The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  8

  But he hadn’t. Lavinia found him, when she came down next morning, sitting in an arm-chair which he scarcely seemed to touch, poring over a map. He had been waiting an hour, he said, and had already seen her mother, who was much better.

  ‘Yes, a good deal better,’ said Lavinia, who had also seen her.

  ‘Very much better,’ he repeated, as though the information, coming from his lips, had a peculiar authenticity. ‘And now as to plans,’ he continued. ‘I have worked out two programmes for the next five days—one for Mr. and Mrs. Evans and Amelia, and your mother, if she is well enough to go with them; they don’t know Venice. Another, more advanced itinerary for us. Just look here.’ He summoned her to the map, and Lavinia, feeling like a map herself, all signs and no substance, complied; but not without a feeble protest.

  ‘But I don’t know Venice either.’

  ‘Ah, but you are intelligent, you can learn,’ he said. Lavinia resented everything in his remark; the implication that her mother was not intelligent, the readiness to agree that she herself was quick but ignorant.

  ‘I don’t know which end the map is up,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘What! Not know your compass? We shall have to begin further back than I thought. Now, you’re the North. I’ll set the map by you. Here is the Piazza: do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lavinia.

  ‘Well, where?’

  Lavinia pointed to it.

  ‘Right. Now I’ve drawn a series of concentric circles, marking on them everything we’ve got to see. I don’t count tourists’ tit-bits, like Colleoni and the Frari.’

  ‘I love equestrian statues,’ declared Lavinia. ‘There are only sixty-four, I believe, in the world. And the Pesaro Madonna is almost my favourite picture in Venice.’

  ‘Well,’ said Stephen, ‘we’ll see what time we’ve got. Now, here’s the first circle of our inferno. What do you put on it? Remember, you’ve been here nearly a week.’ He turned towards Lavinia an acute questioning glance; a pedagogue’s glance. His brows were knitted under his thin straight hair; his large prominent features seemed to start from his face and make a dent on Lavinia’s mind. Not a mist, not a shadow of diffidence in his impatient eyes; no slightest pre-occupation with her or with himself, only an unabashed anxiety to hear her answer. Lavinia resolved it should be as wrong as she could possibly make it.

  ‘St. Francesco della Vigna,’ she suggested, putting her head on one side, a gesture that ordinarily she loathed beyond all others.

  He looked at her in consternation; then let the map fall to his knees.

  ‘Why, Lavinia,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re not trying.’

  Tears of mortification came into her eyes.

  ‘I don’t think I want to learn,’ she confessed.

  ‘Why, of course you don’t,’ he replied, relieved by this simple explanation of her contumacy. ‘No one does. But we’ve got to. That’s what we Americans come here for. Now, try again.’

  ‘Perhaps I could do better outside,’ Lavinia temporized. The terrace revealed the Canal, and the Canal, Emilio. He was leaning against a post, expending, it seemed, considerable energy, for the prow of the gondola swung rapidly round. But whatever the exertion, he absorbed it into himself. The economy of movement was complete. There were no ineffective gestures, no effort run to waste; a thousand years of watermanship were expressed in that one manoeuvre. The gondolier saw Lavinia, took off his black hat, and smiled as he draped himself across his platform. There he sat. He smiled when you smiled, generally. He took you where you wanted to go. He forced nothing upon you. He demanded nothing of you. He had no questions, he had no replies. At every moment he was accessible to pleasure; at every moment, unconsciously, he could render pleasure back; it lived in his face, his movements, his whole air, where all the charms of childhood, youth and maturity mingled without losing their identity.

  ‘There’s a good-looking man if you like,’ Lavinia’s companion remarked.

  ‘Yes, he’s considered good-looking,’ Lavinia concurred.

  ‘I call him very good-looking,’ Stephen repeated, as though there was nothing beautiful or ugly but his thinking made it so.

  9

  ‘No,’ said Miss Evans, speaking, it seemed, for the first time that evening. ‘We shall not stay long in Venice.’ She rose and stretched herself.

  They were sitting, all of them, in the Piazza. Dinner had been a failure, and its sequel, though enlivened by a band and a continual recourse to Florian’s refreshments, a disaster.

