Nights Part 3

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 n.o.body 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, pa.s.sed. 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 _cafe_ 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 _cafe_ 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 a.s.sociations, 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 _cafe_ 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-gla.s.s 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 t.i.tle 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

They were only three--McFarlane, Anthony and Thompson, shall I call them?--but they had not journeyed all the way from Munich to talk about "the boys" and to drop sentimental tears over old love tales. They were off on an Easter holiday and meant to make the most of it. Because Duveneck was Duveneck they gave up the gayer _cafes_ in the _Piazza_ to be with him in the sleepy old _Orientale_. But they were not going to let it stay a sleepy old _Orientale_ if they could help themselves.

Their very first evening Duveneck called for two gla.s.ses of milk--to steady his nerves, he said, though he politely attributed the unsteadiness not to this new excitement but to the tea he had been drinking. People drifted to our room from outside and from the new room to see what the noise was about, until there was not a table to be had.

The old Englishman and his son put down the _Standard_ and laughed with us. The _caramei_ man went away with an empty tray, I do believe the only time he was ever bought out in his life, and McFarlane treated us all to _tamarindo_ to drink with the fruit, and he wound up his horrible extravagance by buying a copy of the Venetian paper "the boys" used to call the _Barabowow_. It was nothing short of a Venetian orgy.

Nor did the transformation end here. The men from Munich were so smart, especially McFarlane, in white waistcoat, with a flower in his b.u.t.ton-hole and a gold-headed cane in his hand, that we were shocked into the consciousness of our shabbiness. Duveneck, who, until then, had been happy in an old ulster with holes in the pockets and rips in the seams, dazzled the _cafe_ by appearing in a jaunty spring overcoat. J.

exchanged his old trousers with a green stain of acid down the leg for the new pair he had hitherto worn only when he went to call on the Bronsons or to dine with Mr. Horatio Brown, where I could not go because I was so much more hopelessly unprepared to dine anywhere outside the _Panada_ or the Kitchen of the _Casa Kirsch_. But in the _Merceria_ I could at least supply myself with gloves and veils, while Jobbins unearthed a fresh cravat from somewhere. And we began to feel apologetic for the dinginess and general down-at-heeledness of Venice which bored the men from Munich to extinction--really they were so bored, they said, that all day they found themselves looking forward to the _caramei_ man as the town's one excitement. I thought the illuminations on Easter Sunday evening, when the _Piazza_ was "a fairyland in the night," and the music deafened us, and the Bengal lights blinded us, would help to give them a livelier impression; but, though they came with us to _Florian's_, it was plain they pitied us for being so pleased.

They couldn't, for the life of them, see why the place had been so cracked up by Ruskin. Nothing was right. The _Piazza_ was just simply the town's meeting place and centre of gossip, like the country village store, only on a more architectural and uncomfortable scale. The ca.n.a.ls were breeding holes for malaria. The streets wouldn't be put up with as alleys at home. The language was not worth learning. At the _Panada_, after we had given our order for dinner, McFarlane would murmur languidly '_Lo stesso_' and declare it to be the one useful word in the Italian dictionary; to this Johnson added a mysterious '_Sensa crab_'

when Rossi suggested '_piccoli fees_' under the delusion that he was talking English; while Anthony was quite content with the vocabulary the other two supplied him. The climate was as deplorable: either wet and cold, when the Italian _scaldino_ wasn't a patch on the German stove and a _gondola_ became a freezing machine; or warm and enervating when they couldn't keep awake.

They dozed in their _gondola_, they yawned in St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace and in all the other churches and palaces, and in front of all the old doorways and bridges and boat-building yards and _traghettos_ and fishing boats and wells and "bits" that Camillo, their gondolier, was inhuman enough to wake them up to look at. The beauty of Venice was exaggerated, or if they did come to a "subject" that made them pull their sketch books out of their pockets, Camillo was at once bothering them to do it from just where Guardi, or Ca.n.a.letto, or Rico, or Whistler, or Ruskin, or some other old boy had painted, etched, or drawn it--Whistler alone had finished Venice for every artist who came after him and they were tired of his very name, and never wanted to have his etchings and pastels thrown in their faces again. What they would like to do was to discover the Italian town or village where no artist had ever been seen and the word art had never been uttered.

