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
CASA ROSA, May 28.
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.
