The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Read online

  ‘Comandi, Signora?’ said the gondolier, whilst Miss Johnstone fitted herself into the space her mother left over.

  ‘What does the man say?’ asked Mrs. Johnstone, petulant at being addressed in a foreign tongue.

  ‘He wants to know where to take us,’ Lavinia replied.

  ‘Do you mean he doesn’t know?’ asked her mother, amazed that any wish of hers, however private, should be stillborn.

  As though anxious to help, the gondolier came forward a little and leaned over them.

  ‘La chiesa dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo?’ he suggested. Soft and caressing, his voice lingered over the words as if he loved them.

  ‘They always say that: they always take one there,’ pronounced Mrs. Johnstone, implying that every Venetian conversation and destination was included in the gondolier’s words. ‘No, we will not go there. You have the book, Lavinia; what does it say for the third day?’

  ‘I’m afraid we haven’t kept pace with it,’ Lavinia said. ‘We should have to start out at daybreak. And the churches all shut at twelve. Let’s go down the Grand Canal to the Rialto, and back by the little canals.’

  ‘Tell him, then,’ said Mrs. Johnstone, settling herself against the cushions.

  ‘Gondoliere,’ Lavinia began, in a hesitating tone, as if she were about to ask his opinion on some private matter. She turned round to find his face close to hers; the beringed left hand, lying across his knee, was level with her eyes. ‘How everyone in Venice seems to strike an attitude,’ she thought, and the sentence she had prepared dissolved in her mind. She eked out her order with single words and vague gesticulations. Off sped the gondola; the palaces slid by; now they were under the iron bridge; soon they would be at the great bend. ‘This man is a champion, my dear,’ remarked Mrs. Johnstone, ‘he knows how to put the pace on.’ Never before had Lavinia’s mother so cordially approved of anything Venetian. But Lavinia herself wondered whether such purposefulness was quite in keeping with the spirit of the place. ‘He has not mastered the art of languor,’ she murmured. ‘Art of what, Lavinia?’ Mrs. Johnstone challenged, stirring under her silks. ‘Oh, nothing, Mamma.’ For the thousandth time Lavinia climbed down. Just then they overtook a barge, piled high with lemons and tomatoes; the bargeman, impaled as it seemed on his punt-pole and shining with sweat, yet found it in him to turn and hail, in the sociable Italian fashion, the Johnstones’ gondolier. The gorgeous fruits framed his glittering smile, and their abundance went well with his loquacity; but Emilio vouchsafed only a mono-syllable in reply, something between a bark and grunt. ‘How taciturn he is,’ Lavinia thought. ‘I will draw him out; I will practise my Italian on him; I will ask for information. Questo?’ she demanded, indicating a sombre pile on the left. ‘Palazzo Rezzonico,’ he replied, speaking as though the name were heaven-sent, the explosive double z’s so tamed and softened they might have fallen from the lips of an angel. ‘That hasn’t got us much further,’ reflected Lavinia. ‘Why does my vocabulary shrivel up directly I have a chance to use it? If the man had been an Eskimo I could have put the question in perfect Italian, using the feminine third person singular and all the apparatus of politeness. But one relapses into inarticulateness directly there is a risk of being understood. And come to that,’ Lavinia pondered, frowning at the arabesque of scorpions and centipedes embroidered diagonally up her mother’s dress, ‘do I ever say what I mean when there is a likelihood of being understood? Perhaps it is fortunate that the likelihood is rare.’ Association of ideas recalled Stephen Seleucis and his impending visit. ‘If only, in thought, I could bring myself to call him “Ste”,’ she mused, ‘perhaps I could oblige him and mother. He cares for culture.’

  Oi!

  The sudden bellow startled her. Could Emilio have been responsible for it? She glanced up; he was staring impassive and unmoved, much as the campanile must stand after the frightful fracas of its striking midnight. They had left the Grand Canal behind and were elbowing their way up a narrow waterway; gone was all chance of seeing the Rialto, the object of their ride. No doubt Mrs. Johnstone had noticed it. ‘But really,’ Lavinia reproached herself, ‘I must do what I set out to do; otherwise I shall fall a prey to that anæmia of the will of which my Venetian compatriots so energetically boast. I shall consider my time wasted until I have satisfied myself whether Ruskin is right. Mamma thinks he is because her judgments follow her beliefs; my beliefs, if I could entertain any, would follow my judgments, if I could be certain what they were.’

