# Harper's Bazaar/That Phoenix, Memory

“A Glamourous Hint of Old Venice”
Every one abandoned himself to the intoxication of this incognito, which permitted every kind of intrigue.
THAT PHOENIX, MEMORY
Relatives Can Be Ignored, But Ancestors—
By F. Britten Austin
Illustrated by Maurice L. Bower
IT WAS February when we arrived in Venice, a season when the guides around San Marco spring like famished wolves upon the stray tourist, and the fascinating city of the waters was yet more fascinating in the flattery that we and the Venetians had it to ourselves. We had been there just long enough to remember correctly the names of half a dozen out of the two hundred Gothic and Renaissance palaces which line both sides of the Grand Canal, that magic thoroughfare of ever mobile water upon which we were never tired of gazing from the balcony of our fifteenth-century palazzo, when we received a letter from Antony.
Could we put him up for a day or two? It was a bit out of his way, but he'd like to look in on us. He added, by way of explanation, that he “had to go to Bologna to buy hemp.”
I didn't know that they made hemp in Bologna, but it shows you the kind of man Antony is. A man who could think of hemp in connection with Bologna, that city of medieval arcades and robber-baron leaning towers is—well, I suppose one must allow him imagination, of a sort.
I PONDERED his letter. “Of course, he'll simply wreck the romance of everything!” I growled, resentfully. ”What on earth does he want to come barging in here for? He'll grumble at the exasperating slowness of a gondola and jeer at the lack of paint on the palaces. All he'll see in Venice will be a lot of tumbledown old buildings intersected by dirty, smelly little canals he'll wonder that they don't fill up. Antony's a jolly decent chap, but even the most optimistic revivalist would have to admit that he's got no sort of soul!” I glanced at my wife. Unmoved by this burst of eloquence, she was getting on with her dinner with a serene placidity that was easy to interpret. This shirking of a patently joint problem could not be allowed. “Well, what are we going to do about it?” I demanded, with some asperity.
She looked up.
“He's your friend—” she said, delicately and adequately.
It could not be gainsaid. Antony was my friend. In old days.... In brief, for the sake of those old days, I perjured my immortal soul. I telegraphed him the one word: “Delighted.”
HE WAS to arrive by the Simplon Express on the following Sunday. It gets in at 7:40 p.m. and I went to meet him at the station. It was already completely night as I stood on the little steamer, which is the Venetian omnibus, and was borne, swiftly and silently, through the nocturnal mystery of the Grand Canal. More than ever, Venice is romantic at such an hour. Its palaces glimmer above the flood in a perfection that the day denies. Only here and there, at the sheerly abrupt ends of the narrow alleys that lead into impenetrable blackness, is there a lamp, illuminating with a faint and limited splash of radiance some quaint Gothic corner of carved stone, and throwing on the tenebrous mobile swell of the water a long and broken sinuosity of golden light against which silhouette themselves the clustered pali, the great mooring stakes tapering to their bases, that lean perilously awry in their old age.
Normally, after nightfall, the little steamer slides along this liquid thoroughfare of derelict grandeur in an eerie silence that is romantic enough. But to-night was the Sunday before Lent, and every now and then a little burst of chorused song, the thrum of a guitar, issuing from one of those dark clefts between the palaces, startled one with a sudden resurrection of spectral gaiety. It was as if the ghosts of old days were abroad. And into this unreal evocation of romance Antony was coming—confound him!—with his blatant modernity, his crassly prosaic lack of understanding. I felt myself guilty of a contributory act of vandalism as I went to meet him.
He arrived. His honest round face was bisected by a broad grin as he spotted me waiting in the little crowd by the ticket-barrier, and his hand-clasp was that vehement finger-crushing crunch that is supposed to betoken an overwhelming cordiality of affection.
“How are we, old bean?” he greeted me, sublimely unconscious that he struck from the very outset that jarring note I had foreboded. “Pretty chirpy?”
I AM afraid I was rather short with him, though he was far too thick-skinned to perceive it Any other guest, more attuned to the spirit of the place, I should have put in one of the gondolas which nose themselves together, like long black fishes at feed, by the broad water-steps of the railway station and the sudden transition to which, a step or two only from the train, makes arrival at Venice at whatever hour of the day or night, the most romantic arrival in the world. But a gondola would have been wasted on Antony.
“Queer sort of place this!” he remarked as the little steamer bore us swiftly back along the Grand Canal. “Pretty whiffy, too!” The tide was low, and the side-canals are then apt to be a trifle malodorous, I must admit. “Damned unhealthy, I should think, all this stagnant water. Pity they don't light it up a bit more, isn't it? Gives one the creepy creeps. Ugh! Are they all dead, the people in those houses? I had no idea Venice was like this—never been here before, you know.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to demand why, in heaven's name, he had come now, but, with an effort of self-control, I refrained. The remarks I have quoted are a pretty fair summary of the cheerfully maintained running fire of comment to which I listened until my soul ached. It was a relief when we got off at the Accademia steamer station and wended our way through the narrow gloomy calli to the land entrance of our palazzo,
All the way back he sat stunned and passive, as though only vaguely conscious of his environment.
