‘My dear Elizabeth,’ she wrote,
‘I was enchanted to get your letter. What have I to set beside your sick-room adventures? I believe that if you were at the North Pole you could cause jealousy and heart-burning among the very bears. My sickroom experiences (for I have them too) are much more prosaic than yours; poor Mamma is in bed, can’t get up for several days, by doctor’s orders, and I have to look after her. But strange things happen even in Venice, though not (as you will readily believe) to me. My friend Simonetta Perkins (I don’t think you know her—she was recommended to Mamma, who didn’t like her, so she devolved upon me) has formed a kind of romantic attachment with a gondolier. She is not in love with him, of course, but she very strongly feels she doesn’t want to lose sight of him. Not to see him from time to time would be the death of her, she says. She passionately desires to do him a good turn, but as she has never done one before she doesn’t know how to set about it. (She is rather selfish, between ourselves). She has confided her plan to me, and I am passing it on to you to have the benefit of your wordly wisdom, which is renowned in two continents. She meditates transplanting him to America and setting him up near her home, in some attractive occupation, either as a baker, or clerk to a dry goods store, or something like that. She would like it still better if she could get her mother (who is very indulgent) to engage him as footman or chauffeur, or gardener or even furnaceman, if he didn’t think that beneath him; then she could look after him, as it were, herself, and see that he wasn’t home-sick. She knows a little Italian (very little considering the time she has been here), and is very rich—she could easily transplant St. Mark’s, stone by stone, she told me, if the Italian Government would consent to let it go. I said she could do that equally well and at less expense by the exercise of faith; and she replied, quite seriously, that faith only availed to remove inanimate objects like mountains, but it couldn’t bring her her gondolier—not a lock of him, not a hair.
‘What do you advise her to do? Of course Italians do emigrate, and it would be nicer for him to go as a private servant than settle in the Italian quarter at New York—a most horrible place. I was taken to see it once, with detectives all round me, pointing revolvers.
‘I do hope you are better.
Affectionately,
Lavinia Johnstone.’
Lavinia paused, thought for some time, then added a postscript.
‘Rome will soon be too hot to hold you; couldn’t you flee from the wrath to come and relieve my loneliness in Venice? I am staying till Friday, it is tedious with Mother in bed and no companion but Simonetta and her obsession.’
All the same, Lavinia thought, as she walked upstairs to her mother’s room, I hope she won’t come.
15
The mid-day gun boomed, but Lavinia did not hear it.
‘You mean he won’t come after all,’ she said.
The melancholy-looking concierge shook his head.
‘He came this morning at seven o’clock and said that he was very sorry, but he could not serve you. He could not hire himself to two families in turn; it would be unfair to the other gondoliers. They must have a chance.’
‘I am not a family,’ said Lavinia, with a touch of her old spirit.
‘No, mademoiselle,’ replied the concierge, looking so gravely at her that she wished she had been; her singularity sat heavily upon her. She returned to the terrace where she had been waiting the last two hours. Emilio, too, had arrived; more, he had found a fare. A woman was boarding the gondola. The gangway lurched a little as she crossed it and she turned, giving the man who followed her a smile full of apprehension and affection. She was as lovely as the day. Her companion lengthened his stride and caught her hand, and they stumbled into the gondola together, laughing at their awkwardness. The cluster of servants smiled; Emilio smiled; and Lavinia, charmed out of her wretchedness, smiled too. Into her mind came the Embarkation of St. Ursula; a vision of high hopes, adventure, beauty, pomp, in the morning of the world. Her smile grew wan as it lighted upon Emilio; she did not mean to recognize him, but he spread out his hands so disarmingly that the smile found its way back, flickered up again like a lamp that will burn a moment longer if you shake it.
‘Who is that?’ she asked at random of the servants who were still congratulating each other in a mysterious, vicarious way.
‘Lord Henry de Winton,’ someone said. ‘They are just married.’
Lavinia went up to her mother’s bedroom and stood in front of a pier-glass, studying her reflection.
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Johnstone from the bed. ‘Am I not to see your face?’
‘I thought I would look at it myself,’ replied Lavinia.
‘Shall I tell you what you see there?’ asked her mother.
‘No,’ Lavinia answered, and added, ‘you can if you like.’
‘Tears,’ said Mrs. Johnstone.
‘I cry very easily,’ Lavinia excused herself.
‘As easily as a stone,’ her mother rejoined.
That, alas, was only too true. Jack-the-Giant-Killer made the cheese cry by a trick, but the pressure by which the giant squeezed tears out of his stone was genuine and Lavinia could still feel the clasp of his fingers. Emilio had deserted her; he had an instinct for what was gay, what was care-free, what was splendid; a kind of ethical snobbery, she reflected, fingering the pearls that reached to her waist. She was secretive, she wore a hang-dog air, she moved stealthily in her orbit; no wonder people avoided her. She was a liar and a cheat; scratch her and you would find not blood, but a mixture of private toxins. Whereas they went blithely on their way, wearing their happiness in public, anxious that everyone they met should share it. And they had taken Emilio from her—Emilio for whose sake, or at least on whose account, she had foregone her high ironical attitude, the attitude she had spent years in acquiring, which had preserved her from so much if it had given her so little. Her detachment, that had been the marvel of her friends, how could she hope to find it now, its porcelain fragments befouled by slime? Miserably she walked up and down, her inward unrest so intense that the malign or disturbing aspects of what she saw around her contributed nothing to it. Over and over again she traced the stages of her degradation. It began with the hunt for the smelling-bottle; it was still going on: the monster inherited from the Kolynopulos had not done growing yet. ‘Still,’ thought Lavinia, ‘if only I had engaged Emilio the first evening, I should have got what I wanted and been satisfied.’ She evoked the incident a dozen times, each time saying ‘yes,’ where before she had said ‘no,’ almost cheating herself into the belief that she could alter the past. Why had he not told her last night that a trades’ union scruple forbade him to enter her service? He must have thought it over, weighed her in the balance and found her wanting. How? Lavinia did not flinch from the mortification of this enquiry. She had overheard someone say she was not really beautiful. But how did her appearance affect the case? His appearance had affected it, but then, he was not hiring her. She did not look magnificent, not, like so many Americans, as if she was the principal visitor at Venice. The Johnstones never tried to look like that. He must have taken her meanness over the note at its face value, imagined she would always haggle over a lira. The irrelevance of this consideration, and its ironical inadequacy as the foundation of her sufferings, almost made her scream. But why, she thought, be so cynical? Emilio may not be a liar, if I am. Perhaps he did want to give the other gondoliers a chance. The benison of the thought stole through her, reinstating Emilio, reconciling her to herself. The reverie refreshed her like a sleep.