  Bui!

  That was a good one, and a collision at this perilous corner providentially averted. Emilio and the coal man, carboniere, or whatever it is, have words, but without much ill-feeling, to judge from their faces. Emilio would look cross at any time, or is it savage, perhaps, or just stern, incorruptible, fearless, conscious of his Northern blood? He must be descended from the Visigoths I suppose; hence the colouring. How wonderfully he manages the gondola, taking it round these corners as cleanly as if it had a bend in its back. And here we are at the hotel.

  The Splendid and Royal came into view, blinking behind its sun-blinds; and the servants, seeing with whom they had to deal, formed a circle on the steps, advertising their anxiety that Mrs. Johnstone should make a successful landing. Even Emilio came down into the hold to give her his arm, stretching it out stiff at an odd impersonal angle, as though it was a bit of ship’s furniture. The strength of her clasp left upon his skin a milky stain which faded even as Lavinia, bowed with books and rugs, momentarily laid her hand there. How cool it was, with all that sunshine stored up in it. She heard her mother’s voice, raised to the pitch of indignant non-comprehension that had served her so well in life.

  ‘Emilio wants, Emilio who?’

  ‘Emilio Varagnolo, Madam, your gondolier.’

  ‘Well, and what does he want?’

  ‘He wants to be paid.’

  ‘Lavinia,’ said her mother, ‘you’re always wool-gathering. Here, give him this.’

  But “this,” in all its eloquent parsimony, with all its air of making the foreigner, in his own territory, pay, was precisely what Lavinia could not give him. Already she had suffered much from those uncomfortable partings, from those muttered curses and black looks which were the certain outcome of giving Italians nothing but their due. In this case, it was less than what was due. Mrs. Johnstone’s blameless desire that people should not get the better of her generally ended, Lavinia knew, in her getting the better of them. Wondering by how much she should increase the fare she looked across and met the eyes of the gondolier, which also seemed to wonder. Hastily she pulled some notes out and, scarcely stopping to count them, walked down the little gangway and put them into his outstretched hand. What she had neglected to do, he did most thoroughly. With an absorption that might have amused her he reckoned up the sum, and, finding it tally with his expectations, or perhaps even rise to his hopes, he acknowledged her generosity with a dazzling smile and a magnificent salute. All the vitality of which she had been conscious, and whose application to alien activities she had vaguely resented, was suddenly released, let loose upon her in a flood. She shivered and turned away, only to be recalled.

  ‘Madame! Signorina!’

  ‘What is it?’ Lavinia asked.

  ‘Emilio wants to know if he shall return in the afternoon.’ Instead of answering, Lavinia walked back to the steps. Emilio still wore his smile.

  ‘Venga qui alle due,-alle due e mezzo,’ she said.

  ‘Va bene,’ Signorina,’ he answered, and was gone.

  2

  ‘I told the gondolier to come at half-past two,’ Lavinia casually mentioned to her mother at luncheon.

  ‘What gondolier, dear?’ asked Mrs. Johnstone.

  ‘The one we had this morning.’

  ‘Well, we don’t want to encourage the man.’

  ‘How do you mean, “encourage”, Mamma?’ Lavinia mildly enquired.

  ‘I mean what I say,’ said Mrs. Johnstone without attempting further elucidation.

 
; ‘Then,’ pursued Lavinia, ‘we shall be able to see La Madonna dell’ Orto and all those churches on the Northern fringe.’

  ‘Which day are they for?’ demanded Mrs. Johnstone, suspicion leaping into her voice.

  ‘They are not all for a day,’ confessed Lavinia, reluctantly admitting the inferior status of the churches on the Northern fringe. ‘Tourists often neglect Sant’ Alvise, though it is a gem and well repays a visit, the guide book says.’

  ‘We are not tourists, whatever it may be,’ remarked Mrs. Johnstone.

  ‘And,’ continued Lavinia, momentarily elated by the success of her ruse, ‘it contains the pseudo-Carpaccios, a notable instance, Mr. Arrantoff says, of Ruskin’s faulty a priori method and want of true critical sense.’