I pass over his introduction to our apartment and the fatuous boisterousness of his greeting to my wife. She, of course, was charmingly gracious to him, but there was something in her smile to me which seemed, in lieu of sympathy, to reiterate “he is your friend, you know,” and maliciously leave me with the entire responsibility of his presence.
What were we going to do with him? It was the last Sunday of the Carnival—nowadays, only when Lent is closely imminent does Venice remember that ancient excuse for revelry—and I was anxious to go out and see what was to be seen. My wife pretexted a headache. “You two men go together,” she said. And so we went.
AS I have said, that night the ghosts of old days seemed to be abroad. Until the Republic fell at the end of the eighteenth century, the Venetian Carnival lasted for six months and all of pleasure-loving Europe flocked to it, as now to the more sedate gaiety of Monte Carlo. Every one went masked. Along the narrow tortuous calli, as the Venetian streets are called, noisy throngs of roisterers, travestied in every variety of grotesque or fanciful disguise, danced around and with the normally grave patrician shrouded in his long straight cloak, and himself now anonymous in the mask close under his three-cornered hat. His dignity was temporarily abrogated. There were no longer social distinctions, no longer even names. Every one, noble or plebeian, was merely Sior Maschera. And every one abandoned himself to the intoxication of this incognito which permitted every kind of license and intrigue. The very Senators of the Grand Council could not wait till they were outside the council chamber before dragging on their dominoes. And the noble Venetian ladies, each with her cicisbeo—that inseparable cavalier who rendered her all those petty intimate services which it was the worst of bad form for a husband to render to his own wife—went masked also, a little white or black satin visor over their laughing eyes, their identity yet more closely hidden by the long head-veil that reached to the puffed out pannier skirts. Naughty Venetian ladies! They danced out of existence forever with the Carnival itself, as the cannon smoke of Napoleon rolled over the obliterated eighteenth century.
But to-night, as we crossed the wide, dimly lit space of the Campo San Stefano, the chant of voices in rhythmic unison echoed from one of the dark little streets and suddenly there issued into the square a little procession of white-clad Pierrots, dancing and leaping as they went, singing a wild incomprehensible song to the strumming of guitars, with a little white Pierrot posturing and turning somersaults at their head. They passed across the Campo and disappeared. I said nothing, my breath caught in a curious spasm of emotion at this spectral evocation of the past. And Antony said nothing either. For which I was grateful.
In silence we threaded that series of narrow and twisted little streets, with a step-arched bridge at every fifty yards, which—improbable though it seems to the stranger—is the main route from that quarter to the Piazza of San Marco. And all the way we were met by the strangest apparitions. Pierrots in white and black and red and green, ghastly skeletons that were youths in black tights gruesomely painted with white bones, medieval pages, toreadors, Red Indians, knights, eighteenth-century gentlemen, Moors, Turks, Chinamen, Mephistopheles, men in women's clothes and women in men's, all with their faces daubed with crude color in a manner that varied from the terrifying to the merely ludicrous and all making a joyous clamor of shouts and songs and a din on tin drums and wooden trumpets that was sufficient to wake the spirits of the oldest dead, were promenading the city in the traditional manner of the olden times. It was the Venetian Carnival of a hundred and fifty years ago come to life again. This fantastic resuscitation thrilled me strangely and mercifully Antony had apparently not a word to say about it. I did not inquire into his feelings. Once or twice I glanced at his face. He was staring at these weird figures as though dazed. I was content to leave him so.
BUT it was in the immensity of the Piazza of San Marco that this perambulating masquerade reached its climax. One saw that the band was playing in the center, but it was inaudible in the murmuring surge of human voices, in the raucous cacophony of wooden “squeakers,” the bursts of laughter, the snatches of song that echoed and re-echoed from those three enclosing façades of colonnaded Renaissance architecture and the mosaic-encrusted Byzantine front of St. Mark's at the further end. The place was black with people, but the crowd of lookers-on was merely an undifferentiated background, almost unperceived, for the vividly conspicuous little companies of maskers, in endless variation of bizarre attire, singing at the top of their voices yet naively absorbed in a certain ritual precision of performance, which burst continually through its mass. There were hundreds of them, holding together in self-sufficient little groups that made each its own particular little riot far and wide over the great square.
The eye was bewildered with the multiplicity of impersonations; Pierrots with their black blobs on costumes of every hue, burnoosed Arabs, sequin-jingling gipsies, harlequins, dandied medieval courtiers, pig-tailed Chinamen, clowns, creatures with monstrous noses and awful eyes, a wild medley of the charmingly fanciful and the hideously grotesque. Here strange incarnations to which one could give no name pranced in a vociferous Bacchanal single file through the crowd; there girls in pink dominoes, their hair streaming loose, danced like young mænads in a hand-linked whirling ring with young men who forgot their dignity as ancient Romans; everywhere gracefully promenading was the eighteenth century with cane and knee-breeches, white wigs and hooped skirts. Menaced at every instant with final separation, we pressed ourselves with difficulty through the throng and I. for one, lost almost the sense of my own identity, felt myself almost unreal in a fantastic world. Antony struggled to keep touch with me, uttering not a word and, as I have said, apparently dazed.
At last he spoke.
