The Conscience and the Gondola

I AM not one who derides that excellent institution, the New England conscience; without it, I do not see how we could ever have had a New England, or where our literature would be to-day. Other countries have their special virtues, but it remained for New England to have a conscience; let us cherish it, therefore, just as if it were as large and overpowering as our writers have loved to pretend. Let us not hold with those who act as if the New England conscience were a morbid pathological symptom, like the overgrown liver of the Strasburg goose.

I respect, too, its offspring, the yachtsman’s conscience, — which is New England conscience on its mother’s side, and man-o’-war etiquette on its father’s. Although I do not pounce on uncoiled ropes and coil them up with that fierce passion with which a New England housekeeper attacks the attic during the spring house-cleaning, and while I here confess that I do not feel disgraced forever if I do not make my mooring the first time, still, I think the yachtsman’s conscience is a fine and noble thing, though often arbitrary in its workings, and occasionally somewhat artificial in its punctiliousness.

Still, the conscience impresses me less than it did before I saw it at work in a foreign country. I had imagined it a stable quantity, as potent and as up and a-doing anywhere in the world as it is at home.

This is not so. There are forces bigger than it, and I purpose to tell the story of its undoing.

In the first place, Stan would have saved himself much trouble had he realized from the beginning that a craft forty feet over all, twenty-four foot water line, six-foot beam, and drawing four inches of water, should no more be considered a yacht than a toboggan or a snowshoe. Toboggan, snowshoe, and gondola are all highly specialized vehicles of transportation, called into being bv peculiar conditions; and as a toboggan should not be confused with a real sleigh, neither should a gondola be looked on as a real boat; nor do I think Stan would have so considered it, but for his yachtsman’s conscience; for while we were in Venice it seemed as if on its mother’s side it harked back to some New England house-cleaning grandmother, the kind that ariseth ere it is light — and makes all the rest of the family rise too. It did not wake, the first day. It lay in wait for the moment when we should have a gondola of our own.

We did not imagine in the beginning that we should have a gondola; an unpretentious sandolo, propelled by a beautiful but rascally little boy, seemed to us nearer the kind of boats we were used to, and more in keeping with the humble station in life to which God has called us.

We had hardly said sandolo to each other, when, by some mysterious wireless, news of us was sent forth and half a dozen sandolo boys were yapping under our windows.

“Those sandolos are in filthy shape,” Stan grumbled. “They have n’t been scraped since the Austrians left Venice. We’ll try one, though,” he conceded, with gloom.

Our sandolo darted off with its peculiar rocking motion.

“This boat,” Stan announced with conviction, “won’t be a safe boat for the baby. If we ever send the baby and nurse out alone, I shan’t feel comfortable a second.” Which, being translated, meant that Stan wanted a gondola like those that passed us, arching their lovely necks proudly, their gondoliers sporting bright-colored sashes. One of these our sandolo hurtled rudely, at which the gondola turned on us sidewise, with, it seemed to me, a proud, wounded look. Stan’s eye rested on this gondola with an expression such as I have known it to wear only for a boat he is falling in love with.

“There’s no doubt about it,” he said accusingly, “ sandolos are crank boats. I’m getting too old to take risks.” — “Risk your child’s life if you like,” his virtuous manner connoted, “ I shall not.”

We dismissed the sandolo, and Stan went out for a walk. Later, he returned with a glow on his face which means, “I have found a boat I like.”

“I’ve been looking,” he said, “at a perfect peach of a sandolo. You ought to see it! You can see your face in it,” he added reassuringly, as though a sandolo you could see your face in were less crank than those on which the varnish had worn off.

“How much is it a week ? ” I asked.

“A week!” Stan echoed. “It’s not for rent — it’s for sale! And at such a price! You couldn’t fail to get back on it sometime what you paid for it. The man,” he added, with a touch of selfconsciousness, “sent his children out in it every day.” It is a curious fact that Stan always has more confidence in a boat he owns than in any boat he rents, as if the very fact that a boat belongs to him creates some mysterious bond between them, which causes it to render him some occult allegiance, by which it pledges itself not to drown him or his.

“I don’t suppose we could buy a sandolo,” he went on, “still — there’s no harm in looking at her! ”

We went together. She was a beautiful boat, and everything that our boats usually were not. She sat there in the little canal and sparkled impertinent and alluring eyes at us.

