I forget what I did, where I went after leaving the Lido and at what hour or with what recovery of composure I made my way back to my boat.I only know that in the afternoon, when the air was aglow with the sunset, I was standing before the church of Saints John and Paul and looking up at the small square-jawed face of Bartolommeo Colleoni, the terrible condottiere who sits so sturdily astride of his huge bronze horse, on the high pedestal on which Venetian gratitude maintains him.The statue is incomparable, the finest of all mounted figures, unless that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol, be finer:
but I was not thinking of that; I only found myself staring at the triumphant captain as if he had an oracle on his lips.
The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully personal.But he continued to look far over my head, at the red immersion of another day--he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries--and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of.
He could not direct me what to do, gaze up at him as I might.
Was it before this or after that I wandered about for an hour in the small canals, to the continued stupefaction of my gondolier, who had never seen me so restless and yet so void of a purpose and could extract from me no order but "Go anywhere--everywhere--all over the place"? He reminded me that I had not lunched and expressed therefore respectfully the hope that I would dine earlier.
He had had long periods of leisure during the day, when I had left the boat and rambled, so that I was not obliged to consider him, and I told him that that day, for a change, I would touch no meat.It was an effect of poor Miss Tita's proposal, not altogether auspicious, that I had quite lost my appetite.
I don't know why it happened that on this occasion I was more than ever struck with that queer air of sociability, of cousinship and family life, which makes up half the expression of Venice.
Without streets and vehicles, the uproar of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an immense collective apartment, in which Piazza San Marco is the most ornamented corner and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses of decoration.And somehow the splendid common domicile, familiar, domestic, and resonant, also resembles a theater, with actors clicking over bridges and, in straggling processions, tripping along fondamentas.As you sit in your gondola the footways that in certain parts edge the canals assume to the eye the importance of a stage, meeting it at the same angle, and the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the battered scenery of their little houses of comedy, strike you as members of an endless dramatic troupe.
I went to bed that night very tired, without being able to compose a letter to Miss Tita.Was this failure the reason why I became conscious the next morning as soon as I awoke of a determination to see the poor lady again the first moment she would receive me?
That had something to do with it, but what had still more was the fact that during my sleep a very odd revulsion had taken place in my spirit.
I found myself aware of this almost as soon as I opened my eyes;it made me jump out of my bed with the movement of a man who remembers that he has left the house door ajar or a candle burning under a shelf.
Was I still in time to save my goods? That question was in my heart;for what had now come to pass was that in the unconscious cerebration of sleep I had swung back to a passionate appreciation of Miss Bordereau's papers.They were now more precious than ever, and a kind of ferocity had come into my desire to possess them.