Leslie Hartley: The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

Difficult to get at, more difficult to get into, infested outside by noisy children thirsting for money, and inside by sacristans more silent, but no less avaricious, the churches on the Northern fringe were everything that Lavinia had hoped. The September sunshine turned pink into rose, grey into green, danced reflected on the undersides of bridges and lent a healing touch to the cold rococo splendour of the Gesuiti, roofed and walled in gold. Devils at close quarters, at a distance the children with their ash-gold hair looked like angels taken from Bellini’s pictures. ‘Don’t give them anything,’ Mrs. Johnstone warned Lavinia, ‘we must not encourage beggars.’ ‘ Via, via ,’ cried Lavinia, but they only mocked her, repeating the word in high glee, crowding round and pulling at her empty hands till her rings hurt her fingers. Even Emilio, rising in wrath on the poop and fixing them with a glare of unrestrained ferocity, scarcely quelled them. But he was a great help when anything went wrong, when a key couldn’t be found, or when a church was hidden round a corner. Personal investigation, poking about on her own, was unthinkable to Mrs. Johnstone. The unknown alarmed her and she never paused to think how she, in her turn, would have alarmed the unknown.

Standing all billowy and large, within a few feet of the fondamenta, she would majestically wave her parasol to Emilio, who, leaving the gondola in charge of a beggar, leapt to do her bidding. Not a single detail of his alacrity was lost upon Lavinia. She wondered how he could walk at all, above all how he could walk so fast; she imagined he would go lop-sided, twisted by the unequal exercise of his profession. But his coming ashore renewed her confidence, she liked to see him striding ahead, and she caught herself abetting her mother in her passion for guidance, even when such guidance clearly was not required.

Never had she felt happier than when, late in the afternoon, they left San Giobbe homeward bound. Or more conscious of virtue. Always a conscientious but rarely an ecstatic sightseer, she had presented to each picture, each sculpture, each tomb, a vitality as persistent as its own. She felt at one with Art. She discriminated, she had her favourites, but her sensibility remained keen and unwearied, never missing an æsthetic intention or misjudging its effectiveness. To what could she attribute this blissful condition? Lavinia did not know, but irrelevantly she turned round and asked the gondolier the name of a church they were passing. ‘He will take me for an idiot,’ she thought, ‘for I have asked him once already.’ ‘Santa Maria dei Miracoli,’ he informed her without a trace of impatience. Lavinia knew it, but she wanted to hear him say it; and she continued to look back at the receding edifice, long after its outlines had been eclipsed and replaced by the figure of Emilio.

Mrs. Johnstone’s voice, always startling, made her positively jump.

‘Lavinia!’

‘Yes, Mamma.’

Mrs. Johnstone generally called her daughter to attention before speaking.

‘It was about Ste Seleucis.’

‘I knew it was,’ Lavinia replied.

‘Then why didn’t you remind me?’ her mother demanded. ‘I might easily have forgotten.’

Lavinia was silent.

Now, when he comes, I want you to be particularly nice to him.’

‘I always am, Mamma; that’s what he complains of,’ Lavinia rejoined.

‘Then you must cut the nice part out. Now there were four men in America you might have married, and their names were—’

‘I could only have married one,’ Lavinia objected.

‘Their names were,’ Mrs. Johnstone pursued, ‘Stephen Seleucis, Theodore Drakenburg, Michael B. Sprott, and Walt Watt. They were not good enough for you.’ Mrs. Johnstone paused to let this sink in. What did they do? They married someone else.’

‘Three other people in all,’ Lavinia amended.

‘But Stephen didn’t,’ said Mrs. Johnstone, as though virtue disclaimed the abbreviation that affection craved. ‘And next week, I hope you will give him a different answer.’

Lavinia looked upwards at the Bridge of Sighs. ‘I should be very inconsistent if I did,’ she said at last.

