She tried to return the stare; it troubled her. It was vivid, abstracted, and unrecognizing. It seemed to be projected up at her out of those fierce blue eyes.
She turned to look behind her, half expecting to see some dumb show, a servant making a face, that would explain the gondolier’s interest and explain it away. She saw only a blind window and a blank wall. Unwillingly her eyes travelled back, searching vainly in their circuit for some less hazardous haven. Once more they rested on the gondolier. Hunched up, he sat, but without any appearance of awkwardness or of constriction; one brown hand drooped over his knee: the gold of his rings glittered against the brown. He was like some black bird that, in settling, had not troubled quite to fold its wings.
‘But he can’t really fly,’ thought Miss Johnstone, meeting his eyes at last, ‘and there’s the water between us.’ Emboldened by the reflection, she scanned his face. Did the twist of his brown moustache make him too predaceous, too piratical? She decided it did not. How did he come by the tawny hair that waved under the gallant curve of the black sombrero? Of course, many Venetians had brown hair. Again she dropped her eyes before the urgency of that stare, and at the same moment was conscious of a change in the demeanour of the loitering servants, and heard a familiar voice.
‘Lavinia! Lavinia!’ Right and left her mother’s summons enfiladed the terrace. ‘Am I to wait here all night?’
‘Coming!’ cried Miss Johnstone in a thin pipe, making her way through the occasional tables to where, nodding and tossing her bold, blonde head, her mother stood while the servants scurried round her.
‘Where is my gondola?’ that lady demanded, her eye sweeping the Grand Canal with such authority that her daughter thought the craft must rise, like Venus, from the waves. ‘I ordered it for eleven. I come down at half-past eleven, and there is no sign of it.’
‘Emilio, Emilio,’ called a concierge, shrinking so much that his scarlet waistcoat hung quite loosely on him. ‘He is here, Madam.’
‘Why doesn’t he come then, if he’s here?’ Mrs. Johnstone asked, adding in a gentler tone, ‘I see, he’s untying himself. What unhandy things these gondolas are. No wonder they are to be abolished.’
Propelled from post to post by Emilio’s outstretched hand the deprecated vessel drew up to the steps. With a gesture that just escaped being a flourish, the gondolier took off his hat and held it across his body; his hair blew backwards, caught by the wind. As though in a dream Miss Johnstone saw her mother, poised on the unsteady embarkation board, give him the benefit of that glare before which all Boston quailed; and then, a weakness surely without precedent, she saw her mother’s eyelids flicker.
‘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.