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

‘I jumped off the seat and crossed over to the palace with as much determination as if it had been a fortress I was going to take by storm, and rang the bell as if I had every right to ring it. With the angry buzz of a trapped hornet the door opened, and I was inside. A sigh of fulfilment escaped me, as if something I had long been waiting for at last had come to pass. But where now? Which way? Which of the four staircases should I take? While I was debating a voice slanted down at me, like a shaft of sunlight piercing the shadow in a picture: “Chi xè?” it rasped. Who was I, what did I want? I could not answer either of those questions, I could not even consider them as questions, only as obstacles to my progress. I waved and shouted something, but it did not satisfy the caretaker: she came waddling down her private staircase, almost touching each side, so fat was she. She advanced across the damp flagstones of the entrata and barred my way. “Chi xè?” she asked again and this time I found a kind of answer.

‘ “Cerco una signorina!” I exclaimed. “I am looking for a young lady!”

‘It wasn’t really an answer, and it wouldn’t have gone down in England: but in Italy it did.

‘ “Va bene!” she said, and my mind rather than my eye took note of her disappearance, as if she hadn’t been a woman but a difficulty to be disposed of. Something seemed to guide my footsteps as I dashed up the main staircase: the steps were dirty under the grey and white stucco of the rounded ceiling, and sweating, as I was, from the sirocco. Almost before I was aware of it I had cannoned out into the great sala: I pulled up short on the slippery terrazzo like a schoolboy breaking off a slide. After the gloom of the entrata, the tall windows at either end made the gallery unexpectedly light. A row of doors faced me: I chose the middle one and rang the bell. A man appeared in his shirt sleeves, flanked by two small children who stared up at me with their fingers in their mouths.

‘ “What do you want?” he asked.

‘ “Cerco una signorina,” I replied.

‘He smiled, not altogether pleasantly. “But there are so many young ladies,” he said. “What is her name?”

‘ “I don’t know,” I confessed. “She knows me, but I don’t know her.”

‘ “What does she look like?” he asked. “Is she dark or fair?”

‘Again I had to say I didn’t know, and a sense of the hopelessness of my quest began to steal over me: I felt how silly, and, above all, how unromantic I must look, at my age, looking for a young lady whom I didn’t know.

‘ “But you would recognize her if you saw her?” the man asked.

‘Again I had to say no; and then I had the presence of mind to add “But she would recognize me!”

‘He nodded sagely, as if this was a situation that might easily arise and one which, as a man of the world, and a man of heart, he understood. Excusing himself, he turned away and called to someone inside the flat. A woman came out—his wife, I suppose; she was thin-faced and dark and wore long ear-rings. While he was explaining my quest to her I was again overwhelmed by a conviction of its hopelessness; yet she did not seem to share it; she kept looking at me with quick, measuring eyes as if she was trying to guess, from my appearance, the sort of person I should be interested in.

‘ “There are a score of signorinas living in the palace,” she said to me; “would yours be young or old?”

‘I stared; it had never occurred to me that a signorina could be old; but of course she could, the word only implied unmarried, and I was old; it was a natural question.

‘ “No, young, young,” I cried, “I am sure she is young.”

‘The woman smiled and hesitated.

‘ “Proviamo!” she said. “Let us try!”

‘Fascinated, I watched her ring the bell of the flat next to hers; the door opened, there were explanations, then a girl came out with her, a pretty girl of eighteen or so, who shyly looked me up and down, and then shook her head. Four or five times, at neighbouring doors, the process was repeated; once the couple drew a blank; once they came out with three signorinas all of whom politely looked as if they would have liked to recognize me if they could. Between each identity parade my hopes soared, only to be dashed again.

‘All at once I realized it was over; no more signorinas were forthcoming; my well-wishers had exhausted their stock of suspects; now it was for me to prosecute my search, and they sincerely hoped I should be successful. I stood a moment encircled by their smiles, and then with Latin realism and acceptance of failure, the smiles were turned off and I found myself alone.

‘Twilight was falling. It was thickest where I stood; I might have been in the middle of a tunnel, with a glimmer of violet light at either, end. My excitement had evaporated and the shadow of defeat, which is also the shadow of reality, began to mingle with the other shadows. Again, which way? At which end of the tunnel should I begin? Then I remembered, and was amazed at myself for having been so dense: it was the end that overlooked my flat that I must explore: the inspecting signorinas had come from the middle of the palace, which had no view of mine.

‘With this realization my hopes revived. Looking through the four-arched window I could see my own: for once Giuseppina had not closed the shutters and I had the fancy that I could see myself, looking out, looking at something I didn’t know was there, something I had created without knowing it, as the burning-glass knows nothing of the fire it starts.

‘A puff of heat enveloped me, and all at once the sala, enormous as it was, seemed airless. How often, in Venice, the sirocco dies away at sunset just when it is most needed, making the nights seem hotter than the days. I did not remember this, but the sweat burst out on my forehead, and I felt my shirt sticking to my back. But it wasn’t only my body trying to throw off something that oppressed it, it was my mind, trying to shake off the riding, driving impulse which possessed it, and which had begun to create, in the near distance of my mental landscape, a tract that wavered and trembled and did not, as painters say, explain itself—an agitation of moving shapes of light and dark, a tangle of branches in a high wind, with sometimes a flash of white among them, like a peeled stick tossed to and fro. You know Velasquez’ picture of the Spinners?—well, it was as if the tapestry in the background of that picture had come to life and all its intricate design was wavering tremulously upwards. I was conscious of reality, like a pillar on each side of me, framing my view, but my thoughts were joined to that unstable centre where the vegetable flames were leaping, where nothing was clearly made out save the fact of flux.

Resist it as I would, I felt myself being sucked into this disturbance and soon my feet were moving in time with it rather than in answer to my own control—so that it was without really knowing what I was doing or even where I was that I rang first at one door and then at another, asking questions that I scarcely understood, though their urgency and intensity seemed to shake me, and receiving answers whose purport I gathered from the tone and gestures which accompanied them, not from the words themselves. Without knowing how, I found myself on other floors which might have been in another building, so different were they from the sala I had left: where the ceilings were low, the windows square or squat, where the whole plan of the palace had been be-devilled by party walls, divisions ply-wood thin, ingenious devices to wrest from the once noble simplicity of the great structure its last inch of living room.

‘Up and down I went, by staircases broad and narrow, and I must have crossed the sala again, though I don’t remember doing that, when I found another entry, another staircase and yet another range of doors.