  ‘Bed-time?’ muttered Mr. Evans, brushing his waistcoat with his hands. He jingled his watch-chain which had retained flakes of ash, uncertain in which direction gravity, such was the ambiguity of gradient on Mr. Evans’s waistcoat, meant them to go.

  ‘If Amelia wishes,’ his wife primly replied.

  ‘I do,’ said Amelia.

  They parted, Stephen accompanying Lavinia and her mother to their hotel.

  ‘You must take care of that cold, Mrs. Johnstone,’ he said, as they stopped at the door. ‘And will you lend me Lavinia for half-an-hour? I want her to see the Rialto by moonlight.’

  ‘I always do one or two things for mother before she goes to bed,’ Lavinia protested.

  ‘Am I quite helpless?’ demanded Mrs. Johnstone. ‘Am I utterly infirm? You make me feel an old woman, Lavinia, fussing about after me. Take her, Ste, by all means.’

  Lavinia was taken.

  On the fondamenta, below the Rialto, they encountered an émeute. Cries rang out; there was a scuffle in which blows were exchanged and blood flowed. Terrified by the sight of men bent on hurting each other, Lavinia tried to draw Stephen away, but he detained her, showing a technical interest in the methods of the combatants.

  ‘Your real Italian,’ he said, mimicking the action, ‘always stabs from underneath, like this.’

  Panic seized Lavinia. She felt vulnerable all over. The malignant light of the moon served only to reveal shadows and darkness; darkness under the great span of the Rialto, darkness in the thick foliage that shrouded the Casa Petrarca, darkness in the antic figures which tripped and rose and struggled with each other in the sheet of pale light that carpeted the fondamenta.

  At last Stephen yielded to her entreaties.

  ‘Well, I’m glad I saw that,’ he said. But Lavinia felt that something alien, some quality of the night, had entered into her idea of Venice and would persist even in the noonday glare. It was to Stephen she owed this illumination, or rather this obfuscation, and she could not forgive him.

  The narrowness of the mercerie brought them close together.

  ‘Lavinia,’ he said, ‘I’m going to ask you a question. I suppose you know what it is.’

  She did know, and her unwillingness to hear was aggravated tenfold by his obtuseness in choosing the moment when she liked him less than she had ever done. She was silent.

  ‘Don’t you know? Well, what should I be likely to ask?’

  Lavinia trembled with obstinacy and rage.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, with the air of giving her an easier one. ‘What do I generally ask?’ He pressed her arm; a thrill of hysteria ran through her. ‘Put it another way,’ he said. ‘In your small but sometimes valuable opinion, Lavinia, what am I most in need of?’

  Lavinia’s self-control deserted her.

  ‘Consideration, imagination, everything except self-confidence,’ she said, and burst into tears.

  They walked in silence across the piazza, in silence past St. Moses to Lavinia’s hotel.

  ‘Good-night,’ he said. There were tears in his voice, and she hated him for that. ‘I didn’t know you disliked me, Lavinia. I will go away to-morrow, to Verona, I think. Bless you.’

  He was gone. Lavinia listened at her mother’s door; no sound. She went to bed but her thoughts troubled her, and at about a quarter to four she rose and took out her diary.

  ‘I could never have married Stephen, but I didn’t mean to be cruel to him,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t kn
ow what came over me. At the time there seemed nothing else to say; but on reflection I can think of a dozen things I might have said, all without wounding him. And he has such deep feelings, like most unselfconscious people, whose interest in a subject blinds them to the fact that they may be boring others with it. He really cares for me, and I ought to have been flattered by his enthusiasm and zeal for my improvement, instead of wanting him to let me go to the devil my own way. Is that where I am bound? I detected a whiff of brimstone this evening and I’m not sure whether the room is clear of it yet. I wasn’t really angry with him; that’s where he has the advantage over me; I was exasperated and unnerved, whereas he is now plunged, I fear, into real old-fashioned misery, the sort that keeps you awake at nights and is too hard and too heavy to yield to soft analysis. Well, I am awake, too. But that’s because I worry about myself: I am so concerned with self-justification that I whittle away the shame I ought to feel, externalizing it and nibbling bits off it until I grow interested and quite proud of it. If I had a proper nature, instead of this putty-soft putty-coloured affair, my relations towards people would fall into their right places, and not need readjustment at the hands of my sensibility. No one knows where they are with me, because they really aren’t anywhere; I am forever making up my mind about myself.