  ‘Then I am sure I don’t want to see them,’ Mrs. Johnstone declared. ‘And who is Mr. Arrantoff, anyhow?’

  ‘He is quite modern,’ said Lavinia feebly.

  ‘All the more reason that he should be wrong,’ her mother asserted. ‘Ruskin was nearer Carpaccio’s date, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He wasn’t contemporary,’ said Lavinia.

  ‘Perhaps not, but no doubt he had the tradition,’ Mrs. Johnstone retorted. ‘In most cases, as you have told me more times than I can count, the tradition is all we have to go on. Ruskin went on it, I go on it, and you will, if you are sensible. But I am afraid sense is not your strong point, Lavinia. There’s something I want to talk to you about. Remind me.’

  ‘Can’t you talk to me about it now?’ Lavinia asked.

  ‘I don’t want everyone in the room to hear me,’ her mother replied, raising her voice as though to justify her misgivings. Several people at neighbouring tables turned round in surprise. ‘You see,’ Mrs. Johnstone commented complacently, ‘I was right. They can hear. It will do in the gondola.’

  They parted; Mrs. Johnstone to rest, Lavinia to read. The first four volumes of Richardson’s masterpiece had yielded little but irritation. Why, she had asked herself a hundred times, if Clarissa really wanted to leave Lovelace, didn’t she go? She wasn’t a prisoner, but on she stayed, groaning, complaining, fainting, making scenes, when she might have walked out of the front door any hour in the twenty-four. Instead of which she tried to match her wits against the contrivances of a cad, hoping ultimately to charm him into a respectable citizen. But to-day Lavinia found herself more tolerant of Clarissa’s voluntary bondage. Where, after all, could Miss Harlowe have gone? Would it be an agreeable home-coming for her, Lavinia, if after a parallel behaviour and a parallel experience she returned to the parental roof? Mrs. Johnstone was not usually tender towards animals, but surely, on that occasion, she could be counted upon to spare the life of the fatted calf. ‘Never, my dear Lavinia,’ she affectionately admonished herself, let any situation get the upper hand of you.’ She sighed, realizing from past experience how improbable it was that any situation would put itself to the trouble. ‘Not that I should welcome it,’ she added, in an access of distaste. ‘No Lovelaces for me.’ She took up her coffee, which was growing cold, and looking over the brim of the cup she saw Emilio. He had arrived long before his time and was sitting on the low, carved chair, a luxury found only in the best gondolas, reading a newspaper. She watched his hands moving among the sheets, opening and closing. The thought that he could read gave her pleasure, such pleasure as might come from observing an unlooked-for accomplishment in one’s own child. She wished he would lean back against the cushions and make himself comfortable: after all, it was his gondola. They cost seven thousand lire, a large sum for a poor man; and yet, as people who keep lodgings must let their best rooms to strangers and live in holes and corners themselves, so he, perhaps, had a scruple about taking the easiest seat. Warm and seductive, an humanitarian mood was visiting her, when the gondolier folded his paper, glanced up, and saw her. His face, she fancied, was friendly behind its glitter, he waved his hat and made a pretty show of activity; but when, in some confusion, she signed to him that she was not ready, he settled down to his paper again. Lavinia also returned to her book, but what she read did not hold her attention; the fact that she knew how to read didn’t provide her with a solace, nor Emilio, to judge from his abstraction, with food for pleasurable thought. The dumb show in which she had taken part a moment since repeated itself before the ready auditorium of her mind; she saw his face alight with recognition; she tried to visualize his expression, penetrating, impatient, interrogatory, expectant. He looked as though any moment you might do something that would delight him. Why had she not done it? And yet what could she have done? She had an uneasy feeling that in the exchange of gestures she had not acquitted herself as she should have done, had missed an opportunity. ‘Perhaps I can repair the error,’ she thought, moving to a chair directly opposite the gondola, A smile rewarded her and she saw to it that this time her own greeting should not lack warmth.

