Edith Wharton
A Venetian Night's Entertainment
Wharton, Edith. "A Venetian Night's Entertainment." Scribner's Magazine 34 (Dec.
1903): 640-651.
About the print version
A Venetian Night's Entertainment
Wharton, Edith
Scribner's Magazine
New York
1903
Note: Volume 34
Published: 1903
THIS is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street house (now
the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous East India firm of
Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn to the oval parlour (and
Maria's harp was throwing its gauzy web of sound across the Common), used to
relate to his grandsons, about the year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow.
I
"Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony Bracknell,
leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East Indiaman, the Hepzibah B., saw
far off, across the morning sea, a faint vision of towers and domes dissolved in
golden air.
It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony, newly of age,
and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman of old Bracknell's
fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city trembled into shape. Venice!
The name, since childhood, had been a magician's wand to him. In the hall of the
old Bracknell house at Salem there hung a series of yellowing prints which Uncle
Richard Saulsbee had brought home from one of his long voyages: views of heathen
mosques and palaces, of the Grand Turk's Seraglio, of St. Peter's Church in
Rome; and, in a corner -- the corner nearest the rack where the old flintlocks
hung -- a busy merry populous scene, entitled: St. Mark's Square in Venice. This
picture, from the first, had singularly taken little Tony's fancy. His
unformulated criticism on the others was that they lacked action. True, in the view of St. Peter's an
experienced-looking gentleman in a full-bottomed wig was pointing out the fairly
obvious monument to a bashful companion, who had presumably not ventured to
raise his eyes to it; while, at the doors of the Seraglio, a group of turbaned
infidels observed with less hesitancy the approach of a veiled lady on a camel.
But in Venice so many things were happening at once -- more, Tony was sure, than
had ever happened in Boston in a twelve-month or in Salem in a long lifetime.
For here, by their garb, were people of every nation on earth, Chinamen, Turks,
Spaniards, and many more, mixed with a parti-coloured throng of gentry,
lacqueys, chapmen, hucksters, and tall personages in parsons' gowns who stalked
through the crowd with an air of mastery, a string of parasites at their heels.
And all these people seemed to be diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with
the hucksters, watching the antics of trained dogs and monkeys, distributing
doles to maimed beggars or having their pockets picked by slippery-looking
fellows in black -- the whole with such an air of ease and good-humour that one
felt the cut-purses to be as much a part of the show as the tumbling acrobats
and animals.
As Tony advanced in years and experience this childish mumming lost its
magic; but not so the early imaginings it had excited. For the old picture had
been but the spring-board of fancy, the first step of a cloud-ladder leading to
a land of dreams. With these dreams the name of Venice remained associated; and
all that observation or report subsequently brought him concerning the place
seemed, on a sober warranty of fact, to confirm its claim to stand midway
between reality and illusion. There was, for instance, a slender Venice glass,
gold-powdered as with lily-pollen or the dust of sunbeams, that, standing in the
corner cabinet betwixt two Lowestoft caddies, seemed, among its lifeless
neighbours, to palpitate like an impaled butterfly. There was, farther, a gold
chain of his mother's, spun of that same sun-pollen, so thread-like, impalpable,
that it slipped through the fingers like light, yet so strong that it carried a
heavy pendant which seemed held in air as if by magic. Magic! That was the word
which the thought of Venice evoked. It was the kind of place, Tony felt, in
which things elsewhere impossible might naturally happen, in which two and two
might make five, a paradox elope with a syllogism, and a conclusion give the lie
to its own premiss. Was there ever a young heart that did not, once and again,
long to get away into such a world as that? Tony, at least, had felt the longing
from the first hour when the axioms in his horn-book had brought home to him his
heavy responsibilities as a Christian and a sinner. And now here was his wish
taking shape before him, as the distant haze of gold shaped itself into towers
and domes across the morning sea!
The Reverend Ozias Mounce, Tony's governor and bear-leader, was just putting
a hand to the third clause of the fourth part of a sermon on Free-Will and
Predestination as the Hepzibah B.'s anchor rattled overboard. Tony, in his haste
to be ashore, would have made one plunge with the anchor; but the Reverend
Ozias, on being roused from his lucubrations, earnestly protested against
leaving his argument in suspense. What was the trifle of an arrival at some
Papistical foreign city, where the very churches wore turbans like so many
Moslem idolators, to the important fact of Mr. Mounce's summing up his
conclusions before the Muse of Theology took flight? He should be happy, he
said, if the tide served, to visit Venice with Mr. Bracknell the next morning.
The next morning, ha! -- Tony murmured a submissive "Yes, sir," winked at the
subjugated captain, buckled on his sword, pressed his hat down with a flourish,
and before the Reverend Ozias had arrived at his next deduction, was skimming
merrily shoreward in the Hepzibah's gig.
A moment more and he was in the thick of it! Here was the very world of the
old print, only suffused with sunlight and colour, and bubbling with merry
noises. What a scene it was! A square enclosed in fantastic painted buildings,
and peopled with a throng as fantastic: a bawling, laughing, jostling, sweating
mob, parti-coloured, parti-speeched, crackling and sputtering under the hot sun
like a dish of fritters over a kitchen fire. Tony, agape, shouldered his way
through the press, aware at once that, spite of the tumult, the shrillness, the gesticulation, there was no undercurrent of clownishness, no
tendency to horse-play, as in such crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of
facetious suavity which seemed to include everybody in the circumference of one
huge joke. In such an air the sense of strangeness soon wore off, and Tony was
beginning to feel himself vastly at home, when a lift of the tide bore him
against a droll-looking bell-ringing fellow who carried above his head a tall
metal tree hung with sherbet-glasses.
The encounter set the glasses spinning and three or four spun off and
clattered to the stones. The sherbet-seller called on all the saints, and Tony,
clapping a lordly hand to his pocket, tossed him a ducat by mistake for a
sequin. The fellow's eyes shot out of their orbits, and just then a
personable-looking young man who had observed the transaction stepped up to Tony
and said pleasantly, in English:
"I perceive, sir, that you are not familiar with our currency."
"Does he want more?" says Tony, very lordly; whereat the other laughed and
replied: "You have given him enough to retire from his business and open a
gaming-house over the arcade."
Tony joined in the laugh, and this incident bridging the preliminaries, the
two young men were presently hobnobbing over a glass of Canary in front of one
of the coffee-houses about the square. Tony counted himself lucky to have run
across an English-speaking companion who was good-natured enough to give him a
clue to the labyrinth; and when he had paid for the Canary (in the coin his
friend selected) they set out again to view the town. The Italian gentleman, who
called himself Count Rialto, appeared to have a very numerous acquaintance, and
was able to point out to Tony all the chief dignitaries of the state, the men of
ton and ladies of fashion, as well as a number of other characters of a kind not
openly mentioned in taking a census of Salem.
Tony, who was not averse from reading when nothing better offered, had
perused the "Merchant of Venice" and Mr. Otway's fine tragedy; but though these
pieces had given him a notion that the social usages of Venice differed from
those at home, he was unprepared for the surprising appearance ...
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