We neither of us spoke of the sandolo that afternoon, for we both knew if we did its purchase was as good as accomplished; we knew, too, that dearly as we wanted it we could n’t afford it, and yet, not to buy it offended our New England principles of economy. Moreover, while we stood in its beguiling presence, Stan had heard my unspoken pleading: “ Oh, do buy it, and take the blame of it! ”

I make no doubt we should have bought it, if that evening, when we returned home, there had not been drawn up before our riva the most beautiful gondola in Venice. It was a gondola from a Venetian novella. Its forward part was overlaid with rich carving of acanthus leaves, interwoven in pleasant design — just enough to give the effect of a little extra splendor; to put this gondola in a class above the ordinary cab-stand gondola.

In it stood a red-faced gondolier. His striped jersey was torn and dirty, and his cap, one of those long, pointed ones worn as night-caps by men in France, lacked a tassel, but there was something appealing about him which made one love him. He seemed like a bedraggled Newfoundland dog, who for want of a master and a proper home has been sleeping in the rain. He looked at us with his faithful dog’s eyes, leaning at ease on his oar, in a pose as picturesque as though he had been dressed with a proper sash and hat. He smiled at us trustingly and said in soft Venetian, —

“I have brought the gondola of the Signori.”

I turned to Stan. I had expected —and sneakingly I had hoped — to see the expression on his face which means that nothing shall stand between him and his desire; which means that he is willing to go without shoes —yes, and make his wife and child go without shoes — rather than give up the boat he wants. Instead, be looked as though he pitied that splendid gondola.

“Here, you,” he cried to the man, “ behold! Why don’t you — why don’t you — ” He turned to me, his face its frequent impatient red; he does not like to ask me for foreign words. “Margery, what’s the word for brass ? ”

“ Metal ” was the only translation I could give him.

Why don’t you clean your metal ? " he demanded.

“ I have cleaned it,” replied the man sweetly.

“ Che! Che! Che! ” clicked Stan, and waggled his forefinger as he had learned to do in Tuscany.

The man spread his hands and tilted his head in a charming gesture of deprecation. He reminded one of a dog that begs pardon with the lifting of a floppy paw. His gesture conveyed to us subtly that while he thought he had cleaned his brass, we evidently knew better.

“ It’s a shame,” said Stan, “ to see a beautiful boat like that with dirty brass! Think what she’d be like if those dolphins did n’t look like a ship’s galley just after dinner! ”

Here it was that the New England conscience stirred in its sleep.

“ I’m going to hire that boat,” he asserted, “ and get that brass bright.”

This was no subterfuge to get hold of the boat. Not a sail did I get in her that afternoon. Stan sent the man, whose name was Giuseppe, for what is used in Venice for making brass bright, and growled because it was not the Putz Pomade with which I was accustomed to shine up the brass on our boats at home.

Giuseppe gave the brasses what is known as “ a lick and a promise,” and stood smiling and obedient before us, waiting to start forth, only to hear Stan say, —

“That’s not clean! That’s not the way to polish brass! Give here!” and for want of Italian words he gave Giuseppe an object-lesson in the art of polishing brass.

I once knew a narrow-built New England woman, who, when I commented on the spotlessness of her house, said drearily, “Yes, I fight it day and night.” So Stan “ fought it ” — he fought it on the dolphins, he fought it on the ferro, he fought it on the scroll on the stern. And perceiving that he was not getting the worth of his gondolier’s services, he had the cushions and carpet removed upon the riva, and there brushed and beaten. I sat by, gloomy and ill-tempered, while my afternoon of glory was taken from me bit by bit.

“There!” said Stan, the afternoon being finished, “ now that gondola looks as it ought to! I’m sorry we can’t hire it.”

But I have New England blood of my own.

“Can’t hire it!" I repeated. The waste of cleaning some one else’s gondola affronted me. “We’ve got to have it.”

Stan gave me a look which meant, “ The price of this gondola be on your head! ”

“ Come to-morrow at eight,” he commanded.

II

I woke up next morning with a joyful fear, like a child at Christmas. Perhaps, after all, Santa Claus had not come! Perhaps, after all, there was no gondola ! Stan apparently shared my feelings, for all I could see of him was the back of his pajamas; the rest of him hung perilously out of the window. I hurried to the other window.

“ Has it come ? ” I asked.

Stan turned toward me with a sour scowl. It had. A little way down San Vio lay our splendid gondola, and without its face washed or its hair combed. Giuseppe, unshaven, lay coiled up on its soft cushions and slumbered.

“Look at that brass!” said Stan. “ Hey, Giuseppe! ”

The word was taken up down the Vio. “ Hey, Giuseppe! Your Signori, Giuseppe ! ” Small boys echoed it from side streets, with, “ Hey, Giuseppe! ” He was evidently a well-known figure of the quarter. “ Asleep again, Giuseppe ! ”

He sprang to his feet.

