The servant who interrupted it, bringing her a card, looked as if he had been there a long while.
‘To introduce Lord Henry de Winton,’ she read, and underneath, the name of an old school-friend.
‘Tell him I shall be delighted to see him,’ said Lavinia.
He came soon after, his wife with him.
‘Ah, Miss Johnstone,’ she cried, taking Lavinia’s hand, ‘you can’t think what a pleasure it is to find you. You must overlook the shameless haste with which we take advantage of our introduction.’
‘We couldn’t help it, you know,’ her husband put in, smiling from one to the other. ‘We had such accounts of you.’
Lavinia had been for so long seeking rather than sought after that she didn’t know what to make of it.
‘I hope I shall live up to my reputation,’ was all she could think of to say.
If they were chilled they hardly showed it; they continued to look down upon Lavinia, kindling, melting and shining like angelic presences.
‘It’s hard on you, I own,’ said Lady Henry. ‘How much pleasanter for you to be like us with no reputation at all, not a rag!’ Repudiated virtue triumphed in her eyes; but her husband said:
‘You mustn’t scare Miss Johnstone. Remember we were warned not to shock her.’ They laughed infectiously; but a tiny dart pierced Lavinia’s soul and stuck there, quivering.
‘You mustn’t try me too far,’ she said, making an effort.
‘You’ll take the risk of dining with us, won’t you?’ Lord Henry begged. He spoke as if it were a tremendous favour, the greatest they could ask. ‘And your mother too.’
‘I should love to,’ said Lavinia. ‘Mamma, alas, is in bed.’
Instantly their faces changed, contracted into sympathy and concern.
‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ Lady Henry murmured. ‘Perhaps you’d rather not.’
‘Oh, she’s not dying,’ Lavinia assured them, a faint irony in her tone, partly habitual, but partly, she was ashamed to realize, bitter.
They noticed it, for their eyebrows lifted even as their faces cleared.
‘How tiresome for both of you,’ Lady Henry said. ‘Should we say eight o’clock?’
16
‘Why,’ wrote Lavinia, ‘when I meet the most charming people in the world should I feel like a fish out of water? The kindness of the de Wintons goes over my head. I feel like a black figure silhouetted against a sunset. The blackness is my will. I have altogether too much of it. This morning I thought it had died. My life seemed dislocated; I did the things I dislike most without minding them at all. Three hours I tramped Venice to find a propitiatory shawl for Mrs. Evans. Malice governed my choice at the last; she will look a fright in it; but as I went from one shop to another, ordering its entire stock to be laid before me, and then going away without buying, I did not feel wretched and distressed, as I used to do. I didn’t mind what happened. If I had been struck by lightning I shouldn’t have changed colour. Things came to me mechanically, but not in any order or with any sense of choice. Volition was stilled. The de Wintons roused it. They did everything they could to draw me out, to draw me back to their level, their world where I once was, where all desires are at an equipoise, where one wants a thing moderately and forgets it directly one can’t get it; where one can leave one’s spiritual house, as the dove left the ark, and return to it at will. While they talked, appealing to me now and then, weaving into one fabric the separate threads of our lives, finding common interests, common acquaintances, a hundred similarities of opinion and as many dissimilarities, that should have been just as binding, drawing us together until it seemed our whole existence had passed within a few yards of each other, I felt in the midst of the exquisite witchcraft that each lasso they threw over me dissolved like a rope of sand, leaving me somewhere much lower than the angels, alone with my ungovernable will. It frightenes me; I cannot escape it; I cannot find my way back to that region where diversity is real and inclination nibbles at a million herbs and forgets the wolf, will, that watches him. Emilio is nothing to me; he is the planetary sign, the constellation under which my will is free to do me harm. I have devised a remedy. Cannot I in thought identify myself with the outside world, the world that sees with unimplicated eye Lavinia Johnstone going about her business—notes a feather in her hat as she stands on the terrace, sees her apparently deep in conversation with a rough-looking man, jots down her arrival in a newspaper, thinks she’ll be gone in a week, wonders why she doesn’t change her clothes oftener, decides after all not to trouble to speak to her? Then I should recover my sense of proportion; I should matter as little to myself as I do to the world.
‘I write like a pagan. Perhaps my disorder is more common-place: it is the natural outcome of doing a number of wrong things, letting myself get out of hand. Sin is the reason of my failure with the de Wintons. The Kolynopulos’ monster, what exactly is it? It’s no use going to Mamma to get rid of it, she said so. I begin to wish that Elizabeth would come.’
Next morning the doctor was due. Lavinia stayed in to hear his report. Each time she sought the sunshine of the terrace she found Emilio there. His presence wounded her; his recognitions, formal and full at first, diminished with each encounter and then ceased. ‘He has behaved badly to me,’ she thought, injured and yet glad of the injury. Though he avoided her and grudged her his company, he could not take away from her the fact that he, Emilio, acting responsibly with her image in his mind, had wronged her. It was a kind of personal relation, the only one, most likely, she would have. She looked at him again. The sun shone full upon his brown neck. Surely such exposure was dangerous? Suddenly he looked up. With her hand she made a little sweeping motion behind her head. The gondolier smiled, clutched his sailor’s collar with both hands and comically pressed it up to his ears, then let it fall. He pointed to the sun, shook his head slowly with an expression of contempt, smiled once more and smoothed away the creases in his collar. The Kolynopulos’ monster at last came out of hiding and swam into view. Mechanically Lavinia put out her hand and took a telegram from the waiter’s tray.
Earnestly advise Miss Perkins leave Venice immediately. Alas cannot join you. Writing. Elizabeth.
Lavinia crunched up the blue paper and threw it towards the canal. It was a feeble throw, the wind bore it back; so she took it to the balustrade and hurled it with all her might. It fluttered towards Emilio who made as though to catch it; but it fell short of him, and she could see it, just below the water, stealthily uncurling.
The handwriting of Lavinia’s diary that night was huddled and uncouth, unlike her usual elegant script. She had been searching Venice, apparently, for a guide to conduct, or some theological work with a practical application.