An Englishwoman's Love-Letters Part 11

LETTER x.x.xIX.

My Own, Own Beloved: Say that my being away does not seem too long? I have not had a letter yet, and that makes me somehow not anxious but compunctious; only writing to you of all I do helps to keep me in good conscience. Not the other foot gone to the mender's, I hope, with the same obstructive accompaniments as went to the setting-up again of the last? If I don't hear soon, you will have me dancing on wires, which cost as much by the word as a gondola by the hour.

Yesterday we went to see Carpaccio at his best in San Giorgio di Schiavone: two are St. George pictures, three St. Jeromes, and two of some other saint unknown to me. The St. Jerome series is really a homily on the love and pathos of animals. First is St. Jerome in his study with a sort of unclipped white poodle in the pictorial place of honor, all alone on a floor beautifully swept and garnished, looking up wistfully to his master busy at writing (a Benjy saying, "Come and take me for a walk, there's a good saint!"). Scattered among the adornments of the room are small bronzes of horses and, I think, birds. So, of course, these being his tastes, when St. Jerome goes into the wilderness, a lion takes to him, and accompanies him when he pays a call on the monks in a neighboring monastery. Thereupon, holy men of little faith, the entire fraternity take to their heels and rush upstairs, the hindermost clinging to the skirts of the formermost to be hauled the quicker out of harm's way. And all the while the lion stands incorrectly offering the left paw, and Jerome with shrugs tries to explain that even the best b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in his dear lion's mouth. After that comes the tragedy. St. Jerome lies dying in excessive odor of sanct.i.ty, and all the monks crowd round him with prayers and viatic.u.ms, and the ordinary stuffy pieties of a "happy death," while Jerome wonders feebly what it is he misses in all this to-do for which he cares so little. And there, elbowed far out into the cold, the lion lies and lifts his poor head and howls because he knows his master is being taken from him. Quite near to him, fastened to a tree, a queer, nondescript, crocodile-shaped dog runs out the length of its tether to comfort the disconsolate beast: but _la bete humaine_ has got the whip-hand of the situation. In another picture is a parrot that has just mimicked a dog, or called "Carlo!" and then laughed: the dog turns his head away with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, exactly as a sensitive dog does when you make fun of him.

These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pictures which are quite glorious in color and design, but they help me to love Carpaccio to distraction; and when the others lose me, they hunt through all the Carpaccios in Venice till they find me!

Love me a little more if possible while I am so long absent from you! What I do and what I think go so much together now, that you will take what I write as the most of me that it is possible to cram in, coming back to you to share everything.

Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I would like to see your face!

Here, dearest, among these palaces you would be in your peerage, for I think you have some southern blood in you.

Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody said to me to-day, "But you are not quite English, are you?" And I swore by the nine G.o.ds of my ancestry that I was nothing else. But the look is in us: my father had a foreign air, but made up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle N.

used to call him "John Bull let loose."

My love to England. Is it showing much autumn yet? My eyes long for green fields again. Since I have been in Italy I had not seen one until the other day from the top of St. Giorgio Maggiore, where one lies in hiding under the monastery walls.

All that I see now quickens me to fresh thoughts of you. Yet do not expect me to come back wiser: my last effort at wisdom was to fall in love with you, and there I stopped for good and all. There I am still, everything included: what do you want more? My letter and my heart both threaten to be over-weight, so no more of them this time. Most dearly do I love you.

LETTER XL.

Beloved: If two days slip by, I don't know where I am when I come to write; things get so crowded in such a short s.p.a.ce of time. Where I left off I know not: I will begin where I am most awake--your letter which I have just received.

That is well, dearest, that is well indeed: a truce till February! And since the struggle then must needs be a sharp one--with only one end, as we know,--do not vex her now by any overt signs of preparation as if you a.s.sumed already that her final arguments were to be as so much chaff before the wind. You do not tell me _what_ she argues, and I do not ask.

She does not say I shall not love you enough!

To answer businesslike to your questions first: with your forgiveness we stay here till the 25th, and get back to England with the last of the month. Does that seem a very cruel, far-off date? Others have the wish to stay even longer, and it would be no fairness to hurry them beyond a certain degree of reasonableness with my particular reason for impatience, seeing, moreover, that in your love I have every help for remaining patient. It is too much to hope, I suppose, that the "truce"

sets you free now, and that you could meet us here after all, and prolong our stay indefinitely? I know one besides myself who would be glad, and would welcome an outside excuse dearly.