“ Eceomi! Eccomi! ” he cried cheerfully.

“ Your metal!” shouted Stan from the window. “ Your metal! — I can see dust an inch thick from here on the gondola,” — he turned and spoke to me across the space of wall between our two windows, in a tone suggesting that I had failed in my housewifely duties.

“ How do you expect that you are going to hold your job if you don’t keep your metal bright ? ” was what he attempted to bawl, in Italian, His tone conveyed to Giuseppe that it would be best for him to begin cleaning the gondola, and suddenly.

Stan began dressing. After each garment he poked a suspicious head out of the window. Now he muttered things to me about the shiftlessness of Italians, and again he threw a warning cry to Giuseppe. When he had finished dressing, he swallowed a cup of coffee and went to his house-cleaning. I found him, after my own leisurely breakfast, rubbing his handkerchief on one piece of brass after another, to see if any dirt came off; and as often as he rubbed, he turned the accusing bit of linen on Giuseppe in stern silence, and Giuseppe, quelled, hastened to the offending spot. This morning he seemed more like a devoted, well-meaning dog than ever. One could imagine his tongue hanging out of his mouth, as he panted after his unwonted exertions. He gave a clever imitation of a man who has realized that the polishing of brass is a serious matter.

But even after the gondola was faultless, the bright morning was still darkened by the dilapidated appearance of Giuseppe.

“That man has got to keep himself cleaner. He’s got to wear better clothes,” Stan announced.

He conveyed this at once to Giuseppe.

“ I’m a poor man,” Giuseppe deprecated gently. “ In other times I had many clothes — sashes, scarfs — ah, I shone in those days ! Now— ” he wagged a finger; he had no other clothes, not a rag, was what his finger eloquently told us; and somehow further conveyed to us that his nakedness was no fault of his own—that he had suffered wrongs and injustice.

“I know a shop,” he continued, “ where clothes for gondoliers abound. If the Signori— ”

Stan ignored this suggestion.

“ We will go,” he commanded peremptorily, “to San Salvatore.”

Now, it is a bad thing to be too strongminded. It wears out the character. We had been strong-minded as we could be all day, and we were so occupied in San Salvatore, in saying strong-mindedly that it was not our business to provide gondoliers with their clothing, that I, for one, have no more memory of that church than had I never been there; but I am sure, if I were to go into it, strong-mindedness would again rush over me. What I do remember is the inside of a stuffy shop, piled full of blue garments, and another little shop, gay with bolts of bright-colored silk and cotton with which gondoliers make their scarfs and sashes. That ’s what comes of being too strongminded. The reaction is disastrous.

As I look back on it now, the score between the East and West stood thus at the end of that first day: one for the West: Stan had got his brass cleaned; five for the East: Giuseppe had his new clothes and several naps. At the time, of course, we were not conscious of the struggle for supremacy which Giuseppe on the one hand, and we on the other, were fighting out. The New England conscience had been victorious in one, and wheedling, soft-spoken, beguiling Italy in the other. Moreover, Giuseppe had seen Stan’s passion for cleanliness, and had used his knowledge swiftly and efficiently, and we knew it, though Giuseppe tried to throw the sand of gratitude in our eyes.

III

As I look back, I can well trace that silent battle of which at the time I was not so much as aware. We would begin the day with an apparent victory, for the early morning hours were spent in overseeing Giuseppe not doing his work. I can see now that we spent our strength too freely in the first part of the day. We felt that we had really accomplished something, and were disarmed, and would let Giuseppe and the gondola take us where they would. Without our knowing it, they were continually wanning obscure points in the game. They, and Venice, were undermining that backbone of our strength, our sense of duty. We were content when they took us into obscure little back waters, where the silence was broken only by the plash of our oars and the melancholy “ Poppen-jee! " as Giuseppe warned the empty air that he meant to turn from one deserted waterlane into another as deserted. They carried us past high walls — walls green below, and diversified by crabs, where the canal lapped them; above, rose and saffron, here and there showing patches of deeper rose where pieces of plaster had fallen from the bricks. Through grilled gateways, at the water’s edge, we could look deep into gardens which seemed to stretch away into forests. Everything was quiet; there was no sound even of a bird. Enchantment brooded over us. Then suddenly, out of the silences, Giuseppe and the gondola carried us under some populous bridge, where two files of Venetian women in black shawls passed ceaselessly. The sound of the noisy Venetian people would again come to us for a moment. Then silence again. The enchantment of the enchanted city was upon us.

