Читать книгу Penelope's Postscripts - Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith - Страница 4

La Giudecca, May 15,

Casa Rosa.

Not for a moment have we regretted leaving our crowded, conventional hotel in Venice proper, for these rooms in a house on the Giudecca.  The very vision of Miss Celia Van Tyck sitting on a balcony surrounded by a group of friends from the various Boston suburbs, the vision of Miss Celia Van Tyck melting into delicious distance with every movement of our gondola, even this was sufficient for Salemina’s happiness and mine, had it been accompanied by no more tangible joys.

This island, hardly ten minutes by gondola from the Piazza of San Marco, was the summer resort of the Doges, you will remember, and there they built their pleasure-houses, with charming gardens at the back—gardens the confines of which stretched to the Laguna Viva.  Our Casa Rosa is one of the few old palazzi left, for many of them have been turned into granaries.

We should never have found this romantic dwelling by ourselves; the Little Genius brought us here.  The Little Genius is Miss Ecks, who draws, and paints, and carves, and models in clay, preaching and practising the brotherhood of man and the sisterhood of woman in the intervals; Miss Ecks, who is the custodian of all the talents and most of the virtues, and the invincible foe of sordid common sense and financial prosperity.  Miss Ecks met us by chance in the Piazza and breathlessly explained that she was searching for paying guests to be domiciled under the roof of Numero Sessanta, Giudecca.  She thought we should enjoy living there, or at least she did very much, and she had tried it for two years; but our enjoyment was not the special point in question.  The real reason and desire for our immediate removal was that the padrona might pay off a vexatious and encumbering mortgage which gave great anxiety to everybody concerned, besides interfering seriously with her own creative work.

“You must come this very day,” exclaimed Miss Ecks.  “The Madonna knows that we do not desire boarders, but you are amiable and considerate, as well as financially sound and kind, and will do admirably.  Padrona Angela is very unhappy, and I cannot model satisfactorily until the house is on a good paying basis and she is putting money in the bank toward the payment of the mortgage.  You can order your own meals, entertain as you like, and live precisely as if you were in your own home.”

The Little Genius is small, but powerful, with a style of oratory somewhat illogical, but always convincing at the moment.  There were a good many trifling objections to our leaving Miss Van Tyck and the hotel, but we scarcely remembered them until we and our luggage were skimming across the space of water that divides Venice from our own island.

We explored the cool, wide, fragrant spaces of the old casa, with its outer walls of faded, broken stucco, all harmonized to a pinkish yellow by the suns and winds of the bygone centuries.  We admired its lofty ceilings, its lovely carvings and frescoes, its decrepit but beautiful furniture, and then we mounted to the top, where the Little Genius has a sort of eagle’s eyrie, a floor to herself under the eaves, from the windows of which she sees the sunlight glimmering on the blue water by day, and the lights of her adored Venice glittering by night.  The walls are hung with fragments of marble and wax and stucco and clay; here a beautiful foot, or hand, or dimple-cleft chin; there an exquisitely ornate façade, a miniature campanile, or a model of some ancient palazzo or chiesa.

The little bedroom off at one side is draped in coarse white cotton, and is simple enough for a nun.  Not a suggestion there of the fripperies of a fine lady’s toilet, but, in their stead, heads of cherubs, wings of angels, slender bell-towers, friezes of acanthus leaves,—beauty of line and form everywhere, and not a hint of colour save in the riotous bunches of poppies and oleanders that lie on the broad window-seats or stand upright in great blue jars.

Here the Little Genius lives, like the hermit crab that she calls herself; here she dwells apart from kith and kin, her mind and heart and miracle-working hands taken captive by the charms of the siren city of the world.

When we had explored Casa Rosa from turret to foundation stone we went into the garden at the rear of the house—a garden of flowers and grape-vines, of vegetables and fruit-trees, of birds and bee-hives, a full acre of sweet summer sounds and odours, stretching to the lagoon, which sparkled and shimmered under the blue Italian skies.  The garden completed our subjugation, and here we stay until we are removed by force, or until the padrona’s mortgage is paid unto the last penny, when I feel that the Little Genius will hang a banner on the outer ramparts, a banner bearing the relentless inscription: “No paying guests allowed on these premises until further notice.”

Our domestics are unique and interesting.  Rosalia, the cook, is a graceful person with brown eyes, wavy hair, and long lashes, and when she is coaxing her charcoal fire with a primitive fan of cock’s feathers, her cheeks as pink as oleanders, the Little Genius leads us to the kitchen door and bids us gaze at her beauty.  We are suitably enthralled at the moment, but we suffer an inevitable reaction when the meal is served, and sometimes long for a plain cook.

Peppina is the second maid, and as arrant a coquette as lives in all Italy.  Her picture has been painted on more than one fisherman’s sail, for it is rumoured that she has been six times betrothed and she is still under twenty.  The unscrupulous little flirt rids herself of her suitors, after they become a weariness to her, by any means, fair or foul, and her capricious affections are seldom good for more than three months.  Her own loves have no deep roots, but she seems to have the power of arousing in others furious jealousy and rage and a very delirium of pleasure.  She remains light, gay, joyous, unconcerned, but she shakes her lovers as the Venetian thunderstorms shake the lagoons.  Not long ago she tired of her chosen swain, Beppo the gardener, and one morning the padrona’s ducks were found dead.  Peppina, her eyes dewy with crocodile tears, told the padrona that although the suspicion almost rent her faithful heart in twain, she must needs think Beppo the culprit.  The local detective, or police officer, came and searched the unfortunate Beppo’s humble room, and found no incriminating poison, but did discover a pound or two of contraband tobacco, whereupon he was marched off to court, fined eighty francs, and jilted by his perfidious lady-love, who speedily transferred her affections.  If she had been born in the right class and the right century, Peppina would have made an admirable and brilliant Borgia.