That night, however, things seemed to be going better. I was able to settle down to my opera, and even to work at it. In the intervals my thoughts returned, not without a certain pleasure, to those scattered fragments of the torn engraving fluttering down to the water. I was disturbed at my piano by the hoarse voices and the scraping of violins which rose from one of those music-boats that station at night under the hotels of the Grand Canal. The moon had set. Under my balcony the water stretched black into the distance, its darkness cut by the still darker outlines of the flotilla of gondolas in attendance on the music-boat, where the faces of the singers, and the guitars and violins, gleamed reddish under the unsteady light of the Chinese-lanterns.
"_Jammo, jammo; jammo, jammo jà_," sang the loud, hoarse voices; then a tremendous scrape and twang, and the yelled-out burden, _"Funiculi, funiculà; funiculi, funiculà; jammo, jammo, jammo, jammo, jammo jà_."
Then came a few cries of "_Bis, Bis_!" from a neighboring hotel, a brief clapping of hands, the sound of a handful of coppers rattling into the boat, and the oar-stroke of some gondolier making ready to turn away.
"Sing the _Camesella___," ordered some voice with a foreign accent.
"No! _Santa Lucia_. Hi! sing _Santa Lucia_--d'you hear?"
The musicians, under their green and yellow and red lamps, held a whispered consultation on the manner of conciliating these contradictory demands. Then, after a minute's hesitation, the violins began the prelude of that once famous air, which has remained popular in Venice--the words written, some hundred years ago, by the patrician Gritti, the music by an unknown composer--_La Biondina in Gondoleta_.
That cursed eighteenth century! It seemed a malignant fatality that made these brutes choose just this piece to interrupt me.
At last the long prelude came to an end; and above the cracked guitars and squeaking fiddles there arose, not the expected nasal chorus, but a single voice singing below its breath.
My arteries throbbed. How well I knew that voice! It was singing, as I have said, below its breath, yet none the less it sufficed to fill all that reach of the canal with its strange quality of tone, exquisite, far-fetched.