The Miracle of the Images. Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.
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way with him, wearing a French frock coat, himself took him up in the lift and showed him his room. It was a pleasant chamber, furnished in cherry-wood, with lofty windows looking out to sea. It was decorated with strong scented flowers. Most essential, it had the biggest bed in the hotel, suitable for the Strangers six foot seven inch frame.
The Stranger, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others push aside with a glance, a lite comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous-to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, and the absurd. Thus the Strangers mind still dwelt with disquiet on the episodes of his journey thus far: on the horrible old fop with his drivel, on the outlaw boatman and his gouging. They did not offend his reason, they hardly afforded food for thought; yet they seemed by their very nature fundamentally strange, and thereby vaguely disquieting. Yet here was the sea; even in the midst of such thoughts he saluted it with his eyes, exulting that Venice was near and accessible. At length he turned around, disposed his personal belongings and made certain arrangements with the chambermaid for his comfort, washed up, and was conveyed to the ground floor by the green-uniformed Swiss who ran the lift.
The stranger took one of the many ferry boats from Lido to Venice, He would walk again among the tourist and watch the little nuns dressed in crisp habits...a remarkable and unusual sight for the stranger...nuns had long since given up the habits for more practical street clothing like suits, painters pants, surgical outfits or jeans. But here in Venice headed toward St. Mark's Square crossing the Bridge of Siege they were in abundance and adorable he thought as he slouched away in squeaky shoes from the landing toward the Bridge of Siege, the place were the hangman came with prisoners about to die. There they stood and looked out at their assassins...those who had condemned them to hang by the neck until they were dead.
Claude Wermuth took it all in, he watched the tourist heave to and fro...watched them mount the Bridge and then disperse into St. Marks Square craning necks to view the tower and the opulent carvings...the massive marble statues of the horses above the Cathedral and then into the square to find a café' to sit and sip espresso as Wermuth found himself doing while watching all the beautiful people about him.
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