In silence we passed by beautiful old palaces, whose defaced escutcheons pleaded with us to remember how glorious their dwellers once had been. We passed the beautiful iron gateway of a garden, where one frail autumn rose mirrored its brave little head in the canal. It was such a venturesome little flower, and so poetical in the midst of the decay, that I turned to Stan for sympathy. He spoke:—

“ This son of a sea crab has n’t shined the ferro to-day! ” he said.

But while such skirmishing for position was continual, it is the decisive actions which stand out in my mind. The most important one began soon after we came, when, late one afternoon,

“ Giuseppe,” Stan commanded, “ go out to the lagoons beyond the Giudecca.”

I recognized the tone of the skipper. Unconsciously I slipped into my familiar attitude of able seaman, and forebore to ask why, as I should have done had we been in a thing on wheels.

“ I think,” Stan was good enough to explain, “ it would be nice to see the sunset.”

As we slid out into the canal of the Giudecca, Stan turned and watched Giuseppe.

” There’s not so much to rowing a gondola,” he said. “ In principle, it’s not unlike a canoe. A man who can use a single paddle ought to get the hang of this thing in a short time.”

We threaded our way among the big fish-baskets and nets of the Giudecca, and out into the sunset beyond. Giuseppe knew all about sunsets and forestieri. He made us fast to a post favorable for watching the august spectacle, curled himself up, and went to sleep. It was the usual routine.

To the right and left of us, at a little distance, were other gondolas. Most of them contained lady artists, who had come out to paint for the millionth time in history another variation of that wellknown picture, Sunset on the Lagoons. Well, one cannot wonder that it should so often have been painted, and it was all that everybody has said about it, and I was losing myself, as every one must, in the first wonder of it, when Stan sprang to his feet.

“ Giuseppe.,” he said, “ cast off that rope. I believe,” he went on, “ that I can row this craft out here where there’s plenty of room.”

He picked up the oar, and let it fall into the curious little contrivance that the gondoliers so amazingly use as an oarlock, dipped the oar into the water, and bent his body strenuously forward. The next moment the gondola had whirled around like a top, and my back was turned toward the sun. The oar, conscious that an untrained hand held it, sprang derisively from the crotch, and I had the satisfaction of seeing an experienced oarsman do what I had never been permitted to do under pain of derision — “ catch a crab.”

I mentally added to my knowledge of boats this little observation: crabs, in gondolas, are caught forward, not backward. Stan also added this piece of knowledge to his boatman’s lore.

He picked himself up and looked at the oar sternly. His disapproving eye traveled to me. 1 tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. If I budged or spoke, I knew the crab would turn out mysteriously, as had so many of our small accidents, to be my fault again. Venice disappeared; the lagoons vanished. Again I was the shivering cabinboy, trying to evade the wrath of the “ old man.”

’Get back in there!” Stan spoke sternly to the oar.

“ If the Signore — " Giuseppe suggested.

“ Enough,” said Stan. “ I know how to row a boat.”

With this he spun the gondola around again. Again the oar, indignant at its unskillful handling, flew out. This time Stan did not fall; he was making progress. By the time the gondola had spun round in its tracks for the sixth time, the oar no longer came out.

“ Ha ! ” said Stan triumphantly, “ I’m getting the hang of the thing.”

“ To go forward,” suggested Giuseppe, “ the Signore should — ”

With the air of conferring a favor, Stan permitted Giuseppe to take the oar. The gondola responded to its master’s hand. With its clean, effortless motion, it leaped forward. Stan watched Giuseppe attentively.

“ Give here,”he commanded Giuseppe. It ’s just like canoeing; you turn your oar at the end of a stroke,” he announced triumphantly.

“ If the Signore will go piano, piano — less force at first — ”

Stan gave a less vigorous stroke to the boat and progressed sideways a foot.

“ Hold your left hand so,” advised Giuseppe. The voice of the instructor penetrated his usual deferential tones.

“ The left hand should be further down,” commanded Giuseppe, as Stan caught another crab.

Then, for the next ten minutes, I witnessed what I had never dreamed I should see — Stan meekly permitting himself to be instructed in boat-lore by a lazy, red-faced Italian boatman, who did not know the main sheet from the top-s’l halyards. Up to that moment, it had not occurred to me that my husband had anything more to learn about boats. I had looked upon him as omniscient. Without putting it into words to myself, I had fancied that he had come into the world knowing how to sail a boat. I had fancied that he had learned how to row before he could walk.