‘Who wants you to be consistent?’ asked Mrs. Johnstone. ‘When you are married you can be as consistent as you like. But not when you are turned twenty-seven and unmarried, and have a grey hair or two, and the reputation of being as forbidding to decent men as the inside of Sing-Sing prison. I could say more, but I will refrain, because you are my daughter and I don’t want to hurt your feelings.’

A confession of belated solicitude always rounded off Mrs. Johnstone’s harangues on this topic; it had become a formula.

‘Decent men?’ Lavinia echoed, watching the throng of loungers on the piazzetta. ‘You don’t think it’s their decency that makes me dislike them?’ She spoke without irony, reflectively.

‘Well, I don’t know what else you had to find fault with,’ remarked Mrs. Johnstone, ‘except their looks. Ste isn’t a beauty; but you can’t have everything.’

‘I am content to have nothing,’ muttered Lavinia. In the fuss of landing, for they had reached the hotel, her rebellious utterance escaped censure. Disencumbered, her mother trod heavily upon the fragile gangway, to disappear amid solicitous servants. She herself remained to collect their traps, hidden by the gathering dusk. Some had slipped off Mrs. Johnstone as she rose, her amplitude, as a watershed for these trifles, making the range of search wide, almost incalculable. She knelt, she groped. ‘I will find them,’ thought Lavinia, and then, as her hand closed upon the last, ‘why should I find them?’ She replaced her mother’s smelling-bottle in a crevice of the cushions, and appealed to Emilio with a gesture of despair. Instantly he was on his knees beside her. The search lasted for a full minute. Then ‘ Ecco, ecco ,’ cried the gondolier, delighted by his discovery, holding the smelling-bottle as tenderly as if it had been the relic of a saint. Infected by his high spirits, exalted into a mood she did not recognize, Lavinia stretched out her hand for the bottle and smiled into his eyes. Their exquisite mockery, the overtone of their glitter, annihilated time. Lavinia passed beyond thought into a stellar region where all sensations were one. Then the innumerable demands of life swarmed back and settled upon her, dealing their tiny stings. For one thing Emilio must be paid.

But Emilio had no change. He searched himself, he turned this way and that; he bent forward as though wounded, and backward as though victorious. His hands apologized, his face expressed concern, but not a lira could he find to dilute Lavinia’s fifty. So she gave him the note, and then followed the incident which was eventually to cause her much distress and self-reproach. That she didn’t, at the time, divine its importance the casual entry in her diary shows.

‘The depression I have felt the last few weeks left me to-day; why, I cannot think. Perhaps the homily I gave myself last night in bed has borne fruit. I resolved not to be idle, discontented or inattentive, but to throw myself into life and let the current carry me whither it would. Nothing of the sort seems to have happened; I haven’t taken any plunge; but this morning, on the Grand Canal, and still more this afternoon, going round the churches with Mamma (how that bored me at Verona, see August 30th and resolution), I felt extraordinarily happy. (Here the words ‘Perhaps I have a capacity for happiness after all,’ were deleted). Not quite so happy after dinner when we went out to listen to the piccola serenata; that was with a different gondolier. I think I shall persuade Mamma to stick to the one we had this afternoon, engage him by the day. He wanted to come for us this evening, and I have asked myself since (although it is a trivial matter) why I said we shouldn’t need him. I should be sorry if he thought us ungrateful for all his help, but I felt, just at the moment, that I had overpaid him and it would be disagreeable, with the same man, to reduce the rate in future; also I wasn’t sure whether Mamma might not prefer the Piazza, and then he would be disappointed of his fare. I don’t want to appear capricious. Emilio didn’t take my saying no very well, not as pleasantly as he took my fifty lire note; I thought he scowled at me, but it was almost too dark to see. What does it matter? but he had been charming, and it is so seldom a foreigner takes a genuine interest in one. I hope I wasn’t mean over the money; but it makes it hard for poorer people if you give too much, and isn’t really good for the Italians themselves. It would be a pity to spoil Emilio. How lovely the false Carpaccios were—I prefer them to the real ones. Is there anything else? Hiding the smelling-bottle wasn’t the same thing as a lie—just a game, like hunt-the-thimble.’