Andreas thought that it was no such extraordinary distinction as he had imagined to be introduced to Signorina Nina, and by this friend, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
They had reached an open square with wooden tables and wicker chairs in front of a little coffee-stall. At one of them a man dressed all in black was writing letters. At another a coarse middle-aged man with a blue chin, wearing an odd kind of long frogged coat, sat at his ease, listening unmoved to the pleadings of a young man who did not venture to draw up his chair to the table, and hardly even dared to sit down, so that Andreas could not look at him without a feeling of pity and distress.
“Look at those two,” said Zorzi, taking possession of the chocolate Andreas had ordered for him. “That’s a rich Greek and his nephew. The old man is a millionaire, and the poor lad is his only relation. But he isn’t pleased with him because the young man married against his will, and he won’t let him into his house. The young man can hardly keep his head above water. He’s in the hands of moneylenders, Jews and Christians, and is always running after his uncle. Take a quiet look at them: the old man will hardly deign to see him, let alone give him an answer. He goes on smoking and lets him talk—look how the miserable beggar is wriggling for fear of getting so much as the smell of his smoke. And after a while, you’ll see, he’ll pay for his coffee and go away, and in the end the young man will fall on his knees before him, and the old man will take no more notice of him than if he were a dog. He’ll hang on his coat, and the old man will shake him off and go on his way as if he were alone. You can see the same show several times a day, in the morning in front of the Exchange here, and in the evening on the Riva. Isn’t it amusing to see what beasts people can be to each other, and how obstinate they can be in their spite?”
Andreas was hardly listening, so preoccupied was he by the appearance of the man writing. He had an inordinately long, narrow body, which, as he wrote, stooped over the table, under which his long legs could only find room as it were by apology, inordinately long arms which could, at a pinch, find room, and inordinately long fingers which held the bad, squeaking pen. His posture was uncomfortable and even ridiculous, but nothing could have more finely revealed the essence of the man than this discomfort, and the way he bore it, overcame it, was unaware of it. He wrote hurriedly, the breeze tugged at the page, he ought to have lost his temper, and yet there was self-command in all his limbs, a—so strange as the word may seem—courtesy towards all the lifeless objects which rendered him such sorry service, a superiority to the discomfort of the situation which was incomparable. A strong gust blew one of the sheets over to Andreas. Andreas started up, and hastened to return it to the stranger, who, turning quietly round, took the proffered sheet with a slight bow. Andreas met his dark eyes; he thought them beautiful, although they were set in a face that nobody could call handsome. The head was far too small for the figure, and the sallow, rather sickly face so strangely awry that the absurd image of the shrunken face of a dead toad flashed through Andreas’s mind.
He would have liked to know a great deal about the man, but he did not want to learn it from Zorzi, who bent towards him and whispered: “I’ll tell you who that is as soon as he’s gone. I don’t want to mention his name now. He’s the brother—well, the brother of the great gentleman whom I told you was the protector of the family you’re living with. You know whom I mean—the one under whose aegis the lottery is being arranged. He is a Knight of Malta,” he went on, but at once paused as the writer raised his head, “but as you see, he doesn’t wear on his cloak the cross which it is not only his right, but his duty to wear. He has travelled a great deal, they say; he has been far into the interior of India, and even at the Great Wall of China, and some say he is in the service of the Jesuits, but others say he is no more than a freemason.”
The rich Greek and his beggarly nephew stood up—the gross callousness of the one, the bestial servility of the other, were revolting. In both, human nature seemed to have lost its dignity. For Andreas it was past understanding that so vile a spectacle could take place in the neighbourhood of a being such as he imagined the Knight to be. When the two raised their voices, the one spitting like a cat, the other in a kind of whimper, he even felt he must rush between them and silence them with his stick. The Knight of Malta raised his eyes for a moment, but looked away over the two, as if they were not there, and, closing his letter as he rose, nodded to a lad who now ran up, took the letter with a bow, and went off with it, while the Knight walked away in the other direction.
