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

‘I could not expect any more help from the windows; they were blind eyes that did not see, or if they saw I could not read their expression. For my purposes the many-windowed façade of the palace, ranged around its deep, dividing chasm, might have been a blank wall, and as at a blank wall I looked at it, when I did look at it.

‘I was up against a blank wall: how could I penetrate it? Suddenly it occurred to me, and I cursed myself for not thinking of it before, that the palace had a door as well as windows, a door through which, at one time or another, each of its occupants must go in and out. The door must be on the other side; it must open on the Zattere.

‘I can never remember how well you know Venice, Arthur, but the Zattere is a mile-long promenade, with bridges and cafés and all the rest of it, that stretches from the Dogana to the south-west corner of Venice. It faces a great curved sheet of water as wide as the Thames at London Bridge. It gets all the sun there is, and all the moon there is, and all the air there is, and is thronged with people at all hours of the day and most hours of the night. Besides those who are going somewhere on business, there are always crowds of loungers, the licensed loiterers of all Italian towns: and these I joined. I took my stand opposite the great door, and when I was tired of standing there were stone benches to sit on, and round bollards, sturdy mushrooms of stone polished to a honey-coloured smoothness, which were not so comfortable, being convex, but had the advantage that on them one could swivel round in any direction. There I sat, sometimes literally for hours, watching the door as, at very irregular intervals, it opened and shut. Of those who came out I got a full front view; how unaware they seemed of being watched! Those who went in I could not see so well, because, having rung, they turned their backs on me and waited for the electric latch to buzz (I could sometimes hear it) and set the door ajar; then they pushed it and went in. But these I had longer to study, I could learn something of them by the way they waited, impatiently or patiently. And sometimes, as a change from sitting or standing, I would go up to the door myself, casually, as though struck by a sudden whim, and when someone opened it I would peep inside at the immense, murky entrata, with its cross-beams, its marbled stucco flaking from the walls, its solemn doorways crowned by architraves, and, far in the distance, the glimmer of light through the iron grille that opened on the garden and the fountain. To the right was the archway of the great staircase, the main artery of the palace; people went up it and came down it, and I marvelled at their unconcern.

‘Sometimes the portinaia—the door-keeper—from her eyrie on the left, or her husband, or one of her children, would challenge the entrant, who would then answer something I could not catch: these, I supposed, were strangers to her. Those who went in without having their business asked were the habitués, the tenants, and these I gradually got to know.

‘And also I got to know that none of them was she; for her I should have recognized instantly, I had as little doubt of that as I had that she would recognize me. And when she recognizes me she will not be able to help betraying it, I thought.

‘Hope was so buoyant in me that for several days my failure to find the object of my search only made me more hopeful; I felt, illogically, that the odds against me were being exhausted, and it was a mathematical certainty that I should be successful. Only patience was needed, and I was unconscious of the need, for hope has no need of patience. But gradually it was borne in on me that the sands were running out, my days in Venice were numbered, and I might have to leave without accomplishing what I had come to think of as the aim and object not only of my visit but of my life.

‘I tried to consider my predicament impartially, and relate it to the canons and requirements of ordinary, rational living; and then I began to suffer in earnest, for fantasy in the grip of facts is like a fly caught in the toils of a spider. I could not bring myself to go back on the promise I had made myself; it seemed like blasphemy against myself, as if I was requiring myself to deny my own existence. In vain, as a discipline, I tried to concentrate on what I was doing at the moment, to do things deliberately, and at set times, to make a ceremony of lighting a cigarette, to be critically conscious of the taste of food and wine, to remind myself, when walking, that I was putting one foot in front of another. Many such exercises in realism I went through, yet they had no reality for me—my only reality was in some room in the Palazzo Trevisan which I had begun to think I should never see.

‘You know the Zattere and how it faces the long crescent of the Giudecca, with the canal in between as wide as the Thames at London Bridge and much deeper—but I told you all that. I’m getting old, I repeat myself—no, you needn’t deny it, Arthur, it’s the truth and I hope I’m not too old to recognize the truth. It’s a wonderful view but I always turned my back on it, the palace interested me so much more.

‘Well, one evening when I had gone out to keep my vigil, about six o’clock I think it was (I usually spent the two hours to dinner-time thus occupied) I was sitting on my stone seat staring at the palace when Antonio came by. My eyes recognized him but for a moment my mind didn’t—he had become an absolute stranger to my thoughts. Then, my whole being welcomed him, I scarcely remembered what had come between us, and for a moment, so potent was his presence in bringing back the past, I could hardly associate myself with the ghost I had turned into—it seemed a dream.

‘He was striding along between the brightly-coloured nurse-maids and their charges, and I jumped up with hand outstretched, meaning to cross his path. But he looked right through me, and if I hadn’t swerved I believe he would have walked right through me, as if I had been indeed a ghost.

‘Shaken, I sat down again, and for several moments I couldn’t even think, I could only feel contrary tides of emotion sweeping over me. Then I saw that I was facing outwards, looking at the Giudecca, not at the palace, and I knew that whatever my mind might tell me, something more instinctive than my mind had given up hope.

‘It was a heavy day threatening thunder, like so many June days in Venice; and in the thick, white sirocco sunlight the colours of the houses on the Giudecca—grey, yellow, terracotta, pink—seemed to merge and lose their proper qualities in a uniform lack of tone; and what stood out was the fenestration, the whitish oblongs and truncated ovals of the windows, monotonously repeated. Except for a dreadful travesty of Gothic, three enormous eyelets beyond the Redentore, scarcely a single pointed arch could I see.

‘I suddenly felt a respect for the five factory chimneys, and I looked with indulgence, almost with affection, on the great bulk of Stucky’s flour mill, battlemented, pinnacled, turreted, machicolated, a monument to the taste of 1870, that might have been built out of a child’s box of bricks. A romantic intention had reared it, and left behind something that was solid and substantial and a benefit to mankind.

‘I am short-sighted, and as my eye travelled backward from the mill, I saw something which I had taken to be a line of fishing boats moored in front of the houses opposite. But now I saw that it was not masts, and spars and rigging that was veiling the houses from me, it was scaffolding; I couldn’t see the houses, but behind the scaffolding they were there all right, waiting to be repaired, to be cured of whatever sickness they were suffering from; it was just a cloud of invisibility, a temporary eclipse, and it would pass. Only let the workmen get on with their job—don’t take them off for one of your European wars, Arthur—and the houses would be as good as ever. I don’t know why, but this discovery put fresh heart in me; and the uprush of confidence brought an idea with it, as it so often does.