  ‘There, I have succeeded in my discreditable design: I feel easier. But that doesn’t mean I am worse than those who don’t know in what direction to aim their self-reproaches. Why should stupidity be held the mark of a fine nature? I am not the more bad because I realize where my badness lies. But I do dread to-morrow, with Stephen going away hurt, the Evanses piqued, Mother unwell, and only the Kolynopulos to fall back on—and Emilio, of course. I had almost forgotten him.’

  10

  Lavinia’s misgivings were not unfounded. In the morning, still keeping her bed, Mrs. Johnstone had an audience first of Stephen, then of the Evanses, and, finally, of her daughter, who had gone for refuge and solace to a hairdresser’s, where she let herself, half unwillingly, be the subject of successive and extremely time-taking remedial processes, each one imposed upon her with a peculiar affront. It was depressing, this recital of her hair’s shortcomings; dry, brittle, under-nourished, split at the ends, it seemed only to stay on, as the buildings of Venice were said to stand, out of politeness. Ploughed, harrowed, sown and reaped, Lavinia’s scalp felt like a battlefield. A proposal to exacerbate it further she resisted.

  ‘Does Madam want to lose all her hair?’

  ‘No, you idiot, of course I don’t.’

  Through a film of soapy water Lavinia’s eyes tried to blaze; they smarted instead.

  ‘I might just as well cry,’ she thought, and seeing the woeful image in the mirror she shed a few tears which didn’t show in the general mess.

  She appeared before her mother with a false air of freshness.

  ‘Who was it tired her head and was thrown out of a window?’ asked Mrs. Johnstone, glaring from the bed.

  It is my lot to have to answer stupid questions, Lavinia thought.

  ‘Jezebel, that much-married woman,’ she replied.

  ‘Now that’s where you’re wrong,’ Mrs. Johnstone contradicted her. ‘She married once; it was the only respectable thing she did.’

  ‘The Psalms say she was all glorious within until she married. Later it says, “So long as the whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel”—I forget what.’

  ‘Lavinia!’

  A long silence followed. Miss Johnstone, regardless of her prototype’s defenestration, leaned out of the window. Her own bedroom opened on to an interior court: it must be pleasant to have a room with a view.

  ‘Lavinia,’ said her mother at last, ‘I don’t think Venice is doing you any good. You’ve sent Ste away broken-hearted; you’ve offended the Evanses, you’ve made me ill; and now you address your own mother in the language of the market-place.’

  ‘The language of the Bible,’ interposed Lavinia.

  ‘You’ll go to the agency now and book places for us in the Orient express. “We’ll start to-morrow, or Friday at the latest.’

  ‘The Wagons-Lits Company, like the churches,’ said Lavinia, ‘closes between twelve and two.’ The impulse to profanity was new to her, and as she left her mother’s room she regarded the intruder with dismay, an emotion soon overpowered by the realization that in a few hours’ time she would have to leave Venice. During her solitary luncheon she scoured her mind for a device to circumvent her marching-orders; all the way to the Piazza she asked herself, ‘Is there no way out?’ She could think of none.

  It was the clerk at the counter who, all involuntarily, for he could never willingly have been helpful in his life, showed her the way.

  ‘When do you want to go?’ he said, when Lavinia, squashed, elbowed and pounded, at last reached him.

  Lavinia pondered. She did not want to go at all. What was the effect, psychologically, of saying you wanted something that you passionately did not want? Did it do you any good? How did the will, thwarted, revenge itself? Where did its energy go, since it was incompressible and must find an outlet somewhere? It might assert itself in some very extravagant fashion. When she spoke, it was with her lips only.

  ‘To-morrow,’ she said.

  You can’t go to-morrow,’ the man replied, his face lighting up with a joy that, contrasted with the ordinary cast of his features, seemed almost innocent.

  Lavinia’s lips moved again. She would give Providence its chance.

  ‘Friday?’

