cap, while the body of another has a delicately wrought tracery, as if a fish-net had been thrown over it.

Sometimes the children crowd about me as the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco struggle for the corn flung to them by the tourists.  If there are only three or four, I sometimes compromise with my conscience and give them something.  If one gets a lira put into small coppers, one can give them a couple of centesimi apiece without feeling that one is pauperizing them, but that one is fostering the begging habit in young Italy is a more difficult sin to face.

To-day when the boys took off the tattered hats from their bonny little heads, all black waves and riotous curls, and with disarming dimples and sparkling eyes presented them to me for alms, I looked at them with smiling admiration, thinking how like Raphael’s cherubs they were, and then said in my best Italian: “Oh, yes, I see them; they are indeed most beautiful hats.  I thank you for showing them to me, and I am pleased to see you courteously take them off to a lady.”

This American pleasantry was passed from mouth to mouth gleefully, and so truly enjoyed that they seemed to forget they had been denied.  They ran, still laughing and chattering, to the wood-carver’s shop near-by and told him the story, or so I judged, for he came to his window and smiled benignly upon me as I sat in the gondola with my writing-pad on my knees.  I was pleased at the friendly glance, for he is the hero of a pretty little romance, and I long to make his acquaintance.

It seems that, some years ago, the Queen, with one lady-in-waiting in attendance, came to his shop quite early in the morning.  Both were plainly dressed in cotton gowns, and neither made any pretensions.  He was carving something that could not be dropped, a cherub’s face that had to be finished while his thought of it was fresh.  Hurriedly asking pardon, he continued his work, and at end of an hour raised his eyes, breathless and apologetic, to look at his visitors.  The taller lady had a familiar appearance.  He gazed steadily, and then, to his surprise and embarrassment, recognized the Queen.  Far from being offended, she respected his devotion to his art, and before she left the shop she gave him a commission for a royal staircase.  I am going to ask the Little Genius to take me to see his work, but, alas! there will be an unsurmountable barrier between us, for I cannot utter in my new Italian anything but the most commonplace and conventional statements.

VI

Oh, this misery of being dumb, incoherent, unintelligible, foolish, inarticulate in a foreign land, for lack of words!  It is unwise, I fear, to have at the outset too high an ideal either in grammar or accent.  As our gondola passed one of the hotels this afternoon, we paused long enough to hear an intrepid lady converse with an Italian who carried a mandolin and had apparently come to give a music lesson to her husband.  She seemed to be from the Middle West of America, but I am not disposed to insist upon this point, nor to make any particular State in the Union blush for her crudities of speech.  She translated immediately everything that she said into her own tongue, as if the hearer might, between French and English, possibly understand something.

“Elle nay pars easy—he ain’t here,” she remarked, oblivious of gender.  “Elle retoorneray ah seas oors et dammi—he’ll be back sure by half-past six.  Bone swar, I should say Bony naughty—Good-night to you, and I won’t let him forget to show up to-morrer.”

This was neither so ingenious nor so felicitous as the language-expedient of the man who wished to leave some luggage at a railway station in Rome, and knowing nothing of any foreign tongue but a few Latin phrases, mostly of an obituary character, pointed several times to his effects, saying, “Requiescat in pace,” and then, pointing again to himself, uttered the one pregnant word “Resurgam.”  This at any rate had the merit of tickling his own sense of humour, if it availed nothing with the railway porters, and if any one remarks that he has read the tale in some ancient “Farmers’ Almanack,” I shall only retort that it is still worth repeating.

My little red book on the “Study of Italian Made Easy for the Traveller” is always in my pocket, but it is extraordinary how little use it is to me.  The critics need not assert that individuality is dying out in the human race and that we are all more or less alike.  If we were, we should find our daily practical wants met by such little books.  Mine gives me a sentence requesting the laundress to return the clothes three days hence, at midnight, at cock-crow, or at the full of the moon, but nowhere can the new arrival find the phrase for the next night or the day after to-morrow.  The book implores the washerwoman to use plenty of starch, but the new arrival wishes scarcely any, or only the frills dipped.