“Let us go now to the Ridotto,” he said
The Ridotto? I hesitated a moment, collecting my wits. The Ridotto was the great public gambling-house of Venice in the eighteenth century. Where was it? I remembered. It was just at the mouth of the Grand Canal, to the right of the Piazzetta. One passed the Mint, the gardens of the Royal Palace, the office of the Port—and it stood, or used to stand, just beyond.
“Come along then,” I agreed and led the way toward the Piazzetta, meaning to turn to the right along the water front by the Royal Gardens.
He stopped me.
“One cannot go that way,” he said. “One must go round. There is a canal in between.”
So there was! I had forgotten the canal at the end of the Gardens. But I had never been to the Ridotto, if it still existed, in my life, and I did not know the way round at the back. Antony had, however, already started off in the reverse direction through the Piazza, and I followed him mechanically. My mind was so bewildered with that phantasmagoria that leaped and danced all around me, confusing me with its babel of noise, that I did not for the moment question why Antony should know anything about the Ridotto, let alone that he should know the way. My reasoning faculties were suspended in that din. He shouldered through the crowd, left the Piazza by the way we had entered it, and turned to the left down a little street, strangely quiet after the hubbub we had quitted.
THREE-QUARTERS of the way down we stopped before an open portico that led into a large but obviously deserted and dilapidated entrance hall.
He turned to me, puzzlement on his features.
“What's happened to it?” he queried.
“It was shut up a hundred years ago,” I said. “What did you expect?” And then suddenly, in the quietness of that street, my mind began to work again. “But I thought you said this was the first time you had come to Venice?” I demanded.
He stared at me with that dazed look on his face, and then seemed to wake up with a jerk.
“Yes—I—of course it is,” he answered.
“Well, then, how the devil did you know your way round by the back to this place?” I challenged him.
He looked at me, genuinely puzzled.
“I'm damned if I know. Funny, wasn't it?” He bit his lip as he looked at me with a curious vacillating uncertainty. “I—I—it sounds an absurd thing to say, but I sort of lost myself in that crowd—I seemed to have a vague idea—” he stopped. ”It's nonsense, of course!”
“You found the way here all right—when I couldn't have taken you—and that's not nonsense! And I should like to know how you did it,” I said, with some emphasis. The incomprehensibility of this occurrence almost annoyed me. I scanned his honest, bewildered face for the hint of some far-fetched practical joke, inherently improbable though I felt it to be. There never was a more sublimely simple-minded fellow than Antony. He was obviously genuine now in his inability to explain.
“I—I really can't tell you,” he said. “It just came over me.” He shook himself as though shaking off an uncomfortable spell. “Let's go for a quiet walk somewhere—away from that mad crowd.”
We retraced our steps up that deserted calle, pushed through the double stream of people flowing to and from San Marco, and turned into the narrow Frezzaria. Here most of the shops were already shut and passers-by were few. We turned again at random into another dark and narrow cleft between the tall houses, and lost the Carnival entirely. In this labyrinth of gloomy alleys, scarcely wide enough for us to walk abreast, and lit only with diffused moonlight and a yellow lamp at the sharp corners, there was not a living soul save ourselves. Only occasionally, when we slackened pace on one of the numerous little high-arched bridges for a glance at the moldering front of some old palace, silent and mysterious above the stagnant water of a narrow side-canal, did a faint reverberation of distant clamor come to our ears. We walked in silence; I puzzling over the inexplicability of that incident of the Ridotto, Antony apparently equally disinclined for speech.
SUDDENLY, at a corner that seemed made for some medieval cloak and dagger murder, he stopped and clutched my arm, looking about him as though seized with an identification. In the wall on out right was the black cavernous opening of a sotto portico leading to an interior court.
“We must go down here!” he exclaimed.
“But why on earth—?” He did not even hear my expostulation. He had already darted into the blackness of the sotto portico. There was nothing to do but to follow him.
I did so, with the little qualm of trepidation natural at venturing into such an uninviting darkness. Groping my way in, I felt the wall bear round to the left and emerged unexpectedly on a narrow little quay, arched over with a colonnade picturesquely silhouetted against the misty moonlight of a side-canal. Antony was already at the further end. I rejoined him.
“What are you playing at?” I began again. He seemed not to hear me. He was staring up at the moonlit façade of an ancient Gothic palace, its brick eroded and the carved stone of its pointed windows chipped and blackened, its water-gnawed pali leaning over the last stage of decay, but yet magnificent as it reared itself massively at the junction of this canal with another. There was not a light anywhere on its front. Antony clutched my arm, and his hand was trembling.
“Her window!” he whispered. “There!” He pointed up. “The long thin one. Just under the carved madonna.”
I lost patience.
“Look here, Antony,” I said roughly. “This is getting beyond a joke. Whose window?”
“Eh—what?” He gave a genuine start as he turned and looked at me. ”What?” He seemed precisely like a somnambulist suddenly awakened. “What is it? Where are we?”
“Damned if I know,” I replied. “Look here, my lad, I've had enough of this. Either you're playing a silly trick, or you're not well. In any case you're getting on my nerves. But while we're about it, I shall be glad if you'll tell me whose window it is that you're so interested in.”
He passed a hand dazedly over his brow.
