‘Monday.—I am a little uneasy about Mamma. If I hadn’t gone to Torcello (and it takes the best part of the day by gondola) she would have stayed in. She didn’t want me to go, and perhaps I ought not to have gone; it is dull for her being alone; but she needn’t feel so strongly about the Kolynopulos: they are quite amusing in their way, and she might just as well have come with us. Now she has a temperature again, nothing much. I offered to sit up with her the first part of the night, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Too late for the Evanses and Stephen to call now; I am glad, rather, that they couldn’t get rooms at this hotel. Another scene with Mamma about Stephen. She thinks that if I don’t marry him I’ll never marry anyone; it is hard for us to make new friends, the choice is so small. The proximity of Amelia goads her into saying more than she means. I told her that Stephen meant nothing to me; since I had been at Venice he had ceased to exist for me. She asked why Venice had made any difference. I couldn’t tell her about Emilio, who is the real reason—not that I am in love with him—Heavens! but my thoughts turn on him in a special way; they run on oiled wheels, and if I try to think about Stephen at the same time the reverie breaks up, most painfully. I owe Stephen nothing. He lectures me and domineers over me and the sight of him recalls scenes of my childhood I would much rather forget. The fact that he has loved me for ten years only exasperates me; it is a thought outside my scheme, I don’t know how to deal with it. Sufficient unto the day: to-morrow will settle all. Pray heaven he may have fallen in love with Amelia.’
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.’