But it was Venetian painting that got most on their nerves. They had given it a fair chance, they protested. "Trot out your Tintorettos,"

they said to Camillo every morning, and he carried them off to the Palace, and the Academy, and more churches than they thought there were in the world, and at last to the _Scuola di San Rocco_. And there a solemn man in spectacles took them in hand. They said to him too: "Trot our your Tintorettos," and he led them up to a big, dingy canvas, and they said: "Trot out your next," and they went the rounds of them all, and they asked, "Where's your Duveneck?" and he said he had never heard of Duveneck, and they said, "Why, he's here!" and they left him hunting, and were back in their _gondola_ in ten minutes, and they guessed they could do with Rubens! I trembled to think of the shock to tourists and my highly intellectual friends at home, religiously studying Baedeker and reading Ruskin, could they have heard the men from Munich talking of art and of Venice. And I must have been painfully scandalized had I not got so much further on with my education as to have a glimmering of the truth Whistler was trying to beat into the unwilling head of the British public--that an artist knows more about art than the man who isn't an artist, and has the best right to an opinion on the subject.

Perhaps their disappointment in Venice was the reason of their pre-occupation with Munich. Certainly "Now, at Munich" was the beginning and end of the talk as "when 'the boys' were here" had been before they came. They would not admit that anything good could exist outside of Munich. I remember Duveneck once suggesting that Paris was the best place for the student, to whom it was a help just to see what was going on around him.

"But what does go on round the student there?" McFarlane interrupted.

"It's all fads in Paris. What do they talk about in Paris to-day but values? [This, remember, was more than a quarter of a century ago.]

That's all they teach the student, all they think of. Look at Bisbing's picture last year. They all raved over it, said it was the _clou_ of the Salon, medalled it, bought it for the Luxembourg, and I don't know what all. And what was it?--Pale green sheep in the foreground, pale green mountains in the background, so pale you could shoot peas through them. That's what you have to do now to make a success in Paris--get your values so that you can shoot peas through 'em. And what will it be to-morrow? And what help is it to the student, anyway?"

But one thing certain is, that whatever the fads and movements in the Paris studios happened to be, the American student in those days did see what was going on in Paris, and just to see, just to feel it, was, as Duveneck held, a help, an inspiration. To-day, living in his own _pensions_, studying in his own schools, loafing in his own clubs, he does not take any interest in what is going on outside of them and will talk about what "the Frenchmen are doing" as if he were still in Kalamazoo or Oshkosh.

What the student, in Duveneck's and McFarlane's time saw going on round him in Munich was, as well as I could make out, chiefly b.a.l.l.s and pageants. To this day I cannot help thinking of life in Munich as one long spectacle and dance. Duveneck, who could talk with calmness of his painting, was stirred to animation when he recalled the costumes he had invented for himself and his friends. He could not conceal his pride in the success of a South Sea Islander he had designed, the effect achieved by the simple means of burnt Sienna rubbed into the poor man, but so vigorously that it took months to get it out again, and a blanket which he mislaid towards morning so that his walk home at dawn, like a savage skulking in the shadows, was a triumph of realism. Pride, too, coloured Duveneck's account of the appearance of the Socialist Carpenter of his creation who made a huge sensation by inciting to riot in the streets of an elaborate Old Munich--the origin of Old London and Old Paris and all the sham Old Towns that Exhibitions have long since staled for us. But his masterpiece was the Dissipated Gentleman, like all masterpieces a marvel of simplicity--hired evening clothes, a good long roll in the muddiest gutter on the way to the ball, and it was done; but the art, Duveneck said, was in the rolling, which in this case, under his direction, was so masterly that at the door the Dissipated Gentleman was mistaken for the real thing and, if friends had not come up in the nick of time, the door would have been shut in his face.

Duveneck was as enthusiastic over the Charles V. ball, though all the artists of Munich contributed to its splendour, working out their costumes with such respect for truth and so regardless of cost that for months and years afterwards not a bit of old brocade or lace was to be had in the antiquity shops of Bavaria. And the students were responsible for the siege of an old castle outside the town, and in their archaeological ardour persuaded the Museum to lend the armour and arms of the correct date, and, in their appreciation of the favour, fought with so much restraint that the casualties were a couple of spears snapped.