“Window?” he said. “What window? What are you talking about?” He stared at me in an utter lack of comprehension.
“That settles it!” I pronounced. “We go straight home, my lad, if I can find the way. Come along.”
I drew him by the arm toward the dark entry by which we had come. He did not resist, but involuntarily he half-turned for another upward glance as we left that silent little colonnade by the waterside.
BACK again in the narrow street, I hesitated for the correct direction. There is nothing so confusing as this maze of Venetian calli. Then, though far from certain, I thought I could make a pretty good guess at it, and continuing a few steps further on I turned sharply into a narrow street on our left. We had scarcely got round the corner when Antony shrank back abruptly and stopped dead.
“No, no, no!” he cried, with the unexpected poignant accent of a child in a terror. “Not this way! Not this way!”
I refused to let a sudden absurd eeriness get a grip on me.
“Don't be a fool!” I said. Was the man going out of his mind—or was he merely ill, delirious? In either case, this could not be allowed. “Come along!” I caught hold of him and tried to drag him onward. He stood as though rooted to the stones, shivering miserably in all his body.
“No, no, no!” he cried. And then suddenly, wrenching himself from my grasp, he turned and fled like a hare in the opposite direction.
It was all I could do to keep him in view as I followed at my best speed. When at length I overtook him, it was to find him leaning against a wall, panting for his breath. I was now thoroughly angry.
“What on earth is the matter with you?” I demanded. “Why did you run away like that?”
“I was running, wasn't I?” he asked, feebly, as though not quite sure where he was or what he had been doing.
“You most certainly were,” I replied. “But what's the matter? Why did you run?”
“I—I don't know,” he said, plainly ashamed of himself. ”Something came over me—I simply couldn't go down that little street.” He pulled himself together with an obvious effort. “I say, old man,” he went on, contritely, “I'm awfully sorry for behaving like this. I—I can't explain it. You must think I'm mad.”
“Never mind what I think,” I retorted. “Let's get along home. That's the place for you. But I'm hanged if I know which way to go. You've lost us properly now.”
He murmured once more something about being sorry as we set off again to find our way out of this bewildering labyrinth of constantly intersected narrow alleys all exactly alike. There was no one whom we might ask. We had walked for some distance in silence, all my wits concentrated on the problem of puzzling out our route, when he laid a hand on my arm.
“I say, old man,” he said, almost humbly, “would you mind talking? It—it's this silence, I think.”
I GAVE him a sharp glance but made no comment. This was no time or place for a psycho-pathological diagnosis. All my faculties were preoccupied with the necessity of getting home as soon as possible, and I was still utterly bewildered as to my whereabouts. But I threw him a sop.
“Well, tell me all about your dinner in the restaurant-car to-night,” I suggested brutally, as I looked about me for some familiar architectural feature.
“That's a good idea!” he exclaimed, and forthwith he began to recite, with meticulous detail, the menu of every meal he had had on that train since leaving Calais.
He was still in the middle of his catalogue when we were suddenly disgorged, with that utter unexpectedness which is characteristic of finding one's way in Venice, into the dark open space of the Campo San Stefano.
“Here we are!” I exclaimed, with a deep breath of relief. “We're nearly home, my son—and it's bed for you, and doctor in the morning. You've got an illness coming on.”
“No, no,” he said. “I'm perfectly all right now. It's left me all of a sudden. B(illegible text)ing over those jolly old meals did it. I say, old man,” he added, imploringly “Don't tell your wife anything about it. I don't want to look a silly ass.”
He made me promise silence, He was, in fact apparently, as he said, “quite his chirpy self again,” and beguiled the long stretch of our way with voluble fatuity, telling me about some wonderful “bird” he knew at a thé dansant in London before coming away. I listened with the surface of my mind while underneath I was devoutly hoping that when he woke up in the morning he would not find himself in the full grip of an attack of measles or something equally inconvenient. Yet that explanation did not quite satisfy me—the rest might be incipient delirium, but how the devil did he know the way to the Ridotto? A fantastic hypothesis flitted in my thoughts—and I banished it incontinently. It was too absurd.
He appeared perfectly normal when he was once more in our apartment, and made my wife laugh with his exuberant descriptions of the Carnival masqueraders. But I went to sleep that night worrying over the whole episode, and haunted by the regret that I had not at least taken his temperature before turning in.
THE next morning it was with some relief that I found him up and dressed before me, leaning over the balcony and gazing at the palaces at the other side of the [Grand] Canal. I joined him.
“How do you feel this morning?” I asked.
“Splendid,” he replied. “Slept like a log. I say, old man, what's the name of that palace over there, the one directly opposite. It seems sort of vaguely familiar to me. I suppose I must have seen it on a picture post-card somewhere.”
“Giuliani,” I said. 'There are dozens of Giuliani palaces all over the city, like the Mocenigo and the Contarini. It was an old noble family with many branches.”
He nodded his head.
“Giuliani,” he murmured to himself. “Giuliani—Giuliani—Caterina Giuliani—”
“What's that?' I challenged him sharply. Were last night's disconcerting symptoms recommencing? “Who is Caterina Giuliani?”
