Lavinia got up. Behind her St. Mark’s spread out opalescent in the dusk.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘and thank you for this afternoon. I must go, but before I go will you tell me what vices Caroline said I had? I know her,’ she went on, looking down at them without a smile. ‘She must have mentioned some.’
They looked at each other in dismay.
‘Be fair,’ Lavinia said, turning away. ‘Think of the burden I carry, with all those recommendations round my neck.’
‘We didn’t mean to “give you a character”,’ Lord Henry’s voice stressed the inverted commas.
‘Couldn’t you,’ said Lavinia turning to them again, ‘take just a little bit of it away?’
Perhaps Lady Henry was stung by her ungraciousness. ‘Caroline did say,’ she pronounced judicially, ‘that she—that they all-wondered whether, perhaps, you weren’t self-deceived: that was what helped you to keep up.’
‘Not consciously deceived,’ Lord Henry said, ‘and they didn’t want you undeceived: it was their business to see you weren’t.’
They both rose. ‘Good-bye,’ said Lady Henry. ‘It’s been delightful meeting you. And may we subscribe to what Caroline said?’
Lavinia said they might.
Without much noticing where she went, she made her way over the iron bridge, past the great church of the Gesuati on to the Fondamenta delle Zattere. The causeway was thronged, chiefly it seemed by old women. Hard-faced but beautiful in the Venetian way, they moved through the mysterious twilight, themselves not mysterious at all. Even their loitering was purposeful. The long low crescent of the Giudecca enfolded the purple waters of the canal, shipping closed it on the east; but at the western end there was a gap which the level sun streamed through, a narrow strait, seeming narrower for the bulwark of a factory that defined its left-hand side. The sense of the open sea, so rare in Venice, came home to Lavinia now; she felt the gap to be a wound in the side of the city, a gash in its completeness, a false word in the incantation of its spell. She fixed her eyes on it hopefully. She was conscious of a sort of drift going by her towards the sea, not a movement of the atmosphere, but an effluence of Venice. It was as though the beauty of the town had nourished itself too long and become its own poison; and at this hour the inflammation sighed itself away. Lavinia longed to let something go from her into the drift, something that also was an inflammation of beauty and would surely join its kind. The healing gale plucked at it, caressed it, and disowned it. The sun, pierced by a gigantic post, disappeared into the sea, and at the same moment the black mass of the Bombay liner detached itself from the wharf, moved slowly across the opening and settled there. The canal was sealed from end to end.
The night was very hot. Lavinia walked to the door of the hotel that opened on the canal and leaned against the door-post, looking out. Voices began to reach her; she recognized the tones, but the intonations seemed different.
‘She’s like an unlighted candle,’ Lady Henry de Winton was saying. ‘I can’t understand it.’
‘An altar-candle?’ suggested her husband. ‘Well, we did our best to light her.’
‘No, not an altar-candle,’ Lady Henry said. ‘Not so living as that. A candle by a corpse.’
Lavinia tried to move away and could not.
‘Didn’t you find her a little un-forthcoming,’ Lady Henry went on, half-injured, half-perplexed, ‘and rather remote, as if she had something on her mind? She didn’t seem to be enjoying herself, poor thing. We may have been enjoying ourselves too much, but I don’t think it was that. Did you notice how she scarcely ever followed up what one said?’
‘Perhaps she was tired,’ Lord Henry said. ‘She spends a lot of time looking after her mother.’
Does she? thought Lavinia.
‘I could see what Caroline meant,’ Lady Henry continued. ‘The features were there all right, but the face wasn’t. I felt so sorry for her, I longed to save her from her depression or whatever it is; I piled it on; I put words into Caroline’s mouth; I perjured myself; which reminds me, my darling, that you did dot my “i’s” a little too openly.’
‘I tried to make what you said seem true,’ Lord Henry remarked.
‘Of course you did.’ There was a pause in which they might have kissed each other.