And, in my recollection, their recollections stood for such truth and gorgeousness that when England, years afterwards, took to celebrating its past with pageants, more than once I found myself thinking how much better they order these things in Munich!

And from the studios came the inspiration for that ball Munich talks of to this day in which all the nations were represented. There was a Hindu temple, a Chinese paG.o.da, and an Indian wigwam. But the crowning touch was the Esquimaux hut. Placed in a hall apart, at the foot of a great stairway, it was built of some composition in which pitch was freely used, lit by tallow candles, and hung with herrings offered for sale by nine Esquimaux dressed in woollen imitation of skins with the furry side turned out. All evening the hut was surrounded, only towards midnight could the crowd be induced to move on to some fresh attraction. In the moment's lull, one of the Esquimaux was tying up a new line of herrings when he brushed a candle with his arm. In a second he was blazing.

Another ran to his rescue. In another second the hut was a furnace and nine men were in flames, with pitch and wool for fuel. One of the few people still lounging about the hut, fearing a panic, gave the signal to the band, who struck up _Carmen_. Never since, McFarlane said, had he listened to the music of _Carmen_, never again could he listen to it, without seeing the burning hut, the men rushing out of it with the flames leaping high above them, tearing at the blazing wool, in their agony turning and twisting as in some wild fantastic dance, while above the music he could hear the laughter of the crowd, who thought it a joke--a new scene in the spectacle.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed a rug from somewhere and tried to throw it over one of the men, but the man flew past to the top of the great stairway. There he was seized and rolled over and over on the carpet until the flames were out. He got up, walked downstairs, asked for beer, drank it to the dregs, and fell dead with the gla.s.s in his hand--the first to die, the first freed from his agony. Of the nine, but two survived. Seven lay with their hut, a charred heap upon the ground, before the laughing crowd realized what a pageant of horror Fate had planned for them.

Munich stories, before the night was over, had to be washed down with Munich beer, which, at that time as still, I fancy, was best at Bauer's.

By some unwritten law, inscrutable as the written, it was decreed that, though I might sit all evening the only woman at our table in the _Orientale_--oftener than not the only woman in the _cafe_--it was not "the thing" for me to go on to Bauer's. Therefore, first, the whole company would see me home. It was a short stroll along the _Riva_, but the Lagoon, dim and shadowy, stretched away beyond us, dimmer islands resting on its waters, the lights of the boats sprinkling it with gold under the high Venetian sky sprinkled with stars; and so beautiful was it, and so sweet the April night, that the men from Munich could not hold out against the enchantment of Venice in spring. I felt it a concession when McFarlane admitted the loveliness of Venice by starlight, and his languor dropped from him under the spell, and I knew the game of boredom was up when, in this starlight, he decided that, after all, there might be more in the Tintorettos than he thought if only he had time to study them. But Easter holidays do not last for ever, and the day soon came when the men from Munich had to go back to where all was for the best in the best of all towns, but where no doubt, on the principle that we always prefer what we have not got at the moment, they told "the fellows" in the _Bier Kellars_ that only in Venice was life worth while, that Rubens was dingy, and that they guessed they could do with Tintoretto.

V

Somehow, we were never the same after they left us; not, I fancy, because we missed them, but because we could hold out still less than they against the spring. When the sun was so warm and the air so soft, when in the little ca.n.a.ls wistaria bloomed over high brick walls, when boatloads of flowers came into Venice with the morning, when at noon the _Riva_ was strewn with sleepers--then indoors and work became an impertinence. On the slightest excuse J. and Duveneck no longer shut themselves in the studio, I gave up collecting material from my window and lunch from the _Riva_, Jobbins interrupted his search and Martin his argument, the Consul fought shy of the old corner in the _cafe_. And in the languid laziness that stole upon Venice, as well as upon us, I penetrated for the first time to the inner meaning of the chapter in his _Venetian Life_ that Howells labels _Comincia far Caldo_, the season when repose takes you to her inner heart and you learn her secrets, when at last you know _why_ it was an Abyssinian maid who played upon her dulcimer, at last you recognize in Xanadu the land where you were born.