“What?” he looked at me. “Did I say that? I don't know why. It just came in my mind. Perhaps it's an historical name I've heard or read somewhere.”
“I think not,” I replied firmly. “I'm pretty sure that Caterina Guiliani is not a name mentioned anywhere in any history. I say, Antony,” I scrutinized him shrewdly, “you didn't by any chance dream when you went to bed last night that you were in the Venice of past centuries, did you?”
He laughed.
“Not on your life! I didn't dream of anything. I slept like a log.” He met my eyes, satisfactorily. “I know what you're getting at. You're worrying over my behavior last night. I worried about it too, old bean, I don't mind telling you, on the Q.T. Wondered if I was going off my chump. But, bless your dear heart, I'm not. I was over every price in the market before I went to sleep, and got 'em right every one. I'm just a bit nervy, that's all, with all that ra(illegible text) after a long journey. And I'd had a thick time before coming away, too. Don't you get any idea into your mind that I'm going to perform any old reincarnation stunt, or any rubbish of that sort. I'm very much in this century, old thing, let me assure you.”
At that moment, my wife joined us and, in charity to his imploring glance, I turned the conversation on to the safe ground of general platitude. Where should we take him this morning? St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace of course—but after? I picked up a useful comprehensive illustrated guide-book to Venice that lay on the escritoire, and turned over its pages for inspiration. Suddenly one of the illustrations caught my eye. It was a photograph of an ancient Gothic palace standing at the junction of two canals—the palace of last night, the one with the madonna above the long, thin window. And underneath were the words: Palazzo Giuliani.
I don't think I have ever been more startled in my life. I almost jumped up to show him the photograph—and stopped myself just in time. The sight of the name he had (illegible text) unconsciously murmured, linked with the old palace in which he had been so strangely interested last night, might—I shrank in carrying my thought to its logical conclusion. He was now cheerily normal. Let sleeping dogs lie. Besides, it would have necessitated a long and awkward explanation to my wife. I closed the book without a word.
ALL that morning, as we walked about the city, I watched him narrowly but in vain for any peculiarity that might confirm the fantastic idea which persisted in cropping up at the back of my mind. It was too absurd, of course! If ever there was a typical, solid, unimaginative young Britisher, rather fatuous when not occupied with matters of business, it was Antony Sinclair. He jabbered away loquaciously to my wife, making her laugh with his cheerful slang, in every respect the not-too-intelligent product of an English public school and a few years in the City. We took him round to the usual show-places and he duly uttered all the ordinary tourist's comments—but of any abnormal recognition, not a hint.
He was facetiously amusing all through lunch, and afterward we went for our coffee to one of the cafés on the sunny side of the Piazza, where we sat at an outside table idly watching the downward swooping flocks of pigeons and the sauntering afternoon promenade of the Venetians. The Carnival would not end until the following night and, although the masqueraders do not usually appear till after dark, a few bold or impatient revelers were already showing themselves, their costume and paint rather crudely incongruous in the daylight. We sat and looked at them in silence, all the immediate topics of conversation exhausted.
Suddenly Antony startled us by a burst of laughter.
“Ha! ha! ha! Vastly droll that mask there, stap me! The harlequin with his lath—d'ye mark him?” He laughed again, hilariously.
THERE were, as I have said, a few fancy dresses on the Piazza, but neither of us could anywhere see a harlequin. Then the curious archaism of his phraseology, which I had at the moment taken to be merely a piece of high-spirited buffoonery, struck me with a new significance. I glanced at him in alarm. That strange dazed look was again in his eyes. Ought I to get him home? I had no time to resolve the question. He uttered a sharp ejaculation that made every one about us turn to look at him.
“Look! There she is!” He half-rose from the table in a quivering excitement, quite unconscious of the grasp with which I was quick to restrain him.
“Who? Where?” asked my wife, in natural surprise.
“There!'”? He pointed toward the colonnaded end of the Piazza away from St. Mark's. One or two figures were walking across the square, but they were ordinary middle-class Venetians, unlikely people for him to know. “There! 'Tis she—Caterina! 'Tis she—I swear it! Should I not know her, even though she hides her pretty face under her mask, the dainty rogue? Why, 'tis the very flowered pompadour she was wearing when I first saw her! She saw me, too—I protest, she saw me!”
“But—” began my wife, quite bewildered. “Where? Whom are you talking about?”
“There!” He pointed. “Caterina! La Signora Contessa Caterina Giuliani! There with her fat waddling old mother—a pox upon her! And that damned what-d'you-call-him—cicisbeo—sidling up against her skirts, curse him! I drew upon him in the Ridotto last night when he bragged of fastening her garter, and his friends have not yet waited on me. But he shall meet me, for all that, or my name is not George Sinclair!”
My wife stared at him, uncertain whether, in the boisterous high spirits he had been exhibiting all day, he was facetiously affecting to be back in the eighteenth century, or whether—she caught my eye in the unadmitted sudden doubt of his sanity. Gripped with a curious fascination, I made a gesture to keep quiet. George Sinclair! Perhaps now I should get a hint that would enlighten the whole mystery of his strange behavior. But I kept a tight grip on his coat.
“There! She sees me! She lifted her mask, the teasing jade! She smiled! I protest, 'fore Heaven, she smiled! Ha! Look! They are going into the church, the three of them!”