As I watched Stan being instructed by Giuseppe I realized that a real lover of boats is willing to learn anywhere and anyhow. Still, it hardly seemed fitting that I should witness this, and I turned my eyes away from Giuseppe and his pupil. It was then I noticed that the boat was steadily progressing sideways, crabfashion. We were bearing down slowly, tranquilly, persistently, upon the gondola of a lady artist. I looked at Stan. He was engrossed in his oar. Giuseppe’s eves were fixed on Stan. From time to time, he offered suggestions.

What happened shows how lacking in judgment is the able seaman. It had been impressed on me never to offer suggestions to the commanding officer, so I sat there, pusillanimously silent, while our gondola slowly sidled down on that of the lady artist. It was the thousandth case, when I should have given warning, but even up to the final thump, it did not seem possible to me that such an impossible thing could happen as that Stan should not know where we were going.

It was not much of a collision, — just a thumping of the two sides of the gondolas. My husband turned a displeased and astonished head on me.

“When you had so little to do,” he exclaimed, “nothing to do but keep watch! ” — he did not finish.

Guiltily I made our apologies to the painter. We fended off, while Stan said to Giuseppe, before joining me, “Well, I think I did very well for the first afternoon.” We all ignored the fact that we had progressed some two hundred feet in a lateral direction.

He tried again the next afternoon, and for several afternoons; and at last the time came when the boat obeyed him so far as to move forward in a comparatively straight line. One day he even succeeded, during the half of an hour, in laying a straight course along the line of five posts, and then he rested his oar and took his place beside me. I had expected a burst of triumph, but what Stan said was, —

“It’s no use, Meg, I can’t do it. It takes a lifetime for these fellows to learn. In the course of six months or so, I might be able to strike a two-knot gait on the lagoon without hitting a mudbank, but I never could carry a boat into a canal, and there’s no use trying. I give it up.”

I look upon that as one of the pathetic moments of my life.

Henceforth Giuseppe took on a new importance. He could do something about a boat that Stan could not. We could not be independent of him. Stan could be padrone of his gondola : he could direct Giuseppe where to go, but he could not be skipper ; he could not show him how to go there. He gave in with an amiability that filled me with pity. We never discussed his sorrow. He chafed under it until the day came when Giuseppe suggested that Stan should learn the forward oar, which, he said, was much easier. I had another moment of pathos in the eagerness with which my husband accepted this suggestion, and it was impossible not to exult with him when he mastered that oar completely at the first lesson. In the return of my husband’s good spirits, I was grateful to Giuseppe — even after I found out that the brunt of brute work in a gondola falls on the forward oar : it is that which does most of the pushing; the rear oar has the light, skilled labor of steering.

The tactfulness of Italy had won another point. Giuseppe had satisfied his employers and won comparative repose for himself.

This contest between the gondola and Stan was the decisive battle. The Venetian boat had secrets that it would confide to no foreigner; only a Venetian would ever know by what trifling little flip of the oar a forty-foot craft could be moved four inches this way or that, sideways or forward or backward or catcornered, at the wall of the gondolier. Nor could any gondolier impart that knowledge; it was a part of him, instinctive as walking. Indeed, the steering of a gondola through crowded canals is a series of little perfect miracles, a continual tour de force, and one that any gondolier — and here is the amazing part of it to us — can perform without apparently taking thought of what he is doing. He can exchange badinage with a friend on the riva, while he is going through as intricate and delicate a series of manœuvres as a performer on the tight-rope; he can turn his head around and explain in pointed Venetian his opinion of the ancestry of a bargeman who has narrowly escaped crushing him, while his oar causes his gondola to escape collision with another by exactly three-quarters of an inch. Though one might try for years to learn it, one could never attain this nonchalant perfection. It is said that there are foreigners who have taken a sandolo or gondola into the canals, but they do it as the dog walks on his hind legs. A foreigner can never master the ultimate secrets of a gondola; he can never learn to guide it when he is thinking of something else.

IV

Meantime, the reason for Giuseppe’s nakedness when he came to us slid into our consciousness. It was his red nose, for one thing, and the good-humored raillery from servants at many palace windows; for it seemed to us that there was not a palace in Venice whose signori had not at some time employed Giuseppe. His pleadings for his wage in advance also told us much. When we emerged from a church, Giuseppe, a few seconds later, emerged from the near-by trattoria. After each of our absences, his face grew redder.