‘Let’s forget Miss Johnstone. We’ve done our kind act for to-day.’
There was a creaking of chairs and Lavinia fled to her room.
‘It’s no use,’ she wrote, after several attempts. ‘I cannot say what I think; I do not know what I think. I am intolerably lonely. I am in love with Emilio, I am infatuated by him: that explains me. If I can’t be justified, at any rate I can be explained. Why should I hold out any longer? I am unrecognizable to myself, and to my friends. My past life has no claim on me, it doesn’t stretch out a hand to me. I believed in it, I lived it as carefully as I could and it has betrayed me. If I invoked it now (I do invoke it) it wouldn’t give me any help. Its experience is all fabulous; its sign-posts point to castles in Spain. Whatever happens between me and Emilio I could never find my way back to it. Respectability must lose its criterion.
‘It pleased me to know that Emilio had been honest after his fashion. I can’t pretend I admire him or even that I very much like him. The only creditable feeling I have is a sort of glow of the heart when he behaves less badly than I expect. These are the credentials of my passion; credential really, but the word is plural. Passion, I call it, but a shorter word describes it better. It does seem a little hard that now I have gone through so much, given up so much, I have no sense of exaltation, no impulse left. I suppose the effort of clearing the jungle of past associations has taken all my strength. I have made a desert and called it peace.’
Next morning a letter accompanied Lavinia’s breakfast. She opened it listlessly; she had hardly slept, and all her sensations seemed second-hand.
‘No, my dear Lavinia,’ she read, ‘you do not deceive me, though you do surprise me. I hope this letter will find you in America, but if it doesn’t, if you have flouted my commands and are still eating your heart out in Venice, it may still serve a useful purpose. How simple you were to imagine I should be taken in by the apocryphal Miss Perkins! If you hadn’t been in your weak way so catty about her, I might have thought twice about believing in her; but your letters, you know, are always crammed with things like this: “Dear Caroline, what a saint she is, she sent me a thimble at Christmas”.
‘I will now give you some rules for your guidance and I earnestly counsel you to follow them. As to your design of shipping the adored to Boston, I don’t like to say what I feel about it; but this I will say: it alarmed me for you. Lavinia, you are not at all cut out for what I might call the guerrilla warfare of love. Your irregularities would be much too irregular.
‘Now listen to me, Simonetta Perkins, you who were once recommended to Mrs. Johnstone, then rejected by her, and have now devolved upon yourself. The great thing to do is to have a programme. At ten, say, go and have a straight talk with your mother; tell her to get up, there’s nothing the matter with her, and she’s only wasting her time in bed. At 10.30 go to your bedroom or some inaccessible place, the roof if possible, ring the bell and tell the waiter to bring you a cocktail. Nothing is so successful in restoring one’s self-respect as giving servants a great deal of trouble. At eleven, sit down and write some letters, preferably a testimonial to me saying you are following my instructions and deriving benefit. At twelve you might visit one of the larger churches. I suggest SS. Giovanni e Paolo: don’t look at the church, look at the tourists, and despise them. Order your luncheon with care and see that you get what you like and like what you get. In the afternoon go to the Lido, or else buy yourself some trifle at a curiosity shop (I recommend one in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, kept by a man with a name like a Spanish golfer,——della Torre). At five you should call on a Venetian hostess, submit to universal introduction (they will hate you if you don’t and think you mal élevée), praise the present administration and listen politely to the descendants of the doges. If the flutter in your heart is still unsubdued go to Zampironi’s on the way to your hotel and get some bromide: they have it on tap there. In the evening, if you haven’t been asked to a party, go to Florian’s and drink liqueurs—strega, I suggest. Or, if you want a shorter way to oblivion, their horrible benedictine punch. Repeat the time-table on Thursday, and on Friday, by the time your train reaches Verona, certainly when it reaches Brescia, you will have forgotten your gondolier, his name, his face, everything about him.