Before going to the dressmaker’s yesterday, I spent five minutes learning the Italian for the expression “This blouse bags; it sits in wrinkles between the shoulders.”  As this was the only criticism given in the little book, I imagined that Italian dressmakers erred in this special direction.  What was my discomfiture to find that my blouse was much too small and refused to meet.  I could only use gestures for the dressmaker’s enlightenment, but in order not to waste my recently gained knowledge, I tried to tell a melodramatic tale of a friend of mine whose blouse bagged and sat in wrinkles between the shoulders.  It was not successful, because I was obliged to substitute the past for the present tense of the verb.

Somebody says that if we learn the irregular verbs of a language first, all will be well.  I think by the use of considerable mental agility one can generally avoid them altogether, although it materially reduces one’s vocabulary; but at all events there is no way of learning them thoroughly save by marrying a native.  A native, particularly after marriage, uses the irregular verbs with great freedom, and one acquires a familiarity with them never gained in the formal instruction of a teacher.  This method of education may be considered radical, and in cases where one is already married, illegal and bigamous, but on the whole it is not attended with any more difficulty than the immersing of one’s self in a study day after day and month after month learning the irregular verbs from a grammar.

My rule in studying a language is to seize upon some salient point, or one generally overlooked by foreigners, or some very subtle one known only to the scholar, and devote myself to its mastery.  A little knowledge here blinds the hearer to much ignorance elsewhere.  In Italian, for example, the polite way of addressing one’s equal is to speak in the third person singular, using Ella (she) as the pronoun.  “Come sta Ella?”  (How are you? but literally “How is she?”)

I pay great attention to this detail, and make opportunities to meet our padrona on the staircase and say “How is she?” to her.  I can never escape the feeling that I am inquiring for the health of an absent person; moreover, I could not understand her symptoms if she should recount them, and I have no language in which to describe my own symptoms, which, so far as I have observed, is the only reason we ever ask anybody else how he feels.

To remember on the instant whether one is addressing equals, superiors, or inferiors, and to marshal hastily the proper pronoun, adds a new terror to conversation, so that I find myself constantly searching my memory to decide whether it shall be:

Scusate or Scusi, Avanti or Passi, A rivederci or Addio, Che cosa dite? or Che coma dice?  Quanto domandate? or Quanto domanda?  Dove andate? or Dove va?  Come vi chiamate? or Come si chiama? and so forth and so forth until one’s mind seems to be arranged in tabulated columns, with special N.B.’s to use the infinitive in talking to the gondolier.

Finding the hours of time rather puzzling as recorded in the “Study of Italian Made Easy,” I devoted twenty-four hours to learning how to say the time from one o’clock at noon to midnight, or thirteen to twenty-three o’clock.  My soul revolted at the task, for a foreign tongue abounds in these malicious little refinements of speech, invented, I suppose, to prevent strangers from making too free with it on short acquaintance.  I found later on that my labour had been useless, and that evidently the Italians themselves have no longer the leisure for these little eccentricities of language and suffer them to pass from common use.  If the Latin races would only meet in convention and agree to bestow the comfortable neuter gender on inanimate objects and commodities, how popular they might make themselves with the English-speaking nations; but having begun to “enrich” their language, and make it more “subtle” by these perplexities, centuries ago, they will no doubt continue them until the end of time.

If one has been a devoted patron of the opera or student of music, one has an Italian vocabulary to begin with.  This, if accompanied by the proper gestures (for it is vain to speak without liberal movements, of the hands, shoulders, and eyebrows), this, I maintain, will deceive all the English-speaking persons who may be seated near your table in a foreign café.

The very first evening after our arrival, Jack Copley asked Salemina and me to dine with him at the best restaurant in Venice.  Jack Copley is a well of nonsense undefiled, and he, like ourselves, had been in Italy only a few hours.  He called for us in his gondola, and in the row across from the Giudecca we amused ourselves by calling to mind the various Italian words or phrases with which we were familiar.  They were mostly titles of arias or songs, but Jack insisted, notwithstanding Salemina’s protestations, that, properly interlarded with names of famous Italians, he could maintain a brilliant conversation with me at table, to the envy and amazement of our neighbours.  The following paragraph, then, was our stock in trade, and Jack’s volubility and ingenuity in its use kept Salemina quite helpless with laughter:—