When he had disappeared round the corner the square seemed desolate to Andreas. Zorzi bent and picked up a folded sheet of notepaper from under the table. “The wind has blown some of Knight Sacramozo’s correspondence under our feet,” he said. “Excuse me a moment. I’ll go and take it to him.”
“Let me take it,” came from Andreas’s mouth: his tongue seemed to say it of its own will. The fulfilment of his wish meant infinitely much to him; he snatched the paper out of the other’s hand and ran after the Knight down a narrow alley.
There was more than grace, there was a really inimitable distinction in the way the Knight listened to him and took the paper, and Andreas thought he had never experienced so wonderful a harmony between the bearing of a human being and the sound of his voice. “You are very kind, sir,” came from his lips in German, in the best pronunciation. His genial, and at the same time spiritual face seemed to express a profound kindliness arising from his soul. In the space of a moment Andreas felt himself received with benevolence, caught up into an atmosphere which elevated every fibre of his being, and then dismissed. He stood before the stranger as if inanimate, his body felt clumsy, his attitude uncouth. But every limb of his body was aware of every other, and, as flame quivers on flame, imprinted deep within him was the image of the tall figure which, in easy assurance, in gracious civility, bent slightly towards him.
He went back, already striving dully within himself to retain the expression of those eyes, the sound of that voice, as though he had lost them for ever—wondering, “have I ever seen him before? How else could his image have been impressed on me in one moment? I can learn about him from myself!” But great was his astonishment when he felt, rather than heard, swift and light steps hurrying after him, which could belong to nobody but the Knight, when he saw him catch up with him and, in the same winning voice, with the most perfect courtesy, assure him that he must have made a mistake. “The letter you were so kind as to give me, sir, is neither written by my hand nor addressed to me. It must belong to you—in any case, I must beg you to dispose of it!”
Andreas was embarrassed and confused. A few hazy thoughts crossed his mind, the fear of seeming to intrude stabbed him like a hot needle. In his predicament, he felt it at any rate easier to say something definite than to make some vague reply, for which he would never have found the words. He reddened at a sudden movement of his hands, which had already stretched out for the letter, but all the more definitely he averred that the letter most certainly did not belong to him, that it was in no way his to dispose of. The look with which the Knight at once acquiesced was rather the look of a man who will on no account insist than of one persuaded of error, and the faint shimmer of a smile played across his face, or only his eyes, as he again bowed courteously and turned away.
“It is time,” said Zorzi, “if you want to meet our lovely Nina today. She will be up, and if we are lucky will have no visitors yet. Later she drives out, or dines with her friends. Well?” he asked, as they walked, “did you make the acquaintance of the Knight, and give him back his letter? Think—the fool writes two or three such letters a day, ten pages at a time to one and the same person, though he sees her every day, and so far as I know he isn’t even her lover. For she is half crazy, and is either lying ill in bed, or on her knees in some church. She has no husband, nor any other relation. The Knight is her only visitor, and as she does not go out he hasn’t even the fun of passing for her cavalier. But he hides the affair fr
om everybody, as if she were a girl or a nun.”
“How do you contrive to know everybody’s secrets?” asked Andreas, wondering.
“Oh, you hear all kinds of things,” returned the other, with the smile Andreas had already so much disliked. “But here’s the house. We’ll just go up—or rather, wait here a minute. I’ll run up and see how things stand and whether she will receive you.”
Andreas could not be sure how long a time now passed. Perhaps the artist only stayed away as long as, in the ordinary way, he needed to go upstairs, have himself announced, and announce a visitor: perhaps he had had to wait upstairs, and a much longer time passed.
Andreas moved a few steps from the house door through which Zorzi had vanished, and went to the end of the rather narrow street. It ended in an archway, but, strangely enough, under the archway a bridge led over a canal to a little egg-shaped square with a chapel standing in it. Andreas returned, and was annoyed that he could not, after those few minutes, recognize the right house in the row of somewhat simple and uniform house fronts. The door of one, dark green, with a door-knocker in the shape of a dolphin, seemed to be the one through which Zorzi had vanished, yet the door was shut, and Andreas thought he could still see Zorzi as he stepped into a passage through an open door. Still, there was no danger of their missing each other if Andreas went back to the bridge again to have a look at the little square with the church. The street and the square were completely deserted; a step would be audible, let alone a call, or repeated calls, if Zorzi were looking for him, so he crossed the bridge. Below, on the dark water, a little boat was moored to it; not a human being was to be seen or heard; the little square had a forlorn, abandoned look.