“The church?” queried my wife, altogether puzzled.
“Yes! The church there—San-Jimmy-what-d'you-call-'em!” He pointed to the arcade of shops at the end of the Piazza. The church? The Church of San Geminiano which formerly stood on that spot, was demolished by Napoleon in 1807! I doubt if Antony Sinclair had ever heard of it. “She turns again! She beckons! I crave your pardon, friends!” He twisted himself to us for an excited but courtly bow. “I must follow her! Even if I contrive not to whisper to her during the service, I can at worst offer her holy water as she comes out. See! She lifts her mask and beckons!”
He almost knocked over the table as he broke from me and darted off.
“After him!” I exclaimed, jumping up from my seat. Heaven knew what public absurdity he might commit in this fatuous search for non-existent people in a church that was no longer there!
“What's the matter with him?” gasped my wife, as we hastened in pursuit of his running figure.
“I'll explain later!” I gasped, “For Heaven's sake, let's get hold of him now!"
He was well ahead, but still in sight. I saw him leap up the couple of steps of the arcade—and come with a crash against the narrow strip of wall between two shops. It was by the grace of God he had not gone clean through a plate-glass window. I saw him drop, stunned with the impact, upon the pavement, and the next moment I was at his side.
THERE was, of course, already a crowd around us as I endeavored to lift him up. Fortunately, it was almost more interested in the excitedly voluble explanation which the astonished shopkeeper, with dramatic gestures, broadcasted to all and sundry, than in the occurrence itself. My wife pushed through to me as I got him on his feet.
“I don't think he's much hurt,” I reassured her, “but we must get him home. A gondola.”
The word “gondola” uttered by a foreigner in Venice instantly wakes every Venetian to an intense activity of helpfulness. “Gondola? Gondola, signore? Ecco! Ecco, una gondola!” Half a dozen hands pointed. There was, mercifully, a gondola-stand within fifty yards, just round the corner of the Bocca di Piazza.
All the way back, he did not utter a word. He sat stunned and passive in the gondola, as though only vaguely conscious of his environment. The man was obviously ill. We got him home, and took his temperature. It was 103°! I put him straightway to bed and, while my wife went in search of a doctor, sat and kept watch over him.
He lay for a long time motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he opened them and looked at me, without a smile.
“I say, old man, I think I must be going off my chump,” he said. There was a curious frightened look in his eyes.
“Nonsense!” I reassured him. “Just keep yourself quiet—you'll be all right.”
He stared at me fixedly.
“It's strange!” he said. “One minute I see you sitting there, just as you are—and then you sort of fade out like a movie picture, and I'm looking at something quite different. People in fancy dress—knee-breeches and puffed-out skirts, such funny mincing sort of people, all bowing and scraping to one another, and offering snuff with immense politeness. They've all got funny little masks on, too. It's so muddling—one picture is just as real as the other.” His voice died away with his last words, and his eyes closed again.
There was a moment or two of silence, and then once more his lips moved, this time in a stealthy murmur, an ingratiating significant smile totally altering the expression of his face. He made a movement with his hand as though dipping it into a bowl and sprinkling water with his fingers.
“Hear me, Signora! Ascoltami!” Then, under his breath, to himself: “Curse the Italian lingo! Was that right?” His whisper suddenly became more intense, the smile more significant, the words hurried as if making the most of the briefest of opportunity. “Un piccolo momento, per l'amor di Dia! Ascoltami! Io t'amo! Io t'amo! Ah, perdutamente! Signora! Signora Caterina! Io t'amo!” Then dropped to a sotto-voce comment for himself: “Would God she spoke English!” rose again in a murmured earnestness of appeal: “Signora!” His hand snatched at something invisible and brought it quickly to his lips for a fervent kiss. Then suddenly his smile changed to one of alert and satisfied understanding, with a quick nod of the head and a touch of his finger on his mouth in a pledge of silence. “Chut! I understand. Capisco! Capisco, bellissima Signora!” He paused a moment as if listening, answered in an even more conspiratorial whisper. “Stasera?—Un messagero?—Ti ringrazio, Signora!—Ah, damn that cicisbeo! Were this not a church, I would—!” He gnashed his teeth and scowled, and then his face cleared again in a smile of self-satisfied contentment. His murmur was once more a conversation under his breath with himself. “This evening! A messenger. Per Bacco, but I'm trembling all over! Stap me, but I'm in love. You are in love George, really in love. That smile of hers! Those eyes—when she lifted her mask—” His voice died away again.
WHEN slowly his eyes opened and he once more stared at me.
“That's a rummy thing!” he said, in his normal voice. “I could have sworn I was standing in the doorway of a church and watching the daintest little bird in eighteenth-century clothes go off along the Piazza—there was St. Mark's at the other end—in company with a fat old dame and a thin fellow in knee breeches and a long coat. Such a funny feeling, too, I had. Did you ever really go off the deep end about a girl, old bean?—you know, everything going whir!—inside every time you looked at her? It was like that. Seemed to me as if I was madly head-over-heels in love with her. So real, too. I can feel it still.”