For, oh, the funniness of near and dear things! Arthur's heart is laid up with a small love affair, and it is the comicalest of internal maladies. He is s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up courage to tell me all about it, and I write in haste before my mouth is sealed by his confidences. I fancy I know the party, an energetic little mortal whom we met at Lucerne, where Arthur lingered while we came on to Florence. She talked vaguely of being in Venice some time this autumn; and the vagueness continues.

Arthur, in consequence, roams round disconsolately with no interest but in hotel books. And for fear lest we should gird up his loins and drag him away with us out of Paradisal possibilities, he is forever praising Venice as a resting-place, and saying he wants to be nowhere else. The bathing just keeps him alive; but when put to it to explain what charms him since pictures do not, and architecture only slightly, he says in exemplary brotherly fashion that he likes to see me completing my education and enthusiasms,--and does not realize with how foreign an air that explanation sits upon his shoulders.

I saw to-day a remnant of your patron saint, and for your sake transferred a kiss to it, Italian fashion, with my thumb and the sign of the cross. I hope it will do you good. Also, I have been up among the galleries of St. Mark's, and about the roof and the west front where somebody or another painted his picture of the bronze horses.

The pigeons get to recognize people personally, and grow more intimate every time we come. I even conceive they make favorites, for I had three pecking food out of my mouth to-day and refusing to take it in any other fashion, and they coo and say thank you before and after every seed they take or spill. They are quite the pleasantest of all the Italian beggars--and the cleanest.

Your friend pressed us in to tea yesterday: I think less for the sake of giving us tea than that we should see his palace, or rather his first floor, in which alone he seems to lose himself. I have no idea for measurements, but I imagine his big sala is about eighty feet long and perhaps twenty-five feet across, with a flat-beamed roof, windows at each end, and portieres along the walls of old blue Venetian linen: a place in which it seems one could only live and think n.o.bly. His face seems to respond to its teachings. What more might not an environment like that bring out in you? Come and let me see! I have hopes springing as I think of things that you may be coming after all; and that that is what lay concealed under the gayety of your last paragraph. Then I am more blessed even than I knew. What, you are coming? So well I do love you, my Beloved!

LETTER XLI.

Dearest: This letter will travel with me: we leave to-day. Our movements are to be too restless and uncomfortable for the next few days for me to have a chance of quiet seeing or quiet writing anywhere. At Riva we shall rest, I hope.

Yesterday a storm began coming over towards evening, and I thought to myself that if it pa.s.sed in time there should be a splendid sunset of smolder and glitter to be seen from the Campanile, and perhaps by good chance a rainbow.

I went alone: when I got to the top the rain was pelting hard; so there I stayed happily weather-bound for an hour looking over Venice "silvered with slants of rain," and watching umbrellas scuttering below with toes beneath them. The golden smolder was very slow in coming: it lay over the mainland and came creeping along the railway track. Then came the glitter and the sun, and I turned round and found my rainbow. But it wasn't a bow, it was a circle: the Campanile stood up as it were a spoke in the middle,--the lower curve of the rainbow lay on the ground of the Piazzetta, cut off sharp by the shadow of the Campanile. It was worth waiting an hour to see. The islands shone mellow and bright in the clearance with the storm going off black behind them. Good-by, Venice!

Verona began by seeming dull to me; but it improves and unfolds beautiful corners of itself to be looked at: only I am given so little time. The Tombs of the Della Scalas and the Renaissance facade of the Consiglio are what chiefly delight me. I had some quiet hours in the Museo, where I fell in love with a little picture by an unknown painter, of Orpheus charming the beasts in a wandering green landscape, with a dance of fauns in the distance, and here and there Eurydice running;--and Orpheus in Hades, and the Thracian women killing him, and a crocodile fishing out his head, and mermaids and ducks sitting above their reflections reflecting.

Also there is one beautiful Tobias and the Angel there by a painter whose name I most ungratefully forget. I saw a man yesterday carrying fishes in the market, each strung through the gills on a twig of myrtle: that is how Tobias ought to carry his fish: when a native custom suggests old paintings, how charming it always is!