The church was of brick, low and old: in front, on the side facing the square, it had an entrance which was little in keeping with it; broad steps bore a colonnade of white marble, and a classical pediment with an inscription. In the Latin words some of the gilded letters were capitals. Andreas tried to read a date out of them.
When he again lowered his eyes a woman was standing some distance away, to the side of the church, looking at him. He could not quite make out where she had come from, for she was standing rather as if she had been on her way to the church, and had stopped irresolute, or perhaps startled by Andreas’s presence. He had heard no steps approaching or crossing the square, and he found himself wondering whether, with her respectable, simple dress, she wore house shoes, which had muffled her footsteps, then wondered at himself being occupied with the thought. For she was nothing more than an apparently young woman of the lower classes, with the black shawl over her head and shoulders, from whose pale, but apparently very pretty face two dark eyes were watching the stranger with a curious, and, unless distance deceived him, anxious fixity—with the same fixity, he felt, whether he now pretended to be studying the capitals of the Corinthian columns or returned the look. All the same, he had no reason to stay there, and he had already set his foot on the lowest of the stone steps, thus withdrawing from the woman’s field of vision.
But when, raising the heavy curtain, he entered the church, the woman at the same time entered through a side door, and went to a prie-dieu standing near the altar. And now Andreas had the distinct impression that here was a woman oppressed by sickness, whether of the body or the mind, seeking relief from suffering by prayer.
He had now no other wish than to leave the church again as quietly as possible, for it seemed to him that the woman, now and then, looked anxiously round at him, as though he were an unwished-for witness of her painful solitude. Now in the church, compared with the square, which lay in the harsh sunshine, the light was dim; in the cool, stuffy air a faint smell of incense still lingered, and Andreas, who had no desire to pry, but merely to leave the place, certainly did not keep his eyes fixed on the woman perfectly clearly. However, apart from that, it was certain, he could have sworn, that she had turned, not to the altar but to his own self, with her hands clasped in entreaty, that she had even struggled to move towards him, but had been hindered, as though heavy chains lay about her body from the hips down. At the same moment he thought he clearly heard a moan: soft as it was, it could not have been an hallucination. The next moment, certainly, he could not but regard, if not the movement, then any reference to himself as imagination, for the stranger had shrunk back into the prie-dieu and was perfectly still.
Without a sound he crossed the short space separating him from the door, and took pains to raise the curtain so little that no ray of the harsh light should disturb the holy twilight in which he was leaving the sorrower. As he did so his eyes involuntarily sought the prie-dieu again, and what he now distinctly perceived astonished him so much that he stood still in the folds of the curtain, breathless. There, at exactly the same spot, sat another woman—sat no longer, but was standing up in the prie-dieu; she turned her back to the altar, bent forward, then furtively looked round at him again. In her dress the woman did not greatly differ from the other, who must have departed with an almost incredible swiftness and stealth. The new one was dressed in the same dark, unassuming colours—Andreas, on the way, had seen the wives and daughters of the humbler townsfolk dressed thus in respectable uniformity—but this one wore no shawl. Her black hair hung in curls on both sides of her face, and her bearing was such that it was not possible to confuse her with the oppressed and grieving creature whose place she had taken so suddenly and noiselessly. There was something impudent and almost childish in the way in which she looked round angrily several times, then peeped over her shoulder to note the effect of her look. She might just as well have been trying to frighten off an intruder as to awaken curiosity in an indifferent onlooker; it even seemed to Andreas, as he now finally turned to go, as though she had signalled to him behind his back with open arms.