  3

  Difficult to get at, more difficult to get into, infested outside by noisy children thirsting for money, and inside by sacristans more silent, but no less avaricious, the churches on the Northern fringe were everything that Lavinia had hoped. The September sunshine turned pink into rose, grey into green, danced reflected on the undersides of bridges and lent a healing touch to the cold rococo splendour of the Gesuiti, roofed and walled in gold. Devils at close quarters, at a distance the children with their ash-gold hair looked like angels taken from Bellini’s pictures. ‘Don’t give them anything,’ Mrs. Johnstone warned Lavinia, ‘we must not encourage beggars.’ ‘Via, via,’ cried Lavinia, but they only mocked her, repeating the word in high glee, crowding round and pulling at her empty hands till her rings hurt her fingers. Even Emilio, rising in wrath on the poop and fixing them with a glare of unrestrained ferocity, scarcely quelled them. But he was a great help when anything went wrong, when a key couldn’t be found, or when a church was hidden round a corner. Personal investigation, poking about on her own, was unthinkable to Mrs. Johnstone. The unknown alarmed her and she never paused to think how she, in her turn, would have alarmed the unknown.

  Standing all billowy and large, within a few feet of the fondamenta, she would majestically wave her parasol to Emilio, who, leaving the gondola in charge of a beggar, leapt to do her bidding. Not a single detail of his alacrity was lost upon Lavinia. She wondered how he could walk at all, above all how he could walk so fast; she imagined he would go lop-sided, twisted by the unequal exercise of his profession. But his coming ashore renewed her confidence, she liked to see him striding ahead, and she caught herself abetting her mother in her passion for guidance, even when such guidance clearly was not required.

  Never had she felt happier than when, late in the afternoon, they left San Giobbe homeward bound. Or more conscious of virtue. Always a conscientious but rarely an ecstatic sightseer, she had presented to each picture, each sculpture, each tomb, a vitality as persistent as its own. She felt at one with Art. She discriminated, she had her favourites, but her sensibility remained keen and unwearied, never missing an æsthetic intention or misjudging its effectiveness. To what could she attribute this blissful condition? Lavinia did not know, but irrelevantly she turned round and asked the gondolier the name of a church they were passing. ‘He will take me for an idiot,’ she thought, ‘for I have asked him once already.’ ‘Santa Maria dei Miracoli,’ he informed her without a trace of impatience. Lavinia knew it, but she wanted to hear him say it; and she continued to look back at the receding edifice, long after its outlines had been eclipsed and replaced by the figure of Emilio.

  Mrs. Johnstone’s voice, always startling, made her positively jump.

  ‘Lavinia!’

  ‘Yes, Mamma.’

  Mrs. Johnstone generally called her daughter to attention before speaking.

  ‘It was about Ste Seleucis.’

  ‘I knew it was,’ Lavinia replied.

  ‘Then why didn’t you remind me?’ her mother demanded. ‘I might easily have forgotten.’

  Lavinia was silent.

  Now
, when he comes, I want you to be particularly nice to him.’

  ‘I always am, Mamma; that’s what he complains of,’ Lavinia rejoined.

  ‘Then you must cut the nice part out. Now there were four men in America you might have married, and their names were—’

  ‘I could only have married one,’ Lavinia objected.

  ‘Their names were,’ Mrs. Johnstone pursued, ‘Stephen Seleucis, Theodore Drakenburg, Michael B. Sprott, and Walt Watt. They were not good enough for you.’ Mrs. Johnstone paused to let this sink in. What did they do? They married someone else.’

  ‘Three other people in all,’ Lavinia amended.

  ‘But Stephen didn’t,’ said Mrs. Johnstone, as though virtue disclaimed the abbreviation that affection craved. ‘And next week, I hope you will give him a different answer.’

  Lavinia looked upwards at the Bridge of Sighs. ‘I should be very inconsistent if I did,’ she said at last.

  ‘Who wants you to be consistent?’ asked Mrs. Johnstone. ‘When you are married you can be as consistent as you like. But not when you are turned twenty-seven and unmarried, and have a grey hair or two, and the reputation of being as forbidding to decent men as the inside of Sing-Sing prison. I could say more, but I will refrain, because you are my daughter and I don’t want to hurt your feelings.’

  A confession of belated solicitude always rounded off Mrs. Johnstone’s harangues on this topic; it had become a formula.

  ‘Decent men?’ Lavinia echoed, watching the throng of loungers on the piazzetta. ‘You don’t think it’s their decency that makes me dislike them?’ She spoke without irony, reflectively.