There was never a _festa_ in the _Piazza_ that we were not there, watching or walking with the bewildering procession of elegant young Venetians, and peasants from the mainland, and officers, and soldiers, and gondoliers with big caps set jauntily on their curls, and beautiful girls in the gay fringed shawls that have disappeared from Venice and the wooden shoes that once made an endless clatter along the _Riva_ but are heard no more, and Greeks, and Armenians, and priests, and beggars, pa.s.sing up and down between the arcades and the _cafe_ tables that overflowed far into the square, St. Mark's more unreal in its splendour than ever with its domes and galleries and traceries against the blue of the Venetian night.

There was never a side-show on the _Riva_ that we did not interrupt our work to go and see it; whether it was the circus in the little tent, with the live pony, the most marvellous of all sights in Venice; or the acrobats tumbling on their square of carpet; or the blindfolded, toothless old fortune-teller, whose shrill voice I can still hear mumbling "_Una volta soltanta per Napoli!_" when she was asked if Naples, this coming summer, as the last, would be ravaged by cholera.

She was right, for in the town, cleaned out of picturesqueness, cholera could not again do its work in the old wholesale fashion.

There was never an excursion to the Islands that we did not join it. To visit some of the further Islands was not so easy in those days, except for tourists with a fortune to spend on _gondolas_, and we were grateful to the occasional little steamboat that undertook to get us there, though with a crowd and noise and a bra.s.s band, for all the world like an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves disgraced forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a _gondola_, the sails of the fishing boats touching it with as brilliant colour, the Islands lying as peacefully upon its shining waters, the bells of the many _campanili_ coming as sweetly to our ears, the sky above as pure and radiant; and it mattered not how we reached the Islands, they were as enchanting when we landed.

One wonderful day was at Torcello, where nothing could mar the loveliness of its solitude and desolation, its old cathedral full of strange mosaics and stranger memories, the green s.p.a.ce in front that was once a _Piazza_ tangled with blossoms and sweet-scented in the May sunshine, the purple hills on the mainland melting into the pale sky.

And a second day as wonderful was at Burano, with its rose-flushed houses and gardens and traditions of noise and quarrels, and the girls who followed the boat along the bank and pelted us with roses until Jobbins vowed he would go and live there--and he did, but a market boat brought him back in a week. And other excursions took us to Chioggia, the ca.n.a.ls there alive with fishing boats and the banks with fishermen mending their nets; and to Murano, busy and beautiful both, with the throb of its gla.s.s furnaces and the peace of the fields where the dead sleep; and again and again to the _Lido_ where green meadows were sprinkled with daisies and birds were singing.

More wonderful were the nights, coming home, when the gold had faded from sea and sky, the palaces and towers of Venice rising low on the horizon as in a City of Dreams, the Lagoon turned by the moon into a sheet of silver, lights like great fireflies stealing over the water, ghostly _gondolas_ gliding past,--then we were the real Lotus Eaters drifting to the only Lotus Land where all things have rest.

The fussy little steamboat, I found, could rock ambition to sleep as well as a _gondola_, and life seemed to offer nothing better than an endless succession of days and nights spent on its deck bound for wherever it might bear us. I understood and sympathized with the men who lay asleep all day in the sunshine on the _Riva_ and who sang all night on the bridge below our windows. What is more, I envied them and wished they would take me into partnership. Were they not putting into practice the philosophy our ancient friend Davies had preached to me in Rome? But only the Venetian can master the secret of doing nothing with nothing to do it on, and if J. and I were to hope for figs with our bread, or even for bread by itself, we had to move on to the next place where work awaited us. And so the last of our nights in Venice came before spring had ripened into summer, and the last of our mornings when porters again scrambled for our bags, and we again stumbled after them up the long platform; and then there were again yells, but this time of "_Partenza_"

and "_p.r.o.nti_," and the train hurried us away from the _Panada_, and the _Orientale_, and the Lagoon, to a world where no lotus grows and life is all labour.

IV

NIGHTS IN LONDON

IN LONDON

I

I cannot remember how or why we began our Thursday nights. I rather think they began themselves and we kept them up to protect our days against our friends.