He was standing in the square, a little dazzled, when someone came out of the church behind him, and brushed past him so quickly that he felt the air move. He saw one side of a pale young face, which turned sharply away from him, with flying curls which nearly touched his cheeks. The face was twitching, as if with suppressed laughter. The swift, almost running steps, the abruptly averted face as she brushed past him—all this was too violent not to be intentional, yet it looked rather like the mischief of a child than the insolence of a grown-up. Yet the figure was that of a grown woman, and the audacious freedom of the body was so strange, as she ran towards the bridge in front of Andreas, flinging her slender legs till her skirts flew, that for a moment Andreas thought it might be some youth in disguise playing a prank on him, the obvious foreigner. And yet again, something told him unmistakably that the being before him was a girl or woman, as she herself came to a standstill on the little bridge as if waiting for him. In the face, which he thought pretty enough, there was a dash of impudence; the whole behaviour looked absolutely wanton, yet there was something about it which attracted rather than repelled him. He did not wish to meet the young woman on the bridge: there was no other way back into the street. So he swung round again, mounted the steps into the church, thinking that having now given the woman a definite sign of refusal, he would be rid of her. He found it strange enough that the other woman was no longer in the church. He went right up to the altar, glanced into the little chapels right and left, looked behind the columns—nowhere a trace. It was if the stone floor had opened and swallowed up the mourner, casting up in her place that other strange creature.
When Andreas again emerged onto the square, he saw, to his relief, that the bridge was clear. He went back into the street, wondering whether he had not, after all, missed Zorzi coming out, and whether Zorzi might have gone to look for him in the direction they had come from. A clean-looking house next door to the one with the brass knocker now seemed to him to be the right one, because the door was standing open. He went in, meaning to knock at some door on the ground floor, ask for Nina, then go up himself and discover the artist’s whereabouts. He did so all the more quickly since he imagined that from about the second house after
he had crossed the bridge, a light footfall and a swish of skirts had dogged his steps. From the entrance hall the stairs led upwards, but Andreas turned aside and went into the courtyard to look for a porter’s lodge or some other human dwelling. The courtyard was small, enclosed by walls, quite overgrown with vine-leaves to a considerable height: the loveliest ripe grapes of a reddish kind hung down into it, strong wooden posts supported the living roof; there was a nail driven into one of them with a bird-cage hanging on it. At one point in the vine-leaf roof there was a gap, big enough for a child to climb through. From that point the glow of the radiant sky above fell into the courtyard, and the beautiful shapes of the vine-leaves were sharply outlined on the tiled floor. This not very big place, half room, half garden, was filled with pleasant warmth and the scent of grapes, and silence so deep that Andreas could hear the restless movements of the bird which, untroubled by his approach, hopped from perch to perch.
Suddenly the careless bird dashed itself in terror against the side of its cage, the beams of the vine-roof rocked, the opening darkened abruptly, and over Andreas’s head, at the height of a man, a human face looked in. Black eyes, with whites glittering in contrast, fixed his startled gaze from above, a mouth half open with strain and excitement, dark curls on one side slid down among grapes. The whole pale face was wild and tense, with a flash of satisfaction, almost childishly unconcealed. The body lay somehow on the light trellis of the roof, the feet were most likely hanging in a hook in the wall, the finger-tips on the top of a post. Then a mysterious change came over the expression of the face. With infinite sympathy, even love, the eyes rested on Andreas. One hand forced its way through the leaves, as if to reach his head, to stroke his hair, the four fingers were bleeding at the tips. The hand did not reach Andreas, a drop of blood fell on his forehead, the face above him turned white. “I’m falling,” cried the mouth … one moment had been the reward of unspeakable effort. The pale face was wrenched away, the light body jerked upwards, then slid back over the wall. How it reached the ground on the other side Andreas could no longer hear; he was running to the front of the house to cut off the mysterious being’s retreat. It could only be the house on the right; either she would come out of it, or she had jumped down into the courtyard and must be hiding there. He stood in front of the house door—it was the one with the dolphin. It was shut and did not yield to his pressure.
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