“You've been dreaming,” I smiled at him reassuringly. “By the way, Antony,” I put the question with the most casual air of indifference I could assume, “was there ever a George Sinclair in your family—a long time ago?”
He looked puzzled at me.
“George Sinclair? Never heard the name in my life. Why?”
“Never mind. I'm rather interested in your dream lady, though.” I pretended to my conscience that I was a bit of a psychoanalyst digging for a “complex” or whatever they call it. “Did you dream how you met her?”
“It's funny,” he answered, “but I can see it all of a sudden. Just as if I remembered.”
“Really?”
“Yes—so clearly!” His voice went dreamy again. “Wait a bit. I've got it. It's in a big room with old-fashioned chandeliers, prisms and candles. I'm sitting down at a table with a lot of other people—gambling. There are gold coins all over the table. I'm sitting next to a lady—masked, of course; nearly every one is masked—who laughs—such a topping laugh!—just the same whether she wins or loses. All along the table people are playing furiously, throwing out their golden coins or sweeping them back in heaps. Weird looking lot—as if they hadn't any faces in those masks. Every now and then there's a little shindy—jabber, jabber, jabber, nineteen to the dozen—between some of them. Dirty work, I suppose. Hallo! I've got into some sort of scrap myself! I'm arguing for all I'm worth with a fellow whose face I can't see—he's got a mask over it, of course. He's wearing a sky-blue satin coat with dirty lace at his cuffs. I'm giving him what for! What's it all about? I've got it—it's not on my account. I spotted the brute sweeping up some of the winnings of the little lady next to me, and pounced on his hand. It's all over. There he goes—trying to swagger as he pushes off through the crowd. They're all looking at me, those masks, like a lot of great birds without faces, horrid, rather! The little lady is looking up at me. I can just see the smile of her mouth underneath her white silk mask as she speaks—'Grazie inespressible, Sior Maschera Inglese!' I must be masked as well then—of course, she can guess I'm English. She's accidentally knocked off her mask! I say, such a beautiful roguish face! I'm stammering something idiotic, while inside I've gone all of a tremble, and feel a tongue-tied silly ass. She laughs teasingly as she puts on her mask again.” His voice died away.
“Go on. What next?” I said, fascinated by this evocation of an eighteenth-century night at the Ridotto.
His eyes opened on me.
“I don't see any more. It's all gone. I say, old bean, it's queer to dream like that, isn't it? I don't know two words of Italian really, and yet just then it seemed as if I knew quite a fair amount—enough to talk, anyway.”
“Very queer,” I agreed. “But don't excite yourself about it. Just tell me anything that flits into your mind. Had the lady a husband?”
He frowned as though looking into the recesses of his consciousness.
“I can't quite make out about him—he doesn't seem to matter.”
I smiled.
“Those old Venetian husbands didn't matter very much,” I said. “It wasn't good form. Every fashionable lady had her cicisbeo—”
He interrupted me.
“Cicisbeo! That's a word I know, somehow. In the dream, you know—not really. A damn fellow that was always hanging round her skirts, carrying her purse for her, holding her fan, making himself indispensable, mincing around like a dancing-master. I had the devil of a row with him—one night in the Ridotto—”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
But he had apparently relapsed into sleep. His eyes closed. His breathing went deep and regular after one great sigh. I sat and watched him, hoping, interested though I was, that my wife would soon return with the doctor.
Suddenly he commenced to murmur again. His face assumed an expression of mingled anxiety and pleasant expectation.
“Ecco!” he said. “I'm ready. “What's 'ready'? Pronto—sono pronto. You lead, I follow. Villainous looking rascal, but I suppose he's all right. She sent him—said she'd send a messagero. Don't like these damn narrow streets, though. Where's he going? E proprio questa via? That's right, got it right this time—my Italian is improving, stap me! Must be the way, if he says it! Wish I had gone by gondola, though—that's the best way to go—gondola by side canals. In luck finding her palace last night—but the gondolier knew it, of course. How long did I wait before she looked out of her window? Seemed hours. She saw me—I wager she saw me. Where is he going, this fellow? What? Down this dark hole? Si, si, si, illustrissimo! Oily brute. In for it, now, though—better follow him.... Ah! A little arcade—what's that canal, I wonder? Why, of course, there's her palace! That's her window! There—under the madonna! No light in it. But we're the wrong side of the water! What? Aspetta? Wait a moment? What? Oh, you're going to fetch a boat? Wait here for you? Capisco, capisco.”
THERE was again silence for a moment. I stared at Antony's face, lying there on the pillow, and tried to divine what vision he saw flitting through his brain. His features twitched, and every now and then twisted as though in an uneasiness of mind. Then once more came the feverishly muttered words.
“Where has the fellow gone? Waiting all this time ... don't like it. Is he playing a trick? There he is! No that's a shadow of one of the columns—moonlight deceives one's eyes. But I'll wait no longer. Don't want to get caught here—like rat in a trap. Which way out? End of colonnade—turn to right—dark—but there will be moonlight in the little street, thank God....”
