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There is no noise, no bustle, no brutality of waiters, no ahurissement of tourists. And when dinner is done, we can sit awhile over our cigarette and coffee, talking until the night invites us to a stroll along the Zattere or a giro in the gondola. Night in Venice! Night is nowhere else so wonderful, unless it be in winter among the high Alps.
She drowsed after a while, and whenever she woke she thought they had just touched her own landing. By fits it was cloudy and moonlight; they began to meet peasants' boats going to the Rialto market; at last, they entered the Canal of the Zattere, then they slipped into a narrow way, and presently stopped at Mrs. Vervain's gate; this time she had not expected it.
But that it was once better can be seen in one of the Guardis at the National Gallery, No. 2099. Finally we have Sansovino's mint, now S. Mark's Library, with the steamboat bridge for passengers for the Giudecca and the Zattere in front of it, and then the corner of the matchless Old Library, and the Molo with all its life beneath the columns.
Bare necessities are marvellously cheap, and the pinch of real bad weather such frost as locked the lagoons in ice two years ago, or such south-western gales as flooded the basement floors of all the houses on the Zattere is rare and does not last long. On the other hand, their life has never been so lazy as to reduce them to the savagery of the traditional Neapolitan lazzaroni.
And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga. It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon the Grand Canal during the day.
A few women from the neighbouring streets and courts crossed the bridges in draggled petticoats on their way to first mass. A few men, shouldering their jackets, lounged along the Zattere, opened the great green doors, and entered. Then suddenly Antonio cried out that the bridal party was on its way, not as we had expected, in boats, but on foot.
The Euganean hills stand like stupendous pyramids, Egyptian, solemn, against a lemon space on the horizon. The far reaches of the lagoons, the Alps, and islands assume those tones of glowing lilac which are the supreme beauty of Venetian evening. Then, at last, we see the first lamps glitter on the Zattere. The quiet of the night has come.
We got that high collar off of him, a slouch hat on his head instead of his stove-pipe, and a pipe in his mouth, and before the winter was over he had more friends than any fellow in Venice. It was only awkwardness that made him talk so queer and ugly. And maybe we didn't have some good times in those rooms of his on the Zattere!"
The last house of all before the gardens is the office of the Harbour Master; the little pavilion at the corner of the gardens belongs to the yacht club called the Bucintoro, whose boats are to be seen moored between here and the Molo, and whose members are, with those of sculling clubs on the Zattere and elsewhere, the only adult Venetians to use their waters for pleasure.
The boat slipped in across the Zattere, in and out of cool water alleys, under church windows and palings of furtive gardens, until he came to the plashings of the waves on the marble steps along the Grand Canal. Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace facades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed.
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