It was evident— everything pointed to it— that It had interfered with his work in the other hundred and fifty positions from which Giuseppe had been discharged, but we tried to pretend that in our case It would not interfere. Nor did It ; we did not let It. We learned some things about the blind eye, Stan and myself, in those weeks. When our gondola went very slowly,— “ The wind is against us,” I would say; and when it knocked off its tar against the stones of Venice, “ He is no longer a young man,” apologized Stan, not realizing how this was sapping our moral strength, so that finally, when It did interfere with his work, we had no resistance left.

One morning Stan looked out of the window as usual. Far down the Vio we could see the gondola. It was empty. Its carpet had not been spread; the tende were not put up.

“ He has n’t come,” said Stan.

“ I hope he’s not sick,” I mitigated. In the background of my mind lurked the real explanation of his absence. I knew that It lurked in Stan’s too. But here Stan plumbed for me the depths of his fall. Far from indignant,—•

“ Well, I rather hope he won’t come to-day,” said my husband blithely, “It’s time we took some of those walks that we’ve been talking about so long. You can’t really know Venice without walking a lot.”

To the suggestion of the earneriera, “ So Giuseppe has— ” she lifted an airy hand to her mouth with a gesture of drinking— we turned blank faces.

After we had spent two days in “ learning to know Venice,” Giuseppe appeared in our apartment, bleary-eved and voluble. I noticed that he did n’t take off his hat. He had had, he explained, a terrific pain in his stomach; he spared neither gesture nor metaphor to explain to us how terrific this pain had been. It had been the grandfather of all pains. No one else had ever had such a pain as his; but weak and trembling as he was, he, the faithful Giuseppe, had hastened back to his post.

“ A drink would do your stomach good,” Stan suggested, knowing all the time, in his New England soul, that he was helping a fellow-creature on a career of slackness. But as he spoke his eyes traveled up and down his gondolier’s blouse; and as Giuseppe turned to bow his graceful Latin greeting to me, he revealed a shameless mend, that began at his collar and ended at his waist.

“ What’s the matter with your blouse, Giuseppe ? ” Stan demanded.

“ My blouse ? ” asked the unconscious Giuseppe. “ It is newly cleaned. It is effulgent.”

“ Has there perhaps been a hole in it ? ” pursued Stan.

“ A hole ? ” inquired Giuseppe. “ Ah ! Behold, it is true—there has been a hole! Ah ! ” he protested, “ those scoundrels of shopkeepers, to sell a blouse with a hole! I go to confront them with it.” He backed toward the door.

“ Giuseppe! ” called Stan.

Giuseppe ceased his backward course.

“ Hang it! ” Stan flung to me, “ that rip was n’t there when we bought it.”

Well I knew it had n’t been there. It had been freshly caught together with stitches of the kind that save nine. And here was Stan almost willing to be convinced that it had always been there!

“ It does n’t do to push these Italians too hard,” he apologized — he seemed actually to be protecting Giuseppe from my wrath. He compromised with his dying conscience by suggesting that it was customary to remove one’s hat when in the house.

Giuseppe’s hand flew to his head. With surprise he found that his unprincipled hat, with inanimate perversity, had somehow contrived to remain upon his head. He snatched it off.

“ Scusi, scusi, Signori! ” he murmured, and the involuntary courtesy of Italy coerced him into bowing low. There bobbed up from behind his head something white, and as he stood straight again, a curl like that of an 1830 belle dangled from behind his ear.

It was not of hair; it was of cotton batting, and the other end of it was stuffed into a long, jagged crack in Giuseppe’s scalp. He saw our bewildered looks, and flung his hands out sidewise.

“ Now,” he said, with virtuous intonation, “ I will tell the truth to the Signori. Yes, I will tell it to them. The hole in my blouse did n’t come from the store. I knew it all the time. But Giuseppe is kind-hearted. Does he talk of unpleasant things in the company of ladies ? Never! He does n’t come to you crying of what has befallen him; no; rather than that, he risked the shame of impoliteness, keeping his hat on his head. Signori, a great misfortune befell your Giuseppe. A little more,” his eyes grew moist, “ and you might never have beheld him again. Signori, a knife it was hat made the holes in my blouse and in my head, — the knife of a drunken friend. Oh, Signori, how sharp is the knife of a drunken friend ! ”

He paused.

“ Signori,” he continued in the tone of one telling a commonplace tale, “ I sit in the trattoria. I sit and eat my pasta. Enters a friend of mine, whom I have not seen for a year. When last I saw him, he went away taking with him my watch, a watch of the value of twenty lira, given to me by grateful padroni. He and my watch and chain of value disappeared together. When I see my friend, I say to him : ' Jail-bird and the son of jail-birds,’

I say to my friend, ‘ robber of honest men’s jewelry, restore to me my watch! ’ ”

Giuseppe’s tone was one of unctuous courtesy.