  ‘Full up, Friday,’ said the man, again as though the congestion of the train afforded him immense satisfaction. ‘But you can go—’

  ‘Stop,’ said Lavinia, running her fingers over the counter and pausing at the third finger of her right hand. ‘Will you give me two tickets to Paris for Friday week?’

  She walked back, as though in a dream, straight to her mother’s room. All the petulance had gone from her manner, and she felt, as she saw Mrs. Johnstone propped on the pillows, with so much that made her formidable either left out or undone, that she could wait upon her mother for ever.

  ‘I am very sorry, Mamma,’ she said, ‘but all the sleeping-cars to Paris are reserved till next Friday week. So I took tickets for then. I hope you don’t mind, and I think it’s for the best; you really aren’t fit to travel.’

  ‘If I’m fit to stay here I’m fit for anything,’ Mrs. Johnstone replied. You’re sure you went to the right place, Lavinia?’

  ‘Certain, Mamma.’

  ‘Well, I don’t imagine it will be much pleasure for you to stay,’ Mrs. Johnstone remarked, as though Lavinia were a scapegoat for the sins of the railway company, and that was a comfort.

  11

  ‘I never thought,’ Lavinia wrote that evening, ‘that one result of wrong-doing was to ease the temper. I feel like an angel. It is so long since I did anything I knew to be wrong, I had quite forgotten the taste of it. Certainly I must try again. To do wrong against one’s will, as I did last night, how disagreeable! But with the full approval of conscience (it must have approved, or it wouldn’t have let me be so nice to Mamma) how intoxicating! Before, when I felt I must only be good, my choice was confined, in fact I had no choice. Now, at last, I see the meaning of free will, which no one can see who has not wilfully done wrong. Even the people who say they always act for the best, and do so much harm, never get an inkling (it is their punishment) of the pleasure they would have if they knew, as others do, that they are really acting for the worst. The joys of hypocrisy are not self-sufficing, they depend upon the approval of others, whereas deliberate sin can be relished only by oneself; of all pleasures it is the least communicable. Why, I wonder, is that? Let me take an instance. Suppose I saw Emilio beating his mother, because his choice that day happened to be surfeited with good? He would be enjoying himself, just as I enjoyed prolonging our stay by deceiving my mother; but should I enjoy seeing him? Perhaps not, but then cruelty is a thing apart; no one can want to be cruel. Suppose I saw him kissing
someone—someone he had no right to kiss? That wouldn’t please me either. But if I saw him give alms to a beggar? That would delight me, I know, for I’ve often wished he would. Well, there’s no moral to be drawn from this, except that one should keep one’s wickedness within oneself; to look at it from outside seems to dim its lustre. I will not be the spectator of my own mother-beating. Self-examination looks askance upon forbidden delights and morbidity is a force making for righteousness: away with it.’

  12

  The regatta of Murano was a sorry affair. Even the Kolynopulos, whose ready response to advertised spectacles had prompted the expedition, confessed disappointment. The dowdy little island was seething with people; the race was conducted with much fuss and continual clearing of the course; but when it actually happened, after a lapse of several hours, excitement had worn itself out and given way to impatience. No gondola, reflected Lavinia, as the first man home was received with shouts and pistol-shots, should ever try to suggest speed. It was like a parody of a boat race, the exhaustion of the performers remaining, the thrill left out, and an air of troubled and unnatural competition hanging over all. On their way back, at Lavinia’s request, they visited St. Francesco della Vigna. From across the lagoon the great Campanile had kept catching her eye, its shaft in the purple, its summit in the blue. She promised herself a moment of meditation in the melancholy cloister; but for some reason the church failed her. The ruinous shrine in the centre of the garth assumed a pagan look; the shadows were too thick for comfort; the darkness had nothing to tell her; the heavy doors were locked against her. She purposely outpaced Mrs. Kolynopulo, whose eyes were long in accustoming themselves to the half-light, to seek out a column she remembered—a column which supported a creeper, common enough, and wispy and poor, but lovely from one’s consciousness of its rarity in Venice. But its greenness had gone grey, its leaves were falling, and the defeated tendrils, clawing the air, symbolized and reaffirmed her failure to recapture the emotion of her first visit.