He made a movement with his hands that sketched the gesture of groping through the dark, his face scowling. What was coming now? I wondered. I tried to reconstruct that hundred-and-fifty-year old episode in my mind as I waited. She had evidently sent a guide to lead him to her palace, as she had promised in the church, and the guide had brought him through that dark sotto-portico to the little colonnade on the canal-side whence one could see the Gothic palace with the madonna carved above a window—but was it she who had sent the guide? The doubt shot through me, as disturbing as though I were contemplating a real event enacted before my eyes. Would her guide have brought him to the wrong side of the water and then left him in that cul-de-sac? I waited, in a curious thrill of apprehension for the sequel. It came.
“The street again—thank God!” He breathed a sigh of relief, then screwed up his eyes, closed though they already were, and moved his head from side to side as if peering each way into a darkness. His expression changed abruptly in a start of nervous alarm. “Who's that there? In the shadow! Yes! Cloak across his face! That's murder! My sword, quick! Gone! Gone! Scabbard empty! That villain must have slipped out!” As he spoke, with a tone that heightened each moment in a tense excitement, appropriate expression came and went on his face with dramatic vividness. “Which way now? Quick! Round the corner! Along here! No! There's another one them—waiting! My God! Damn that villain! If I only had my sword and could get my back against a wall!” He panted in desperate excitement, his head darting from side to side. “They're closing on me! How many? Three or four, at least—that was steel there surely, in the moonlight! Down this street, perhaps? Quick! Ah, they're here, too!” His fingers worked. “Not so much as a pocket-knife! By God, they're on me! Could I catch one by the throat, snatch his sword? Not swords, stilettos! Ah!—his face! That damned cicisbeo! Ah!” He finished in one sharp cry of pain and terror, lay deathly still.
WHAT had happened? I thought I could guess. That cicisbeo had settled scores after the old Italian fashion. And the unfortunate Englishman? Assassinated, I might assume, for a certainty. But who was that George Sinclair—if such a person ever existed—whose unpleasantly romantic experience had reenacted itself in the mind of so unpromising a subject as Antony? Or was it all merely a delirious dream, without any antecedent basis in fact? I puzzled over these questions, without arriving at any sort of solution, as Antony lay in a quiet sleep, his murmurs silenced. My meditations were interrupted by the arrival of my wife with the doctor.
Nervously we waited outside the room for the verdict. It confirmed our fears.
“Unless I am mistaken,” said the medico, “your friend is in the incubation stage of some sort of fever—I trust, not typhoid. We shall know to-morrow.”
Typhoid it was. The next day put it beyond doubt. Inconvenient though it was, there was nothing for it but to submit. Anyway, it was a satisfying explanation of his strange behavior. Delirium is often curiously logical in the dramas it weaves. He must have had the fever on him when he arrived.
I wired home to his people, and received a telegraphic reply to the effect that his cousin, Geoffrey Sinclair, was on his way out to take charge of him.
Him also I met from the 7:40 p.m. at the railway station. He was an older man than his cousin Antony and quite a different type, obviously studious, with the urbane manner of a college don. I liked him on sight as we shook hands.
I put him in a gondola which—using, as the gondolas do, the short cuts by the side-canals—was at least as quick as the little steamer. From the first words of our conversation, as we glided noiselessly through that labyrinth of narrow waterways between the derelict, crumbling palaces, I could tell that my instinctive summary of him was correct. He was a well-read fellow, with—to judge by his comments—no mean knowledge of architecture and history. I named to him such of the palaces as I could and his remarks were invariably to the point.
We slid out from under a bridge toward an ancient Gothic palace, romantic in the soft light of the moon, which rose sheer from the water at the junction of two canals. It was the palace with the carved madonna above one of its windows.
“What palace is that?” he inquired.
“Palazzo Giuliani,” I replied, wondering if I should tell him later what a curious part that palace had played in the oncoming of his cousin's illness.
“Palazzo Giuliani?” he repeated, with an odd vivacity of tone. “That's interesting! Very interesting!” He turned to stare at it as we glided past.
“Why is that so particularly interesting to you?” I asked, in surprise.
“Well,” he laughed, “the name is linked with a bit of our family history. I'm rather keen on that sort of thing and I happen to have in my library an old manuscript diary kept by an ancestor of mine while he made the Grand Tour of France and Italy in 1750. Very interesting. This ancestor of mine apparently fell in love with a Venetian lady by the name of Caterina Giuliani. I promised myself that I would hunt out her palace when I came to Venice.”
“You've found it. That's the place.” I smiled at him. “And your ancestor's name was George Sinclair.”
He looked at me in astonishment,
“How on earth did you know that?” he asked.
“Never mind. What happened to him?”
“An unpleasant experience. He was attacked one night by some—bravi, don't you call them?—and very nearly killed. But he recovered, came back to England, married an English lady, and died peaceably in 1790.”
“Very interesting, indeed,” I commented. “And, may I ask, does your cousin Antony know anything of that story?”
“Antony!” He laughed scornfully. “My dear fellow, Antony's a very nice chap, but his intellectual activity stops short at his business. I should be surprised if he has ever heard of George Sinclair—indeed, I doubt if any one knows that little story except myself.”
I smiled, but said nothing.
THE curious part about it is that Antony when he recovered, had not a glimmering of any memory of his romantic aberration. He'll probably call me a liar when he reads this.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1941, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 83 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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