“My friend, who is a robber and a murderer, tells me that I never had a watch and chain — there, in the trattoria, where many know I have had a watch and chain! I say to my friend, ‘ Shameful one, you were born in the court-yard of Zanipolo; ’ and, Signori, being in drink, this angers him—zipp, zipp! Giuseppe falls.”

“Well, well, Giuseppe,” Stan cut him short, “ get the gondola ready.”

“ Signori,” said Giuseppe, “ loss of blood has made me weak. If the Signori would give me pay in advance— ”

Stan’s hand traveled to his pocket. I looked out of the window, ignoring the incident. Half an hour afterwards, Giuseppe, having renewed his strength, helped us into the gondola. During the afternoon he grumbled accounts of his battle to us. From time to time, from behind me, I would hear the words, “ Zipp, zipp! and Giuseppe—poor, faithful Giuseppe— Giuseppe falls! ”

I wish I might omit the humiliating sequence, but truth compels me to state that that evening the street on which the back-windows of our apartment gave was filled with shouts. We tried, Stan and I, over the evening lamp, to ignore the fact that our names were called, and that it was Giuseppe’s voice which clamored for us. But even this decent reticence on our part was denied us, for Iola, our little maid, came pump-pumping up the stairs on some errand.

“Oh,” she said, “listen to Giuseppe! Hey, but he roars! A proper beast is Giuseppe! He cries aloud down in the calle that the Signori have not paid him. That is what comes, Signori, of paying him two days in advance.”

I looked at Stan. He looked away.

“ Yes, he has spent the money of two days in advance in the wine-shop of my aunt. Now he will again get himself into debt, and there will be another canal closed to the Signori. Giuseppe dares not pass trattorie where he owes money. Did the Signori not know ? That is the reason it takes the Signori so long to arrive at the Rialto. Giuseppe can go here, but not there.” She illustrated with expressive gestures. “ There are many trattorie in Venice, and in almost all Giuseppe owes money. Soon the Signori can only goon the Grand Canal and the lagoons.”

A loud burst of noise from the calle took Iola to the window.

“Ah, listen!” she said, “Giuseppe says he will work no longer. He discharges the Signori! My uncle comes out— he kicks Giuseppe! ”

V

The reader will please next observe my husband, the punctilious yachtsman, the advocate of man-o’-war discipline, proceeding down the Grand Canal in a gondola. He is rowing the forward oar himself. The back oar is rowed, perhaps you think, by a new and sober gondolier. It is not; it is rowed by Giuseppe. Moreover, the dolphins are dull and the ferro is rusty. Giuseppe’s face is red, and he mutters to himself as he rows. But I maintain that it was the gondola’s fault that we took Giuseppe back, for she “stood in” with Giuseppe shamelessly, in spite of the fact that he did not keep her brasses clean, or brush off her carpet. The day after the row Giuseppe and the gondola appeared, ignoring all unpleasantness. They did it magnanimously, as though it were we who had made a scandalous noise in the Calle del Pistor. We paid no attention to them as we passed them on our walks, our dignified silence conveying to them that we were done with them forever. They both spent the day slumbering peacefully by our riva. Whenever we passed they would come to life with “Eccomi! Eccomi! Signori.” They bowed touchingly to our blank faces whenever we came out or went in.

The fourth day Giuseppe frisked up to us blithely.

“ Per favore, Signori,” he said. “My pay! ” He had the air of delicacy that one has when tactfully reminding people of a just debt. “ And,” he concluded, “ if the Signori will give me money for the candles, I will also see that the gondola is tarred. Excuse me for calling the Signori’s attention to it, but the gondola is in a disgraceful condition.”

He pointed to the gondola, which lay in San Vio sulking.

“ As long as the Signori said nothing about it, I said nothing; but the time is come when Giuseppe can no longer keep silence. Duty demands that Giuseppe shall say to the Signori, ‘ Scusi, Signori, but it is my duty to remind the Signori that they owe it to their gondola to provide candles for its blacking.’ ”

I shall always believe that some second sight caused Giuseppe to hit upon the one thing that would have made Stan forgive him.

Interested in spite of himself—“ Candles for blacking ? ” Stan asked.