Riva.

We have just got here from Verona. In the matter of the garden at least it is a Paradise of a place. A great sill of honeysuckle leans out from my window: beyond is a court grown round with creepers, and beyond that the garden--such a garden! The first thing one sees is an arcade of vines upon stone pillars, between which peep stacks of roses, going off a little from their glory now, and right away stretches an alley of green, that shows at the end, a furlong off, the blue glitter of water.

It is a beautifully wild garden: gra.s.s and vegetables and trees and roses all grow in a jungle together. There are little groves of bamboo and chestnut and willow; and a runnel of water is somewhere--I can hear it. It suggests rest, which I want; and so, for all its difference, suggests you, whom also I want,--more, I own it now, than I have said!

But that went without saying, Beloved, as it always must if it is to be the truth and nothing short of the truth.

While this has been waiting to go, your letter has been put into my hands.

I am too happy to say words about it, and can afford now to let this go as it is. The little time of waiting for you will be perfect happiness now; and your coming seems to color all that is behind as well. I have had a good time indeed, and was only wearying with the plethora of my enjoyment: but the better time has been kept till now. We shall be together day after day and all day long for at least a month, I hope: a joy that has never happened to us yet.

Never mind about the lost letter now, dearest, dearest: Venice was a little empty just one week because of it. I still hope it will come; but what matter?--I know _you_ will. All my heart waits for you.--Your most glad and most loving.

LETTER XLII.

Dearest: I saw an old woman riding a horse astride: and I was convinced on the spot that this is the rightest way of riding, and that the sidesaddle was a foolish and affected invention. The horse was fine, and so was the young man leading it: the old woman was upright and stately, with a wide hat and full petticoats like a Maximilian soldier.

This was at Bozen, where we stayed for two nights, and from which I have brought a cold with me: it seems such an English thing to have, that I feel quite at home in the discomfort of it. It had been such wonderful weather that we were sitting out of doors every evening up to 9.30 P.M.

without wraps, and on our heads only our "widows' caps." (The M.-A.

persists in a style which suggests that Uncle N. has gone to a better world.) Mine was too flimsy a work of fiction, and a day before I had been for a climb and got wet through, so a chill laid its benediction on my head, and here I am,--not seriously incommoded by the malady, but by the remedy, which is the M.-A. full of kind quackings and fierce tyranny if I do but put my head out of window to admire the view, whose best is a little round the corner.

I had no idea Innsbruck was so high up among the mountains: snows are on the peaks all around. Behind the house-tops, so close and near, lies a quarter circle of white crests. You are told that in winter creatures come down and look in at the windows: sometimes they are called wolves, sometimes bears--any way the feeling is mediaeval.

Hereabouts the wayside shrines nearly always contain a crucifix, whereas in Italy that was rare--the Virgin and Child being the most common. I remarked on this, which I suppose gave rise to a subsequent observation of the M.-A.'s: "I think the Tyrolese are a _good_ people: they are not given over to Mariolatry like those poor priest-ridden Italians." I think, however, that they merely have that fundamental grace, religious simplicity, worshiping--just what they can get, for yesterday I saw two dear old bodies going round and telling their beads before the bronze statues of the Maximilian tomb--King Arthur, Charles the Bold, etc. I suppose, by mere a.s.sociation, a statue helps them to pray.

The national costume does look so nice, though not exactly beautiful. I like the flat, black hats with long streamers behind and a gold ta.s.sel, and the s.p.a.cious ap.r.o.n. Blue satin is a favorite style, always silk or satin for Sunday best: one I saw of pearl-white brocade.

Since we came north we have had lovely weather, except the one day of which I am still the filterings: and morning along the Brenner Pa.s.s was perfect. I think the mountains look most beautiful quite early, at sunrise, when they are all pearly and mysterious.

We go on to Zurich on Thursday, and then, Beloved, and then!--so this must be my last letter, since I shall have nowhere to write to with you rushing all across Europe and resting nowhere because of my impatience to have you. The Mother-Aunt concedes a whole month, but Arthur will have to leave earlier for the beginning of term. How little my two dearest men have yet seen of each other! Barely a week lies between us: this will scarcely catch you. Dearest of dearests, my heart waits on yours.