“As the Signori know, candles are required for blacking,” Giuseppe repeated, “ and of the best. I have already spoken to the gondola-maker behind San Trovaso. He awaits me and the gondola. If the Signori have never seen a gondola blacked, perhaps they would graciously consent to accompany me ? ”

Of course Stan wanted to see a gondola blacked. Choice was beyond him. He carried off his defeat with a swagger that was borrowed from Giuseppe’s own.

“ You can come too, if you like,” he condescended to me. “ Giuseppe, where do you get these candles ? ”

A boat-yard in Venice is as unlike other boat-yards as Venice is unlike other cities. Every two months, all well-conducted gondolas repair each to its own boat-yard for its grooming. There is a certain familiar intimacy among these establishments. None of them is very large. Each has its own select clientèle. Here a gondola is fairly sure of meeting no stranger; instead, it will come across childhood friends. It may watch new gondolas under construction and learn for whose family they are intended, or to what tragetto they are destined. With us, a boat-yard is a place where boats are born, and, alas, a place where many boats die. You may see them any day, withering away with age, tragic spectres of the boats they once had been. Often they may have been deserted while they were but in the prime of old age by treacherous owners, who put them up the year before, promising to have them overhauled in the spring, and then left them to shrink and die, until one day there is nothing for it but to break their bare, weather-beaten planks for old junk.

Gondolas do not do their dying in the Venetian boat-yards. Now and then one may see a dead gondola hauled up on some riva of the Giudecca, but for the most part, dead gondolas are as much out of sight as is the Campo Santo.

When we arrived at the boat-yard back of San Trovaso, a new gondola was having its smooth planks bent into shape. A torch was being held under it, and as the wood softened, it was bent into even more graceful lines.

Amid the shavings of the shop stood an iron cauldron on legs. A fire of shavings blazed beneath it on the hard earthen floor. It was a casual sort of a fire, and seemed to have wandered to the right spot by chance. To our eyes it looked as if it might wander out from beneath the pot any minute, and lick up the shavings around it, the store itself, and the gondolas in it. Apparently it was only through its own good-will that it remained where it should.

We watched the spectacle, which will always remain a miracle to foreigners, for a few moments.

“ These Italians,” Stan conceded, “ can teach us something after all.”

Giuseppe kicked some shavings into the fire and unwrapped his package of candles. A small boy and the owner of the yard gathered with us around the cauldron. Giuseppe threw into the pot the package of two or three dozen candles, and left them to become liquid wax, while the owner of the yard gave our gondola a baptism of fire. He carried a lighted torch over every edge of her sides and bottom. The tar melted and ran off; sometimes the fiery drops fell into the carpet of shavings with which the yard was everywhere strewn. Why the yard and the gondola were not instantly in flames, I cannot say. I had myself little impulses to rush forward and throw my cloak over blazing parts of the boat, and so, I think, had Stan, for when it was all over he drew a long breath.

By this time our candles were liquid wax, and the padrone poured into it black dust out of a bag and stirred the mass around with a stick. It was a forbidding, oily soup, as repulsive to see as black mud near an oil-factory. A small boy appeared, with a large handful of waste; he dropped it into the mass and squeezed it. The stuff oozed unpleasantly from between his fingers and streamed down into the pot. He made for the gondola, and the padrone and Giuseppe followed with the cauldron. During the half-hour that followed, the bottom and sides of the gondola were thoroughly sponged over. It was all done with a perfection of technique, — no hesitation anywhere; every one knew his part. If one loved a boat, one could not but like the men who so well knew how to treat her. It was accomplished, too, with the greatest economy of time and labor.

“ Gad, that’s simple! ” said Stan, and he turned an approving gaze on Giuseppe.

It was in this fashion that the gondola and Giuseppe got around us again. We had been taken behind the scenes of a gondola’s world, and had been shown something that we knew we would always be glad that we had seen, and through Giuseppe. Besides this, everything that one does for a boat attaches it to one. As we got into our shining gondola Stan turned to me: —

“ After all, you see, he really does care for his boat in the essentials. He may not go in for form, any more than a fisherman does, but the main thing is, he cares for the things that count.”

So I knew Giuseppe had been forgiven ; I also knew he had not only been forgiven for this time, but that he had been forgiven in advance for all future misdemeanors. As long as we should stay in Venice, that gondola and no other should take us to and fro, and it would be propelled — when it was propelled — by Giuseppe. Venice and a gondola and Giuseppe had combined against us; they had fought us on their own ground, using their own subtle methods of warfare, and had beaten us. We belonged to them as long as we stayed there, — yes, and for longer. We had hired them in the beginning, and had striven to change them according to our ideas of the fitness of things, but in the end they owned us, and so will continue to do as long as the memory of them stays with us.